I was asked recently by a Professor of Business Management if publishing my blog was not tantamount to giving up trade secrets for no value in return. I used the metaphor of a telescope to explain how it is possible to understand the principles but not succeed in the execution (necessitating the professional services of the author).

If you had never seen a telescope before to understand its use, and you were asked to look through it, it would be most logical to look through the large end. It is wider, offers more light, and it could be assumed, greater perspective. Yet what you would see would appear small and far away. There is a natural tendency to put your goals first, even when your intention is to focus on the customer. So the customer is smaller, remote and confined to a perspective of being subservient to your marketing goals. If the customer actually had its eyeball at the other end of your telescope it would see the marketer magnified many times greater than reality. And that's a happy thought to many a brand marketer seeking to be a customer's champion.

If you reverse the telescope the customer looms large and close, magnified in its significance, many times more so than the marketer. It is the customer at the other end that would now see the marketer very small and distant. This reversal is called the 360º About Face (see blog posting).

By some quirk of our human nature (call it ego), we all see our own perspective in magnification and everyone else's in diminution. It is not a simple thing to switch the roles around, to forego the very perspective that gives us our sense of self-assurance to achieve what we want to each day. But the truth of the matter is that we are judged each day, not from our own perspective, but from that of the customer. And without the psychology built in to be able to achieve this dissociation from one's own perspective, no amount of theory can enable successful implementation.

Furthermore. the reason why this blog can deliver all these theories and not give up its trade secrets, is because the execution of the theory is what counts. The execution is what touches the customer and is the catalyst of the relationship development. Ergo "Touch Marketing" is my term for what I do.

A recent case in point: I consulted with a construction company to develop a marketing platform within a key vertical. After processing my research and competitive analysis I made my recommendation for the strategy and presented the execution framework. Part way through the presentation the VP Marketing announced that they had implemented the same strategy 4 years earlier and it had failed within this same market. I prevailed upon the VP to show me the program and was able to explain why its execution was goals-centred in the same way as the rest of their marketing (not resonating with the target audience it was aimed at). The point was won, the strategy was approved, and the tactical execution became the foundation of the program. It now stands as the main architecture of their business methodology in this market.

It is possible that this is a technique that can be documented and taught. Right now it is more important to push the theory more and more into the mainstream of marketing. And so I continue with my blog.