I want you to look at the photo I have posted above. I am very proud of this photo. This is a photo I took at a lacrosse game a couple years ago. The player in the black uniform has just gotten a shot off against the defender in white. The player with the black jersey’s name is Ethan. He was a teammate of my son. I brought my camera to the game to see if I could capture a special moment and I came away with this one. On this day, I followed players through the lens of my camera and shot photos like crazy when any action came their way. I captured hundreds of photos throughout the course of the game. Most of them weren’t worth keeping, but in this shot I remember following Ethan as he curled into midfield and raised his stick for a pass. His defender was all over him, trying to deny the pass, but Ethan dodged him and got one step ahead. He caught the ball and shot it at the goal all in one motion. What I just described happened in a fraction of a second. If you said "one Mississippi,” you would have been too slow to capture this image. I just happened to have him in focus and pushed on the shutter at the right time. I got lucky. Or did I?

There is a thought that gets expressed in business that marketing has more to do with luck than it does with careful planning. The boardroom fable goes something like this: a person with a great need for what your business happens to do somehow stumbles upon some marketing piece like your web site, a brochure, your LinkedIn profile, etc. and gives you a call. If they had experienced your marketing piece a split second before or behind their need, they would have ignored it. But the stars aligned with the planets and your marketing and their need found themselves at the same place at the same time. It was pure luck. Or was it?

When marketing is working, your business brand will come to mind when a customer has a need. Leading up to that split second when they decide to make a purchase from you is a lot of planning and implementation. There has been a lot written about how we make decisions in fraction of seconds. In many ways, we are not always aware of how we come to those decisions, but if you are in marketing, your job is to influence those split seconds. It is the reason you will grab a specific brand of ketchup when you are in a grocery store and ignore others. It is the reason you will be drawn to a certain brand of car when you are ready to make a purchase. It is the reason you go to a certain search engine when you want to seek out something on the web. Before we decide to do any of that, there is a lot of awareness marketing that happens. As consumers, we don’t think we pay much attention to it, but the results tell us differently. We are drawn to brands we are familiar with and reject the ones we are not. There is a lot that goes into making your target market aware of your brand at this subconscious level. It involves the logo you use, the colors you use, the slogans (a.k.a. taglines) you use. It engages your customers without them thinking about it. Here is a case in point. I walked into an auto parts store looking for motor oil for my car recently. See if you know which brand I gravitated to in the store.

• I was drawn to brand that comes in a green container with a black cap.
• Their logo has a big golden "Q” on it.
• They are big sponsors of NASCAR racing, In fact they have a race they sponsor in Kentucky every year.

If you guessed Quaker State, you are correct. Quaker State has a slogan that states, "for guys who care about what goes into their engines.” Do you believe that Quaker State is the best motor oil you can put into your car’s engine? Are they better than Valvoline, Penzoil, Mobil or some generic brand? I do, but I cannot tell you why I hold that belief except that their awareness marketing has soaked into my brain and comes out in my purchases. They have done a good job of getting their brand in front of me and the rest of their target market (men who own and maintain their cars, as you can tell from their slogan.) But they have also done a good job of making me think they are the king of motor oils. What happened when I walked into that auto parts store is not an accident. All of the marketing that surrounds the Quaker State brand was working in a split second purchase. I did not even see the yellow, white or blue bottles of oil. I reached for the green. Your awareness marketing needs to be intentional to get these kinds of results.

Now let me get back to the photo of Ethan. Did I get lucky? Let me say that this was not the first time I had seen Ethan make the move that got him in front of a defender to make that shot. In fact, I had seen him practice that dodge move, raise his stick, catch and shoot quite a bit. I had a suspicion that he was lining up for this shot before it happened. I simply followed him through the lens of my camera until the split second he took the shot. Luck? I like to think of it as implementing a plan.