Archiverr Resources Center

MRKT 301: Advanced Marketing

Study Notes

Differences between Marketing and Advertising

Marketing and Advertising, although they sound similar but in reality

they are not. Advertising is only a part of the bigger game called

Marketing. Marketing encompasses 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 variety of mediums to promote the

product.

Advertising is one of the most important component of a marketing

strategy and also the most expensive. Advertising constitutes sending the

message across the public about your company, product or services. It

also constitutes behind the scenes work like the process involving

formation of various strategies and coming up with a 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

internet is becoming increasingly popular too.

Easiest way to differentiate advertising from marketing is to consider

marketing as a cake and if you cut the cake, advertising as 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 product and build 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

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 mistake 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 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 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 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.