The forgotten truth about services marketing

If you gathered your leadership team today and asked them, "What is marketing?" chances are you'd hear responses centered around advertising, sales, and getting your brand noticed. This perception, as common as it is incorrect, limits your company's true potential. Especially if you're in the professional service sector.

Many executives mistakenly think better marketing means louder, broader, and more relentless outreach. They confuse promotion and advertising for marketing.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: if your service isn't outstanding, all your promotion won't just fail, it will actively undermine your brand.

As Harry Beckwith wisely asserts in his book Selling the Invisible:

The first rule of service marketing: The core of service marketing is the service itself.

To put it bluntly, your primary promotions tool isn't your latest ad campaign or viral LinkedIn post—it's your service quality, your delivery, your customer experience. That's your "better reality." That's marketing.

Improving this reality should be your strategic priority.

We all know that exceptional service doesn't merely satisfy—it delights and inspires word-of-mouth advocacy. Companies like Starbucks and Zappos succeeded because they consistently created outstanding experiences. Their success, their fame if you like, had little to do with a weak force like advertising.

In doing so, great companies spend less on blunt force promotional marketing activities because their delighted customers become their best marketers.

They also understand that marketing is more complex than promotional activities, and use price, product, and distribution levers to grow their business.

How can your organization practically apply this principle?

1. Customer experience audit: Evaluate every touchpoint with your customer from their perspective. What frustrates them? Where do your promises fall short? Address these gaps relentlessly.
2. Invest in service excellence: Empower your employees to advocate for the customer. Great service is human-centric. People deliver it, not ads.
3. Align marketing with reality: Ensure your promotional messaging accurately reflects what customers genuinely experience. Great companies make clear promises to the customer and failing to deliver on the promise creates disillusionment and kills credibility.
4. Measure and refine continuously: Establish feedback loops and metrics that reflect genuine customer satisfaction and loyalty, not just short-term sales boosts.

As executives, our role isn't merely to amplify messages but to authentically shape what those messages represent. Beckwith emphasizes, and experience proves, that building "better reality" isn't just a marketing strategy—it's foundational to enduring business success.

Ultimately, your best advertising doesn't come from glossy brochures or aggressive outreach. It comes naturally from customers who've experienced a service they can't help but share.

This is the first post in a series inspired by Harry Beckwith's timeless book, Selling the Invisible.