According to 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.” Its concept has evolved from the earlier orientations, which focused strictly on the product, the production, the sales, or the customers, into something where everything matters nowadays.
Despite the fact that Marketing has been around since someone decided to trade a product or to defend an idea, still there are several misconceptions about it, such as these you will see next. They make the life of marketing specialists very hard and stop good ideas to become successful businesses, so it is crucial to put an end to them.
1 – Marketing is only about increasing sales
Many people think that the only goal that a Marketing plan can have is to increase sales. And this is as wrong as it can be. Of course, selling the company’s sales or product is important to any business, but sometimes, this isn’t what it needs at all.
Actually, depending on the context becomes mandatory that the company decreases its sales, so that they can adjust their production process, customer service, or even the product itself. Otherwise, the company might not be able to cope with the demand and could end up damaging its reputation instead – and their sales as a consequence.
2 – Marketing is advertising
Not only of ads lives a marketing plan. Based on its current holistic approach, marketing also involves customer relationship, internal activities, and socially responsible projects, just to name a few segments. And advertising might not be the best tactic to achieve your goals in these mentioned cases.
Ads, either online or offline, do play a key role in most of the marketing strategies, and yet much can be accomplished through phone calls, blog posts, and face-to-face conversations. Considering the strong competition and the complexity of process involved in current the business world, only an integrated traditional and digital marketing plan can ensure that you will be successful.
3 – Marketing is an evil thing that makes people buy what they don’t want
It would be great if this were true. Any company with money enough to contract the best marketing experts in the world would be lucrative. But we have seen plenty of businesses going bankrupt due to a massive sales failure – check what happened to RadioShack, in Texas, for believing that people would buy electronics that actually had become irrelevant.
It is true that Marketing strategies aim to reinforce brand authority, and a desire to buy a product or service as a consequence, but this is all that it can do. It can’t force or hypnotize anyone to pay for something they have no interest, or that they consider as a bad choice.
4 – Only the Marketing Department needs to care about Marketing
While understood as something dependable of the company’s processes as a whole, it becomes impossible to leave the marketing activities under the responsibility of just one department. It will become mandatory to count on every single person in the team, from the doorman to the board of directors, to make the expected results come true.
Even those who have no direct contact with customers still have to be involved, as they are probably essential to other crucial activities, such as the quality of the products or services. When the company takes it as a priority, their team becomes more confident, and it reflects on their productivity as a whole.
5 – You never know if your Marketing strategy really had an impact
Yes, you do. Marketing isn’t a guessing game, and you can know almost everything in terms of the impact of your strategies on your business. Monitoring and evaluation are mandatory steps of any marketing plan, and there are entire studies, tools, and techniques ready to be applied to basically any kind of business.
Actually, this process of analysis starts even before the marketing plan is approved through all research that is done to evaluate the company’s portfolio, team, customer service, and with the goal to understand their clients better. That is to say that there will be plenty of data at service to find out if the Marketing strategies changed the business’s scenario in any way, even those not related to sales.
6 – Without money, you can’t make any Marketing strategy work
This misconception often walks hand in hand with the idea that Marketing is only about advertising or promotion. When it is understood that Marketing starts longer before the product is ready to be sold, it becomes easier to understand that several crucial marketing ideas are developed and put into practice with very little or no budget at all.
In other words, when a company calls its team for a meeting to show them the first drawing of a new product so to gather opinions and insights, they are already working on their marketing strategy. When someone prospects a client while away from the office, maybe in a very casual situation, it is also a cost-free marketing technique.
7 – Only big companies need a Marketing Plan
Another common misconception is that only big companies need a marketing plan. They deal with long chains of command and several products, and the only way to get ideas aligned and happening in an efficient manner is by putting everything on paper. Unfortunately, while this is also true, it is also the reason why so many small businesses never grow up.
A company that wants to be taken seriously will need to be the first one to do it. And one of the main proofs of professionalism is having created and implanted a marketing plan covering all parts and phases of their internal and external processes. It will also minimize the changes of mistakes being caught along the way or being by surprise due to changes of scenario.
In Conclusion
As the Marketing’s guru Philip Kotler said
“marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. Marketing is the art of creating genuine customer value. It is the art of helping your customers become better off. The marketer’s watchwords are quality, service, and value”
If you understand it well, those misconceptions mentioned above will fade away, and it will be much easier to make the most of what marketing strategies can offer to any kind of businesses.