No, marketing is about improving the perception of the good you’re selling (or your brand). Marketing rebranded itself as marketing, but it’s actually just a branch of propaganda. Keep in mind that there’s no requirement for something to be false in order for it to be propaganda, propaganda just means that you argue a position regardless of if it’s true.
What you describe as «proper» marketing might be labeled as «honest» marketing, but even that’s impossible because lots of elements from marketing have nothing to do with the features of the product. The logo, the colour, the names, the words, they are all chosen to convey something and to influence your perception.
I’ll admit it gets used all sorts of ways and few even know the technical what it can cover even working in a job doing something under that umbrella shoved under the term. And then there’s the fact that these things all get called marketing materials and so on etc
But marketing is technically about understand a customer need and meeting it better than competition.
It explicitly involves all of it including strategy on product/service. Sadly there is such a thing where a company markets at the purseholders and that link of it actually being beneficial to the end-user vs they [purseholder] can blag/sell/believe [eg when it’s a parent desperate for their teenager to do better] that (with propaganda and tactics like ‘anti mental health’ to questions) but that’s not the sales pitch which is eg the iapt presentation saying ‘saves money at any cost’ to GPs but a different message to MPs, insurance companies etc.
Sometimes products are reverse-engineered to good ends (how can we deliver a clean hotel room for £x) , but particularly with this selling to someone other than the person ending up undercard service it’s other people’s ‘problems’ and their definitions of what they think it is that become potentially designed around.
The Behavioural Therapy model used gets unpacked and laid bare nicely in the Netflix series ‘the Program’
Some do this with a long term or just trustworthy approach and get the product right , the others sure know what the difference is from those to theirs and might be selling it on cost of convenience or just ‘con’ (the short termism or cash cow category)
But no marketing is the whole thing and not the second - it’s a marketing strategy they’ve gone for maybe and that marketer in charge might have had that product/service dumped on them along with other criteria but the whole stuff technically comes under that term it’s just you get a sales-oriented organisation (flog it) vs a marketing-oriented one (fulfilling customer need). It’s why marketing literature has big conversations about trust and transparency
The branding and marketing comms is one aspect. Which might sit in a marketing or comms dept
But yes it’s annoying how many even bosses or boards just want the make it sell bit when technically it should include being part of developing what it is and becomes.
Agree on the perception part you can get that misunderstood both ways - the first being selling or thinking it’s something it’s not really underneath , and there’s even bigger room for issue when it’s one person being the buyer for a different end-user getting it chosen for them as you get people selling at the purse holder with different levels of accuracy and silencing whilst putting words in mouth of eg service user etc.
Of course someone can also have something really good and just not be getting it across because they aren’t speaking the right language metaphorically or as we’d be more familiar don’t have those same placement opportunities eg on supermarket shelves or via routes to patients etc and so on and it turns out they are better value all round when we scout out that great battery shop etc .
I wasn’t being pedantic on you tbf and it seems like I’m being a bore but there’s a point I try and get to at the end because this is sitting in the ‘what actually technically is this’ territory that could be relevant, plus it’s something I have to add whenever I see the term because it’s my background and that full aspect stuff is what I do but get lots who just assume they know what marketing is etc want to just you know hire someone to stick a logo on the way they want it and think the job takes very little time or thinking/tracking etc as it’s just a quick art task they could do in two days that they can see they think is involved in something working or not working. I’m sure many professions have the same issues somewhere of other in being misunderstood to lesser or greater extents (ironic or not ironic it’s marketing that often includes communications).
I’ll agree there a lots who have the job title or call themselves marketers who are working in marketing but often if you are just trained in the organisation then aren’t aware there’s very different overall remit of the subject /discipline
Anyway the issue isn’t about the logo either.
I agree on it being propaganda that’s why I use the term when it is propaganda. Or something even more limbo-land
Marketers are regulated to where they can’t actually say something is something it isn’t. Or to infer that. And they can’t play dumb on ‘I thought that was good evidence/that report meant it does promise an A in my exam’ but have to write the actual correct words of what it can claim.
There’s an irony having read all these bps papers over the years where medical care and research seems to not be bound by the same eg CMA regulations that most of elsewhere can no longer get away with eg even in your website about a course has to be accurate and factual or to clients about a service if treatment each claim has to be well evidenced and reference able etc . It’s why LP and the advertising complaints has been more straightforward
And there’s something definitely going on where journals are providing a loophole and once it’s ’written Down there’ they think the legtitimacy of that inference actually in the paper to that population can be fuzzier than laypersons would assume etc
In many other contexts this text of claims to ‘sell’ something that doesn’t do what it says would cause an issue with ‘not being marketing compliant’ eg a uni course couldn’t claim to heal its dyslexics without referenced evidence and that would include very specific outcomes like what employment all the grads from it got here. And drop-outs flagged as a rate at the top (as a course issue not a student one) etc
So I find the different ‘boundaries’ allowed for this healthcare stuff a real puzzle but also part of the question on regs.
I genuinely don’t think we can call someone in a paper making inferences their actual results and methodology don’t justify would meet those regs so it sits in a strange place
) and sorry if all my words I put down within a longer post hoping the whole thing gets across a point don't each come across that way, I think probably one of my words somewhere in my original post came across as one potential way of reading it that was likely never intended or the point of the point being made, I don't know. I struggle with word-finding so there will always be finding the closest thing possible, typos etc unless I'm having a miracle-day, today's not it so I'm stuck, but I do my best and there's been no having any go or tone etc intended in any of what I've written.