Marketing is not advertising

Anyone who says they do online marketing is wrong

We're not talking about Facebook ads or online ads in general, because those tools belong to the advertising side. Marketing and advertising are two different things. Anyone who says they do online marketing is wrong, because they do online advertising. There's marketing, which can be applied online and offline; the technical side and how to invest the money make up advertising.

I create marketing tools, but my budget for creating them isn't the advertising budget. The cost of producing a video is a marketing cost, as is the catalogue, the samples, the photo set. The cost of buying space on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or in print is an advertising cost. And publicity, relations with journalists, has its own separate budget. They can't be mixed. If I produce a catalogue and send it to the customer's home, that's marketing; if I buy a sponsored post or a page in a magazine, that's advertising.

Marketing comes after the brand

Marketing follows directly from branding, so it doesn't exist if I don't have brand positioning. It has to be at the service of the brand and its positioning. Nor is it a discipline in its own right, so there are no “marketing experts”: it has to sit inside a process of creating a high-end brand and be integrated into a system.

In premium and luxury there is no expressed or explicit demand, meaning the solution to an immediate problem, like nappies and Vicks VapoRub in the mass market. The marketing process, and this concept is very important, serves to stimulate and grow latent demand so that the potential customer identifies with our brand.

And it doesn't end with the first purchase. We print a magazine, with a big cover, and send it to the home of the customer who bought the kitchen. They certainly don't throw it away: they put it on the coffee table because it shows that the VIP from New York on the cover has their kitchen too; their guests find it in front of them and ask about it. It's a way of stimulating referrals, spontaneous word of mouth.

Google's real competitor is Amazon

Look at the journey of a mid-market consumer with a problem to solve: they search on Google, find the paid ads, the SEO results, the maps, and arrive at a mass-market brand and the purchase. On that journey Google's real competitor is Amazon; Facebook plays a different game. The two compete to solve the customer's explicit problem. Amazon is still Google's biggest advertiser, and since 2025 generative search has also stepped in between, ChatGPT and AI answers, which respond to explicit demand even before the search engine does.

High-end companies shouldn't invest in sponsoring conscious demand, because they're throwing their money away. Their customer has a problem of positioning themselves on the social ladder. And that problem is solved earlier, in their head.

Reality doesn't exist: what we call “reality” is only a perception of reality that we create in our mind. Marketing is building a brand in the mind of the potential customer.

Perception

Al Ries says something fundamental: marketing isn't about products, their features or their quality, but about perception, meaning how people perceive the product and the brand. Let me give you an uncomfortable example. Naturally my kitchen is top of the market in its interiors, finishes, runners. But if tomorrow I had the kitchens made elsewhere, by a mass-market manufacturer under private label, and carried on with the marketing I've created, I'd still sell them, and in the short term I'd increase my margins. Because the perception of the brand in my customer's head is already built. In the long run it doesn't work, because the product isn't consistent and word gets around. But it shows how much perception weighs compared with the product.

In the classroom I put it even more bluntly: don't read Kotler, read Ries. All his books. Kotler explains marketing for mass-market products, with market research and the four Ps. Ries explains how you get inside people's heads. If you sell at the high end, you need the second.

Marketing is also exclusion. Other manufacturers make kitchens with laminate doors, meaning plastic; we don't. Just by saying that you automatically position yourself on a higher level, and you disqualify in advance the customer who's only looking at price.

How perception is built

The high-end customer, in terms of mental process, buys like this: first the category, then the brand. Between the category and the brand, publicity gets into their head: brands are created by public relations. From the bottom up, on the other hand, the brand has to do marketing first and advertising after: create content about the brand, with writing, photos, video and audio, turn it into posts, ads, videos, articles and podcasts, and so get into people's minds through their phones.

Buying advertising pages in magazines isn't a profitable investment and I don't recommend it to any small company: with the budget for two magazines you can do everything else on social media. You get the result with the press office, with smart content and with the advertising money. In the end the customer wants that particular product and wants to spend that high sum that gets them the object which identifies them in society.

And it holds even if you sell to dealers. The distributor asks for my product only when their customer asks them for it: “What, you don't have RiFRA? I saw the ad.” That's how demand from intermediaries is born: through communication to the end consumer. At that point you come in, on your terms, and they buy on your terms, because the demand is there underneath.

From my book Direct from Milano and my classroom courses. Figures and examples updated September 2026.