Although many people don’t realize it, there is a significant difference in sales and marketing. But even before we begin delving on the issue, a bigger fundamental question is, why should you care?

When the boom in entrepreneurship first began, companies could not produce goods fast enough for the consumer to buy. Consumers queued up and fought to buy a company’s product. Getting products off the shelves just needed a good sales team and maybe an advertising team. Today, the number of consumers is growing by about 3% each year, but the number of companies producing the same goods has gone up thousands of percent, leaving the average consumer now flooded with choices.

 

What does this mean for the businesses? Hypercompetition, which inadvertently leads to price wars. Almost everywhere the consumer turns, there is a company trying to sell him or her something for less than another company, or giving him/her an extra item, a giveaway. For the business place, this equates falling margins, flailing companies, and inadvertent takeovers.

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It seems that most companies don’t realize this: that marketing is the tool that helps businesses compete on something other than price. However, many people still have a strong misconception about marketing, even in this day and age. Their two strongest misconceptions about marketing are this:

  1. That marketing is about sales; and
  2. That marketing exists to support the product/service.

 

Too many companies call up marketers today and say, “My sales just dropped 30%,” or “My sales are not strong enough; come teach some of your marketing stuff.” Marketing is not about sales. Marketing, in the words of Phillip Kotler, is “the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers through creating, communicating and delivering superior value… In short, [it] is to convert people’s changing needs into profitable opportunities.”

 

Marketing is not about making a cent today and losing a dollar tomorrow. It is about creating, maintaining, and growing a profitable relationship with the company’s customers. It is about understanding the customer’s needs, and offering superior solutions to it. Too many companies still insist on a production concept, where the product comes before the customer, even in this era where the choices are overwhelming to the average consumer. They do this because they do not understand the true meaning of marketing.

 

In many articles I have read on this website, I realized that many people still think that marketing begins at the point when it is time to sell, because marketing and selling has been confused together. Let me clarify it now: the time to sell begins when you have a product or a service, whether tangible or intangible. Marketing – good marketing – should have existed in the company even before the product, even before the company moved into the market.

 

Therefore, marketing does not exist to support whatever the company produces. Rather, what the company produces exists to support its marketing instead.

 

Marketing is a dynamic agent that will always be around, and it will always evolve to suit the needs of the marketplace. If you are still confusing marketing with selling, or marketing with advertising, it is time to adapt and learn so as to better fortify your company in today’s battlefield for the consumer and his/her wallet.