Marketing, Advertising, and Sales 101

What is Advertising?

It’s often confused with Marketing. And Sales. And Sales and Marketing. Community Outreach? Sure, toss that in there with all the other euphemisms, too.

Marketing is renting a lodge where the animals are. Advertising is hunting. Sales is bullets.I hate to break it to you, but you’re the deer, dear.

Marketing people have the least to do with the public, at least personally, so any essential creepiness on their part is hidden. They talk about customers like bacilli in a pyrex dish, but no one hears it until it’s passed along to others and gussied up and covered with shiny glass balls and garlands. That’s why cable networks don’t make episodic dramas about callow and cutthroat marketing departments with buxom secretaries.

People in advertising can seem rather two-faced. Janussarries, if I can coin a word. Advertisers are paid to fall in love with a product. Like all callow lovers, they are prodigious haters, too. They are tasked with making others love and hate things in turn, but the money has to convince them first. The most effective advertising sometimes sounds like love, or sounds like something unexceptional, but is seething with studied disregard for competitors. Don’t be evil is not a promise to nice. It’s a vicious, unsubstantiated accusation against your competitors, made by stealth. It’s almost worthy of a politician.

Salesmen are the butchers. Close the deal. They are paid to get stuff on their aprons, the stuff the supposedly vicious admen and rapacious businessmen can’t seem to stomach. Good salesmen make the customer feel as though the salesmen is simply helping the customer get what they want. It may even be true. But generally salesmen would push your face into the paper and mash a pen in your hand and move your arm over the contract by jerking your elbow around, if they could. They don’t come on the lot, ‘lessen they wants to buy…

It’s not personal (Sonny); it’s just business.And salesmen aren’t even always wrong in this regard. Sometimes a potential customer drives themselves to distraction worrying endlessly about signing on the line that is dotted. Ending the process gracefully is a blessing all around in many cases.

I run a very rare operation nowadays. I am a vertically integrated business. I thought up the concept, and I designed the products, and I make the product, and made the place the product is made, and I identify the potential customers, and talk to them, and sell to them, and send things to them, and I wonder forevermore afterwards about whether every single one of them is still happy with me. It’s easy for me to love the thing I’m selling, and I deserve less or more credit for delivering the whole megillah depending on your worldview. If I was more disconnected from the disparate steps in my operations, others could be paid to do them, and more customers could be served. Some persons like small, and reward me for my efforts. Some give credit to bigger organizations that don’t lose their soul by inches in expanding out instead of up. Me, I’d just like to eat more often and sleep more soundly.

I’ve become attuned to the machinations of selling things to people. I see the wires behind the animatronics a lot. We live in a world where Bill Gates is considered by many to be an evil mofo, but the ShamWow guy is lovable, at least between bouts of biting a hooker on the face, and being bitten.That is not a naturally occurring phenomenon.

To put yourself in Michelangelo’s shoes, he told the Pope that once the money was settled, he’d find a way to fall in love with the Pope’s thankless Sistine ceiling painting job. The Pope just wanted to get his message out. He hired the best ad man he could find. We’re all the better for it. And I’m sure the Catholic salesmen ultimately had an easier time closing the deal under that ceiling. Advertising and marketing and sales doesn’t have to make your flesh crawl. And many of the greatest artists I know of produced advertising for others. Picasso was one, lifelong advertiser for himself, but made is seem as if he didn’t have a bit of self-promotion going on. I preferred Suess just taking the money and making Flit ads. There’s more charm in it, and less deception.

So everyone has to warm to their task along the way to sell a product or service, and everyone uses dollar bills for the fire they warm their hands over. But you can tell when it’s not just the money talking; when a manifest affection develops for the object of the attention of talented people.

Watch the video. Whoever made it — and conceptualized it in the first place —  learned to love it; and maybe you might to, they importune without seeming to, if you’ve got a moment.

How else do you explain telling potential customers how much fun they’ll have with their boogers frozen in their beard?