Marketing Tips from a Marketing Agency: Make the invisible visible

It would only stand to reason that a marketing & branding agency would be pretty good at branding and marketing itself.

So I thought it might be fun to explore some branding & marketing concepts using our own agency, McLellan Marketing Group, as the guinea pig.

Make the invisible visible

Let’s face it — there are many elements of business that are pretty ordinary.  Not only are they ordinary but 99% of businesses do them the same way. 

Think of all the communication elements that you pretty much ignore because everyone’s looks and behaves the same.  Posted hours of operation, fax cover sheets, privacy disclaimers, e-mail signatures.  And on and on the list goes.  We’re so used to them being ordinary that, as consumers, we don’t even notice them.

Which makes them invisible.

A smart marketer will use the element of surprise and make the invisible visible.  An agency friend of ours in Denver (AOR) sends out a quarterly newsletter.  At the bottom of the newsletter, just like everyone else, they have a privacy disclaimer.  But theirs reads something like:

We’ll never sell or give your e-mail address to anyone.  Because that wouldn’t be nice.

They turned the invisible visible and gave us a hint of what working with them might be like. 

At MMG, one of the invisible things we make visible is our titles.  Could I be CEO or President?  Sure.  But yawn.

But by being the Top Dog, suddenly we’re visible.  When was the last time someone looked at your business card and make a comment?  It happens to all of us at MMG every day.  Along with the Top Dog, some of the present and past MMG titles have been:

The Warden (are you going to risk not giving her your time sheets?)
Girl Wonder
Sgt. of Strategy
Brandologist
Chaos Curator
Conductor
Go To Guy
Dr. Designo

Do our titles say much more about the agency, our work style and our attitude than CEO, CFO, Art Director, etc. would say?

What’s invisible in your world that you could make visible?