ADVERTISING IS NOT MARKETING

AM | @MackinlayEuruni

Sources. Evelyn Ehrlich & Duke Fanelli. The financial services marketing handbook. Tactics and techniques that produce results. Bloomberg, 2012, introduction.
_____________

We'll talk a lot about advertisement during the course — sometimes for practical reasons (i.e., the heavy schedule). But as Evelyn Ehrlich and Duke Fanelli rightly point out, advertising is not marketing. Here's the relevant fragment (p. 3):

We've run into a lot of people, often in sales, who think that the most essential thing you need in order to improve sales is advertising. Or, conversely, we've run into other people, also often in sales, who don't believe in marketing because advertising doesn't work. So let's get this straight right away; advertising is one one tool in marketing, and it's not always the central one. Anyone who wants to incrase business is going to look for the fastest and easiest way to do it, which usually means committing a lot of money.

But marketing is a discipline that requires strategic thinking more than it requires a big budget. Careful planning means setting goals, choosing target market segments, determining or creating a product's differentiation and positioning, and selecting the tactics that will get the product noticed and bought by your targets. Successful marketing can mean playing golf with your best client's CEO, or it can mean opening new markets in Asia.

The talking baby ads have been a big hit for E*TRADE since they debuted during the Superbowl broadcast in 2008. One of many online trading firms that cropped uo during the first dot.com fever in the late 1990s, E*TRADE is among the few of its contemporaries still on the scene. One of the reasons for its longevity has been a willingness to break through the clutter by creating amusing advertising that has generated viral success — and added to the bottom line.

But note that the ads, while certainly attention-getting, also work on the level of matching the brand's image with the firms's positioning strategy. The point of the campaign is that E*TRADE makes investing so easy that even a baby can do it. Other online brokerages could make the same claim — but the baby gets the message across with humour and charm — qualities not usually found in
financial advertising.

________