Marketing is NOT Advertising - the Essential Differences You Must Know

People commonly misconceive that Advertising and Marketing are interchangeable terms, and therefore are synonymous. On the contrary, Advertising is a subset of Marketing, and their differences include their breadth and depth of scope. For the layman, Marketing is the marathon in the bid to capture a portion of the consumer market; Advertising is that distance between the first 41.5 kilometers and the last hundred meters, where the marketing campaign focuses on grabbing the consumer's attention.

Consumers only see the advertising part of the marketing campaign. The TV commercials, billboard posters, and advertisements placed on cereal boxes are only a minute part of what marketing is about. Marketing consists of many different components: the product itself, product design, media planning, the handling of public relations, product pricing, customer satisfaction, customer support, sales, and of course, advertising. Most of this happens backstage, out of the eye of the consumer herself. The end result is the packaged product, and the advertising campaign that is set to promote it.

Market research is the most important component of marketing that most companies miss out on by under-investing in this area or ignoring it entirely. Market research will determine who your product will be for, and will enable you to focus and tailor your customer support, product design and advertising campaign to that target group.

However, companies who are not familiar with the concept of marketing often mistake advertising as a major part of the marketing campaign. They place large emphasis on advertising their product, but ignore the market research and the customer support that goes on behind the scenes. What they end up with is a well-packaged product, which does not sell because of the lack of appeal to the consumers due to poor marketing. Also, start-up businesses do not realize that Multi-National Companies (MNCs) are able to voraciously market their products because of the vast pool of resources available to them, which start-up businesses are unable to access. In attempting to mimic the marketing campaigns of the MNCs, most start-up businesses end up with less than adequate marketing campaigns that copy their larger brothers' campaigns poorly.

The lesson here is that marketing does not consist of advertising only, and that not all marketing campaigns can afford to be big budget. Instead, cater your marketing campaign to your own company. Make sure enough emphasis is placed on market research and customer support. Also, educate yourself on the cheaper alternatives to mass media advertising, such as door to door advertising and distribution of flyers.