What is Iceberg Marketing?
If you take a piece of ice and place it in a glass of water, only about 10% of the ice’s volume sits above the water line. Ninety percent of the ice lives below the water. This is true of the ice in your drink and of icebergs.
While the portion of an iceberg glimmering above the water is what the world sees, below is where the iceberg’s buoyancy resides and where the iceberg’s strength and danger lurk.
Icebergs and marketing have a lot in common
My decades-long career in marketing has shown me again and again that the vast majority of people incorrectly equate “marketing” with what’s communicated externally. Or what’s visible to the world.
But an organization’s external communication is just the tip of the marketing iceberg. There is far more below the surface than there is above.
We should all understand that everything an organization projects out into the world needs to bubble up from a set of core beliefs and values. Most organizations craft mission statements and develop lists of core values to serve as proxies for these core beliefs.
But the reality is that most organizations don’t spend enough time and thought on developing these core elements. Typical mission statements tend to be overly broad in scope, not specific enough, and lacking in personality.
And due to the lack of focus and purpose within the organization’s core, marketers are left to develop external messaging that just doesn’t connect with anything of import.
I believe this lack of connecting the whole of the iceberg is why marketing roles have the highest turnover in business today. CEOs, boards, most marketers even, focus on the visible part of the iceberg. We aren’t looking deep enough.
How does an organization learn to see what’s below the surface?
I have developed a framework, called DEEP MarketingSM, that can help an organization “see” and develop what’s below the surface.
DEEP stands for Discover, Elaborate, Embrace, and Project. The process begins with an exercise to “Discover” who the organization is. The end product of this first step is a concise statement of what, how and why an organization does what it does.
The second step, “Elaborate,” focuses on adding critically important context and depth to what we learn in the first step.
The third step is a process of internal championing enabling the entire organization to understand, validate and “Embrace” the newly defined core.
Notice that it is not until we reach the last step when we are finally prepared to “Project” our newly defined selves to the outside world. Again, most organizations jump right into this step without investing enough time and thought in the first three steps.
I like to think that the DEEP process is akin to building an iceberg from the bottom up. We don’t build anything above the water line until after we’ve built a genuine and meaningfully solid base.
Look for upcoming posts on each of these steps in DEEP marketing.
How can I help you?
If you’d like to learn more about how to connect your visible marketing to what’s hidden, Iceberg can help. See my pages on coaching or on internal marketing evangelism. Or contact me directly. I’m always happy to help.