Marketing is – what, exactly? (The clue is in the name...)

Are you still unsure about what marketing actually is? Perhaps you’re baffled by brand, confused by communications or perplexed by PR. And anyway, isn’t marketing just advertising?

In fact, marketing is about people – the clue really is in the name. Marketing is all about markets. And a market is nothing more than a group of people that you wish to interact with. (You might also call those people customers or consumers, stakeholders or staff; audiences or organisations. The collective noun remains the same - a market.)

There are, unfortunately, way too many words and phrases associated with marketing. The vast majority are duplications or distractions. In fact, the discipline’s core lexicon is concise and inclusive. And it all starts with – what else? – markets.

We group people into markets for no other reason than improving efficiency. Interacting with 8 billion people and countless organisations individually would be fantastically inefficient. We can dramatically improve our strategic effectiveness (what we choose to do) as well as the efficiency with which we implement our strategies (how we go about doing it) by grouping similar types of people into discrete markets.

If you or your organisation wish to interact with groups of people, the most effective way to do so is by using the tried-and-tested business methodology known as marketing. This strategic planning pathway, and its concomitant tactical processes, is invariably best managed and undertaken by the markets team. Or, as they’re usually known, the marketing team.

Yet the underlying approach to getting the most from your markets necessarily involves anybody in the organisation who interacts with those markets (your customers). Usually everybody, in fact. That’s why framing marketing as a business methodology is so important. It really does affect everything an organisation does for its customers. It’s an approach that works; ask Jeff Bezos, who famously puts customers front and centre at Amazon.

Helpfully, one of marketing’s strengths is how it can systematically identify >which< markets we should be interacting with. Not all markets need marketing to, and most organisations will enjoy greater success by bringing their limited resources to bear on interacting with a smaller number of (more relevant) people – or markets. You might think of this as a higher quality, lower volume approach, rather than a lower quality, higher volume approach.*

So what about all of those other words, activities and actions that companies try to win at, and people on LinkedIn get all excited about? Here’s the briefest of primers, to help frame things and provide some context:

Branding is what you do to affect the markets’ awareness and perception of you or your organisation. Branding is simultaneously a simple concept and an overly-complex mess of ideas and competing models. Fundamentally, branding doesn’t sell stuff; it merely creates awareness (or salience) of you or your organsation, and consideration of the same in the minds of your customers. (How they perceive you.) But that's it - brand is nothing more than what people think of you, your product or your company. If they think of you at all.

With that salience in place we then use ‘activation’ (sometimes called ‘performance marketing’ or even go to market - which is needlessly self-evident) to encourage those market members we care about?to actually interact with us. Buying stuff, in other words. (Les Binet and Peter Field describe branding as ‘the long of it’ and activation as ‘the short of it’. Critically, they advocate that both are necessary for commercial success over the longer term.)

Communications is how you communicate with your markets – be it long (branding) or short (activation). Communications is concerned with what you’re saying (the message) and to whom (the market), as well as how you say it, where and when. (The Why is essentially the manifestation of the guiding business objective; usually, if not immediately, to prompt a transaction.) Bear in mind that you can’t logically do communications until you’ve first worked out who you want to communicate with – the people. Markets first; message second.

Advertising is one form of communications. Advertising is most easily understood as being paid-for communications. Adverts can be more or less targeted, i.e. aimed at broader or narrower groups of people (bigger or smaller markets). There are lots of different ways and places to advertise.

Public Relations is another form of communications. It focuses on reaching target markets through third parties, typically via the press and media, without actually spending money on media.

Content goes hand-in-hand with communications. Essentially, it's the stuff you include in your communication. Something - a story, a video, offer, information, image, activity - which conveys and amplifies the message you're sharing with that market.

Promotion is a term that's largely used behind closed (marketing) doors. It’s an inclusive term that gathers up advertising, communications, public relations, branding and a host of other bits and pieces (social media, content, search, the list goes on). At its most simple, promotion is the catch-all term for how you choose to interact with people.

Sales is a proven way of blending marketing tactics (product, price, distribution, promotion) to more effectively interact with groups of organisations, rather than individuals.

And digital? Digital is a linguistic distraction. It’s not a specific thing; merely a quality that some (but not all) marketing media and tools have. Remember, though, that we’re overwhelmingly concerned with people, not media and tools. Only people buy stuff. People first; tools second.

And that’s pretty much it. Everything else is a derivation, a detail or a distraction.

If you doubt my order of things, or if you don’t recognise some of the terms I’ve used, briefly consider your own experience as a member of a market. You might prefer to use different definitions, or be more familiar with some of the details I’ve chosen to omit (by way of reducing complexity). The principle, though, I’m certain will be the same. The clue is in the name.

*Yes, I'm aware of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and sophisticated mass marketing. But most organisations are unable to pitch to every single person. They have to narrow it down a bit.