I've been putting together a letter to send out to prospective clients and have decided to 'define' three terms that are used frequently. They are as follows:

Marketing?
Advertising?
Campaign?

As I started to define these words I began thinking. The more I thought the more detail I decided was needed and the longer the definition became. I found myself wondering if others have had problem with these words... and more importantly, what our clients really believe these words to mean.

What do you think?

Not in the classic 'webster' definition sense but in the day to day 'in the trenches' sense...

... 'what do they mean'?

I hate long definitions. In the medical device world, which is where my background is, people always have trouble understanding the difference, from an FDA requirements standpoint, between "Validation" and "Verification".

I did too, until I saw these definitions:

Verification = Are we building the product right?
Validation - Are we building the right product?

With that in mind, here are my definitions:

Marketing = Making the right people aware of your product
Advertising = Selling your product to the right people
Campaign = A Marketing & Advertising plan.

Here are mine:

Marketing: The intuitive process of exploring, discovering and exploiting market needs.
Advertising: Selling products to qualified prospects in the most effective way
Campaign: An active project with a commercial or advertising goal

Marketing is the art of making a promise and keeping it.

Advertising is one way to get that promise out there, and just a small part of the marketing schmorgasboard.

A campaign is an "attack" on a market using one dominant idea and with one goal in mind.

Obviously two proponents of the KICK principal? Keep It Complicated, Kid.

Okay, here's my simple version:

Marketing is making money.
Advertising is how you get that money.
Campaign is the thing that costs money to get the advertising and ultimately that marketing money.

Not bad, Vin. Let's get a little more pithy on that last definition though

Neb,

Actually it is pithy at its core, the rest is just explanation.

Marketing is making money
Advertising is how you make that money
Campaign is the thing that costs money

Better. I'm a sucker for symmetry. I even hate it if all my bullets don't have the same number of lines.

Ok...great responses all. I'm going to post my definitions and hope to get input on them:

Marketing -Marketing is the ongoing analysis by which a business finds its' primary, secondary and margin audiences and offers for sale any given product or service. It is the documentation of the ever changing customer demands, attitudes and reactions to their products which is then measured against the current marketing plan and adjusted accordingly.

Advertising - Advertising is the creative process by which a business designs and disseminates information to attract and to appeal to a targeted customer; to convince them that their needs will be met thereby creating a desire by which a purchase is made of a particular product or service that a business provides.

Campaign - A campaign is a shorter focused and tightly targeted advertising blitz designed to drive an increased volume of sales to the business for a given period of time.

Whatcha thenk?