Why marketing matters

One of the questions I’m asked often in social gatherings is, “What’s the difference between marketing and advertising?”, which is my opportunity to send the luckless enquirer into a coma with a lengthy explanation. 

I observe that there’s not actually a difference per se, but that one is a function of the other. Advertising, I go on to expound to rapidly glazing eyes, is just part of the go-to-market process for any given product or brand, and that there are many other components to a successful marketing strategy. 

Marketing, most broadly defined, is the positioning of your product in the place where your target market will see/hear/taste/touch/smell it, understand it, recognise its benefit to them, and then want to experience and buy it. Advertising is only one of these mechanisms. 

Here’s an example. Suppose you have a baby care product, and you have an amazing design agency that creates an ad so beautiful that it makes people cry. Would you then run the ad in a sporting shooter’s magazine? The media purveyor will be happy to take your money, and your ad will appear in the next issue, but it’s unlikely to generate a single sale. It’s still advertising, but it’s lousy marketing. 

Likewise, you won’t see Barbie dolls advertised during wrestling matches, and so on, because you're not putting your product in front of the receptive market.  

Marketing takes many forms apart from traditional advertising, and it's out of the box thinking aligned with your brand that will elevate your product from just being an item in an ad that you hope somebody sees. 

Back to your baby product. Instead of advertising in a shooter’s magazine, get a stall at your local market, and a stand in any one of the regular family and baby expos. Partner with a local child-care centre whereby you donate some of your wonderful product to them in exchange for a mention and a link on their social media. In these ways and many others, you have an aligned strategy to position your product under the noses of those most likely to consume it. 

Carrying on from there, strategic partnerships can have great returns for all the parties that participate in a co-branded exercise. Consider the McHappy meal. McDonald’s generates extra sales of the food based on the branded gizmo of the popular IP with whom it has partnered, and the movie, TV show or game etc, gets widespread exposure from one of the world’s largest fast-food brands. Everyone wins – except your waistline. 

Take your baby product. You might go into a partnership with a local infants’ toy store. For every rattle they sell, they give away a sample of your product. And they have the counter card or poster to bring attention to it. The toy store now has a value add to make their products more appealing, and you have presence in another branded space, and all it cost was a few samples. There can be virtue in thinking small.

Obviously, there’s more to good marketing than positioning. For a start, your product must be of decent quality and have a genuine benefit to your buyer. No amount of top-notch marketing will sell a waterproof teabag.  

I’ve seen desperate marketing departments lumped with the job of trying to sell substandard products that the buying team have bought by the skipful because they were cheap on the global commodities market. As I’ve touched on before, there are two reasons these products are going for a song – they're not very good and no-one wants them. So, by buying container loads of them, you’ve just spent big money making someone else’s problem your own. Or your marketing department’s. 

Let say you’ve created a hand lotion that’s purely organic, low allergenic and ideal for psoriasis sufferers. Market test it, which can be as simple as asking your friends and family for their honest opinion. You may love how it feels and smells, but it may be repulsive to everyone else. Don’t treat that as a failure, treat it as product development. And there is no shame in failure anyway. Every successful product, or treatment, or scientific advancement has been built on a thousand failures. 

Then there’s price. Where’s the sense in developing an amazing product that nobody wants to buy because it’s too expensive? Watch the market for similar products to yours. Incredible though your product may be, if it’s not significantly superior, people will settle for something else.  

And there has to be a market for it, with enough space for your product to find a place. We can’t all be Apple, who virtually invented, or certainly invigorated the tablet market overnight. Suddenly, people were prepared to pay a lot for a tech product that they never knew they needed. But that’s because, and only because, of prior decades filled with exceptional product design and marketing. When Apple says, “This is cool and useful and won’t disappoint you”, Apple buyers have good reason to believe. The brand power of Apple is its most formidable weapon. 

Again, all of this is real surface-level stuff. Marketing is a detailed and complex science, and the rules are being updated all the time. Remember, only 40 years ago was no real World Wide Web, or the positioning opportunities it offers that are now ubiquitous. 

Consult a well reputed marketing agency for your venture into the market. If you go to an agency and all they suggest is “Put an ad in the newspaper”, go somewhere else. Your product deserves better than that.  

Good luck!