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.