529. Marketing vs. Advertising vs. Sales 😵💫
Battle royale! Just kidding. It's only definitions
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
Marketing vs. advertising vs. sales
A few weeks back, I made this flowchart for How to Explain Brand to Anyone:
Explaining brand is hard, even when you’re at work, alongside your business peers and even your marketing peers. It’s 10x harder when you’re at a party!
It’s at these parties—or family reunions, or Thanksgivings, or school classrooms—where explaining what you do for a living can be especially arduous. It’s even become a type of party theme unto itself, with people creating PowerPoints to explain to their friends what they do.
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Marketing has it a little easier than brand, but there’s still ample room for confusion when you tell someone you are in marketing. It’s broad and vague and people have a lot of different interpretations of what it means.
How do you explain marketing to a non-marketer?
And how do you differentiate marketing from advertising and sales and promotion and PR and allthethings?
Marketing at the circus, an anecdote
One of my go-to anecdotes for explaining the difference between marketing and advertising and sales is this gem from a Reader’s Digest story called "Promoting Issues and Ideas
If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying 'Circus coming to the Fairground Saturday', that's advertising. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that's promotion. If the elephant walks through the mayor's flower bed, that's publicity. And if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that's public relations. If you did all of this on purpose, that's marketing. If the towns citizens go to the circus, you show them the entertainment booths, explain how much fun they'll have spending money at the booths, answer their questions and ultimately, they spend a lot at the circus, that's sales.
Marketing vs. Advertising vs. Sales
Marketing
Marketing is the big picture. It is everything from figuring out what your customers want to how they want to find out about it. It is the plans, strategies, tactics, and multiple channels you use to reach these customers to sell them the thing that you figured out they wanted (at a price they’re cool with and in a location they’re okay buying from).
The 4 Ps of Marketing are:
Product (what you’re selling)
Price (how much it costs)
Place (where people can buy it)
Promotion (how people will hear about it)
Advertising
Advertising is one aspect of marketing. It is paying for attention. Advertising costs money, whereas not all marketing costs money (but a lot does).
Sales
Sales is you convincing me to buy something, in person (or via Zoom or, old school, via phone). If marketing and advertising are about letting people know, then sales is about closing the deal.
Over to you
How do you explain the difference between these concepts? What is your go-to elevator pitch at a party when people ask what you do for work?
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.
This breakdown of marketing, advertising, and sales is spot on and the relatable explanation helps demystify these often-confused concepts.
However in many orgsanisations marketing is still seen as a support function and not the leader of overall market strategy.
How can this change?