E.O.C. Week 4: What is the difference between Marketing and Advertising

Advertising is more of a public service by advertisement. Marketing concentrates more on the customer values and can sometimes focus all their energy on a certain demographic or age group. On the other hand, Advertising might affect different age groups differently depending on the type of ad and/or who’s doing the advertising. For example, Levi’s have a new cut of jeans that have been out for say 6 months, but it wasn’t selling very much. So they paid a high profile music artist like Kanye West to be the spokesperson to advertise and wear that cut of Jeans. They have him do a lot of commercials on television and whenever he’s at awards shows he mentions the type of jeans he’s wearing. Most likely people in their teens up to the late 20’s will probably start wearing their jeans just because it’s Kanye West who’s wearing them. “Many products and services that are integral parts of Americans’ lives today get their initial boost from opinion leaders.” (MKTG, Lamb, pg. 73). In this case, Kanye West is considered a Opinion leader. And in the next few months they become the current trend amongst that age group. Now the other age groups around that, or people who don’t know or care who Kanye West is probably will not really think about buying those type of jeans. Levi’s now have a certain type of customer that buys their product, but only by chance. They couldn’t predict who will start buying their jeans, they just wanted to promote it to get someone to buy it.
Marketing would take a more extensive approach. They would probably do a focus group or come up with surveys on people who have bought the jeans and ask them questions, like are they comfortable compared to other jeans, does it go well with your style of dress, etc. Then off of those answers they would come up with a marketing plan to implement what they are already doing, or a way to improve the product so more people would buy it.