Everything Is Marketing. (And MANY People Are Getting It Wrong.)
There's a graphic that's been floating around LinkedIn for years. A colleague shared it with me a long time ago and I've never been able to shake it.
(Credit: Matt Swain)
I've shared it probably a hundred times or at least rambled on about it until someone looked cross-eyed. I still love it.
It's also wildly incomplete. But we'll get there.
Here's what most business owners actually think marketing is: the ad. The Instagram post. The thing their nephew can probably do for cheap. The stuff you bolt on after the real work is done.
Wrong. It is fundamentally much more than that.
Everything is marketing. The way you answer the phone. The language on your invoice. What your team says about the company at a barbecue. The experience someone has six months before they ever pay you a dollar. Every single touchpoint is sending a signal — whether you designed it or not.
You are marketing right now. The question is just whether it's working for you or against you.
So if everything is marketing, where the hell do you start?
Brand.
Not the logo. Not the color palette. Not the pitch deck your last agency charged you an eye-popping amount for. The actual foundation — who you are, who you serve, what problem you solve, why you and not someone else, and what you need people to feel every time they brush up against your business.
Everything else is just tactics dressed up as strategy. And tactics without a foundation don't build anything. They just make noise on a budget.
Many businesses are out there painting signs and calling it marketing. A few are planning the whole circus. You already know which one you want to be.
Notes from BB — This one started as a real-time conversation but has lived in Jesse's head for years — ever since a fellow marketing professional shared the circus graphic and it never quite left her. The ideas, the conviction, and the frustration are entirely hers. BB refined the structure and punched up the language. The voice is mostly Jesse.
