Marketing and Advertising Defined

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 comprises 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 attract attention of the targeted 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.

Marketing is a lengthy 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.

The 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.

But many companies often make the mistake of confusing advertising with marketing. They try to
imitate 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. 

Smart marketers are aggressive in approach rather than passive. They provoke 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.

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