Quicken Loans Inc. spends $800 million a year on marketing.

That goes to campaigns to build trust and awareness for the Detroit-based mortgage lender, like kickstarting the Rocket Mortgage Classic golf tournament, CEO Jay Farner said Thursday in a keynote chat at the Association for Corporate Growth's Great Lakes Capital Connection conference downtown.

Separately, though, Quicken Loans and Chairman Dan Gilbert's related Rock Family of Companies are also major drivers of a different messaging campaign: the one on Detroit's nascent resurgence.

That was on full display Thursday as Farner and another Gilbert company executive, Bedrock LLC CEO Matt Cullen, spoke on a regional stage at the M&A conference. An expected 1,200 Midwest private equity, lending and corporate growth professionals are attending the event this week at TCF Center.

In the keynote chat with Honigman LLP partner Alan Schwartz, Farner highlighted how Gilbert's vision for a Quicken Loans campus in Detroit that created opportunity and drew previously skeptical businesses to locate downtown has shaped what it does now.

"It's about messaging, it's about vision, it's about experience," Farner said. "We have a whole tour group led by a guy named Bruce Schwartz. What we learned very quickly is that telling people the story ... didn't really convey what was happening. So, you know, Dan (Gilbert) always kind of demanded, 'Everybody has to come to the city.'"

One-hour meetings turn into three hours, because visitors need to take the tour that winds between high-rises and into Bedrock spaces, Farner said.

"And if we show everybody what we're doing, we show them the possibilities, we show them, we walk them around, and they start understanding, ' Wow, this is a vibrant, exciting, safe place' ... We show them where the city's come so far, where we're going. And then they walk away great ambassadors."