When The Marketing Meaning Is Being Refracted

Well, maybe it is time for me to try writing in English. Before reading my article thoroughly, I would like to apologize first if there were some grammatical errors I did. I'm still learning. This time, I would like to share my opinion about the genuine meaning of marketing. Today, some people always get bewilder and assume that marketing is a sales job. But the real fact is, that definition is totally wrong! Marketing is marketing and sales is sales.

 

Marketing job is to develop some promotion program or campaign to create demand in the market, to attract people, to stimulate customer so they want decide to purchase the product. Marketing also doing some research in order to know the customer character, whether it is match with the product segment or not. Then, create the right program to that selected customers, to give more stimulation. Marketing usually do push strategy to support sales target. On the other side, sales job is to collect the created demand, select potential customers, and persuade them to buy the product. Sales, usually be the one who make a direct contact with prospective customer. They don't create any promotion program and only concern to how to sell, get order, and achieve the given target. They do pull strategy. Nowadays, some companies in Indonesia do miss interpretation between Sales and Marketing. They put sales job into marketing division. Because of that, I as marketer always have to explain my jobdesc which not doing sales job because some of my friends assume that marketing equals sales.

 

Oh... My... God.

 

Then, I'm thinking of several reasons why the companies do that as below:

1. Company eager to press the budget really tight, so they consider to mix up sales and marketing job in one division only. Because the company needs income, then the division should do selling job more than do marketing activities.

2. The title of Sales has a little bit negative impression to the society. People think that a sales is a person who try to sell something, knock door by door, and it's quite annoying.

So, to reduce that bad impression, the company camouflage the title as Marketing. Well, those are the reason that come-up in my mind when thinking why people often misunderstood my job. They thought that I work as marketer so I have an amount target to be achieved. In fact, marketing's target is all about to meet the deadline. Sales target often become a measurement for marketing team whether the campaign was run well or not. So, that's all of my thought for today and also my first English article. Happy to share and please correct me if you found any mistake of my writing.