What Marketing Really Means (Most People Get This Wrong)

One Big Bubble, Five Different Things

I have five different areas that are all really a part of the marketing world: advertising, promotion, publicity, PR, and sales. They are all different. They are all important. But they all live in this big bubble that we call marketing.

So let's define it. Marketing is literally the art and science of using advertising, promotion, publicity, public relations, and sales to generate revenue for your business. That's it. Strip away the jargon and the college textbooks, and that's what's left.

I never graduated with a college degree as a marketer. I created a marketing ability along the way, just because I understood one thing: I needed to get attention. And along the way it became clear that the subject of attention was the subject of marketing. Marketing is just the process of capturing attention and the desire for somebody to buy your products and services.

Advertising vs. Promotion: The Furniture Store Example

To make this specific and easy to understand, I want to use an example. There's a company called Ourhouse. Ourhouse sells furniture: a lot of beautiful things, art pieces, decorations, great quality furniture.

If I work in the marketing department for Ourhouse and I print a magazine showing everything they sell, that is what we like to call advertising. I have not yet put it out there. I have not yet promoted it. I have not yet invested dollars on getting this particular magazine seen by people. It's just the piece.

Now, once I take my list of 10,000 buyers and I say, can you please get these magazines into these people's mailboxes, I am now doing something called promotion. I am taking an advertising piece, the magazine that shows all the cool things they have, chairs and tables and couches and art pieces and lamps, and I'm pushing it out into the world. Same thing when you run a Facebook ad, a YouTube ad, Instagram, TikTok, any platform, or traditional advertising. You are promoting that piece.

Publicity and PR: Getting Other People to Talk

Now let's say I want to get some publicity. I take somebody important, a celebrity. Let's say I get a superstar like Kim Kardashian, and I have her sit down outside the store. She grabs a chair, sits down, and starts reading the magazine. Very obviously it is an advertising piece, but with Kim Kardashian reading it. That is what we like to call publicity: I'm getting other people to talk about the thing I put together.

Now, if I get her to start talking about this brand in her own social media channels, hey Instagram, to her millions of followers, look at this furniture that I bought at Ourhouse, that is public relations. Because I'm getting somebody else to really vouch for what we have going on.

And you might say, well, that's promotion too, because you've got to pay her for that. Sure. But if she does it willingly, if she just says, I'm so blown away by this brand, which by the way happens, that's public relations for your brand. The difference is who's doing the talking.

Then Comes Sales

Now, when people start reaching out to your stores from all these efforts, promotion, publicity, and PR, you are now selling to them. What's the warranty? How much does it cost? How long will they last me until I get them replaced? Do you have an upgrade program? Free shipping, delivery, installation?

All of those questions are sales related. But notice: they all live in that same big bubble. All of them live in the bubble we call marketing. Sales isn't separate from marketing. It's the last stretch of it.

Your Job Is to Build the Bridge

Here's how I like to describe the whole game: marketing is building a bridge between your product and service and your potential customers. And these customers are many different buckets of people. One bucket can be the 25 to 34 year olds. The second bucket can be the 35 to 44s. There's 8 billion people on this planet, 8 billion, all over the place. The job of the marketer is to figure out your product and service, figure out which of these buckets are going to be interested, and build a bridge between you and your customers so they can buy your products and make it profitable along the way.

So once you have a great quality product, once you have a great service to sell, and you know that service has attention out there, people need it, people want it, the marketer's job is to get that bridge built so people continuously travel on it. You connect them with you, and they give you, what do they give you? Money.

And when you do this effectively, and when you do this consistently, you are now winning the marketing game.