There are a few concepts I see misused every day: Publicity (Publicidade), Advertising (Propaganda), and Merchandising.
As a marketing professional, I am extremely picky about certain concepts, and I have no patience for people in the field who use these terms incorrectly.
Publicity: it’s free! Nobody invests money in publicity. Publicity costs nothing. A news story about a particular company is publicity.
Advertising: this one is paid. The correct thing to say is investing in Advertising, not in that blessed term above. There are more than 40 types of advertising, including: persuasive, political, sports, social, institutional, subliminal, ecological, electoral, ideological, government, corporate, religious, services, retail, comparative, promotional, informative, protection, corrective, product, repetition, reminder, cooperative, intuitive, web, educational, television, behavioral, brand, and the list goes on…
Merchandising: this means letting people try the product at the point of sale. You don’t do merchandising on TV, like on those shows where the host says, “NOW LET’S GO TO THE MERCHAN”… Not only do they misuse the concept, with a dreadful abbreviation, they get it completely wrong.
There’s another concept I find appalling: logomarca. There is no such thing as a logomarca; the correct word is LOGOTIPO (logotype). Logomarca is a “Brazilianized” way of saying logotipo. A logotype is one thing, and a brand is another. Some people defend the term logomarca, even our dictionaries do, but then again, who doesn’t make mistakes?