Random musings: Sales vs marketing

Monday, April 18, 2016

Sales vs marketing

Since yesterday was Ford Mustang Day and I was thinking about bringing up this topic again, I figured today was a good day to do it.

Here is the blog post I ran last year about sales vs marketing:

Apparently there's a big debate about which is more important: sales or marketing. And what's the difference? In my opinion, both are important and since today is Ford Mustang Day I'm going to use the launch of the Ford Mustang to talk about the differences.

The following commercial was aired on all 3 TV networks at the same time on April 17, 1964.

Advertising is a part of marketing, where marketing is everything that creates awareness and hopefully a desire for a product. Marketing will include TV commercials, newspaper or magazine advertising, newspaper or magazine articles, logos and anything else that may create a brand awareness, including word of mouth advertising (which is often the most effective). You may have noticed that the car was introduced at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. At least at that time, the World's Fair was considered the place to introduce futuristic ideas or products, so this immediately made the Mustang cutting edge. The commercial also featured young people, so the Mustang was targeted to the young and cool people. The Mustang logo was featured prominently, creating the Mustang brand, and the Ford logo was featured at the end to reinforce that this is a Ford product and that you could get one at your nearest Ford dealer.

So the commercial leads from marketing to sales. You can't buy your car from the TV (at least not back then), but you could buy it at your local Ford dealer. The primary purpose of a car dealership is to sell you a car. The salespeople are trained in sales techniques to say and do the right things to get you to buy a car. But even at the car dealer there is marketing going on. First, there's the brand logo which in our example is Ford. You have to know that you're going to the right place to buy your new Mustang. And there are cars on display, so that you can see all the choices that are available. So, even in a sales environment there is still marketing going on.

So, marketing gets them in the door and sales gets the wallet out. The old saying "If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door" may be true, but only if the world knows about your better mousetrap.