Читать книгу Media Selling - Warner Charles Dudley - Страница 17

You have been reading about “customers” and “consumers,” and the two terms seem to have been used almost interchangeably. It is time to clear up any confusion and accurately define the terms: a customer buys a product; a consumer uses a product. Consumers on the Internet are often referred to as users. Sometimes a customer and a consumer are the same person, for example, when a man buys an electric shaver for himself and uses it. Sometimes they are different people, for example, when a teenager says she wants an iPhone and her mother buys it for her. Proctor and Gamble (P&G) year after year is the world’s largest advertiser; P&G’s customers are retailers such as Walmart and their consumers are people who buy Crest. By advertising to consumers and creating demand for Crest, P&G pulls the product through the distribution system. Some manufacturers do not advertise their products but sell them to wholesalers who then sell the product to retailers and, thus, push products through the distribution system. In the media business, the customer is the advertiser and the consumer is the user, viewer, reader, or listener.

In today’s marketing ecosystem, many companies, such as Facebook, are referring to customers as partners, and this trend toward partnership selling will be discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 2.

You will also find a more detailed discussion of marketing in Chapter 15 and of advertising in Chapter 16 because media salespeople must have a deeper understanding of marketing and advertising than is provided here in this introductory section in order to be effective problem‐solvers and solutions sellers for the media.