Marketing vs Promotion
Promotion and marketing are corporate communication strategies that are very close to each other and often confuse people because of the overlapping. All organizations require marketing and promotion to increase their sales and to create a positive awareness about the company and its products, no matter whether they are profit or non profit. Knowing how important these tools are for companies, it becomes essential to understand the subtle differences between the two concepts to avoid wastage of time and effort.
Marketing
Marketing is a heady mix of all activities that are designed to introduce a product or service in the market and to sell it to the customers. In fact, marketing refers to all activities and processes that are involved in communicating with the potential customers. It starts from identifying a need for a product or a service and then creating and supplying it to potential customers to satisfy their needs. Identification and satisfaction of customer needs is always the focus of any marketing strategy. The purpose behind all marketing activities is to satisfy the needs of the customer while making profits for the entrepreneurs that produce and supply the products or services.
Marketing is a mix of strategies that aim to build strong customer relations by creating value for them. Customer is always at the centre of all marketing strategies where a marketing strategy identifies customers, satisfies them and then tries to retain them. It is marketing that allows management to understand the taste of consumers to be able to design better products to retain them and to increase profits for stakeholders.
Despite changes in marketing strategies and policies, the basic principle of marketing remains the same, and that is to communicate with the potential customer, to result in better sales. In short, marketing can be visualized as the bridge that connects producers with consumers. This broad generalization puts the processes of production, packaging, transport, and publicity, promotion, selling and then servicing the customer in the concept of marketing.
Promotion
Promotion is all activities that are aimed at creating positive public awareness about a product or service or an organization or event. This is done to increase the demand for the product so that sales increase. The product is seen as different from other similar products. Creation of a brand image is a part of the process of promotion. Advertisement and publicity are two important tools for the promotion of a product. Whereas advertisement buys space and time slots in media to inform the features of the product to potential customers, publicity is a free method of letting customers know about a product as media itself realizes the importance or utility of a product or service and informs the public about it. To suppress negative information about its product or service, companies employ media managers who try to keep good relations with the media.
What is the difference between Marketing and Promotion?
• Marketing consists of many activities and promotion is just a part of marketing.
• Marketing can exist without the help of promotion, but promotion cannot exist independently.
• Promotion is all about creating a positive public awareness about the product, and it involves strategies like advertisement and publicity.
• Marketing starts from identifying consumer needs and continues from production and selling, to finally providing after sale service to customers.
• Advancement of a product or service is at the focus of promotion while identification and satisfaction of customer needs is at the focus of marketing.