Marketing Myth #1: Advertising and marketing is the same thing

This is the first in a series of 7 posts by guest blogger and associate of The Marketing Eye, Sharon Wilding, owner and founder of The Purple Edge.

Of course I'm going to tell you it's not, but for advertising read promotion, and I'll still tell you it's not the same thing as marketing. Whether you are using advertising, public relations, emails, websites, billboards, word of mouth, or one of the many other forms of promotions (paid or unpaid) you will be wasting your time and/or money if you don't recognise that marketing covers so many more aspects of your business.

Yes it is vitally important to spread the word about what you have to offer if you want buyers to come flocking, but only once you are crystal clear about the following:

• What exactly is the product or service you offer? What are the elements that make it unique or special and represent real value to a potential customer? What will make customers pay more, come back for more, or recommend you to others.
• And who do you need to spread the word to? Which group of customers (your niche or customer segment) are going to find your product most attractive and valuable? The more tightly you can define this, the better the chance you will delight and satisfy your customers by delivering what they really want, and the better the chance that you will target your promotions efficiently to this group.
• How can customers get hold of your product or service? Which channels are you using - in stores, on line, through distributors or direct from you? Giving customers a choice, or range of options, about where and how they can buy from you could be really important in increasing your sales results and could have major implications for the profit you make on each deal.
• What price are you charging and what does it say about the quality and value position you have chosen to take in the market? How can you flex your pricing or terms to change your success rate in sales or improve your profitability?
• Do you have a business plan that defines the objectives you are aiming to achieve? Do you have a strategy that guides your decision making around your priorities and helps you decide what you won't do as well as what you will?
• Does your plan identify the marketing investment (or budget) that you are prepared to make in order to achieve the objectives you have set? If not, how will you know if the cost of any promotions you want to do is acceptable or not? Or whether the return is appropriate?
• What is the sales strategy and process you have in place to ensure you convert interest and enquiries into sales?

All these issues are aspects of or are influenced by your marketing - in fact there are not many things that you do in your business that are not heavily impacted by the marketing decisions you make. Promotion may often feel like the most visible and costly part of the marketing mix - but failing to address the above list properly is only likely to make it more visible and costly through poor execution and wastage.

Many people say to me ‘we don't do any marketing'. What they really mean is that they don't do a lot of promotions, and that may be the right decision for their business.

If you are getting all the new and repeat custom you can handle then you are obviously doing something right, and maybe you are instinctively good at marketing, but to sustain growth there generally comes a point when a more structured and disciplined approach to managing your marketing mix (i.e. all the stuff above) is going to be needed.

Be honest - if you don't have the marketing skills yourself then go out and get some help or training. Marketing is too important a business function to do half-heartedly.

When the tail wags the dog – the great sales versus marketing debate

How can you tell if a salesperson is lying?

His lips are moving.


Don’t you just love the arguments between salespeople and marketing? Ali v Foreman was nothing compared with the constant bickering between these two old adversaries. Like brothers, they defend the family honour in public and snipe at each other in private.

I came across an excellent LinkedIn discussion last week started by a sales guru who was giving marketing both barrels: sack the Chief Marketing Officer; make every marketer spend at least a year in sales and measure marketing performance solely on the basis of reductions in the cost of sales where among his more strident remedies.

Never one to resist an argument, I couldn’t help but wade in with a view.

So, let’s try and resolve this once and for all. Should the marketing department be a support function to sales or is sales a function of marketing?

In my career I have seen examples of both. Now I’m running my own business, I see it from yet another perspective.

Among my favourite definitions of marketing is the one provided by Professor Paul Fifield who says that the sole purpose of marketing is to sell the maximum amount of units at the highest possible price.

So there you have it, even a Professor of Marketing admits that, in the final analysis, marketing has to deliver sales and profit. Perhaps the salespeople are right? Marketers should immediately bow down to Sales and accept their true position in life.

But what would happen if they did?

I have worked in organisations where salespeople rule. The top roles were filled by the top salespeople and every conversation was about turnover and pipeline. In this environment, the role of marketing was invariably limited to tactical direct mail campaigns, brochures and corporate gifts: all geared to supporting this week’s idea and today’s income target. To create a discussion, let alone gain sponsorship for more strategic initiatives was all but impossible.

This is not to say that the salespeople who were promoted into the senior management positions didn’t have the ability to be strategic. Of course they did, but because the culture was so heavily geared towards short term measurable results, tactics tended to dominate the decision making process. Business performance was highly cyclical as a result with great highs and near catastrophic lows.

Another great definition of marketing is ‘making friends with people who might need you one day’.

The definition needs some work. ‘Might need you’ feels untargeted and ‘one day’ too uncertain, but I love the whole concept of marketing and business being about ‘making friends’ and forging relationships. The idea that a customer would consider a business a friend is a brand Nirvana, providing as it would a platform for long-term sustainable growth and resistance to the worst highs and lows of economic conditions.

Inevitably the idea of building a brand and making friends is too soft and intangible for many people.

Let’s be in no doubt, and I see this first hand in my own business, Sales is one of the most important components of the marketing strategy. If the leads aren’t being found and converted, there is no long term to plan and position for, so the marketing department needs to get its finger out and do its bit to feed the machine.

But Sales is exactly that: one part of the marketing strategy and it puts the cart firmly in front of the horse to have Marketing reporting to Sales. All of the elements of product, price, place, promotion, people, process, physical evidence and positioning need to combine before a business can make friends with customers and sell the maximum number of units at the highest possible price.

A Head of Sales who has the ability to do all of this - manage sales performance as well as think about strategy, targeting and positioning - isn’t a Head of Sales at all, but a Head of Marketing... and thoroughly deserving of the title.

If you can’t measure it, should you do it?

There is a famous marketing saying: ‘Half of my advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half’.

The internet has brought great improvements in the measurability of certain types of marketing activity, but that doesn’t mean to say that anything which isn’t online or that can’t be measured in terms of short-term sales should be abandoned.

The goal of marketing is to build relationships, whether that is with existing customers or prospects. Frequent communications – newsletters, alerts, articles of interest, anything that ensures constant contact – are vital, as of course is the content and quality of those communications. Customers don’t want glossy brochures boasting of capabilities and achievements, they want something that adds value and provides an opinion. This might be substantive updates on issues that are important or the sharing of ideas and best practice. Whatever it is, by communicating often and communicating well, we are keeping in touch and reminding our customers that they are important to us.

And we shouldn’t only communicate when there is work on. Maintaining contact during the quiet periods is key to keeping the relationship alive. Ideas include:

• Keeping in touch with regular emails, publications and phone calls


• Sending articles and clippings - ‘I saw this and thought of you’


• Dropping in to see the customer on occasions (not so scary really)


• Suggesting networking opportunities and potential introductions that might benefit the customer


• Using entertainment and hospitality.

The measurability of these pursuits is sometimes difficult to gauge, but only doing what we can measure will lead to many valuable activities being abandoned. Staying close to customers by increasing the level of contact now will stand every business in good stead when the economic conditions improve.

Judgment time

One of the great things about blogging is that you can read back over your own posts and remind yourself how you were feeling at any point in time.

Looking back over last week's posts I can see that I was in a rather tetchy mood (my wife confirms this to be the case). Condoning cuts in the marketing budget and dismissing tweaks to marketing messages as a finger in the dam are the sort of statements that will get me drummed out of my professional institute.

Thinking about what I was doing last week, I recall spending time with a luxury hotel, a retailer of safari holidays and a London estate agent, all businesses that are at the sharp end of the new normal. I guess I was feeling their pain. These businesses don't need tired cliches or fiddling while Rome burns, they need practical advice and hands on support to help them quickly generate more sales.

16 years of constant growth in the UK has provided marketers with the breathing space and investment to try new ideas and promulgate new principles (never a bad thing). The new normal will be the judge of which of these ideas really contribute to bottom line profit. To see which marketing myths are dispelled and how often the emperor is stripped of his new clothes will be fascinating.

Irrational marketing for rational customers won't work

Seth Godin is a well respected blogger and talks good sense on a variety of marketing related issues. In his post on The rational marketer (and the irrational customer), however, he misses an important point.

Seth expresses frustration at marketers who can't work out why more people won't buy their products or services and suggests the answer is to stop focusing on rational benefits and instead to tune-in to irrational drivers, for example, the hassle of making the change or concern about what the boss will think.

We have clients who find it hard to accept that people aren’t buying their products or services in sufficient quantities too. The first step, is not in messaging or sales techniques, but to establish if there is still an adequate market for the product or service in the first place.

We are in a recession, which means that demand for all but the most essential purchases falls. The response to falling sales is to identify and understand the market. This might mean exploring new markets or establishing a proper basis of aggressive competition in existing ones: normally by differentiation or focusing on a niche. If necessary, costs and processes have to be reviewed to maintain profitability while price competition takes place.

The decision making process might meander through irrational steps, but the ultimate decision to sign a cheque in these straitened times is still a very rational one. Businesses have to accept that their market might be shrinking and adapt accordingly. To try and stave off falling demand by simply tweaking the message is equivilant to putting a finger in a broken dam.