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The Awful Truth About Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust

My five-year-old daughter believes in fairies. Rainbow fairies, weather fairies, flower fairies, even sleep fairies. In fact, she’s an avowed expert on fairies and the only one who knows the truth about them: that they live in magical worlds only she can see. She’s part fairy too, she says, and “filled with magic.”

Right about now you’re probably asking what fairytales and magical creatures have to do with marketing. First I have to tell you that my daughter learned everything she knows from books and movies written by adults who she says don’t really know about fairies. It’s not that grownups are too old to understand what really goes on in pixie hollow; they just don’t have the magic inside that allows them to see the whole picture. So she takes a goblin here, a unicorn there, adds a mermaid for good measure, and creates her own sacrosanct interpretations.

Many people in business are just like my daughter, if not nearly so cute. Their understanding and beliefs about marketing comes from a hodgepodge of Internet blogs, executive summaries, newspaper clippings, and hearsay. They take either what sounds good or feels right as gospel and become experts themselves. They are, like my daughter, full of magic and the only ones who know the truth.

That may sound harsh. Yet, unlike my daughter, people in business can’t afford to play “make-believe.” They go broke.

Marketing is less magic than it is work. It requires effort to identify and satisfy customer needs. It also takes time and, usually, money to move through this process and formulate a marketing strategy to achieve business goals. That strategy may include public relations, advertising, and business development. These elements may work together, separately, or simultaneously depending on the marketing objective.

Information is empowering, but it can also be overwhelming. Instead of trying to drink a bathtub full of water in one gulp, take a few sips. Start by clearly defining your terms, then move on to bigger concepts:

• Marketing: the process of identifying and satisfying customer needs.

• Marketing Strategy: the logical route by which a business hopes to achieve its marketing objectives. It is a road map that guides you to your chosen destination(s) and utilizes advertising, public relations, and business development as fuel for the trip.

• Advertising: the sponsored presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services through newspapers, magazines, television, radio, the Internet, and other mass media. It is used to communicate messages about you as well as your products, services, and causes. In addition, it is used to inform, persuade, and remind target audiences.

• Public Relations: the process of managing how you deliver the message(s) about your business to various publics and audiences.

• Business Development: the process of building, nurturing, and maintaining relationships with prospective and existing clients in an ongoing effort to secure additional sales and selling opportunities.

These definitions may not answer all of life’s persistent questions, but they do reflect the key attributes of-and differences between-core marketing elements. Knowing them and understanding how they interact will put you far ahead of competitors who continue to pontificate and lose market share.

In short, faith, trust, and pixie dust alone won’t be enough to successfully market your business. But a clear understanding of marketing basics, combined with common sense, may just carry you all the way to Neverland after all.