Kelford Labs Daily: Demonstrating Value at a Distance
How marketing, sales, and branding work together.
My definition for marketing, as you’ve heard me say a million times, is “demonstrating value at a distance.”
Which means sales is “demonstrating value in the moment.”
Branding, then, is “demonstrating your values over time.”
These are not really distinct, separate disciplines—they are each approaches to the same problem:
How do we demonstrate to our ideal customers that we have the ideal solution for them in particular?
Marketing allows us to demonstrate our unique approach and the tradeoffs we’ve made to provide extraordinary value to our very best customers at a distance—through ads, social media, our website’s homepage, our signage, and anything else that reaches prospects and customers across space and time.
Sales allows us to demonstrate those same things through one-on-one conversations, proposals, our signup forms and contact pages on our website, and anything else that allows our prospects to make a decision in the here and now.
Branding allows us to demonstrate the values we hold (and that our prospects and customers share) that led us to make those tradeoffs and choices—through our logo, our copywriting style, our visual language on our website, and anything else that our prospects will continually re-experience over time.
While each of these enable and encourage specialization, the practitioner of any of these approaches should be familiar with the costs and benefits of the others.
When we recognize that our sales costs go down when we’ve pre-demonstrated our value and values at a distance through marketing and branding, we’ll be able to grow more efficiently.
And when we recognize that both our sales and marketing influence the effectiveness of our branding, we’ll be more consistent and better able to appeal to our ideal customers because they’ll more clearly see that our values and theirs overlap.
My focus has always been on marketing—so I see everything through that lens.
But that’s just my window into a greater, interconnected system.
At the end of the day, it’s all about value and values and how we demonstrate them.
At a distance, in the moment, and over time.
