Is Marketing Equals Advertising and Selling?

The answer is "No". Why?

A book of a Filipino author of Marketing in the Philippines, Mr. Josiah Go, wrote his book entitled, Fundamentals of Marketing in the Philippine Settings caught my attention when I was reading some Marketing books in a famous bookstore inside the mall.

In the first few pages of the book, he defined marketing as 'what is not'. He simply gave examples of the misconceptions of associating marketing with terms such as selling and advertising. He said that one of the most common misconceptions is associating marketing as selling. He quickly explained that while selling is an important activity of marketing and is a central function in daily business operations, marketing is not selling.

Furthermore, another misconception of some businesses is to have a notion of marketing equals advertising so companies with this kind of understanding spend their huge advertising budget. He said that a related pitfall is for misinformed executive to jump into mass media advertising without an understanding of the pre-requisite as well as constraints of mass media advertising.

The truth is that, selling and advertising is just part of the many functions of marketing.

So what's the use of this information to the readers? If you are a master in Marketing, you probably know the difference and will not bother about this anymore or will just read it to refresh what you already knew. I can say that starting entrepreneurs must need to distinguish marketing from selling and advertising because they cannot afford to spend big amount of money by pursuing misunderstood concept that may lead to opportunity loss or incurring unnecessary costs.

Source: Fundamentals of Marketing in the Philippine Settings, Mr. Josiah Go, author, Phil copyright May 2001.