When it comes to marketing, there are three types of people:

Those who see it as a dirty word. A word which represents the force feeding of (false) brand promises to an audience who have become cynical about anything a business says.
Those who believe marketing is nothing more than a clever idea and who as often as not believe their idea is so wonderfully simple and amazing that no other strategy or concept is even worth considering. These people often perpetuate the growth of group one.
Those who believe in the art of marketing, who believe in the principle of Making Marketing Meaningful.

So how do you make marketing meaningful? In essence, it starts at the basest of levels – understanding everything you are as a brand, what you represent, who you want to be. Then it evolves into understanding everything about your audience; what they do know, what they do not know, what they like and dislike and what makes them tick.

At this point you get to a position where as Seth Godin would say, you know that “people like us, do things like this”. You’ve started to blur the barriers between who you are as a brand and who your audience are as consumers; there is a synergy. You know what they know, but more powerfully, you understand what it is they do not know and even what they do not know they do not know.

It is at this point that you can craft powerful strategy. You are armed with what you want to tell people and can craft your delivery and messaging in such a way as to make it communicate to people at the right point in time with messaging that aids, not hinders them. From this point, campaign messages, decisions about social platforms, ambassadors and even promotions can be made, all of which are steeped in comprehensive strategy. What you do becomes meaningful to people like you, what you say is meaningful and how people react – most importantly for you – becomes meaningful.

The choice is yours, what type of marketing do you want to create?

This post originally appeared on my LinkedIn profile