Differences between Marketing and Advertising

Marketing and Advertising, although they sound similar in reality they are not. Advertising is only a part of the bigger game called Marketing. Marketing encompasses the complete conceptualization of a brand right from research to designing to advertising to sale. Advertising, on the other hand, is a component of the marketing process which is nothing but conveying the message through a variety of mediums to promote the product.

Advertising is one of the most important components of a marketing strategy and also the most expensive. Advertising constitutes sending the message to the public about your company, product, or services. It also constitutes behind the scenes work like the process involving the formation of various strategies and coming up with the right one to target the viewers. The strategy consists of planning things like placing ads, deciding what media to use, what time, frequency, etc. The advertisements are generally placed via mediums like television, snail mail, newspapers, internet, emails, radio, magazines, mobile messaging, flyers, billboards, etc. The most popular one is of course television although advertising on the internet is becoming increasingly popular too.

The easiest way to differentiate advertising from marketing is to consider marketing as a cake and if you cut the cake, advertising is one of the pieces of that cake. The other pieces of cake are market research of the product, product designing, media planning, PR, product pricing, customer satisfaction, customer support, sales, and many more. All these components or pieces of cake should work independently but collectively in achieving the bigger goal i.e. sell products and build the company’s reputation in the market. Marketing is a marathon process involving many tasks that involve hours sometimes days of research. The research part of marketing takes the longest duration as it involves thoroughly understanding the behavior of people towards a product. Designing the product and developing an advertising strategy is also a time-consuming process. Only components that take less time are executing advertisements and sales. Marketing can also be perceived as a medium between consumers and the company.

But many companies often make mistakes of confusing advertising with marketing. They try to ape big companies like Coke and Pepsi in advertising but they simply ignore the work that goes behind that. The classical example of this is, take the case of the logo for instance. Many business owners are so hysterical about the logo of their company in their advertisements that they think that it will simply bring in the sales. But what makes a logo works is none other than the reputation of the company and the logo must have a feeling to it and should truly reflect the company’s values. One should also remember that these companies spend fortunes on advertising which a new start-up business can’t. Rather than spending unnecessary money on branding your product one should invest money and time in communicating to the consumers that they can address their expectations. After building a reputation and growing to a big size company one can think of these lavish ideas. Educating the consumers also helps as it will give them an understanding that you know what you do and are best at doing that.

Smart marketers are aggressive in approach rather than passive. They provoke the reader’s minds by prompting them to do something rather than just making them knowledgeable of the product. Smart marketers also bring home the names, addresses, and contact numbers of people who are really interested in hiring your company by employing aggressive marketing. Thus having a good marketing campaign speaks a lot about the company and their products and advertising gives that finishing touch to the hard work done by the marketing people in selling a product.