Marketing means to me...

[Billaboy]

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:

[desslock]

Billaboy - great post

[Bec]

I think for our business, doing the research and presenting options how best to brand and what tools to get in place would be part of marketing, as well as evaluating what the program currently has, and providing some guidance on the best growth directions to take and the order of what needs done to get there.

The person(s) handling the phones, posting on boards, answering emails and carrying through on the branding concept would be the sales staff, and those making various advertising medium, whether it's sites they own and use for marketing, or building up the materials for an affiliate program gets relegated into design ... ie the freesites, fhg templates, banners, etc. Who handles the tedious part of doing submits, making galleries with the templates, keeping blogs updated, updating the site, uploading content, optimizing the photos etc ... is the grunt job guy, possibly part of the sales system, but not always.

I think for many that ask for "help" ... it's either a lack of staff to bring it all together, or a crew that doesn't have one person delegating who does what, or no clue about laying out a business plan, and usually it's all of the above.

[Gayboys4fun]

Inspirational stuff!