A connection commented that under a recent post, and it got me thinking. The cherry: It's visible, it's shiny, and it gets your attention.
But depending on your POV, that cherry represents something entirely different:
/ For the Sales Team: A pipeline full of qualified leads, shorter sales cycles, and finally hitting those revenue numbers.
/ For the Audience: A brand, product, or service that actually understands them, offering a product that solves a real problem.
/ For the Leadership: It looks like sustainable communication, predictable growth, the ability to plan.
/ For the marketing department: The visible manifestation, if you will, of their efforts.
But here is the reality of Go-To-Market: That cherry doesn't just magically appear. It needs a massive, solid foundation beneath it to hold it up.
In that sense, "advertising" is quite literally the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Or white shark?
It only works when the heavy lifting — the "underwater" marketing — is already done. Things like: market research. Competitive analysis. Product development. Positioning. Segmentation. Pricing strategy. Media selection. A post-launch feedback loop. You get the drift?
When you skip that 90% of the strategic groundwork, your shiny advertising campaign has nothing to stand on. Two scenarios:
(A) It doesn't perform. Crickets. But ... why?
(B) It works. You run the risk of not being able to repeat it, because you did not root this in a stringent process.
So in all likelihood, next time you see a brilliant, high-performing, memorable campaign, assume that quite a bit of that "invisible strategy" went into making it happen.
Any critical "underwater" marketing step you refuse to skip ...?
