Marketing is all about perception.

You know, the thing about the Nike logo is not that when you see the swoosh that you think "Oh, that's Nike". The important thing is that Swoosh = Nike = Sports. Take any logo, any name, throw money at it and eventually people will make the link that logo=company. But that's not that important. Associating a name to a logo is only the beginning. What's important is that BWM = luxury cars, Nike = sports, Bel Ami = cute young europeans. Positioning is often the foundation of an incredible marketing strategy.

What some people don't realize is:
1) A large portion of the marketing they see was not put there to do a sale. Sometimes it's to PREVENT consumption (smoking, consuming less electricity, etc), a lot of the time is to PREVENT post-buying cognitive dissonance (why do you think a lot of car companies are showing ads of their trucks in the moutains or whatever? It's not only to position the product and help a sale, but often primarily to make sure that the guy who just bought the truck feels good about his purchase.), a lot of the time it is to POSITION the company/product (again, Nike and sports) and sometimes it's only to hurt the competition. (Our competitor just opened a new store? Well, we'll do a huge sale in our store so that their numbers are skewed to complicate their post-opening analysis and PR potential.)
2) Advertising/Branding is not the only thing a marketer does. We also look at PR, distribution channel, consumer behaviours, product life-cycle management, and so on.

Anyway, I study/work in marketing so I'd have a lot of things to say about it but I'll let it to that for now :groovy: