Nature vs. Nurture.

I started playing football in the 5th grade and it changed my life. Before, I had lived in Chesapeake, Virginia where I played soccer for a tough sounding co-ed team called the Rainbows. Once we moved to Georgia, I suited up in pads and sought to clobber anything not running too fast to catch. For me, football had more off-the-field value than on. I liked playing but I liked the attention of being a football player even more. On Friday we would wear our jerseys to school and later than night to the high school game where they let youth league players in for free. The cheerleaders all gushed over wearing a player’s jersey and one couldn’t help but develop a snobbish sense of pride from all the fawning.



Then came my freshman year of high school. Thanks to hormones, both natural and injected, half of my former teammates had gained about 50 pounds the summer before our freshman year. The varsity players looked enormous and it broke my heart to know that the only position a 119-pound kid like me was fit for was guarding the Gatorade. Just like that, my keys to high school stardom no longer fit the door.



But being 119 pounds, scrappy and having a slight like for violence does have one advantage: wrestling. I went out for the wrestling team my freshman year and immediately found that it suited me. I remember it like it was yesterday, my first match ending with me barreling out, pretty much running the other kid over and pinning him in 110 seconds.



Wrestling can be scary. For starters, there’s no team to hide behind. Sure, we keep score and pretend it’s a team sport but when you lose out there in the middle of the mat, you’re the one who lost. In front of everyone and for everyone to see, your successes and failures now available for public scrutiny. I found that out in my second match. I contended in a higher weight class because the other team did not have a 119-pound kid. The other kid completely opened a can off whoop ass on me and then tried to stuff me in it. I felt so bad; I could have crawled in it myself.



Coach said I had ability. I was strong for my size and I could get real mean in a hurry. But mean alone doesn’t win matches. It would take technique, courage and tenacity to train like never before to make me a good wrestler. So, after the three hour practices each day, I ran five miles. I took lessons from a former Olympic wrestler and lifted weights at 5 a.m. every morning.

Eventually, I turned out to be a decent wrestler and better yet I learned about myself, getting a grasp on what I wanted and how I needed to get there. Innate ability might have got me to the mat but the training kept from repeatedly being pinned to it.



Today, I’m wrestling with something else. My client has innate ability. Perhaps innate is not the best term. The type of ability I am talking about is one that which is seemingly underlying but has benefited the company in a mode of marketing. Months ago we reviewed the client’s case and found a particular ability that syncs up with the desire of consumer. My team and I busily got down to finding sales and communication channels to shout this ability from the rooftops in hopes of bringing our client success. And then it hit me like a belly to back with a double chicken wing and a figure four: Innate ability is not enough.



My client has a marketable trait but it is faint and only partially believable. They have yet to do the real heavy lifting to develop the trait and it leaves me with little to help them pitch with. This is a common problem. Marketers often have innate or partially developed selling propositions and rather than develop the natural tendency into a skill, they opt to running out on the mat and getting their butt whopped. It is the business equivalent of telling the coach to put you on the varsity team now because with some training and hard work, you might become good someday.



I believe marketing has two main entities and conditions that bond or impede their connection. On one side is the customer. On the other is the offering. The customer has wants, needs and influences. The offering has propositions, channels and all the things that make up the brand. In between the two are all the communication strategies, channel efforts and pitches. An innate but undeveloped offering is like a thin strand connecting the two. There is a connection to be sure, but it wavers in the breezes of disbelief and is easily disjointed if a serious disturbance rolls by.



Marketers are wise to study the connection with consumers of their products and services. With a few questions, one can begin to see if the offering aligns with consumer desire. Here are a few suggestions:



Why should your target prospect care or want what you are offering?



Sure, you say it’s high quality and dependable, but who’s listening? After every sales claim you should ask yourself, “Why does the customer care?”



Is this reasoning believable, reasonable and/or compelling?



I have heard some amazing concoctions of consumer viewpoint in my experience, particularly with marketing to young people. If you want consumer perspectives about a product, ask them. Moreover, listen to what they have to say lest you fall into a trap similar to the marketers of Guns & Roses trading cards.



Why is your proposition better than the nearest competitor?



The competition is a reality. You might not be starring them in the face day-to-day but they still sit next to you on the shelf, web and in the customer’s mind. You better have a real differentiating proposition if you want to compete.



Is this reasoning believable, reasonable and/or compelling?



Again, do a reality check with your sales claims. Is it really stronger, better built, providing more value? I have a former client who rolled out a huge campaign based on the claims that were actually twice the price of the competition. In short, tell the truth.



What are you doing right now to reinforce your pitch to consumers?



Once you have a distilled concept, don’t rest on your laurels. Say you’re a brand of Louisiana fish fry whose pitch is the authentic experience. Don’t stop at just saying you’re the authentic experience. Put beads on your shipper displays. Offer authentic accessories for a real Louisiana fish fry. Don’t just say it. Do it and be it.



Make it your nature to nurture.



Innate ability is important and I don’t want to play that down. But innate ability is not enough. Marketers should take the efforts that are driving loyalty, action or purchase and augment those efforts. Rather than diffusing competitiveness, the differentiating factors of a product or service should be focused into lean, mean and powerful strategies.



Take a big white board. On one side, write your offering. On the other, write your best description of the prospective customer. Start connecting the two with propositions and pitches. Then ask the above questions in earnest. Answer them honestly and with the least amount of confused jargon. After this exercise, you may not fully pin the strategy but at least you’ll have it in a half nelson.



It’s just like wresting. Train and you’ll wipe the mat with that punk in the blue spandex. But lose your focus and you’ll lose big.

And everyone will see it.

Divide and conquer

John had a huge mouth that wrote checks his butt couldn’t cash. It was a quality that made our little clique love him and hate him concurrently. An excellent storyteller, John often used his wit to insult the kids a grade ahead of us. Such was the occasion when he gathered a few pages from a filthy magazine and penned a note in the margins about a classmate’s mother. To put it lightly, it was on.


We already had a strained relationship with this classmate. He once played bass in our garage band but we had to kick him out because of his doofus friends that would always show up sidecar at our practice wanting to join the band. John’s little “art project” was insult to injury and the impetus for the entire sophomore class rallying to teach us freshmen a lesson.


This would be the first fight of the year so word spread throughout the school like mono. John was my friend so I pledged to back him up. I have to admit, I was kind of looking forward to punching our old bassist in the neck. Just as well, he had earned it.


When the appointed hour arrived, a friend of mine from one town over (outside muscle, yeah, that’s how I roll) and I jumped in the most conspicuous car ever conceived: a yellow, railroad servicing truck with a utility bed. Did I mention it was yellow? We drove the few miles to Shorty Howell Park and ascended the hill getting ready to rumble. Shorty Howell is a few baseball and football fields with parking lots and a road encircling it. When we drove in, the entire sophomore class lined the street. Perhaps the stress has fogged my memory, but when I recall the moment, I remember the sophomores wielding tire irons, maltave cocktails and pineapple grenades. Regardless, they might as well have had baseball bats wrapped in rusty barbed wire because just as our giant yellow target entered the prescribed parking lot, I realized we were the only ones there. More specific, my friend wasn’t even really involved so really, I was the only one there.


We bolted as fast as such a practical and utilitarian vehicle could go. The sophomores tailed us, not like it was hard, but amazingly we lost them long enough to make a phone call. I called John asking why he wasn’t there to join me in martyrdom. “My Mom wants me to do some laundry” he replied. He could have said anything. Something like “my Mom wants me to negotiate commodity prices for a consortium of South American businesses”. It didn’t matter. What John was really saying was he wasn’t coming.


The small group of sophomore’s that were out for blood had managed to pull off one of the most perfect effects in war, politics and marketing. First, they divided. Then, they conquered. To begin, they let John know that he was the only freshman they were interested to pounding. That was enough to scare John off. Second they knew that the rest of us would not fight for John if he did not have the spine to show up. Third, they rallied a larger force, mostly just spectators, but the effect seemed like a mob waiting to tie our lifeless bodies to the goal posts.


One need not be a war scholar to recognize this effect in historic battles. Commanders routinely try to separate efforts from supply lines, divide armies and concentrate the most amount of force at the moment of decision. This is war 101 and we should glean some lessons from it.


Yet many marketers seem to fall in their latrines when it comes to battlefield strategy. Instead of focusing their forces, they spread out and try to take the hill with a line six miles long and one soldier deep. They get half way to an objective and redirect the force to a distant objective that, in the fog of war, looks more desirable. They win the wrong battle where the opposition doesn’t even show up and ultimately, they lose the war.


These principles are basic and applicable to most marketing efforts. I have a few tips to share- So lace up your boots, blow your nose and dress the line- It’s time for boot camp.


Know where to divide and who to conquer.


Proctor and Gamble are the kings of divide and conquer. They take a category (say, laundry detergent) and they split it into a million pieces and position their product at the peaks of every sub category. One brand for freshness. One for color. One for whiter whites and so on. The strategy is brilliant. They never give up a piece of the field and when a piece of vulnerable ground is spotted, they are the first to stake it.


Take a look at your category or categories. Can they be split? If you can’t rule the whole category can you rule a piece of it. We once advised a maker of anti- diarrhea products to eschew the broad category dominated by goliaths and instead focus specifically on the travelers diarrhea (what happens when you drink the water) market. The strategy begs a question that’s easy to answer. Why serve in plain diarrhea when you can rule in traveler’s diarrhea?



Rally the masses.



The sophomore didn’t want to kill us because of John’s x-rated collage. Instead, the pocket of incensed sophomores appealed to their classmates with a more attractive call to arms. Here was a group of sassy, punk freshmen that need to be taught a lesson. They insulted an upperclassman (more specifically, his Mom) and they need to pay. What sophomore could resist such a rallying cry?



Brand managers should never expect their motive to motivate the masses. Nobody bought an iPod to increase the share price of Apple. The iPod meant the liberation of music that can come from anywhere and go anywhere. The iPod has led the digital music revolution and while I would like to think that Apple’s motives are purely benevolent, truthfully my black, 80 GB model is an expensive piece of technology that makes the folks at Apple a lot of bucks. Yet Apple has begun to stand for so much more. The iPod thumbs its nose at corporate music and decrees that the user is king of what he or she listens to. And again, what sophomore could resist such a rallying cry?



Focus on the point of decision.


Getting John to chicken out was key to squashing our interclass strife. The sophomores, despite their ugly looks, were not dummies. They focused their strength at the point of decision and used their mass to display strength that made us cower.


Every purchase decision has a point of decision. When people eat, decide to buy a motor home or choose a urologist all have points of decision and are wise to think deeply about those points. It might be to apply recentcy to a TV schedule or getting the right referral materials in the hands of the people your prospect sees right before you. Recognize and concentrate on that point and you can turn back a brood of sassy freshman a thousand strong.


Hey, you’re kicked out of the band!


I have let the story meander in a way that might let you think the sophomores took the day. That’s not entirely accurate. When I realized that John left us to the mercy of 15-year-old punks, I called my brother- a giant, unpredictable senior. As the core of the sophomores trolled the town, trying to track down the yellow big bird mobile, they stopped at a gas station. We spotted them getting back into a sea foam green convertible (really, sea foam green). My brother pulled up and blocked in their car. He grabbed the driver and pulled him up and out of the car. I will paraphrase and censor but the substance of my brother’s oratory was to the effect of “My brother didn’t start this fight so if you don’t leave him alone- I’ll be using your empty skull for an ashtray”.



I guess, in all that excitement, they never thought I might know how to divide and conquer as well.

Heal Thyself

I am the child of a teacher, and that has a lot of influence on how one grows up. For my mom, everything is a lesson. As my peers were eating mud pies and burning ants with a magnifying glass, I was learning how and why vegetables grow in garden and the secret lives of all the creatures that inhabited it. When you have a parent who is a teacher nothing is sacred. My toy soldiers, a staple of male youth since the iron or at least the plastic age, fell victims line after line to my mother, who made them little parachutes out of napkins and sewing string to illustrate how air resistance allowed them to float effortlessly down from the window above the garage to the landing zone in the driveway.



So it is without surprise that every summer came with a major lesson and objective. One summer was spent in summer school in order to skip a level of math the following year. One summer was spent caring for my baby brother while mom taught summer school. And one summer, early in high school, my mom offered that I learn scuba or lifeguarding at the local YMCA. A two week stint at the local fast food joint was all it took to convince that I needed a better job, perhaps one that involved less grease.



I was a decent wrestler in high school and was hardly concerned with the physical requirements of the class. Our first night we huddled next to the pool as we received the instructions for our workout. Five hundred yards, divided between the front crawl with head out of the water, a modified backstroke and the side stroke. My classmate dove right in and it was about then I realized I could not swim. That’s not accurate. I could swim but not like these kids. Most of them were from the class instructor’s swim team. They flew through the water with ease. I thrashed like bulldog pulling a small raft full of cats. Having ear infections, tubes and a botched surgical procedure from a dentist posing as an ear surgeon (yes, I’m serious) when I was young, I spent most of my childhood on the side of the pool while my brothers swam. The lack of pool time kept me from learning a decent swimming stroke. It was not pretty. But I was not deterred. Some coaching from mom and a lot of hard work and I taught myself to swim. And I must have been a good instructor, because I eventually rose to teach swimming and then lifeguarding for the YMCA.



The situation in which I learned to swim still makes me laugh. I remember teaching advanced swimming at Simpsonwood United Methodist Retreat outside Atlanta and telling my students stroke correction, only to be reminding myself the same corrections in my own laps. I did not have the benefit of a long youth of swimming and therefore much of what I preached, I was still very cognizant to practice.



My professional practice has been little different, as I often find the things I become most interested in regarding marketing and communications were absconded from efforts by many of those with or for whom I have worked. My only solace was to retreat to the study of the hordes of scholars, practitioners and consultants who screamed at the top of their lungs for the need for strategy. People like Jack Trout, Al Ries and John Steele, and Publications like Harvard Business review. All warn of the perfect storm that will arise when burgeoning consumer choices, a marketing industry more concerned with the myriad of tactics rather than core strategies and the thunderbolts of change striking the media landscape will all collide in a spectacular implosion.



The thing about teaching yourself something is that you have got to know what you don’t know, you know? You need to recognize where there may be more information or knowledge or experience. Unless you can appreciate that the answer may lie elsewhere, you will never go look for it and assume that what is at hand is all that exists and is therefore right. I hate the idea of stagnation in business, but I also appreciate the comfort that might come with predictability. Some people are doing the same things they’ve always done - like a particular ad placement, trade show or format for presentation simply because they’re comfortable with it and it doesn’t seem broke. Some people would call this not fixing what’s not broke. I have a slightly different view articulated by my friend Charlie. It doesn’t matter if you are on the right track if you’re not moving. You’ll still get run over by the train.



This newsletter is not as much me trying to teach you something as it is me trying to illustrate to you that my partner and I are teaching ourselves something. We’re diagnosing our own problems. We’re correcting our own backstroke. We are, in the very essence, trying to heal ourselves.



Years ago, when we founded this firm, it was in response to what agencies were not providing. As many firms chased down new tactics to fill billing gaps in a client’s budget, they left a gaping hole in the place where strategic counsel was supposed to be. Firms are more concerned on being able to absorb billings for direct marketing, interactive, advertising, public relations and event planning all on the same bill that they have ignored to core problem of constructing a central and powerful core strategic plan. They have, in a sense, become a collection of tactics with no strategy. Like an arsenal of weaponry with no idea where to march, shoot, take cover or take over. As they reach to offer more varied service, the hole deepens and brands are taking the brunt of it.



We intend to fill that hole.



I lecture my clients on doing what they do best and communicating such in a thoughtful way. I teach my clients to marry the consumer need with the offering in a way that consumer’s can spot the connection. I tell my clients to focus. And now Richard and I are telling ourselves the very same.



Welcome to a new concentration of problem solving, ideas and actual solutions. Welcome to a new firm that will focus on solving the strategy problem before all else. Welcome to a new Snowden Tatarski.



For some this won’t seem like much of a change. We’ve always talked about the need for a strategy above all else. For others it will seem abrupt, as they have used our service to carry out the various tactics without having a unified core competitive plan. For us it is and will be a series of ideas, ideals, beliefs and guiding principles. Because this is an organic change, I hope you will forgive any rough edges as we make this transition more succinct and harmonious. The following are some concepts which are at the forefront of our minds as we make this important transition.



We are not an advertising agency. We do not and will not constrain ourselves to the tactic of advertising, nor do we retail media in an agency format. We are a marketing consultancy, and while we will create advertising and advise on media planning as it pertains to strategic marketing, we will not put the fresh wine of a new approach in the old skins of a less relevant and outdated format.


We believe strategy is central to whether an effort is successful or not. Tactics are not strategy and campaigns which are not united in voice, message and selling proposition are not functioning at an optimum. If you cannot clearly articulate your overarching brand strategy in less than 30 seconds, you do not have one.


We are located in a seat of knowledge. Ad agencies are in Atlanta where they can be near competitors and a fabulous new martini bar. We are in Athens next to one of the nation’s most respected and prolific academic institutions with which we have a strong partnership. We are a company which provides the thoughtful resolution of marketing dilemmas; therefore we consider the vast resource of the University of Georgia and its world-renowned faculty to be an asset few can match.

We are a small company. Ad agencies have teams of people who hurriedly run about carrying faxes and video tapes and lattes and they can show what each of these people are doing right on your bill. It does not take a keystone army to solve a marketing problem. We maintain a core group of consultants in residence and in affiliation, including a consultant with 25 years in travel and hospitality, one with 30 in packaged goods, one with 15 years in technology and manufacturing, one with 25 years in food services and one with 35 years and several degrees in marketing research. We also maintain close relationships with filmmakers, music producers, interior designers, event planners and all the other tactical people who can make a good strategy a great result.




I hope you will take a second to view our website at www.sn-ta.com. On it you will find information about our new focus and existing qualifications, many case studies about strategies we created that drive businesses and information on how you can contact us to chat. I am sorry that this newsletter may come off as more of a solicitation than the typically weekly fodder; however, those of you who reply every week with insights and suggestions have become a sort of peer review and I relish the learning I get from so many of you.



And that makes this newsletter and this new focus of our firm important. The learning we get and give to each other increases our collective abilities and therefore propensity for individual and mutual success. The more we teach each other, the more we teach ourselves.

Let it grow

This is the year we decided to fight back. When Maura and I bought our current house we were happy to get a decent sized piece of land while still being close enough to downtown for my occasional cycle to work. 1.59 acres might not seem like much until you mow it. Never the less, we think it’s plenty big for us. When we bought it however, nearly a tenth of the property was covered in kudzu. Living in Georgia most of my life, I have only recently had to tell someone what kudzu is. For those of you not familiar, here’s my description:

Kudzu is a green sewer rat with leaves. It is a parasite of a vine that grows a foot a day (no joke) and wraps itself around trees, trailers, satellite dishes (yes, the big ones) and many other places that country teens go to make out. It will grow over top of, wrap around and strangle the life out of your trees. It is a dastardly vine made even more repulsive with the local transplants who’ve had some sick infatuation for the leafy invader and who have taken to letting the kudzu overtake their hovels.

So, the kudzu took over a portion of the yard that was too uneven for the mower and in an area that the former residents saw fit to litter with bricks, rebar, beer bottles, coils of metal wire and if I eventually find one of those canisters with a zombie in it (like from the Return of the Living Dead movie) I can’t say I’ll be that surprised. My grandmother would politely describe the way this part of the yard was kept as “rustic”.

Maura and I were not and are not content with sacrificing this portion of the yard so we worked up a plan of attack. Napalm was too expensive and the barrel wouldn’t fit in my Subaru so instead we decided to mow it, hoe it and till it until we could make the jungle wasteland into our garden. Now you must know I am a man who must have the right tools for the job even if I don’t really intend on doing the job. We have the mower and the hoe (no jokes). What I didn’t have was a tiller.

For those who don’t know the whimsical intricacies that separate tillers, let me be the first to welcome you to the machine. A tiller comes in two sizes. There are the ones that barely work and are best suited for tilling a potted plant. These tillers can be gas or electric and cost about $300. Then there are the real tillers. These tillers have rear, counter-rotating tines, brush guards and run on gas or plutonium. These kudzu devouring monsters cost more like $800. Knowing my love of tools and toys, Maura has me on a strict budget and without divulging my toy budget; I’ll just tell you that if I showed up with an $850 tiller, I’d have to return the new digital camera to the store.

So one day on an errand, Tatarski and I were wandering through the Sears and I wandered over to the lawn and garden department. I explained my dilemma to the sales associate and he made a recommendation: rent a big tiller and do the yard once. Then, buy a small tiller for maintenance. I didn’t want to say that I would be embarrassed if the neighbors saw me with the “kiddy” tiller. I walked off and sulked in spirit of those regulated to paying kudzu a land tax. I moped around to see what other fun lawn toy could lift my spirits when low and behold; I came upon the biggest, meanest, knarliest tiller Sears sells with a price tag of $207. “What’s wrong with it” I asked the associate. “Nothing” he said. “This happens every year, somebody buys a tiller, does their yard and returns it to the store”. I asked Tatarski to keep his hand on it while I checked out. I wasn’t letting somebody sneak in and get between me and kudzu-destroying bliss.

The next weekend was everything I dreamed it would be. Maura and I scalped the area with a small push mower then we hacked the kudzu at its roots with a hoe and machete (everyone should have one). Finally, I roared out with the tiller like a drunken funny car driver and digested the kudzu into a rich, beautiful garden. All the while I was grinding away at this scourge of a plant, once praised and encouraged for its erosion combating traits, I was thinking; good strategy is like a good tiller. And I have a good tiller.

Business opportunity is out there but you’ve got to till it up. Its not just going to sit their on the surface without someone else to come along and get it before you do. I know. There’ll be rocks and beer cans and the occasional discarded badminton net that gets wrapped around your tines, but a good tiller can power through all of that and leave you standing on fertile soil. I'll stretch the metaphors just as far as I can before they break so put your hat on and pull your boots up. Let’s do some yard work.

Get the right equipment.

If you fully understand the task to be undertaken, you will be better equipped to choose a wise strategy. Or tiller. Knowing what you’re getting into can help you do a thorough job of choosing what resources and efforts you’re going to need to be successful. A funny thing about providing resources for efforts is that investing half of what it takes to be successful does not yield half successful results. Had Maura and I bought one of those junior tillers we would not have done a half good job. The job would have never gotten started as the ground and kudzu would have been too much for the pint-sized effort.

Only when a company fully appreciates the pervasiveness and competitive advantage afforded by a good strategy can the adequate appropriations of resources and efforts be made.

I doesn’t matter how big the tiller is if you’re not willing to walk behind it.

A common misconception is that when a strategy is adopted or initiated that it needs no further care. This is untrue. Strategies have an uncanny knack of drifting which sets up an even worse situation than before. Managers will blame the strategies without seeing or acknowledging the drift. The result is total loss of the value of what might have been a great idea simply because the people carrying it out did not understand and the person who should have been following behind the tiller left it to go on its own to run over the garden hose.

Every time you till it correctly it gets easier.

The way things were always done can be a stubbornly dense layer of soil riddled with the remnants of failed efforts and the intertwined vines of bad ideas and bad intentions. My advice is: don’t be timid if you are looking to create fruitful ground. Get in and bust it up. Cut vines; throw out the useless junk that’s not part of a thriving garden.

Good strategies are pervasive. Turn up the soil now and it will be easier every time you need to do it again. You never know; the ideas, opportunities and staff you wish to cultivate might begin to blossom in an atmosphere that breaks up some soil and works some fresh nutrients into the mix every so often.

You reap what you sow.

I am constantly surprised how many business tasks plunge headlong into efforts and budgets without the correct amount of preplanning. Just like the garden, everything in marketing does not thrive equally across geographies, seasons and degrees of attention. Treat your tomatoes like your cucumbers and you’ll be substituting pickles for tomatoes in your salad.

Growing business from strategy takes patience and good old-fashioned hard work. There will always be a tough row to hoe, the occasional intruding vine but then again, there’s the situation when you look up one day and see everything begin to bloom. Be smart and nature will work with you. Put a good strategy to work and you never know what you might grow.

To Brand or not to, Brad.

Everyone should have a story like this. It seems as if somewhere, a page from my life was made into 47 different after school specials and 115 movies produced between 1983 and 1987. Does art imitate life or is life merely following the script handed to it by art? How many licks until you get to the center of a tootsie pop?

Brad was so much like the villain in all those mid-eighties teen romp films that I still wince at the idea that we were ever friends. Brad was much like a shrinky dinked Iceman from Top Gun. He had Iceman’s flattop and Hitler youth looks. Brad never really played sports but that didn’t matter. Huge doses of steroids (seriously) work wonders on the 13-year-old body and Brad looked like one of those freakishly built, pre-pubescent Russian gymnastic stars with the unnatural bulging muscles.

I guess I was friend of Brad because everyone else liked him or at least feared him. His synthesized testosterone temper earned him a reputation that other eighth graders avoided like a wedgie. Brad was not cool but no one dared say it. Becoming friends with Brad was like joining the army through transcription and even though I never really like him, over time he became tolerable.

Brad’s parents moved a lot. So when his parents moved a few towns away, Brad would come to my house to connect with the old crew. It was on such a day that Brad came over, and together with Amber (who will be explained in a second), we did what kids of our age did. We walked around the neighborhood.

Amber was what is defined at that age as my girlfriend. We were not old enough to go on dates or anything of the ilk. At that age, being girlfriend and boyfriend simply means when a slow song comes on (usually super rawk group Cinderella’s “Don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone”) one should migrate over to slow dance with whoever your girlfriend was that week. Only, with Amber, the week had turned into two years. It started as kind of an accident. When we all first started junior high we played the all too typical game of musical dance partners where everyone pairs up with the person they will send cute little notes and custom mix tapes of love songs to. I guess I wasn’t paying attention with the music turned off and everyone grabbed a cheerleader and I got stuck with Amber. I tried to end it but she cried and I hate it when girls cry.

So here was Brad, Amber and I. I had a football game to go play, which left Brad and Amber to discuss things that 14-year-olds discuss. We beat Norcross for the county championship and I sacked the QB who would later play QB at University of Georgia (Go me!). But the elation of the win was not enough to quell the hurt that I felt when the final buzzer rang. Brad and Amber were now boyfriend and girlfriend, just waiting for a slow song.

Ironically, this happened to me again but with a slight twist. Our little town of Athens is celebrated for its artistry yet its prowess in marketing to the outside world is dismal. Every year our town’s various tourism and economic development entities run ads full of bullet points, clichéd pictures and some campy headline like “Have it all in Athens!”

My team and I decided we could help. We convened a group of the city’s tourism and economic development stakeholders. The Chamber of Commerce, Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB), the Economic Development Foundation, the mayor’s office, the convention center and several area businesses were all invited to a presentation.
We were really on our game in this presentation. The concept we presented was called “Only in Athens.”

The concept and drive behind Only in Athens was to develop a brand that could be used to attract both visitors and relocatees of an individual and organizational nature. We marketed the idea that our seemingly paradoxical existences indicate our unique spirit that is desirable to businesses and individuals alike. For example, in an ad we showed two restaurants on our main drag in downtown. To the first restaurant pointed an arrow which said “Chateau D’ Pomerol, $198 a bottle” to the second restaurant pointed an arrow which said “Chateau D’ Milwaukee, $3.50 a pitcher. The ad then went on to explain that Athens’ biggest selling point is great diversity peacefully existing in one area. Diversity of geography, business, entertainment and lifestyle make Athens what it is. This approach is in opposition to the too often bullet point laden junk that so typifies destination marketing. We told the relocating businesses that our unique offerings were something that they needed and that they could only find in Athens. Similarly, we told the prospective visitors that unique cultural and enriching experiences also exist to make Athens a fine destination.

Walking out of the meeting, I knew we nailed it. You could see the glimmer in the attendee’s eyes as they imagined all the other seemingly paradoxical relationships that exist in Athens. We had struck a cord and were awaiting a flood of new and even better ideas to emerge from within the strategy. It took only days to get the e-mail.
And we were crestfallen. The head of the Conventions and Visitors Bureau dispatched an e-mail to the mayor calling for the group that had convened to reconvene for a more expansive study of which he would happily be in charge of. He powder puffed our efforts and vacuumed all the momentum we had created in pursuit of his ambitions.
Welcome back Brad.

In the three years it took the CVB to craft a brand for the city there was enough tomfoolery to upstage the Benny Hill show. The first firm considered promised to do a full review of operational effectiveness of the CVB and other brand entities. That firm was promptly dismissed because this effort was about the CVB trying to make itself relevant, not to let everyone see how the sausage is made.
The second firm was ousted for giving several communities the same brand. All of the smoke and mirrors that the CVB director had used to persuade the stakeholders towards and out-of-town firm ended up being just smoke and mirrors. The dismissal of the second firm was kept quite as to not wake those asleep at the wheel. The third and final effort used a professor from a college a state away, the bountiful resource of about ten thousand dollars and came up with something profound. Athens: Life Unleashed!

The effort landed with such a resounding thud that even some of the stakeholders would not sign their name to it. The newspaper called foul and conducted an online poll where two thirds of the respondents said they hated the concept. The CVB staff ran around like a battalion of keystone cops trying to cover their actions. When I attended their board meeting soon after the supposed launch they cowered from the subject and barely mentioned their three years in the making masterpiece.

I was asked my opinion because we had been summarily dismissed from the CVB because they could not gain political power from our continued efforts; the Economic Development Foundation loved our materials. So did the ADDY judges. The material was named “Best in Show” by the local ADDYs. A major market research company who studied the branding efforts of the State of Georgia said the work was “The best municipal marketing materials I have ever seen.” So what was my opinion?

My critique is simple. That’s not a brand.

It’s a campy slogan. It’s a poorly designed logo. It’s a group of ads that continue to perpetuate the undesirable concept that Athens is a place of excesses. Honestly, when was the last time anyone typified anything positive as being “unleashed?”

I blame the CVB for putting their own attainment of power and influence above the needs of the town but I don’t fully blame them for the brand screw up. It is a common problem to equate the idea of a brand with so much that it is not.

Businesses often make this mistake. They design a logo and call it and new brand position. They mock up a few yuckfest ads and say they have a new brand strategy and that strategy is “fun!” Branding has become the new buzz concept for companies but it is so widely misunderstood and widely misused that the unimpressive result of such misuse has made the approach suspect. It reminds me somewhat of the Adkins diet. People who know and faithfully implement the diet lose weight. People who do it halfway or simple don’t know what they are doing gain weight and blame it on the diet. Rarely does one hear someone say, “I tried the Adkins diet but my inability to following directions or commit myself to any long-term discipline has delivered lackluster results”.

I cannot and will not attempt to explain every nook and cranny of creating brand in this chapter. Instead, I’ll throw out some broad and oft violated rules that will help you test the integrity of what you are calling a brand.

A brand is a system of meaning.

A brand gives consumers predictability and assurance. A brand is all the attitudes and perspective concerning a product or service. It encapsulates the essence and inspirational nature of a brand. It is the awareness of the earth exuded by Patagonia and the love of driving extolled by BMW. A brand is a personality for a product or service. And like a person, if the brand is not interesting, engaging and fully developed from a personality standpoint, good luck making friends. And even if such a brand can make friends, they’ll all be like Brad.

A brand is not a logo.

A logo may identify a brand. A logo may even incorporate the spirit or essence of the brand (Like Nike’s swoosh) but the logo itself is not the brand. A swoosh without all the imagery and emotion of Nike is an icon that could just as well be promoting a fertility clinic.

A brand is not just for mass communication.

A brand also functions as an internal ethos. Companies with solid and rooted brand concepts have an uncanny ability to incorporate the meaning system within their organization. Sometimes it is the internal culture which gives rise to the brand. Brands such as Ben and Jerry’s and Saturn used the communication of internal culture to inform the masses what they stand for and believe in.

A brand is active. A brand is nothing without a brand strategy.

I have observed far too many companies conduct a distillation of their brand only to say, “Okay folks this is our brand: we believe in innovation.” “Now, back to work.”
A brand strategy that is not implemented is worthless. Brand strategies are not just the persona but how that persona is cultivated, communicated and nurtured. The brand strategy determines what types of media the communication will flow through and what the next product or distribution channel might be.

A brand is everyone’s business.

The iPod was not an invention of the marketing department yet it taps so deeply into the Apple brand. The brand is essentially what is being sold and it is everyone’s responsibility to live the brand. New products should be on-brand. Sales should be selling on-brand. The design of the corporate headquarters should be on-brand. A brand is what a company and its products are. It is based in who you are in the life of the prospective consumer. If it is something you try to fake, you will fail.

Brad vs. the CVB.

The violation that too many companies make, ultimately leading to their poor branding efforts, is betrayal. A brand is not created in as much as it is discovered. A brand already exists for most companies and the careful uncovering of exactly what motivates a consumer to take action and love a brand might as well be pure gold. The failed efforts of branding have given the practice a tarnished reputation when truthfully it was ineptitude and incompetence to blame.

Be it Brad, the CVB or your marketing department, loyalty can make the difference in whether or not those you want to like you will actually like you. When an entity shows loyalty to its prospect and earnestly listens to that which is already beckons the brand’s devotees, magic happens. In the all too common situation where personal agendas, politics and a little back stabbing are leading the way of your branding effort, I have but one recommendation: Put them back on the leash.

The dog and phony show

This is a true story. Sink, Matt and I hauled up across state lines for a competitive pitch on a nice piece of business. We had a good feeling about the account and had done some preliminary work that was pretty great. Anyways, they stuffed us into a boardroom while they went out to round up the attendees who had run off to play with their Blackberries between meetings.

On the client side, I’ve always hated these meeting. Agencies and consultant always seem to present a gumbo of campy clichés and talk to PowerPoint presentations for thirty minutes about creating a “winning mindset.” When I pitch these days, I think back to those horrid presentations and try to make mine a bit more interesting.

Back to that day in the pitch, I saw a small black box. Sink, who can get all clandestine on command, snagged the box and opened it. It was a cell phone with some stupid card that said something to the effect of “Make the call! Choose Purple Llama Advertising!” (name slightly changed). We studied the bribe and noticed a stand where a projector had just been. Right there, we completely changed the presentation. No slides, no sound effects. No bribes. Straight talk and straight answers.

I was told later that we butchered the competition from a strategic capability standpoint but that some of the members of the voting body were just enamored with the cell phones, gifts and other little gimmicks.

I have a confession to make: our industry does this. We offer bribes, and lavish dinners and outings to tattletales. We promise connections, influence and activities that could be accurately classified as kickbacks. I have seen agencies whore out employees, take clients to Vegas and/or suggest better access to high ranking state officials. It is important to note that not a single part of this has anything to do with ability or prowess in helping the client reach strategic goals.

What are marketers to do? On one side you have consultants and agencies sending you champagne and taking you on “media tours” that include $700 dinners they will eventually charge to your company along with the customary 20% markup. On the other side are actual capabilities. The answer looks easy, but the result anything but.

So what allows the substitution of food, embroidery or a cell phone for real ability? It has to do with marketing team construction, commitment and liability. The team is often the root of whether the right group of outside marketers or a group of dopes who gave away watches will be selected. Here a few tips to avoid making this dumb mistake.

The person in charge should be in charge.

In every environment I have worked in there are always those folks determined to milk the job for anything they can get. They bring in all their personal mail and use the company stamps. They ship their Christmas gifts with the company shipping account. They make their long distance calls from the office so they don’t have to pay for them. To them, this job is about what they get out of it. Never put this person in a position to extract perks from a vendor. I have seen brand managers use the relationship to subsidize travel, pay for vacations and even secure other employment. It’s sickening.

When a person has more at stake than the ability to get free junk, the truth of the situation becomes clear. Is this consultant going to mesh with the corporate culture? What will be the outcome and have we identified the desired outcome in the first place? And the easy tip is to never let a person be involved in the decision unless their neck or their reputation is on the line.

Tell the agency to stop kissing your assets.

Agencies have a knack for getting in the marketing budget and spreading it out until all marketing activities are conducted by and paid directly to them. Endless attempts to encumber more parts of the marketing budget are par for the course, and this is the strategic aim of most conglomerate agencies. Here’s the rub: an agency that oozes over into the area of what your company supposedly needs is never as potent as one who specializes in it already. I would never have an agency handle an important PR project when I know there are people who specialize in PR. I don’t care if the agency just hired two yahoos to write releases. There are people with real track records and abilities in the various subsets of marketing consultation. If you want good work, be willing to look for it.

I already have a cell phone. Give me a strategy.

An interesting fact about the groups I have seen using bribes and junk to peddle their trash is that not one ever had a decent command of the business problem. Instead of salient strategy, they offered logo emblazoned folding camp chairs. Instead of insight, they had an offer to have the next meeting in Bermuda.

Whether or not an agency or consultant can or does have a mental hold on the concept and business problem at hand is extremely relevant. I remember sitting in a meeting with a hack arguing because he could not understand the difference between an American pub and an English pub. Sure, he was more than willing to send our president on a lavish media tour of magazines in Chicago and New York, but ultimately it was worthless because he simply could not understand the strategy.

Put your strategy out there. Give the prospect a chance to reflect it back and comment on it. See if they can really let it soak in. Do they get it? If they don’t, show them the door. Free cell phone or not, your company’s well being is not worth including a dud on the marketing team.

A partnership is two sided.

The last and perhaps most important quip I can offer about the client/consultant interaction concerns the nature of the relationship. The agency is going to need to work from the inside if the results are going to be a real connection between the product and the consumer. Clients who treat their agencies like partners instead of vendors will far exceed the result of those that see the agency like the coffee service company.

So the goal is clear. Getting an agency that can partner with your company, understand your strategy and be a true contribution to the team is not hard to ascertain with a few questions. Ask prospects to explain the strategy and approach on other pieces of business. Ask them how they might approach your business. If they can clearly reflect back to you strategic ability and insight in addressing the business, tell them to keep the free phones and you’ll send them a contract.

PETA hates the dog and pony show.

In recent times, more companies are nixing the big production of agency pitches in favor or more personal interviews. After all, when you ask a person to join your team (which is what the hiring of agency should be), you sit and talk with the person to get to know him or her. You don’t ask the candidate to bake you cookies or make a video about how fun they are. Marketing is serious business and when the result of a marketing effort might have your job in its jaws, you might take the selection of teammates a little more seriously.

So what will it be? Embroidered blankets and promises of connections or strategy and ability? Will you be the one who knows there’s no “I” in team or the one who points out that there is a “me” in team? (There is also a “meat.)” Real business is counting on you to pick strategy over pomp. To pick ability over self interest. And, if after all this you have to have a dog and pony show, well …

http://www.hsus.org/

Just imagine everyone is naked.

There is a legendary class at the University of Georgia taught by one of the guys who led the largest mass streak, according to the record books. While the naked parade happened long before I arrived at UGA, my friend Guy was there, and he assures me everybody got their money’s worth. For a usually starched and pressed southern town, the local folk sure took joy in bringing their kids out to see the naked hippies run down Lumpkin Street.

The class, however, might be even more legendary than naked running hippies. “The Psychology of Sexual Deviation” is one of the hardest classes to get into at Georgia. Tales of posters and mobiles constructed from nudie magazines filtered down to us in junior high from our older siblings. One notorious exercise in the class has a guy and girl sit back to back and watch a silent x-rated film (yes, an actual film played on a projector) while one partner describes the actions of the film in fully clinical terms. No slang. No hinting. Just the facts in psycho babble with an imaginary disco bass track playing in your head all the while. The class had a several thousand person waiting list when I signed up. A groovy adviser and my psych major helped me get a spot in Dr. Pollack’s class.

The class was decent. We took a disturbing survey of what we though our parents’ behavior might be like. We watch a veiled attempt at fine art in a film that ultimately included the clichéd “bow chicka wah wah” track and involved a ballerina. The lady from the health department came in with assorted fruits and vegetables. All in all, it was a decent class.

But what about the posters and mobiles and ridiculous descriptions? I skipped registering for Bowling 101 and The History of Rock and Roll for this. When do we get to the fun part?

There was no fun part. The class had been tamed for some reason, and the result was a class suitable for all audiences. The image that I had trumped up in my mind turned out to be a supercharged high school health class complete with awkward giggles and a written final exam. What a let down.

All these years later, I’m still getting let down. As the tasks of my consultation business require me to find and use emerging methods, I find myself in self-directed study of all types of things. Case interviewing is one of those subjects. (While I could have learned this in business school, I instead spent my time in classes like “The Psychology of Sexual Deviation.”) I’ve studied what many of the greats have to say. I’ve learned methodologies from Kellogg, McKinsey and Thunderbird and many other organizations with names that sound like cereal, scotch and bum wine.

Yet again, though, I’m let down. In a book I am reading currently, the section on evaluating the marketing strategy is barely noted. A few paragraphs talk about position and selling proposition. A few paragraphs talk about linking consumer schema to product attributes in a meaningful way. What is terrible, though, is that the pages of the book don’t do any of the aforementioned things. Instead, they engage endless exercises of drawing circles and bubbles and listing out competitors. In the end, it is a sterile, PG-13 approach that has about as much passion as biology lab.

I don’t blame the author for glossing over strategy. When you don’t understand strategy, it’s hard to get excited. For those of us who understand the power of a huge strategic idea, we get excited because we know success can and often does hinge on the big idea. For the idea agnostic, the alternative is to try to flow chart the concept to death, endlessly searching for a new taxonomy and function paradigm in which to harness creative energy of ideation.

So, for your reading and viewing pleasure, I’m going to make a mobile out of nudie magazine pictures. Just kidding. Instead, I’m going to write the chapter I think is missing from the strategy book. It will be the Cliff’s Notes version - nearly as short as the few measly lines from my recent read. However, I’m going to give you a breakdown of how to evaluate your marketing strategy. For some of you it will be a predictable plot. For others we might have to up the film’s rating owing to your expletives at the realization that your marketing department’s big idea is just a big expense. Either way, get ready, the film’s about to begin.


Just because everyone says the class is awesome doesn’t mean the class is awesome.


Fads can be wrong. Even trends can be artificially engineered as hype spreads like the Norwalk virus. Managers in search of a cure-all happily embrace the newfound approach and then expound it to others in hopes that if the fad fails, they won’t be alone. Like the rumors of this class, non-marketing concepts like Total Quality Management and Benchmarking continue to run strategies amuck. Don’t get me wrong, TQM had some benefits. However, the broad assumption that consumers would flock to a product simply because the manufacturer claimed it was “made better” made a ton of companies looks pretty naked on the balance sheet.

I should have checked out that class before I signed up for it. Like many marketing magic pills, the prospect seemed too good to be true. Well, it was.



Make a mobile or a poster.

If you can’t clearly illustrate it, you don’t have it.
It has plenty of names, but one core concept. If you cannot clearly articulate a marketing strategy in thirty seconds, you do not have one. If you say it is because your plan is so multi-faceted, what you are really saying is that your effort has no unity and is basically a diffuse collection of tactics and efforts, which is not strategy.

Complexity is always covering up something. Though we never did the exercise, I imagine the most humorous part of the whole back to back exercise was to see how one might struggle to describe the acts seen on screen sans the colorful abilities of slang. I have met a few marketers who could ace this exercise with long, 8-syllable words and complex jargon that sounds like Klingon. My beloved mentor Bob once gave me the best breakdown of the many million, several thousand employee company he once headed. He said, “We make and then sell things and hopefully we sell them for more than it costs to make them.”

If you really feel like streaking, go for it.


There is something to be said for bravery in marketing. Bravery is making a call that could hurt your career now rather than absconding and letting it hurt the company later. Companies should be so lucky to have a marketer who puts his or her reputation on the line for a great win.

But don’t confuse bravery with stupidity. Bravery makes a judgment where data is simply unattainable. Stupidity just barrels in on a gut feeling without doing any homework.

Today’s lesson might get a little nasty.


Its can be scary to see the trends and not want follow them. The natural herd instinct of business comes to life when the boss pulls a clipping from a trade magazine and puts it on you desk with a post-it. Then again, you might be the one with a concept that needs the buy-in - in which case be clear, be thorough but quick. And then there’s bravery. It’s scary to be brave in business. Again, the herd instinct says don’t do what we’ve always not done. There’s risk in being brave. Your career teeters on whether your concept was a “game changer” or “the stupidest thing since we bought all those emus.”

Sometimes you feel all alone and naked in the field. But look up. There are a lot of people around you headed the same way. They are just as concerned and just as naked. There sure are a lot of them. Might even be enough for a world record.

Et Tu, CMO?

I was not the most popular student government President at DeKalb College. One of my Senators used to sit right across from me and make accusations; however, he would not direct them directly at me. He would use obscurities like, “Well, (snap) some people, blah, blah, blah random complaint blah, blah, blah.” I sort of feel bad about him not liking me, but he often wore fluorescent mesh tank tops and billowing workout pants to meetings, so I didn’t fully trust his judgment.



Being President had its perks, though. I got snubbed by Spike Lee when we picked him up at his mother’s house in a limo for him to speak at our MLK day celebration. I got to hang out with Zell Miller and discuss important things like cowboy boots and Georgia’s sodomy law. I hugged Maya Angelou and introduced her at an event where she sung and spoke for two mesmerizing hours. I saw and did a lot as President. But in that year, and without me knowing, my adviser Michelle taught me what it means to lead.



I’ve lead other things since being student government President at DeKalb. I was President of my local ad club and served as state director for the American Advertising Federation. I’ve led groups to study issues and solve problems. I lead Snowden Tatarski and it is not always easy, but I have to say if there is anything likable about my style of leadership it is owed to those mentors and friends who made it their cause to teach me.



My mentor Bob is the best mentor a leader can have. Bob teaches an inverted pyramid style of leadership where the leader helps facilitate the actions of the rest of the organization. Nowadays Bob teaches this leadership style to companies, organizations nonprofits and MBA students.



One of the things Bob has taught me in our work and friendship is the value of marketing leadership. A sales and marketing organization is an organism that has a stubborn, thick skin in some spots and a tender underbelly of vulnerability in other areas. Companies often seem to not know what to do with the marketing beast, so they feed it just enough to keep it from starving to death. This methodology leads to countless situations where a good product with sufficient opportunity in the market fails due to poor marketing leadership.



So what is marketing leadership? It is knowing that what you don’t know about the consumer or the product can hurt you, and then seeking clear answers in research. It’s the discipline to not screw up an otherwise good strategy with unneeded input. I am careful to distinguish between input which is helpful in the marketing process and input which simply exist to reinforce a power structure. Put simply, don’t be a bully just because you can.



Marketing departments often suffer from maladies and hexes that tax their own efforts. Whereas leadership could serve as an anchor and source of support, there is instead a black hole that that sucks in the energy and self esteem of the marketing team. To list all the sources of marketing leadership implosion would take volumes. Instead, here are a few of the greatest hits.



A fish stinks from the head.



Behind every dysfunctional marketing organization is a dysfunctional person. Good marketing leadership takes supportive and understanding leaders with the ability to cultivate the next line of marketing leadership. The stinking head of a stinking marketing department gets three words into the last sentence and decides its crap.



To be in the presence of one of these specimens is truly something. They are bullies. They like hunter green and royal red not because of any marketing purpose but because they like it and if you don’t like it you can shut up or quit. These fine individuals ask your opinion as they are walking out of your office. This embrace of command/control style of leadership can and does choke a marketing department down to a group of drones carrying out orders.



A better way to lead is to actually lead. If the team is too dumb to have a good idea, fire them and get a better team. Successful marketing managers hire intellectual equals, if not intellectual superiors. Bullies hire morons, bone heads and nincompoops to run around carrying faxes and press releases. Such makes bullies feel important but in the end the whole company suffers.



None of us is as dumb as all of us.



The opposite of the power bully (though they may coexist) is the kangaroo committee. The kangaroo committee is a group on non-marketers or pathetically skilled marketers who get in a room and try decide which photo to include on the thank you note. This gives an elaborate illusion of doing work. Truthfully, a single person could make all the decisions such a committee makes in a year in a single afternoon. Such committees seem to exist if only to waste time and give people the feeling that their input is wanted. In the end, the committee’s direction is always vague and so someone (often the bully) has to step in and make the decision.



Committees can be great for determining issues. It is worth while to ask the head of sales what they are learning about the customer and what implements would be helpful in closing sales. What you don’t need to know from sales is what color the background needs to be in the product shot. It is not that their opinion doesn’t count; it’s that the clock does. Time as a resource is finite. Unless your aim is waste time and money, find competent people and let them do their job.



The soup sandwich.



Occasionally marketing is seen as a place to resolve corporate conflict. Sometimes this is good and sometimes it is really good. Marketing is the perfect place to discuss the overall corporate strategy concerning customers, marketing, products and opportunities. When it comes to resolving such problems, marketing can really shine.



But the marketing department can also be a dumping ground. I have worked with teams that use the marketing department as a repository for non-marketing executives’ friends’ children in need of an internship, the boss’ spouse who really knows her way around Microsoft Publisher, and best of all, a giant slush fund to pay for undocumented expenses, country club dues and “leadership” trips to Vegas.



Again, strong leadership from a marketing department can snap the rest into focus. Organizations seem to lose focus on marketing because focus never really was the aim at all. Existence was. Instead, marketing pros should feel empowered and included in the crucial operations of the organization. Think deeply about it. Your next breakthrough, business changing concept - is it most likely to come from accounting, finance or marketing?



A modification of the soup sandwich is the invisible rope. The invisible rope ties up the hands of everyone in marketing and ties up nearly every project with only the top brass being able to untie the knot. There are companies where the CEO must see and comment on every ad before it goes out. Sure, quality control you say. No. The ads rarely make it out the door, and the only quality control is more like a limiter as the marketing department can only work at the speed of an eighty-year-old who works sparsely in between golf and naps.



Fire the guy in the poofy pants and pink tank top.



Had I known back at DeKalb College what I know now, I would have handled that Senator a little differently. While I’d be interested in his opinion of how a strategy or direction should be carried out, I would not try to brain (or blame) storm every aspect. I would take the officers who were most capable and give them every authority to solve the issue, but he would not be chosen. Am I being a tyrant or vindictive? I don’t think so. With the competitor, policies and sheer inertia of the masses against you, the least you can expect is honest loyalty and productive leadership within your organization.



I don’t have all the answers and I am not always right. But I know a few things quite certainly for my experience. Great leadership inspires great results. Beware of someone who attends an important meeting in a mesh tank top. And Maya Angelou is far more cordial than Spike Lee

The Aristocrats.

Learning the truth behind the joke “The Aristocrats” was far less funny and intriguing than the build up. I’m sure there is some sort of comedian lore that says I shouldn’t spill the beans, but I really don’t care. The whole idea behind “The Aristocrats” is to tell a joke about a man pitching a play to a theater director. The comedian telling the joke describes the play and ad libs this part to make it his or her own. The versions that I have heard are basically filth-ridden toilet humor that would make Larry Flint blush. The ending (and the name of the joke) is when the theater director asks for the name of the play, to which the guy pitching says “The Aristocrats.”



Hah, Hah. Real funny.



I never really liked the joke because while it could be mildly amusing, the format was pre-scripted, which made even the ad lib part decently predictable with most comedians. I prefer jokes that are a total surprise. I like humor that blazes new paths and makes a new mental connection where there was none before.



Nonetheless, I am in the minority. Society likes its high canned in heavy syrup. At the very least, nobody’s made enough noise about the collective dumbing in humor to really make a difference. Movies are no different. Movie executives even describe film concepts in terms of former ideas: “It’s like Die Hard meets Die Hard Two.” I think the situation comes from the fact that new ideas are difficult and risky. Why take the risk to see if something will connect when you can repeat whatever yukfest somebody originated before you?



Marketing through advertising is no different. Coming up with a new approach, strategy, concept or idea is tough. There’s all that cumbersome research to read. Then there’s the whole review of case study. Finally, you’ve got to connect the consumer insight with the strategy in a way that will keep prospects from turning the page or changing the channel.



That sounds a lot like hard work.



This wouldn’t be a truly great diatribe about advertising sequels if it was not itself a sequel. We examined the tried and true advertising archetypes before, and today’s installment adds new firepower to the advertising tactician’s arsenal of talking food, dancing girls and their midriffs and dumb-dumb dads with hot wives.



So bust out the can opener, because if you want to avoid the heavy lifting of working strategy into effective advertising you can also use a worn out old format that someone else tossed out years ago. Sure, it will smell a bit and be out of style, but look at the alternative- work. Yeah right. I mean, it’s like, martini time.



Relax advertising friends. Don’t get your $100 jeans that come pre-faded and pre-torn in a wad. We can help you maintain the needed time to write your screenplay. Just do what pretty much most ad people do these days and follow these easy formats.


Kids say the darndest things.

Does your product have nothing to say? Don’t worry; just get a kid to say it. It will be cuter and people will pay attention because we all love kids right?

Plus, is there anything cuter than a kid explaining Voice Over IP? Sure, you say that’s not cute, but the kid in you loves it.
There’s a spot out where Mom tells the kid that she wants new floors but doesn’t know how to ask Dad. The kid yells out “Dad, Mom wants new floors.”

In my version, the kid yells out “Dad, Mom needs to see a therapist to deal with her communication problems caused by her absentee father and oppositional defiant mother.” Now that’s funny.


The Monocle Popper

Every so often comes an ad that attempts to appeal to the jilted youth with some kind of set up of an imaginary old and oppressing regime. It’s like somewhere out there is a group of crusty old men driving around in an Xcaliber wearing top hats and they are all out to get us. Think Monopoly's Mr. Moneybags.



A great example of this was all those Taco Bell ads where a dude (even though he looked about 35) jumped the wall at a posh country club, sending the waspy members into an unbridled frenzy. My business partner, Tatarski, loves making fun of these ads, saying things like “My stars!” and then he pretends that his imaginary monocle has popped out and his top hat flew off with a puff of steam.



I secretly wish that the dude in the Taco Bell ad would jumped the wall only to be beaten unconscious with a 9 iron by a sauced up John Daly. My stars! Pop!



Unexplained Celebrity

In the ATL there is a billboard with a picture of a girl from Grey’s Anatomy. (I don’t watch the show so I don’t know which one she is. I think she’s McStupid.) Anyways, it’s her and a cell phone. No words. No explanation. Just her smiling and the phone. She’s not even smiling at the phone.



I thought it was a mistake until I saw the same thing in a print ad. I then I saw it twice by a competitor, but this time with Catherine Zeta Jones and Harry Connick, Jr. Again no explanation, just the celebrity and occasionally, a picture of the product.



Is there some magic power about celebrities that their unexplained presence causes a product to connect with a consumer? “Oh look, a cell phone– wait, is that McStupid? I just gotta have that phone!”



If it turns out that this theory is successful, I am going to start sending all my newsletters with pictures of The Captain and Tennille with the hope that the sheer power of their celebrity will make the words go that much further.

Customer Cam 2.1

I guess after hearing, “A 12-year-old could create better advertising than that!” about a thousand times, some agency somewhere agreed and handed the keys to the creative to the customer. So now we have the customer cam, or better recognized in one of its more horrid forms as the Krystal Cam. The premise is the Krystal Cam tractor trailer pulls up in college towns where college students wax on about their beloved Krystal adventures. They rarely mention value (a key attribute) or convenience (another key attribute). They simply blab on about how cool Krystal is (untrue)interspersed with bubbling about things like how they stay fit on the Krystal diet (also untrue) and college infidelity.



The peddlers of this type of advertising swear it is some mutation of word-of-mouth advertising. Newsflash: its not. It’s unfunny drivel reminding people how stupid they look on TV. This fable has been repeated and offered to clients in substitution of a coherent strategy. While the production crew might have had a blast taking Jaeger bombs with the Kappas at Auburn, the resulting spots are nothing but a hangover.



Zaxby’s tried the same technique, only with slightly less thought. In that ad consumers disgustingly sip and slurp through a plate of food while describing how good it is. Then a voice-over chimes in and says, “Indescribably good.”

What just happened? You had people describe something to you then say is indescribable. But you described it.

The whole effect of the spots is indescribably dumb.


I Believe in Believing in Believing

My realtor is nothing like the class act realtor I see on TV. That guy on TV has got it together. He believes in values that transcend the everyday. He knows what I want to achieve and he has specialized marketing insight when it comes to typing my information into MLS that goes well beyond the ordinary. He has to. If he didn’t, he would wear the yellow jacket. He said so himself.



The declining popularity of the televangelist has been replaced with the peddling performance coach. The spots consist of some big words and a synthesized orchestral build up. At first these spots seem pretty convincing, but in the end you still get the washed up old agent that smells like smoky potpourri.

The Discerning Lifestyle

I’ve always had a thing for lifestyle ads. It’s the soft spot in my recycle bin. And every week Maura and I get a kick out of the ads telling me I am the type of man who knows what I want, and that’s why I’ll invest in gold. Real estate is a great purveyor of the discerning lifestyle with an often humorous twist.



While many of the ads for high priced communities are aimed at discerning customers, the people creating the marketing materials seem to be far less. Example: down the street from me is a neighborhood called Putters, owing to the fact that they have a putting green. Okay. Cute. A little campy, but whatever floats your boat or finds your lost remote. Only problem is the golf club on their materials is not a putter, it’s a wedge. Don’t you think the person so incensed to buy in a community that has a putting green might know the difference? Apparently the marketer didn’t think so. Discerning indeed.



It’s not just them. Across from my office is a tower called Georgia Traditions. Their logo: a modified fleur-de-lis. Okay. Fine. But the fleur-de-lis is no Georgia tradition. It is mainly a French tradition and in this part of the South it is well known as a New Orleans Tradition. I guess the crescent moon and palm tree idea was already taken.


Insert punch line here

So a guy walks into a theater and says “I want to do a play.”

“What’s it about?” says the director.



“Well, I’m just going to piece it together from a bunch of other plays. It’ll have no real meaning or purpose except to spend a lot of other people’s money producing it.” “I don’t really know what I want to accomplish, but that doesn’t really matter”



“Why you must work in advertising,” says the theater director.



The man nods.



“Say, what’s the name of your play, my young advertising friend?”

Rip Rah Rega.

I was the oldest ATO pledge at Georgia since the guy who came back from Vietnam and finished his pledgeship. Having worked a few years in Hotlanta as a photographer and camera slinger, I finally made the trek to Athens to finish my degree. The first semester was horrible. I didn’t know where anything was and I didn’t know anybody, but it wasn’t in the cute, “Isn’t college fun?” sort of way that freshmen stink of. No, for me it was just pathetic, and I knew that if I was going to enjoy my time in school, I would have to shed that jaded, artsy, I’ve-already-had-a-real-job crap and start making some friends.

Georgia rush is an experience unlike anything else. One house wouldn’t talk to anyone not on their list. Another house was full of creepy dorks who insisted that all of us would make great brothers. One house didn’t have a house, just a couch in the front of the yard where the house used to be. And yes, there was a dude passed out on it. Around midnight, my rush group got off the bus in front of the ATO house and the bus pulled off, leaving us in the dark. We started up the hill when the brothers yelled for us to stay at the bottom. Just then, a guy on a motorcycle burst through the front door and roared down the steps in a full wheelie. The rest of the brothers ran out onto the porch to the point that when the first ones got to the edge, the ones in the back started pushing so that people were falling off the porch into the bushes below. They then made us run up the steps and shoot a basket on the basketball court. We then watched a disgusting slideshow and took a tour of the renovated caboose, complete with bar and TV. The house was filthy in the way a river looks after a flood. It smelled like someone was cooking a stew of cigarettes, stale beer and dog fur. The interior design echoed the “expletives scratched on a wall”school of design and the brothers appeared to have each drank enough that night to kill a rugby team.

I knew I was home.

I love ATO, but that’s on purpose. People often like to tell me that they were on the newspaper or the fencing team and it was kinda like a fraternity. No offense to the fencers - it’s nothing like ATO was. At the school newspaper, the guy or gal who schmoozes their way to editor gets to boss people around and get away with it. ATO was more like communism. We had leaders, but mostly just because someone had to be responsible to pay the bills. I didn’t matter if you were the president, if you started being an ass, someone would haystraw your room or tie you to a tree and cover you with the leftovers from a freshly dressed deer.

There was a system and it made you loyal. While you were a pledge, you had to do demeaning things like clean the bathroom, race the house dog during his game of fetch and be a 24 hour chauffer. Before my class pledged, there was a creepy old dude who pulled his bed in the middle of a room and made the pledges watch him sleep. He threatened, “If I wake up and you’re not looking directly at me, you’ll take a bag of sugar up the stairs one granule at a time.”

But then, in the midst of the unpleasantness, the brothers would do something awesome. They paid for and sent my pledge class on camping trips. They would take us out, buy our drinks and introduce us to questionable women. They made efforts to find us dates and introduce us to their friends outside the fraternity. For every tough thing that we went through, there were two things that were really good. It not uncommon to hear of guys getting a little sad after pledgeship because they miss the attention and excitement.

My brothers and I learned how to foster loyalty. If the brothers ever gave us pledges a hard time it was because of some crap we did. If a brother had expressed an interest in a girl and another guy tried to move in, that other guy might expect to get mop water dumped on his head the next morning in the shower. And when brothers did things to help each other, we talked about it and told the guy that we appreciated him. Don’t think we got all weepy about it. Right after we told him we appreciated him, we shot a bottle rocket under his door and it exploded under his futon.

I am loyal to ATO. I believe in its creed and its brotherhood. Sure, I got pissed a few times, but I know I can count on my brothers and our bond is a lasting one.

It’s kinda like how I feel about REI. Okay, maybe that’s unfair. My fraternity is a group that helped me through an important part of my life. But I have known REI longer. I got into the outdoors in high school and REI was my source for equipment and information. I would go there whenever I could to get gear I had been saving for and comb the message boards for things outdoorsy in the ATL. Like ATO, REI had a plan to build my loyalty and while you may say they buy their friends, I protest that my loyalty is simply a repayment of their loyalty to me.

Brands make friends and sometimes those friends are loyal. Brands like Apple and Airstream have followings that rival any the bonds of Beach Weekend or White Tea Rose Ball. Brand devotees have Harley tattoos and Saturn homecomings. Brands that foster such loyalty can sometimes create loyalty that transcends mere support, in which case the followers take over and the company becomes like our chapter President who simply paid the bills. I can’t tell you all the secrets from ATO. But I will tell you the secret that many brands use to recruit their followers. Here’s the secret knock, passcode and handshake.

You’re like us. We’re like you.

I remember an interesting tactic we used when recruiting new members. We asked about particular interests, and paired the recruit with a guy with the same interests. I was a spreadhead so I got paired with groovy guy who wore overalls and carried a bongo drum. The message was clear. The other fraternities are a bunch of geeks in Polo shirts and ironed khakis. Come join us where you can have fun and be yourself, dude.

Brands have the same chance to celebrate their recruits’ individuality. Brands like Airstream, Trek and Subaru all have particular types of purchasers and when those people feel a stronger connection, their loyalty grows. The temptation is to broaden an appeal in order to capture a broader audience. This does not work. It is the equivalent of the fraternity who will let anyone in no matter what; ergo, membership is worth next to nothing.

You’re either with us or against us.

Fraternities are competitive. We fight over the sororities’ social calendars. We fight over recruits. And some times we just fight. Fraternities are not ambiguous about membership. Either you’re in or you’re not. Either you made a few sacrifices and sucked it up or you’re just hanging out at our party being awesome by mere proxy.

Membership has its privileges but it also has its costs. Brands with a strong following are not without commitment. A MacG5 is expensive. A VW may not be the car your Mom or spouse wanted you to buy. You may have to drive out of the way to get to the Fresh Market. The key is making membership in the brand worth it. Only then can there be a sense of pride in belonging.

Together we’re heavy.

I remember how excited we got when we maxed out our pledge classes. More members meant more opportunities for friends and the fraternity as a whole. It meant current and future strength of our brotherhood. It meant that we had successfully communicated what we stand for and that such a pitch was well received.

Brands are smart to appraise and connect the membership. Forums now connect car enthusiasts and Linux people and all the other thriving brand communities. For a brand to adequately develop a following, it has to show people where to go.

Nissan losing their following. Yup.

When brands lose the love for their brotherhoods and sisterhoods, they begin to dwindle. Nissan was once the mighty sports car and truck company who gave us the Z car and Pathfinder. Nissan once had passion. Today their design and communication is so watered down that the voice over in the TV commercial might as well been read from their annual repot. What exactly is “inspired design?” Isn’t all design inspired? And just because it is inspired, does that mean the inspiration was necessarily a good one? What if the car was inspired by a giraffe?

Thank you sir, may I have another?

Loyalty takes work but it is worth it. Brands that want loyal fans better be ready to take their licks, show some restraint and believe in the cause. Today’s consumers have plenty of choices in nearly every category. Today they’re looking for meaning and for something they can support. Give them a brand they can tattoo on their ankles. Give them a brand they’ll display proudly on a car, desk or wall. Give them a brand that they’ll shout out. As for me, well, here it goes.

Rip, Rah, Rega
Alpha Tau Omega
Hip, Rah, Hip, Rah
Three cheers for Alpha Tau
Rah, Rah, Rah, Hey!

The Lexus and the Olive Garden

When my family moved to Georgia when I was young, we thought we were moving into the country. Our neighborhood was one of the first in a patch of pasture land, forest and red clay, and I remember having to ride the bus a long way to school. There was, however, a gleaming beacon of capitalism in our new town, one that beckoned the weary with promises of fulfillment in the form of a video games and cheap jeans. Long live Gwinnett Place Mall.

My friends and I went to Gwinnett Place every weekend. It had a movie theater across the street and that, combined with walking around in circles, was enough to entertain a horde of 12-year-old boys for hours. One major facilitating factor in us going to the mall was the Ruby Tuesday. My dad would not let us go hang out at the mall ourselves, so he and the other dads would go hang out at the Ruby Tuesday talking smack while we blew our allowance on watching Freddy Krueger or buying snap and pops.

But then something happened. An anomaly in our little ecosystem. A new kind of siren that beckoned our parents from far beyond our refuge at the arcade. The prospect of cheap, mass produced Italian food with all you can eat breadsticks was too much. Friday night’s buying candy cigarettes were replaced with accompanying the parents to the Olive Garden for sensibly priced chicken parmesan.

I cursed the Olive Garden for destroying my youthful bliss, but as the years have ticked by, I have come to appreciate that which held our parents captive like armadillos to headlights. Rewind back a few decades and look at the casual dining scene. There was Chili’s, which originally was an upgraded McDonalds that sold beer. There was Applebee’s that was pretty much like a Chili’s and still kind of is but now they also sell Italian. Weird. There was Ruby Tuesday which was like Chili’s and Applebee’s with the undeniable awesomeness of being in the mall. The casual dining sector was a collection of also-ran burger joints that all sold Shirley temples and soggy fries.

The Olive Garden came and changed all that. Not just the Olive Garden, but also Longhorn’s, Fuddrucker’s and every Happy #1 Super King China Buffet served to fracture the casual dining sector into many parts like what happened in Gremlins when Gizmo got wet.

Once there was one idea of casual dining. The sector was split apart as restaurant holding companies stopped running one type of restaurant and started running a portfolio of restaurants. The theory is simple. Give consumers more options within a category and win yourself a larger slice of the pie.

Procter and Gamble is famous for this. One detergent makes your clothes smell nice. One protects colors. One is all temperature. P&G spit the category into many factions and positioned a product to fit each niche. The result is leading brands in nearly every subcategory and a commanding aggregate share of the category as a whole.

So why didn’t P&G just make Tide all temperature, Tide fresh scent and Tide color safe? Well, they sort of did but not with the same potency that their brands Cheer, Gain and Ivory have. This is where you can find the fundamental mistake that many marketers make. They know that additional lines within a category can result in gain of share through the respect and brand affinity created for individual brands. They don’t know the proven fact that line extension is a risky game. Sometimes you get Ivory laundry detergent and it sells. Sometimes you get the Eagle Talon and it sucks.

Dividing the sector and taking a new position within the sector is tricky but doable. Here are a few tips.

1) Know what you do. Know what you don’t do. Do things based on what you know. Don’t do thing based on what you don’t know.

The point here is to have an accurate self appraisal. Don’t position or attempt to position an effort of impractical or improbable aspects. I once had a client tell me his strategy was to be the best customer service company in the world. Even if that was achievable for his company (it wasn’t), it is not the core of his business. Sure, customer service is a conduit for business, but the idea that you can muscle a meager product onto a customer simply by following every sentence with “it’s my pleasure” is wrong, wrong, wrong.

2) Before you dive in, find out how deep the water is.

If you know yourself, the next knowledge you need to have concerns the market. The funny thing about products that roar to stardom and those who explode on the launch pad is that they often have a similar start. Both saw an opportunity where others did not and while the star saw a real need and niche, the failed brand went after a market and consumer that never existed. Good market intelligence is valuable to every effort no matter how novel or innovative. Go ahead. Talk about all those techies who started in their garage without market research. Well, thanks to the idea that market research is somehow passé, there are plenty of companies still in the garage, and considering the market’s hangover from tech’s empty promises, they better get real comfortable.

3) Don’t serve jalapeno poppers at an Italian restaurant.

So you have a niche. You found a vein of potency and you’ve focused on a particular mindset, customer and value proposition. Congratulations. Now don’t screw it up. Often the collective gut says “we’ve made it, now what?” which is immediately followed by some horrid extension. Remember that O’Charley's promo? You know, the American Restaurant with the Irish name that serves Italian. Way to focus, Charley.

Instead hunker down in your niche. How can you invite more people to your little island? VW started with a cool little small car and invited others to join their club. They resisted the temptation to build cars like everyone else and the exploitation of customer insight is why they still exist today.

The nexus at Lexus.

Lexus is on of my favorite examples. Toyota knew they could not build a luxury Toyota (even though they later tried with the Avalon). Toyota means reliability and value and Toyota knows such. When Toyota detected an opportunity for a performance luxury car, they didn’t just buff a Celica to a high shine. From design, to advertising to a limited distribution base to sharpen demand, Lexus was and is a nearly perfect niche creation.

Toyota listened and they reacted with insight and tact.

The world is Fiat.

As boundaries fall between countries and the collective intellect of our fair country is hopefully rising, opportunities for niche brands will abound. Sectors will open and consumers, armed with more information than ever, will make discerning choices on the brands that they ultimately use to show the world who they are. When the opportunity opens, will you be there with a better smelling t-shirt, a 300 horse power roadster or free bread sticks.

Good marketing plans tell the customer that you care.

Great plans tell the customer of your passionate pursuit of their passions and pursuits.

And the truly great niche positions speak so pointedly to a customer so that all that the customer hears is, “When you’re here, you’re family."

The gap wedge.

I was a winter graduate of college. My parents think of it as me making up for those semesters where all I took was skiing and History of Beer (a real class at UGA in case you are considering a graduate degree). I like to think of my extra time spent in school as my victory lap, although I started celebrating well before crossing the finishing line.

But finish I did and my first post school job was in the creative department of a particularly terrible advertising agency. I graduated on December 16th, but the new job did not start until February 1st which left me over a month to do what every ambitious and driven young person should do as a capstone experience of their education and that is play golf everyday, sometimes twice a day.

Golf was kind of my new thing and while I had taken a class in it (insert parental snicker here), it was not until that time between desks that I really began to enjoy the sport. Having only the funds from odd photo jobs to keep me floating, my choice of courses was limited to the Green Hills Country Club or the Athens-Clarke County Municipal Landfill. I choose Green Hills because it had a slightly better chef. Green Hills is the discerning man’s course. And that discerning man should prefer a concrete pad and a net for a driving range. I shouldn’t give Green Hills a bad rap. I mean, it’s a family place. Like, for instance the old family cemetery on the third fairway. Yes, there is a cemetery on the fairway.

My friend Mike was also waiting for his big advertising job to start, but he wasn’t able to join me on the green because he had not technically been hired yet. Mike spent his days working at a golf shop, and like any great friend who works at a golf shop, he hooked me up with all types of junk for cheap. Enter the pure spin. Mike found a club that he swore by and he bought me one. It was a pure spin gap wedge and I remember being impressed with the flashy neoprene cover. I thanked him, put it in my bag and there it stayed.

I didn’t use the gap wedge for a bunch of reasons. For starters, I didn’t know when to use it. Second, my game was making progress with what I already had in the bag so why go and mess with progress by using this awkward little club. Third was that it appeared it was going to take some work to use it correctly and since I didn’t know what the result might be, I ignored it and left it in the bag.
You have to admit you’ve done this at work at least once. You had a tool; you didn’t know what to do with it. You left it in the bag. Somebody might have asked you, “What does that do?” And rather than sound dumb and say “I don’t know,” you said, “Oh that stupid thing is worthless.”

Next time I want to throw a club in the lake, I’m reaching for that one.
I have consulted plenty of companies who leave the marketing department in the bag. They see that slightly awkward looking club and don’t really know what to with it so it sits. They know others use it with prowess but they simply have not let it work for them and so when they’re in the rough, the unused club sometimes finds itself at the bottom of a dyed green lake.

Are you tired of hauling that club you never use? Scared that you’re going to swing it only to ground out? Are you ready to lower the handicap that not properly using a marketing department is causing? Here’s how to better your game with the basics.


Learn to read the situation

Some golfers thoroughly study the landscape and some golfers just wrongly guess and then follow which ever way the wind is blowing. Some get down and read the putt while others rush through a 3 putt and blame it on the ball marks.
Learning to read the situation is the beauty of research and that market research is nothing short of a crucial function and need of marketing. Marketing departments should be actively vetting intelligence about market conditions, trends, competitive movements and channel opportunities.


Some say they don’t have the time to get down and read the situation. I say the time you don’t have now is used up fishing your ball out of the lake. Some say they have intuition and I say that unless you play a scratch game then there is always something more you can learn.

The right swing, every time.

Golfers spend years getting their swing right and they should. It is the element that affects pretty much the whole game and a good swing touches nearly everything. The need to fix the swing is unavoidable and it is my experience that those who refuse to work on their swing do not remain golfers for long.
I wish marketers that ignored their swing would not remain marketers. I’m not trying to be mean or suggest that people give up, but the swing of marketing is where the game is won or lost. The swing is strategy. It’s the successful integration and maneuvering of consumer, market and competitive insights to a pinpoint application of force that sends results sailing far and, more importantly, where you want it to go.


But many marketers don’t care about their swing. Funny, they often try to play the game without swing. And when they do swing, they do this little croquet looking exercise that send the ball twenty feet. “You just hit the ball twenty feet,” someone will yell.
They reply, “Yeah, but it’s in the right direction.”
To which the original golfer says again, “Yeah, but you just hit the ball twenty feet.”
I know, you won’t go in the lake if you hit it twenty feet at a time. Just don’t expect to win anything but the middle finger of the group who’s behind you on the course.
Crafting good strategy takes practice. It takes the driving range of academic study and the training of a pro who knows how and what to correct. The marketer who learns command of strategy may not always hit a hole in one but you can be assured they are progressively making every swing more accurate, more useful and more precise.


Now play the game.


It easy to assume that you’ll get better by playing without learning to read the course or perfecting your swing, and to an extent, you’re right. In marketing, playing the game is carrying out a plan. It is all the advertising, sales activity and promotion that aims an effort down the fairway. You can skip the first two steps and still get incrementally better - that is if you can afford it. TV spots cost money. Brochures cost money. Salespeople cost money. This is not Green Hills. There is no discount for off season play.
But let’s say you do read the course and perfect your swing. In that case, get out there. Be bold. You might not always clear the lake or stay out of the bunker, but with a good idea of the course and a strong consistent swing you have the odds with you.


Give the club a try.


I was working the chipping green at the University of Georgia practice area and decided to give my gap wedge a try. It works. It pops the ball up with perfect spin and when the ball finally sits down it pops down like it fell in a mud. Despite my reluctance, I learned to use it. And my game hasn’t been the same since.