How your image as a company plays a role in your marketing

Marketing is a complicated issue. It's a machine with many parts. One part of marketing is the commercial aspect, how you advertise it and so forth, another part is pricing, another part is customer feedback, and so forth. We should also consider how our company's image as a whole plays a role in our marketing. A company's image may not seem like a specific part of the marketing machine, that is, a company's image may seem more difficult to pin down than a price, or the length of a radio advertisement, or whatever-a company's image, marketing-wise, is hard to quantify and name precisely.

There is, of course, a specific way to get or improve a company image, and the people trained to help us in this are in PR, or Public Relations, but the key thing to remember is that PR falls under the marketing umbrella too. Now, it's possible to view this cynically and say-so it's all fake-we're putting on a mask for the public that PR assures us is currently trendy and attractive and politically correct, and so forth, but it's really a scheme, or in other words a scam. Well, maybe. Certainly there are quite a few companies out there who take the "image thing" approach and certainly hypocrisy is involved. But we can play that game with any aspect of life-everything can be approached cynically-but what's the point?

What we want to do is decide how our image as a company plays a role in our marketing, and if we could be doing a better job at presenting that image. And, if you like, we can consider along the way if there isn't a better, more positive image to strive for; if we can't really be unique in presenting our real selves to the public and so develop a synergistic, positive relationship with the folks we're doing business with.

Ok, let's stop for a moment. Consider what we've just done here. Reread the last three paragraphs. In this brief discussion we've gotten right to the heart of how our image as a company plays a role in our marketing. These are exactly the questions that come up day after day when companies discuss questions of image and marketing. These are exactly the debates that rage day after day in company meetings on image and marketing. Image is one of the main factors of marketing, yet, as we mentioned before, it's hard to pin down to one specific area or another, and it's hard to even talk about without feeling hypocritical and vaguely slimy. But it's there just the same, a thing to be confronted and dealt with, and hopefully with a very positive outcome for all.

Our image as a company, marketing-wise, tells the public what our political stances are, how we view important topics such as maintaining and caring for the environment, the deepness of our commitment to serving the community, the firmness of our integrity, and so on. The public wants to know these things, and we can't begin to provide the answers until (a) we know what they are, and (b) we develop a systematic approach of providing them.

Both (a) and (b) take a lot of time, thought, discussion, and practice, and must be thought of as part of an overall marketing approach, right alongside advertising and sales and so forth. It's easy to view this fact-of-life cynically, but thank heaven it's also unnecessary, because who needs the extra guilt? Running a company is no small task, and presenting something as huge yet ill-defined as an image of a company is no small task. To do it right we need a great marketing team with a high level of commitment to what our company provides and what it stands for.