ADVERTISING ISN’T MARKETING

 

 

My father-in-law was a plumber, but he never trained as a plumber.

When he was seven his region of China was flooded, hundreds of thousands of people drowned, he clung to a tree for three days until he was rescued.

At seven, he started work on the rice-boats and after a few years settled in Singapore.

He did any odd jobs he could and found he had a knack for plumbing, in fact better than a knack, he was what we might now call a savant.

Never having been to school he wasn’t able to read or write or speak English, but he was instinctive at plumbing, faster and better than anyone else.

He opened his own business and was in great demand but, because he couldn’t read or write, the business soon went bankrupt.

Until he met and married my mother-in-law, she’d been educated, she was clever and ambitious.

They set up another company, but this time with her running the business side.

He knew nothing about balancing books, or invoicing clients, or paying the workers, or leasing buildings, or bank loans, so he left that side to her.

She knew nothing about plumbing, but she knew that he was an expert at it, so she left that side to him.

Between them the company grew to become not just a successful plumbing contractor, but also a cast-iron foundry and a stainless-steel works; they owned apartment buildings and even built their own office block; they had branches in Singapore, Malaysia, Borneo, and China.

He didn’t get involved in running the business because he knew she was the expert.

She didn’t get involved in the plumbing side because she knew he was the expert.

That’s how a team works, and that’s why we don’t have 11 strikers on a football team, we have 11 experts who are each good at their different jobs.

I’m really good at the practical side (advertising) but not good at the theory side (marketing, client meetings, running a company, etc).

So I always made sure I had partners who were good at that, I trusted them to do their job and they trusted me to do mine.

It worked well because, as with all the best agencies, that’s how a team works.

But I find some people don’t understand the difference and that’s a problem.

Sales is marketing’s job, advertising’s job is communication.

Sales, distribution, price-points, product-quality, availability, supply-chain, target audience, competitive-set, data-analytics, CRM, press and PR, all these are the job of the strategists, the marketing team, the clients.

They will decide the strategy and issue the brief, then creative’s job is to communicate that brief as powerfully as possible.

To make sure the work stands out, has impact, to make sure it’s understood, to make sure the message is remembered and correctly attributed.

If any of the communication elements aren’t working then it’s creative’s fault.

But if all the communication elements are working but there’s a problem with sales, then the brief must be wrong.

Steve Jobs understood the difference.

When Apple opened its first store in May 2001, industry analysts called it “a costly mistake”.

BusinessWeek said it would be “an expensive disaster”.

But Steve Jobs reinvented retail and built the world’s most profitable store-model from scratch.

Apple stores make $5,500 per square foot, that’s more than Tiffany, Gucci, or any store on earth.

But how? There’s no cash-registers. No sales people. No pressure.

Because Steve Jobs wasn’t trying to sell people products.

He was trying to make people want them.

If we can understand the difference, and who does what job, we can get better at both.