Marketing and Advertising are often considered to be the same thing, and while the concepts are similar, they very divergent in many ways. Advertising tells a story about something to attract attention. Marketing is the planning of, and steps taken, to bring merchants and consumers together. The only aspect that is comparable is both are usually attempts to bring in new and repeat business based on some sort of image or idea that may appeal to potential clients. Other than that correspondence they are rather different. It may be time to rethink what you’re doing to get your image to your clients!
An example of advertising is purchasing a billboard on the freeway that many people may see. This may work well for some businesses and completely ruin others. A fast food chain may do very well, considering the freeway is usually taken by people coming to and from work, either around breakfast in the morning, lunch break in the afternoon, or dinner in the evening. Bear in mind, most fast food restaurants offer drive-thru service and fast food doesn’t necessarily appeal to only one demographic. As people are driving to work in the morning with a growling stomach, the thought of eating is floating around in their minds somewhere. If Jimmy’s Burger Joint has a breakfast menu, and their advertisement is posted on a billboard on that freeway, the minor persuasion to grab a breakfast sandwich at Jimmy’s Burger Joint may seem like a pretty reasonable decision, thus a sale is made. On the other hand, a hardwood flooring company, or a company more specialized in specific fields of work, would probably not want to take advantage of a billboard ad in this way. While driving home from a hard days work, the last thing many people want to see is an ad for something that is not truly appealing to them at the time, such as expensive flooring, as they are most likely tired from work and will quickly forget the billboard was even there. Also, if the majority of people that utilize that freeway are under 30 years old and live in apartments, the chances to make a sale because of that ad are slim to none, and because advertising isn’t very specific in terms of who is being targeted and is usually utilized in situations where they will be viewed by very general audiences, this can lead to a few problems. For example, when handing out door to door flyers, a business can choose which neighborhoods they want to distribute in based on property values, but there is almost no way to tell whether that ad will remotely relate to the person that picks it up and views it. If an ad is distributed to a consumer that cannot relate to it, it will most likely end up in the trash. If the business had paid for each flyer and the delivery service, every flyer that is put in the garbage becomes money that the business may as well have thrown away themselves.
Marketing is a much more personalized approach to advertising, where certain factors are taken into consideration when deciding what an advertising budget should be spent on. It is a process where the ultimate goal is to build relationships between businesses and consumers. Rather than telling consumers to purchase a product or service because the business says it’s a good idea, marketing is focused on establishing interaction that allows true competition and offers consumers the information they need to make an informed decision before making a purchase.
This allows companies to get much deeper with consumers and peak specific consumer attentions. The flooring company stated above could create a marketing strategy to find out what portion of the market the majority of their business is coming from, and come up with a solution that is target specific to that group of people. Marketing flooring to 20 year old college students by posting an ad in the school newspaper would most likely bring in less revenue than posting an ad in a newsletter for a retirement community, solely because older homeowners are more often than not going to be in a much better position to purchase flooring than college students that live on campus. If the market that a business is attempting to target is not defined, that marketing will generally not bring in a positive ROI. Marketing needs to be personalzed based on business location, products and services provided, and pricing, among other things. A restaurant would usually have a different marketing approach than a gym, even if they are side by side. If you have identical companies, one being in Los Angeles and the other in New York City, the marketing strategy for New York City may not work with the demographic in Los Angeles and vice-versa.
While neither should be taken lightly, due to the differences between advertising and marketing, it seems safe to conclude that each business should evaluate what they are trying to accomplish on an individualized level before budgeting towards advertising or marketing. The image of a company can be very fragile; business should have a logical plan of action established considering the public image of a company could be shattered based on a simple mistake or misjudgment.
