Simple definition of marketing for non marketers | Hacker News Reader

Simple definition of marketing for non marketers

gtmdigest.com

I’m an old engineer, but here is my perspective:

Marketing is the money you spend to acquire potential customers. Potential is the key word. How is this done? Think of the word “attraction.”

Sales is the money you spend to close a sale. How is this done? Think “persuasion.” Sales is about doing whatever is necessary to make a transaction happen.

Examples:

Sign on building: marketing

Brochures: marketing

Advertisements: marketing

—————-

Pitch or proposal: sales

Working with a customer: sales

Site Visit: sales

I usually account for marketing expenses as “operations or overhead costs” and sales as “COGS or direct cost.” It just makes more sense to me that way, and it ties the sales cost to gross margin so it is very “visible.”

This is really simple and clear - for that I applaud you.

I agree with your first piece on attraction - I equate this to creating demand. Your examples from the physical world are really good. There are analogs to the digital world that go above and beyond - but content, distribution, and community are key.

The part I disagree with is that everything below the line is sales. The line between marketing and sales is much more blurry these days due to digital. Lots of "self serve". The pitch, the narrative, the capturing of the demand (i.e. maybe this would be the design of the physical store in the physical world) happens in marketing land and there's strong partnership.

Really interesting that you put sales into COGS. If it works for you, that's great! :) I'd encourage thinking about it in CAC (cost of acquiring a customer) and then using Payback (how quickly you pay the CAC back) as a measure of health.

I was hoping for something simple like "create brand awareness"

Not sure this post is doing much better than the problem it describes

Hmm. "The core job of marketing is to grow revenue faster." Did this line not help or too vague?

Marketing does more than that and revenue growth is shared with sales and the rest of the organization

Love this type of discussion. I'll give you that there are many sub jobs within the job of growing revenue faster. I'll also give you that Sales's job is also to create revenue. Revenue creation/growth is the job for both marketing and sales. They have different sub jobs to achieve that.

What do you think marketing does that's above and beyond growing revenue faster? :)

I'm here to learn new perspectives.

Most people don't buy when they see marketing, rather the marketing influences their decision making when they are at the buying point. This is why is said the main thing marketing does is create brand awareness

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