Building Connection - What Marketing Is Made For

Strip marketing back to its bones and it is about connection. Connecting. Someone has a need. Somewhere there is a person or an organisation able to meet it well. Marketing is the thread that runs between the two. That is all it was ever meant to be, and when it is done properly, it is enough.

I think of it as a kind of holy trinity: the right person, the right product or service, and the right place for it to come from. When those three line up, something good happens on both sides of the exchange. The person gets what genuinely serves them, and the organisation does the work it is best at, for someone it can actually help. When any one of the three is missing, marketing turns into something else - noise at best, harm at worst.

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The word that matters is “right”

It is easy to say “the right person” and move on. But “right” is the part that needs the most thought. Right for what? Right by whose measure? The right product or service for someone is not whatever they can be persuaded to buy. It is what meets their actual need, and needs are not always what they first appear. Someone asking for a new website may really need clarity about what their business is for. Someone shopping for a remedy may really need permission to rest. Good marketing begins by doing that analysis honestly: what is the need, how much does it matter, and what would genuinely make sense for this person? Only then can you know whether you are the answer.

The forgotten third

Most marketing advice concentrates on the first two parts of the trinity: know your customer, know your product. The third is the one people skip, and it is the one that holds the other two together.

Before you can attract the people you serve best, you have to know who you are. Not the brochure version - the honest one. What are you genuinely good at? Where do you do your best work? Who comes alive working with you, and who leaves slightly disappointed? An organisation or an individual that has done this work can see its own shape clearly. It knows where it fits. And once it knows where it fits, its marketing has a job it can actually do: to connect that shape with the people it fits.

This is why so much marketing feels hollow. It is trying to connect something to everyone, because the something has never been properly understood. You cannot make a good match if you do not know what you are matching.

Good marketing turns people away

There is a consequence that follows from all this, and it is worth saying plainly: good marketing should repel as well as attract.

If your marketing is working, the wrong people will look at it and think, “this isn’t for me.” That is not a lost sale. It is a success. It has saved them money they would have regretted spending, and saved you from work you would have done less well than someone else. Sometimes the kindest thing a business can do is point a person elsewhere - and honest marketing does that quietly, all the time, without anyone having to say no out loud.

What we have instead

Compare that with what most of us live with now. Every time we go online, we are targeted. Advert after advert, offer after offer, most of it nonsense - not because it is badly made, but because it has no idea whether it is right for us, and does not care. It has stopped asking “is this the right product or service for this person?” and asks only “will they click?”

That is marketing built for consumption rather than fit. In that system a mismatch is not a failure; it is a conversion. The person who buys something they did not need counts the same as the person who found exactly what they were looking for. Sometimes they count for more, because they will come back for the next thing that does not help either. Over-consumption is not a side effect of this approach. It is what the approach is designed to produce.

That is not what marketing is for.

What it is for

Marketing is for connection. It exists so that the right person can find the right product or service, from the right place, at the moment they need it. Seen that way, it is not a dark art at all. It is a form of care: the work of helping someone find what will genuinely serve them, and having the honesty to step aside when that isn’t you.

For any organisation or individual setting out on a marketing initiative, the questions are simple, even if the answers take work:

  Who are we, honestly - and what are we best at?
  Who do we serve best - and what do they truly need?
  Does everything we put out help connect the two?

Get those right, and the rest of the marketing mix - the channels, the messages, the budgets - has something true to serve. Get them wrong, and no amount of reach will make up for it.

Connection. The right person. The right product or service. The right place. That is the whole of it.
Richard Maddrell - September 2026.