Marketing: what is it? + misunderstanding cleared up

Introduction

There is a tremendous amount of nonsense about marketing. For a layman, it is easy to believe that everything is completely different from 10 years ago. Sexy terms and hypes abound. With the result that many a company misses opportunities or makes downright wasteful investments. While marketing is actually quite simple. All you need is patience and thorough research. Not sexy, but crucial. Tasmanic is an agency that helps you make the right marketing decisions.

What is marketing again?

There are still hordes of people - even with marketing in their job titles - who confuse marketing, communications and media. For consumers, marketing is often (bad) advertising.

So first, let's take a look at the definition of marketing according to the AMA, the American Marketing Association:

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

So marketing is not communication

For most people, marketing is the advertising they see. But that is only the communication. In fact, marketing is mostly that which precedes that communication. Those are: analysis, strategy and tactical interpretation.

So: research and data to uncover yet unknown insights. A strategy that creates and positions market, brand, product(s) and/or service(s), based on the data found. And a tactical plan to carefully test, adjust and creatively execute this through the best scoring communication channels.

Online marketing falls under the P of Promotion

Online marketing is actually not a good term, better would be online promotion. After all, online is just one of the media channels to reach people. As a marketer, you can't ignore online today because a lot of people are online all day long. They used to just go to the market and price your wares there.

That online has become so big among marketers is surely also due to its seemingly fantastic measurability. Lord Leverhulme of Unilever once exclaimed, "half my advertising money is wasted, I just don't know which half." With online, that problem seems much smaller. But online marketing simply falls under the classic P of Promotion. At Tasmanic, we realize this all too well and keep a close eye on our role in the overall classic marketing mix of the 4 P's Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

So where does it go wrong?

Real marketing work is not at all fast and hip. It requires patience, endless research, searching for significant things and insights. But everything these days has to be now, now, now. Also, marketers are drowning in the mush of resources and media and so-called types of marketing they can use: from influencer marketing to viral to guerilla, from content to keyword to relationship marketing. And oh yeah, there's also radio and TV, outdoor and print. It's also tempting to run after all kinds of self-proclaimed marketing gurus or deploy new techniques and channels immediately without thorough and critical research.

Integrated campaigns: 57% more effective

That an integrated media strategy works, global research by research firm Kantar Millward Brown shows. Kantar Millward Brown is a leading global marketing and branding research firm. A well-integrated communications campaign across multiple media channels is 57% more effective than campaigns that are not integrated. That same research shows that companies are still missing plenty of opportunities in creating consistency and synergy across media channels. Many marketers think that the strategies of their campaigns fit well together. But the target audience often thinks otherwise. It therefore requires a great deal of expertise to really integrate campaigns effectively and deploy them coherently.

Never sleep, marketing as a continuous data-driven process

Marketing is not a project; marketing is a process that is never finished. It is important to continuously evaluate marketing activities based on data. Data should guide choices and further optimize campaigns.

Reaching the right people, at the right time and with the right message: the premise of marketing doesn't sound all that complex. But to reach potential and existing customers, convert leads into sales and thus achieve business goals, a hefty dose of insight, data, strategy and creativity is indispensable. Why the emphasis on data? Man as homo economicus, as acting rationally, does not exist. Yet economists often still assume this. In fact, much behavior is irrational. Good marketing research gets this to the surface.