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.

Order Up!

Healthy living is my new thing. I eat right when I can. I’m on the bike when I have a chance. Maura and I have even taking to backpacking and we are eagerly waiting to hike Georgia’s wettest trail with over 40 river fords, the Jacks River Trail. Healthy living is all about education. I’ve tried to learn about how food and exercise interact with the body. I know red wine is good for you so I intend to make it great for me. I mean really great. Really.

I learned early in this health kick about the importance of meals. Like how I need to eat breakfast. Years of a Guns ‘N Roses lifestyle have conditioned me to not eat breakfast save for two cups of coffee. No more. Plenty of diet experts and grocery check out line tip books have convinced me that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I force down yogurt and granola, and I have replaced the coffee with tea or water.

Lunch is another problem I have had to remedy. Before I decided to stop eating like a rouge dog, I would treat lunch with one of two answers. The first, resulting from no breakfast, would be to gorge on something high in carbs and blue cheese. The other scenario would be to continue my fast and worked through lunch living off coffee and the pieces of gum we keep for meetings in the conference room. The eventual dinner was pretty much always like you picture a meal on a pirate ship. I’d eat three meats, a starch and a wheat field and wash it down with a bottle of cheap French wine. Bon appetit.

I’ve changed my ways and I’m trying to teach others. While I have got a few who’ve listened to my moderation apotheosizing, I still am surrounded with those who starve and gorge, but this time I am not talking about food. A marketing plan is like a living thing. It loves to be nurtured. When it get beaten and bruised, all who love it feel its pain. And probably most important, it needs proper nourishment.

How do you feed your marketing plan? Are you stuffing it with presentations until it can’t walk only to find it hungry again in an hour? Is your plan getting all the right food groups like awareness building, knowledge building, sales support and defined action? Is it getting enough fiber? That is to say, is the old stuff that doesn’t really need to be around passing through and out or is your plan just plain constipated?

Marketing plans need to eat the right stuff for sure, but just as important is making sure plans are eating three square meals. There are no shortcuts to getting it right and skipping a meal can mean a loss of discipline or momentum later. Want to get that marketing plan back to health? Follow my easy meal plan. It works and despite not having a snazzy infomercial, I assure you its more rewarding than juicing.

Breakfast: Assorted fruits and nuts, bran muffin.

There are only a few focus groups I’ve observed where the attendees would be classified as assorted fruits and nuts. The bigger point is research now will quell that empty feeling come lunch time. And the bran muffin? Sometimes you need to clean things out. Like unproven ideas, wrong convictions and assumptions and the type of business minutia that makes you feel irregular, bloated and gassy.

I am constantly surprised at the people who try to skip research and wonder why they feel awful later in the day. It is just like when you skip breakfast. You end up gorging on something else and wonder why your stomach is upset. My advice: eat your breakfast. Force it down if you have to. It will get easier with time and your brand will certainly be healthier for it.

Lunch: Soup, salad, sandwich and strategy.

There is nothing like a little bit of everything to satisfy a lunchtime craving. Great strategies are just like that. They take all wants and desires into account. I’m not saying if you want a fried banana and mayonnaise sandwich that you should have one. I am saying take into account the need and address all of it with different means. Sales, operations, distributors and others are all salivating for what a wholesome strategy can accomplish.

Yet so many marketers decide to work through lunch. They see lunch as a luxury and seem to think that some gut feeling overrides the need for a strategy. Well, listen up my hungry friends. That gut feeling is hunger and that growling stomach is the boss or the analysts or someone else counting on marketing to be getting its essential vitamins and minerals.

Tactics, it’s what’s for dinner.

Nobody skips dinner. It’s so much food. Why there are so many TV spots and baseball team sponsorships and, oooh, looky there is a gravy boat full of shipper displays. Nobody skips dinner. In fact, they just save room for dinner. Marketers are skipping the research and strategy table and piling up a heaping load of tactics. Another plus to dinner is all the company. When you had no one to eat with over research or strategy, suddenly there are scores of media, agency, accounting people posing as marketing consultants and a table full of other dinner guests just waiting to stuff whatever they’re serving down your trap. Is that a delicious interactive website with a viral video served on the side?

Marketers skip the first two crucial meals and gorge on the other. With no room for research or strategy they are stuffed fat with tactics that have no nourishment. In the end, all that is left is the carcass of a poorly cooked sponsorship, a vintage bottle that claimed to have a clutter-busting ad campaign but ended up being empty, and a really bad case of heartburn because while the meal had some satisfaction, the meal was not free and you got stuck with the check.

Order up.

I’m not serving up what hasn’t been served a thousand times by others. Trout and Ries have been screaming for years for people to stop skipping strategy and research. Industry magazines are asking when marketers are going to stop binging on fad food and start planning their marketing meals with discipline. I imagine the problem is that many of us speaking up for a balanced diet are just about as influential as the middle school gym coach. We can tell you all day long that you should eat right, but gurus, the media and even perhaps your friends want to sell you on a plan that takes no discipline, allows you to eat whatever and whenever with no consequences and will make everyone like the slimmer sexier you. Friends, that does not happen. It has never happened.

Juice by Jeff.

Maura bought me the bike for Christmas and I’m still on it. I’m losing some weight, but I have to say the best thing is learning to live a healthy lifestyle. It changes the way I see my meals and exercise, and I think it’s the right step towards making this heath thing a keeper. Changing the way your marketing plan eats works the same way. Once you have committed to eating right and at the right times, you begin to feel better and the change of perspective means you’re more likely to stick on the right track for the long haul. When hunger growls, consider good, fresh research, well balanced strategy and tactics that are part of a well balanced diet. It pays to eat well. Because, as we all know, you are what you eat.