02/21/2019
15 Lessons, Part 1: “Marketing” Is Everything
(This is the first installment in "15 Lessons," a year-long series by Nick Scott Turner marking the 15th anniversary of Gardner Loop.)
Your brand is not the logo, colors, and typefaces in your style guide. It’s what people think and feel about your organization. You don’t control it, but you can influence it. That’s your job as a marketer: influencing what people think and feel about your organization so that more and more of them become supporters.
The opportunities to influence your brand are everywhere. Not just in posts on social media or in ads on TV, but also in places most people—including many marketing professionals—don’t consider.
The atmosphere around your office?
The cleanliness of your bathrooms?
The way you treat vendors?
Marketing, marketing, and marketing.
You can ignore these ways of influencing your brand if you like. Your boss probably isn’t a marketer and probably won’t notice the connection between your KPIs and, say, the legibility of the forms in accounts payable. But, you don’t work for an organization such as NOFAS or Feed More just to sell more widgets or to give dividends to the shareholders. Your employer is literally trying to change the world and that mission drives you. You aren’t the type of marketer who ignores opportunities to build support for your cause.
Those opportunities—to delight your donors, to create happiness for your coworkers, to leave vendors wishing they were employees—are everywhere. There is no place in your organization that you could look without finding one. And, if opportunities to influence your brand are everywhere, then “marketing” is everything.
