Communications is not marketing

When someone asks me what I do, I say “communications”. Their eyebrows scrunch with confusion. So I clarify and say it’s like marketing.

I have been studying Public Relations and Corporate Communications at Seneca Polytechnic for 2 months, and I regret to realize that I misunderstood the communications field.

Communications is not marketing. Here’s why.

Publics, not target audience

Egg Farmers of Ontario don’t sell products to consumers. They lead the egg sector through promotion, education, and ensure egg farmers follow regulations. Yet, I see their ads all the time in the Toronto subway through their “Get Cracking” awareness campaign.

To Egg Farmers of Ontario, I am considered a public. I am not someone who will hand over my money to them directly. Instead, I may purchase eggs produced by one of their affiliated egg farmers. If one of the egg farmers runs ads encouraging me to buy their eggs, then I become a target audience.

Of course, an audience can be a public. But a public is not necessarily an audience.

Publics broaden the people who interface with a brand beyond customers and this matters because brand reputation is very fragile. With all the layoffs happening in tech over the last two years, internal emails of the news always finds a way to external audiences. Yet, they’re not the intended audience.

Relationships over sales

So what is the goal of communications? Is it to increase sales? It might. But the scope is larger. It also covers brand reputation, which is built through the relationship with various publics.

If your company experienced a data breach, what should you do? Marketing would be concerned about how sales are affected. A communications professional is concerned about how to reassure existing customers. Preparing an email to explain the situation and inform customers is their next step.

Communications is similar to marketing

Having said all the above, marketing and communications are similar.

Both disciplines need to set goals and objectives, and measure outcomes. A communications professional is getting paid for their work, so they should quantify their work in some way. Although, ethically, we aren’t allowed to guarantee results. We should try to find ways to measure our work as an indicator of our expertise.

What is communications then?

What should I say the next time someone asks me what I do? I’ll say that my job is to manage relationships with stakeholders, including customers.