If it touches the customer

The owner of a driving school in Amman decides the business needs marketing, so he hires a young graduate to do it.

She is good. Within weeks the school has bright photos, cheerful videos of nervous students passing their test, a new logo on the cars. Enquiries go up. Then they stop turning into students, and a few months later the owner is wondering whether marketing works at all.

Here is what she was not in charge of. The price, which is quoted differently by each person who answers the phone. The phone itself, which rings out after six in the evening, exactly when working people call. The instructor who sighs loudly at a beginner on her second lesson. The car that smells of cigarettes. The fact that nothing about the school is worth describing to a friend.

Every one of those is marketing. They are what the customer meets, and they are what the customer repeats. The photos and the logo are the smallest part, and the part that counts least when the rest is wrong.

So she had a title that promised the whole thing and authority over a sliver of it. Of course it disappointed both of them. He thought he had hired someone to bring in students. He had hired someone to make noise about a school that had not yet given anyone a reason to talk.

There is nothing wrong with hiring for noise, as long as you call it that. Promotion is a real job. But a person asked to do the marketing needs a hand in the price, the phone, the instructors and the cars. Anything a customer touches is part of it.