By Lucy Cleary, IgnitionOne

There’s an amazing Greek restaurant near where I live, it’s on a bustling street that is also lined with other restaurants and cafes offering food from every country imaginable. These restaurants and cafes have windows covered with their latest specials and tantalising images of their meals. Waiters often stand on the street competing to get punters and always seem to be feeding someone.

Then there’s the Greek restaurant.

It’s always empty; it is rare to see even one occupied table when I walk by on my way home from work.

There are no sandwich boards outside or even a menu on the window, it simply has a sign bearing the name of the restaurant.         

Driven by curiosity and admittedly a little bit of pity, I went there with some friends a few weeks ago for dinner. I can honestly say it was one of the tastiest and best value for money three-course meals I have ever had. I spoke with our elderly waiter who told me it was a family business and pointed to his wife out the back who was the head chef.

Immediately, my marketing mind went into overdrive, this place was really good, really cheap, but clearly lacking in any kind of communications to get punters off the street and sitting at tables. Pinning the menu to the outside window, having a stash of menu pamphlets and doing a mass leaflet drop, getting a sandwich board with their dishes of the day and registering with online restaurant review websites were just some of the very basic ideas I had.

The Greek Restaurant was not flailing because it was a bad place; it had most of the important ingredients, but one thing was missing and leaving it with a distinct disadvantage to its competitors -- no marketing.

"Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising."- Mark Twain.

 Too often marketing is overlooked as a core function of a business. It gets a bit of flack in the corporate world, particularly in B2B where the efforts of branding are not always immediately measurable and the impact of marketing is not always as easily pinpointed as it is for sales where a transaction is solid evidence of success.

But the Greek restaurant is a grassroots example of why marketing is so important to the success of a business.

In its simplest form, marketing is telling the world what goods you have on offer. Without any external communication, no one knows about you and you may as well shut up shop now.