Spiders have gotten a bad rap over the years. Nearly half of women and 10% of men say they are scared to death of these eight-legged creatures. I suppose that has to do with their visibility, especially when you turn on a light in a dark room and a spider drops from a web attached to the ceiling and scurries across the floor. To most people, that is scary. To them, the only way to deal with a spider is to exterminate it. However, spiders do a very good job of ridding our environment of other undesirable insects – namely gnats, flies and mosquitoes – all of which breed by the millions and make up swarms of flying disease carriers. If you wipe out all of the spiders, we would simply be overrun with insect epidemics. To my knowledge, spiders have never caused anyone to die, but you would think that is the case with all the arachnophobia that abounds in our world. Quite the opposite is true. Spiders save lives by killing the disease carriers that make people sick.

On the other hand, termites are generally not visible. You only realize you have termites when you see the damage they have done. These stealth little creatures love to eat wood. You are much more likely to be killed by having termites in your house than you will by spiders. How so? When termites eat away the wood structure of your house and a wall falls in on you while you are reclining in your living room watching TV, that’s how. Spiders are not going to demolish your home from the inside so that it caves in on you.

Marketing is designed to create sales for the betterment of your company. It puts your best foot forward, makes the marketplace aware of your products and services, and fends off threats from your competition. Yet it is often seen as a costly expenditure that can be done away with without any repercussions on your business. This is akin to killing off all of the spiders and thinking that the world will be a safer place. How do you know if your marketing is working for you? Are you making sales? Then your marketing is working. Are the spiders working for our good? Are we overrun with insect-raptor borne diseases? Make the connection.

You may argue that your business is humming along just fine without a marketing brochure or a fancy web site. You may be looking at marketing through the wrong end of your binoculars. Marketing is a very wide business discipline that includes all the information that makes your customer aware of your products and services, the proposition that helps them decide to buy from you, and the experience that brings them back to you as a repeat customer. That may have little to do with a brochure or a web site. It may have more to do with their feelings towards your company’s offerings – that they are quality, easy to find and priced right. That is marketing. I was attending a business meeting sponsored by a local bank. The president of the bank got up to tout their success during economic hard times. He claimed all of it was accomplished without any marketing. Yet, I was sitting at an event that was sponsored by his bank. The bank’s brand was on every table. So was their literature that included a particular piece that said they had the lowest mortgage rates of any lending institution in the state. I am not sure what he considered marketing and what he did not, but his statement struck me as either disingenuous, delusional or way too stupid to be made from the leader of an organization of its stature.

If you think you can keep your business running without marketing, you are living in the termite-infested house. It may look good to you, but it is being eaten away from the inside, making it more and more vulnerable to collapse. It may be time to think of marketing in another way: is it an expense or an investment in sales? If you get past your fear of spiders, you can see the enormous good they do. Think of marketing in the same way.

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10 Common Phobias, by Kendra Cherry, http://psychology.about.com/od/phobias/p/commonphobias.htm

Spider photo by Snowleopard1

Termite photo by Web Substance