6.1: Marketing versus Selling

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Chapter 6 Learning Objectives

Comprehend the difference between ‘marketing’ and ‘selling’.
Gain a working knowledge of what a marketing plan should include.
Understand competitive methods.
Comprehend and utilize different types of sales promotions.
Gain a useful understand of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ sales promotions.
Understand promotional themes and techniques.
Gain a working knowledge of successful promotion management.

“Even when you are marketing to your entire audience or customer base, you are still simply speaking to a single human at any given time.”
Ann Handley

“Great marketers have immense empathy for their audience. They can put themselves in their shoes, live their lives, feel what they feel, go where they go, and respond how they'd respond. That empathy comes out in content that resonates with your audience.”
Rand Fishkin

The Marketing plan

Most restaurant operations engage in activities that they incorrectly refer to a marketing. Many people confuse advertising or personal selling with marketing. Although such activities are without question a part of the marketing function, alone and with no support they do not refer to marketing. Advertising and personal selling are merely forms of promotion, and promotion is just one component of the marketing mix. Operators engaging in activities of this type are merely attempting to sell their products and services. Marketing refers to the ‘entire’ process addressing the hospitality product and service mix.

The product-service mix is composed of all the tangible and intangible products and services that make up a hospitality operation. The product-service mix includes the food, beverages, dining room, meeting facilities, tabletop appointments, and personal attention by service personnel, and well as a host of other tangibles and intangibles. Advertising and selling, alone, focus only on the hospitality operation’s product-service mix, and the goal is to convince the consuming public to purchase and consume a portion of that mix. The ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ of the consuming public are given little consideration. Instead, the operation is hoping that a sufficient number of consumers will patronize the operation to allow the restaurant to achieve its financial objectives.

The hospitality and tourism industry, especially, food service, abounds with examples of operations that have failed because the owners created operations they ‘like’ or ‘always wanted to operate’, yet the owners and operators fail to consider fully the needs and wants of potential customers. The results are predictable: low volume, poor sales revenue, and frequent bankruptcy.

Marketing versus Selling

The difference between selling and marketing is very simple. Selling focuses mainly on the firm’s desire to sell products for revenue. Sales people, and other forms of promotion, come together to create demand for an operation’s current products. Clearly, the needs of the seller are very strong. Marketing, however, focuses on the needs of the consumer, ultimately benefiting the seller as well. When truly marketing a product or service, the needs of the consumer are a strong consideration from the very beginning of the product development process, and the product-service configuration aims at the unsatisfied needs of the consuming public. When a product or service arrives on the scene in the right mix, very little selling is necessary because the consumer need already exists and the product or service is merely in production to satisfy the need.