I had a meeting yesterday morning centered around the new Athletic and Wellness Centre the CCSAI is building. My boss asked me what I had on the agenda and I told her “Welcome and then marketing brainstorming,” she e-mailed me to remind me that it’s not all marketing, it’s about communication too.
That lead me to wonder if anything that comes out of a communications office is ever anything but marketing? Anything I do to communicate to stakeholders about this building has the purpose of building excitement and managing goodwill while the community is inconvenienced by construction.
Everything that comes out of my office is to promote something, create awareness, brand or something similar, it’s never really to say “Just so you know.”
Made me approach the strategy for this building way differently than if I was just keeping you up-to-date for the sake of … well … keeping you up-to-date.
Thoughts on this? Tell me in the comments.
I would say it’s a balance between people feeling like they’re being sold something or being pumped up and people feeling like they have all the true information (as opposed to spun information) that they feel they need about the building.
Obviously both are marketing and both can be crafted but the latter could be called communications by the recipients but the former probably would not. I think it’s a matter of perspective.
Toodles.
Communications/PR, advertising, events, direct mail, etc. all fall under the general term ‘Marketing’. Essentially the role of a Marketing Director/Manager, etc. is to determine the best mix to effectively achieve the marketing objectives. . in some organizations it’s not that cut and dry depending on what industry they’re operating in and the defined role of ‘Communications’. An abbreviated, generic ‘Coles notes’ explanation…