What You Need to Understand About Marketing to Grow Your Business Effectively

The following is adapted from my new book Lies, Damned Lies, and Marketing.

There’s a famous Indian parable that could very well be an allegory for how CEOs view and understand marketing today. Five blind men overhear that a strange new animal called an elephant has been brought into their village. They have never encountered an elephant before, so they set off to discover this animal for themselves.

Once they arrive at its pen, they reach out to feel the animal, so they can discover what sort of a creature it might be. The first man grabs its trunk and says, “Ah, I understand now. An elephant is a kind of large snake.” The second man reaches out and lays his hand upon the animal’s leg and says, “No, I can clearly tell that this elephant has the shape of a pillar, like a large tree.”

The third man touches the side of the elephant and says, “Clearly, this elephant is flat like an enormous wall.” The fourth man grabs its tail and says, “To me, this elephant is like a small rope that swings back and forth.”?

Finally, the fifth man reaches up and feels the long tusk of the elephant and announces, confidently, “You are all wrong. I have felt this animal, and I tell you it is hard, smooth, and sharp like a spear.”

In some versions of the story, the men suspect one another of lying and come to blows. In others, they begin to collaborate, pooling their knowledge to discover the true nature of the elephant. Whatever the case, the story has endured—and if we dig into it a little bit, it’s quickly apparent how much it can teach us about effective marketing.

Truth May be Singular, but Perception is Not

What can a story about elephants possibly teach us about marketing? That while truth might be singular, our perception of it varies. Also, our limited and incomplete perception of reality can cause us to draw faulty conclusions.

This story frequently comes to my mind when I consider the struggles so many leaders have with marketing. Most leaders I talk to aren’t wrong about marketing. Their understanding is simply limited and incomplete. They have a view of marketing based on their own narrow experience.

What they need is a big and comprehensive picture, so they can make decisions from a position of clarity and completeness. Before you even think about diving into specific marketing tactics, you need a holistic understanding of marketing: what it is, how it differs from sales, and what types of marketing are available. This will provide a solid foundation upon which you can begin to build.

What is Marketing?

Let’s start with the most fundamental question of all: what is marketing?

There are many ways to answer this question, but I believe it is most helpful to describe marketing as a bridge that connects a business with its customers and potential customers. Ideally, it’s a two-way bridge: customers acquire knowledge about a company and its products while, at the same time, the company acquires knowledge about customers and the marketplace.

The two-way nature of the bridge is worth emphasizing. You need to ensure that you view marketing in a holistic manner. It’s not just for communicating the value that you deliver through your products and services. It also needs to function as your conduit for learning about your customers, potential customers, competitors, and the entire marketplace in which they, and you, operate.?

When you improve your understanding of their relevant feelings, preferences, and experiences, you are much more likely to design and deliver better products and services that your customers will line up for.

Stripping Away the Confusion

Peanut butter and jelly. Oil and vinegar. Mac and cheese. Sales and marketing. All of these are great pairings of things that also exist independently of each other. Of course, together they are even better than their individual parts.

I use the above examples to illustrate that, while every business wants (or should want) to have a cohesive sales and marketing team, many business leaders run into trouble when they confuse and conflate sales with marketing.?

The two are not the same; indeed, they play very different roles in your company. In clearest terms, sales is focused on the present (or the near term), while marketing is focused on the future (or the long term).

In other words, sales is about trying to get customers to purchase what is in your inventory today, while marketing is about trying to figure out what you should have in your inventory tomorrow and generating interest in that future sale. Sales is about closing a transaction fast, while marketing is about persuading your potential customers and making the job of sales easier.

When your sales team is trying to convince a customer to close a deal, that’s not marketing, and it’s a dangerous mistake to confuse the two. Closing deals is important, but it doesn’t necessarily set you up for future success. If that’s where most of your money is going, then you’re not actually investing in marketing. Nor can sales take the place of marketing, because clearing out the inventory in your warehouse won’t guarantee future success.

To really invest in marketing, you must aim further down the road, trying to get both a long and wide view of your potential customers and the marketplace. To do that, tactically and strategically, you need an approach that focuses on both Big-M marketing and small-m marketing.

Big-M and Small-m Marketing

What do I mean by Big-M and small-m marketing? Big-M marketing refers to foundational aspects of marketing that help define your business strategy. It sets the stage and reveals a path (or multiple paths) that will get you the business results you desire.?

Big-M marketing is about gaining rich insights from your customers, and a strong understanding of your competitive landscape. Equally important, it’s about gaining a deep, introspective understanding of your own company, its team and capabilities, and the limitations that can make all the difference between a suboptimal strategy and one that delivers results.

Small-m marketing refers to the tactics you can implement to move the needle. It also happens to be the more visible part of marketing: your website, logo, brochures, tagline, color scheme, content generation, SEO, advertisements, and so on.

As you can imagine, most of your time and dollars are going to be spent on small-m marketing, and that’s how it should be. It will also remain the more visible part of any marketing effort. However, most leakage of marketing dollars happens in small-m marketing tactics, largely because most businesses jump straight into small-m stuff without investing the necessary time and effort in building a foundation that comes only with Big-M marketing.

Put the Ultimate Customer at the Center

As you think through these concepts, it’s important to remember that great marketing always places the ultimate customer at the center of everything, regardless of whether you’re working with Big-M or small-m, short term or long term. The ultimate customer refers to the person or group who will end up using your product or service.?

Know the marketplace where they operate. Get a clear picture of the landscape around them. Understand how they live, how they think, how they feel, and what things affect them. To get the most impact from your marketing dollars, your foundation, and the tactics you construct on top of that foundation must all be directed toward that ultimate customer—not the distributor or dealer.

For maximum impact, focus on your ultimate customer in everything you do, even if you never directly interact with them. When you do that, you will also be effectively marketing to your intermediaries. Good channel partners will always appreciate and reward you for anything you do to make their selling job easier.

Riding the Elephant

Remember: an elephant is more than just a trunk, or a leg, or a belly, or a tail, or a tusk. You must understand how all of these parts fit together to create the whole animal. Only then will you understand how you can climb on its back and guide it to where you want to go.

Similarly, once you understand how sales and marketing relate and differ from each other, and how each of the different pieces of marketing fit together—both Big-M and small-m—you can bring them together, in an effective way, to grow your business, now and into the future.

For more advice on how to create an effective, holistic marketing strategy, you can find Lies, Damned Lies, and Marketing on Amazon.

Atul Minocha is a partner at Chief Outsiders, a marketing consulting firm that helps CEOs accelerate growth through strategic planning, customer insight, and disciplined execution of well-crafted marketing plans. With experience in startups and Fortune 500 companies like Honeywell, Kodak, and Toyota, Atul works in a wide range of industries, from automotive and healthcare to industrial goods and technology. Atul has a degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and an MBA from Yale University. He is a professor at the Hult International Business School, a mentor and an angel investor with Sierra Angels, a Vistage speaker, and a Forbes contributor.