The biggest obstacle to your success is invisibility. The best, the most experienced, or the most talented cannot enjoy prosperity until they are visible to their potential market.
This quote is the most often cited excerpt from the now-classic business marketing book. It remains an absolute and inviolable truth today—social online marketing transformation and 24 hour news notwithstanding.
Ben M. Bartlett (MBA), in his blog, revisited this concept for 2012, in his post “How to ensure you achieve your business goals in 2012.” He cited the same quote, and qualified it further by writing: “Quite profound isn’t it… Now before I go on, let me make a small addition to the above quote: The biggest obstacle to your success is poor brand visibility.”
We would have qualified it slightly differently. On the next page of the book, we underscore the second major obstacle to success, lack of credibility. To put this together into one overriding concept, we might suggest:
The biggest obstacle to your success is invisibility, but this projected image must be credible and meaningful.
Of course, you can add many concepts to the core principle, such as “which appeals to your audience” and so on, but distilling to s single phrase—the business mantra concept—helps plans stay focused.
The second major obstacle: lack of credibility
Visibility alone will not bring business success. To be known for poor quality, obviously, is the wrong sort of visibility. In the book we put it this way:
The second roadblock on your journey to success is credibility… Building a strong image on no substance will bring only short-term success…”
We go on to advise, “Build your image only on credible truths.” We provide methods—which will be explained later on this site—that allow you to identify and exploit only those core strengths and truths that can help you build a credible visible brand. Differentiation from competitors, and other key tactics, are covered here, but the over arching concept is total credibility.
Timeless Image Marketing Concepts
This site, like the book, title The Persona Principle: How To Succeed in Business with Image-Marketing, isn’t about selling books—several editions and languages is sufficient. The concepts, remain as inarguably true today, although the case studies used to illustrate in the venerable text are just stale.
This, then, is the mission of this site. As a service to our many clients and followers, we’re posting the content from the book here, section by section, as searchable posts, adding up-to-date commentary and case studies, and—hopefully—interacting with business owners, entrepreneurs and marketers on a quest to succeed.
We encourage you to explore these now-entrenched concepts. While we coined the phrase and methodology of Image Marketing—a method that neatly contained the 8 core principles to help you overcome the obstacle of invisibility
