I was doing business with an insurance executive a few years ago. He told me he had two offices in two rooms adjacent to each other. One room was set up to look like a symbolic insurance office. It was organized, had actuarial books placed neatly on a shelf, artwork hanging perfectly on the walls. His desk was free from any clutter. Everything was placed just so, like it was a museum. However, if you walked through the door to his other office, you found a different environment. There wasn't any artwork hanging on the walls or insurance library books for show. His desk was overflowing with file folders stuffed with roughly stacked papers. He had a computer and a phone sandwiched in between the file folders. "This is where I get my real work done," he told me. "The first office is just for the customers."

Do you think this executive was being dishonest with his façade office hiding the real office, or was he being totally honest by understanding that his customers would not want to sit at his little desk in his Spartan second office replete with its mountains of paper? He had come to a conclusion: reality is what the customer perceives it to be. He needed a place where he could look through those file folders, but did not want to take a chance that his customers would think of him as disorganized by looking at his desk. He created what the customer expected an insurance executive's office to look like in the first room and never invited them into the second room.

Marketing is tasked with being the guardians of the company image. That is done through communications - be that the written word or visuals on the web site, printed materials, the audio and video that is produced, the method that is used to engage customers at trade shows, etc. All of it adds up to putting your best foot forward. The reality of any marketer's job is that every potential customer is a suitor for your products or services. What that customer perceives about your company is driven primarily on how good the marketing is doing its job. Promote your strengths, not your weaknesses.

Are we just putting lipstick on a swine's lips and asking our customers to pucker up? For the most part, the consumer of your products or services doesn't want to be hassled with the details of how you get the job done, they just want it done and done correctly. However, there is a growing trend in our global economy where how a product is made is being tied to the marketing of the product. The connectivity of our marketplace has caused snooping around that back office to be more and more common. Social media has emboldened us to take what used to be private information and open it up for anyone who chooses to take a look. So called sweat shops in Third World countries, green manufacturing, genetically modified foods- these are examples where marketing the how it is made makes a difference in the mind of the customer. Here is the very odd state of things for marketers. Much of that behind-the-door information may not even be true - or at least may have a logical explanation. Never mind that workers in those poor countries are more than willing to work long hours just to have a job and the alternative is homelessness, or that much of "green" manufacturing has little to no impact on the environment, or that there has not been any scientific evidence that genetically modified foods have any health risks associated with them. We live in a marketplace where a tidbit of information, whether it is true or not, can grow legs and run for miles. Marketing has to understand what is important to the consumer of their products and services and market to that point. You must manage these expectations or you will find yourself on the wrong end of consumer opinions.

Make the most of what you show your customers in your marketing efforts. Understand what is important to them in order to remove the obstacles to making a sale. Keep in mind that the only reality that matters in marketing is in the mind of the customer. Whether they are right or not, they hold all the decisions that are critical to making you successful.

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The U.S. green economy is a complete fallacy, by Stanton Yuwono, Campus Times, April 14, 2011,

GMO Foods: Why We Shouldn't Label (Or Worry About) Genetically Modified Products, by Cameron English, Policymic, June 2012

Original photo by Daniel Goldwasser