What constitutes a long time in your mind? My mother turns 95 years old today. When she talks of things that have happened in her lifetime, she says they seem like they just happened recently. Time goes much faster as you get older, she tells me.

It seems to me that a long time is relative to the person who is telling the story. In marketing, we work from a strategic timeline that looks like this:

• You market your brand for awareness

• You gather information on the customer’s needs and show how your brand solves their problems

•You make an offer that lures them to try the brand

•You measure their satisfaction with the brand

• You invite them to become lifelong customers

What happens when I try to short-circuit marketing to get to the sale faster? We live in an instant world where we expect things to happen now. I want marketing to work immediately too. But marketing takes time to work. If you try to make it work faster, you will outpace the process and shut down your marketing strategy without giving it a chance to do its job. The first lesson about marketing is it is not an instantaneous business fix for your sales. It will eventually pay off, but you have to take the long view on marketing for it to work. Many marketing dollars are wasted, not because the strategy wasn’t good, but because someone got in a hurry.

The second lesson about marketing and time is this: people forget the recent good, so you have to remind them with your marketing. You may have scored big and outpaced your competition so that customers are delighted with your brand. Once a winner, always a winner, right? No! If you stop telling them, they will forget about you. People quickly move on. I had a client years ago who started his own business. He came from a Fortune 500 company where he had been very successful. He left his corporate job to venture out on his own. He came to me for marketing advice. I asked him what he was going to use as a hook to get potential customers to look at his new business. He said he would use the prestige of his old company and his position in it to open doors. I told him that his previous 20 years of dedicated service to the old company would last him just a few weeks before people had no idea who he was, nor would they care. The old good is something for your resume, not your marketing strategy. Six months later he and I were talking and he told me I was right. If you don’t push your own best features on a consistent basis with your marketing, no one will give you the time of day.

On the flip side of things, people have a hard time letting go of a bad brand experience, so solve customer service issues quickly. It will go a long ways to making things better between you and the customer and it will keep you from a marketing disaster down the road. Many people do not consider customer service part of marketing. I disagree. I think it is essential to your marketing success. The third lesson on marketing and time is this: reduce the negative feelings about your brand by asking customers what they think of your brand after buying it and what you could have done better. This might not have anything to do with the quality of the product or service itself. It may have to do with a snotty comment from someone within your organization. How many customers are turned off by a poor customer service issue? Countless consumers stop using brands because they feel slighted. If you can genuinely fix their problems, you will have good customers for a very long time. If you do not, it will be a long time before your reputation retains good graces with the customer, if ever.

A long time is a relative term. Sometimes it takes a long time to work a potential customer through the process to make a sale. Stay the course until you work your marketing process completely. Tell your story often. This keeps the good aspects of your brand in front of the customer so they don’t forget you over time. Finally, make customer service a part of your marketing plan and you will have customers for a very long time.

And, happy birthday Mom!