People ask this all the time. (Which is fantastic, by the way!)

“Why Invisible Marketing? Isn’t marketing about getting visibility?”

Well, here’s how I think about it.

I have enjoyed, talked about, and experienced deep emotional connections with super-cool Superbowl ads for products I’ve never bought and companies with whom I won’t do business.

But I earn a living because I’m known and trusted by a really small group of professionals and executives, for whom I treat the cancer they’re struggling to manage.

Do I want someone to say to my client, “My, what a memorable campaign your company ran”?

My goal is to expose something valuable to people who will value it. To facilitate the development particular kinds of relationships, which eventually result in durable revenue generation.

It’s comparatively easy to design marketing that the marketer thinks is effective. But it’s terribly expensive to do that. Such marketing typically takes place in an echo chamber, absent the customer, the sales people trying to reach the customer, and the people who are serving the customer after the sale.

It’s hard to design marketing that does its job, which is to contribute to positive Prospect Lifetime Value.

Here’s a non-advertising example. When developing a website, most people are tempted to start with the graphics and colors. The disciplined and productive place to start, however, is with the business case: what problem am I trying to solve? For whom? What do they want from me? What do I want from them? What should we accomplish together through our conversations?

I promise, the color scheme is much easier to define and matters far less than a clear, shared definition of the business problem the site is solving. From the business case flow the message, the functionality, the design standards, and the common ground for making decisions throughout the process.

In everything I do, I try very hard not to begin with branding or design or pretty words or Fun Marketing Stuff or putting together a webinar by Tuesday. (Though all those things have to get done, too.)

When I work with companies, we begin by asking and answering hard questions. And then we test those answers to find out if they are true. Over and over. Iteratively, over time.

I’m not a designer. But I think there’s a beauty to this process. As the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky said in his landmark book Sculpting in Time, “The beautiful is hidden from the eyes of those who are not searching for the truth.”

Related posts:

1. Someone sent me a Seth Godin post, so I will blog about it now.
2. Add these distractions to Marketing’s not-to-do list
3. Building a case = Building a brand
4. Marketers: under pressure for ROI? How to find accountability mentors.
5. Book Review: Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way

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