The Big Five.

I'm back in the saddle again. To those of you who have missed this semi-regular e-mail, I apologize. Things at ST have been busy. We have been venturing into wheat fields and cotton capitals and all the while helping to develop some pretty powerful brands. The last few months have been daunting, to say the least. A big part of my thinking lately has been taken up with the development of a new book that will explore the alignment between consumers, organizations and products. Obviously, that has taken a ton of my time.

And in that time, I've come to realize that you never write the same book that you start out trying to write. For my first book, I started out with grand visions of profundity, only to end up with 140 pages of crude jokes, goofy quips and occasionally something about marketing. My next book will be different. I mean, I hope it will. But don't you worry, all that seriousness is saved for the book. These newsletters will still be as crude as you love...

As I dove through materials on consumer attitudes, marketing strategies and successful implementation, I began to notice something stark. It became clear that the majority of firms successful in marketing a product or service seemed to adhere to a few rudimentary marketing concepts. Conversely, firms that saw their marketing ambitions fail to launch had violated at least one, and more often a few, of these simple marketing maxims.

So what are these concepts? Are they austere puffery about synergistic visioning? Hardly. Are they the ever-broadening decrees that, in fortune cookie fashion, suggest everything while saying nothing? Nope. They are a collection of brilliant, salient inquires collected from clients, fellow consultants, academics, nutcases and the occasional intern.

And now, ladies and gentleman, for your enjoyment (and hopefully the betterment of you marketing), the Big Five:



1) How are we providing value to those who purchase our offering above what is available from competitors?

Put more simply, why do we exist? The President of Saatchi and Saatchi, Kevin Roberts, says consumers are over the "er" descriptors (fresher, crispier, tastier). Roberts says products need a soul or persona over competitive attributes. I call BS. If a product or service does not have an attribute or collection of attributes that legitimizes its existence, maybe it shouldn't exist. And, in time, it probably won't.

This doesn't mean neglect the brand. An entire structure of meaning can be built around competitive attributes. BMW says they build the ultimate driving machines and they do. Their brand is the definition of driving enjoyment. They back up this position with attributes like glued to the road handling and bi-turbocharged engines. Attributes and persona do not function at the exclusion of each other. They are dependent on each other to make and support meaning for the brand. If you don't have an attribute that makes your brand competitive, find one, create one or start over and don't stop until you have one. A brand does not live on image alone.


2) How are we further evolving the offering to match the evolving needs and desires of our customers as tied to our brand?

Many offerings start off responding to a need. Successful offerings seem to find that sweet spot where brand and attribute intersect and a star is born. Then comes Father Time intent on spoiling the party. Over time, attributes may change and be updated. Also, brand messages may get a facelift, or at least a little Botox. The problem, however, is that the two rarely evolve strategically in reference to the consumer.

Here's a decent example. Ford started as the company that made a car accessible to many Americans. They didn't invent the car, and the quality was good but certainly not on the level of earlier, hand built models. When more consumers wanted a truck, Ford put a good truck within reach of millions. Midsized sedan? The Taurus. SUV? The wildly popular Explorer. Yet today, Ford's products and marketing are a mixed bag. Sure, they still make the assorted every-person cars but they also make $65,000 trucks. For every time Ford has done a great job of making desired cars available to the masses, they've screwed it up trying to be the everything car company. And now, manufacturers like Hyundai and Kia are making popular features and designs available to more people and those people are driving past the Ford dealership in a new Sorrento.

Ford could have evolved its product and marketing strategy to something more like IKEA. Smart designs, good quality, no BS rebates or sales tricks. They could have evolved that simple principle of getting good cars within reach of every American. Today Toyota is doing that better than Ford. And if Toyota beats Ford in making a hybrid that is price accessible to the majority of Americans, it just might signal the end of the once great Ford brand.

And if you want to know what a dying brand looks like, check out this link. The devolution of Ford's brand (and brand culture) is truly sad. http://culturegarage.com/2008/01/11/ford-sometimes-i-think-you-want-to-fail/


3) What about us do our customers put up with because no easy alternative exists?

Somewhere, a cable TV executive weeps a little every time a late night talk show host talks about how crappy the cable company is...and is right. You wonder, had they known of the phone and satellite companies' ability to enter the TV market, if they would have thought twice about asking customers to wait between the hours of 10 and 3 on a Tuesday so the cable guy can come figure out why MTV is fuzzy.

Though amusing, plenty of companies do equally stupid things to customers and then are honestly shocked when customers flee in mass exodus to a slightly more sensitive competitor. Too many companies mistake purchase for loyalty, but there is a difference. Purchase may keep you afloat today, but it takes loyalty to weather the storms of the changing market.

I recently tried to track a parcel from our office, but could not find the tracking number. I searched the shipping company's websites and saw plenty of links for logistic solutions, but nowhere did it allow me to see the last few packages I shipped. I called customer service and they plainly told me, "We don't offer that". This company tried to offer me everything under the sun except what I really needed and what I felt was a pretty basic request. Let me tell you, the second their competitor installs that new drop box next to our office, I'm going to see what they'll do to actually earn my business.


4) How easy is it to buy from us?

I know. This sounds stupid. Yet there I was on the phone with a kid selling newspaper space asking him to send me a quote to run in all five of the papers he represents. "Just send me the quote," I said. He didn't care. His prerogative was to send me a rate card, along with an acre of useless promotional junk, like he did, fruitlessly, to everyone else.

My beloved mentor calls it, "The dog finally catching the bus". We are almost so shocked by making a sale that we either can't appreciate it or we don't know what to do, so we fumble. Tell me, why would we ever make it hard to buy whatever it is that we're selling?

Give your sales system an audit. Are your hours, locations, sales rep's schedules all reasonable? How about your quotes, invoices and billing system? Do you make it easy to do business with your company?


5) Do our long-term plans match the needs of our customers and current strategy to address those needs?

I am always amazed at how companies who become successful make such abrupt changes to their strategies and move away from the consumer's affinity. Like bars trying to become white table cloth restaurants or fast food joints trying to sell everything from pizza to Chinese food.

Planning is inevitable in business, but by the very nature of planning a certain amount of suggested input is required. Sadly, much of that input is from a financial perspective rather than a consumer perspective. The result is less effective customer strategies to meet an accounting goal conceived in a vacuum. GM fielded several cars of the same model with different names and even different brands, prompting their lampooning by the press (and most of the car buying public). This was not a marketing decision. It was an accounting decision dressed up as a marketing strategy and, moreover, it was a disastrous failure further watering down this once noble brand.



Give yourself five.

Take a moment and ask yourself and your company these questions. If the answers come easy, good for you. I bet you'll have plenty of success. That is, unless you're lying. For everyone else, this might be a chance to perform a little introspection into how your business operates and the efficacy of its marketing.

Take a moment and write out your company's approach to the Big Five. You should have plenty of juicy morsels about how Tom in accounting keeps derailing your new product rollout to save 50 bucks and how Susie still thinks it's the 1970s when it comes to graphic arts. You might even write enough to write a book. If so, send it to me. I could use the help.

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.

Fries with that.

When I was fifteen, I got a demeaning job at a greasy, disgusting fast food restaurant. I grilled burgers, sliced lettuce and cleaned dead rats out of the grease trap. It was such a joy to have my first work experience molded by the meth addicts and ex-cons who used the esteemed power they had as shift managers to harass and terrorize the staff. Oh, the wonder years.

It was a hotter and greasier day than normal, and I was working the grill when the cheerleading squad came in for burgers. They were dressed in short shorts and tank tops. I stood there, with my grill mate who could barely speak English at my side, both of us covered in so much grease that at the at the end of the shift we would have to peel off our uniforms. I locked eyes with one of the cheerleaders.
That was the end of my fast food experience.

I immediately enrolled in lifeguard classes. Despite the fact that I couldn’t really swim, a year on the wrestling team and a persistent mom got me through the classes and I became a certified lifeguard. I took my classes in Virginia Beach, Virginia, which meant the training was geared toward guarding the beach. The classes were like boot camp and I spent most evenings after class puking up the pool water that I had swallowed when the instructor put forth his best effort to drown me.

True to my purpose in becoming a lifeguard, my first post was at the local pool propagated by the local cheerleaders who, save for the occasional chicken fight, spent their time laying about the pool deck. Was this really a job? I’m watching girls in bikinis have a slap and tickle fight with each other and someone is going to pay me?

Honestly, I felt guilty when I got my first paycheck. At the burger joint, I got covered in more filth and garbage than an ATO pledge for a measly five bucks an hour. Now I was getting six an hour to watch the local cuties spritz themselves. It’s hard to feel like you’re really working when you’re a lifeguard.

I have met at least a few marketers who are like lifeguards. Somewhere deep inside, they feel guilty about asking for money. They duck behind image campaigns or price-offs, anything just to avoid asking for the sale.

I’m a little old (and less shapely) to be a lifeguard anymore, but I still wince when I ask for money. After all, I love marketing and it doesn’t feel like work to me, so why should you pay me? Well, first off, I’m married to a social worker, which means my wife gets paid two banana peels, fourteen food stamps, a few dry beans and a half-eaten bag of frosted donuts each month. Since the mortgage company takes none of these things as payment, I have to charge people for our services.

My mentor who is a lively, spirited (and though not tall, larger than life) man gives me great advice much like a kung fu master or perhaps a Jedi. He recently asked me, “Young grasshopper, are you getting paid for each hour of work you complete for clients?”

“No master,” I responded.

“You work for a fool and must stop.” He shot back.

But I work for myself and the firm.” I responded

“Exactly.”He replied

Note: It is important that you know my mentor is a sweet and honorable man and would never call me a fool unless I really deserved it (which I’m pretty sure I’ve yet to do). Paraphrasing and modification of his comments was needed to maintain Kung Fu imagery.

It’s foolish to not ask for the sale. It’s foolish to advertise without wanting an action. Maybe the action is to change an opinion or consider a service, but whatever you do, have a desired purpose when you have an audience. The master has shown me the way (or, the force if you prefer) of asking for the sale, whatever the sale may be. His nearly magical three step process is reprinted here so that you need not shave your head, sojourn and seek his tutelage.


1) Master says to grasshopper, get beyond the guilt of selling or I’ll smack you.

There is no crime in getting paid what you’re worth. Be it a brand, item or service, value should be compensated. It is easy to start chiseling at the bottom line with justifications like “our margins can allow us to reduce price.” But the truth is, if you cannot respect your offering enough to stand by the price, what do you expect purchasers to do? People pay what they think things are worth.

When you give a fair offering at a fair price, there should be no second guessing. One way to NOT accomplish this is to simply charge what you think the consumer will pay. Instead, simply charge what the consumer should pay (relative to R and D costs, manufacturing, marketing, profit, etc) and stand by it. It is amazing the change in attitude when the seller knows the price and proposition are rooted in logic and fair play.

One of the core tenets in the development of the concept of branding was that the consumers desire to support the brand would negate the need for continual sales and price wars. Some brands are sticking to this notion but others have allowed their brand to become know as “those guys who have a sale every week”.

2) Master says to grasshopper, respect the seller/ consumer relationship and the mutual expectation/ responsibility.

It is too often and too bad when the balance between a consumer and a marketer is disrupted. Often companies view consumers like cattle who stampede in when the right product is thrown in the pen and then crap all over the place. It is not so uncommon that marketer has a less than flattering view of consumers. Consumers sometimes don’t hold up their end of the deal either. Ever get behind one of those people who always complain at the burger joint just to get free junk?

What exists between buyers and sellers is a relationship based on quality, expectation, brand identity, affinity, value, and shared importance. Trying to tip the scales to the favor of one of these at the expense of the other never works out.

3) Master says to grasshopper, the worst they can say is “no” (or perhaps “hell no”).

You really don’t know until you ask. When you run a commercial that doesn’t seem to want the sell, you’re better off not advertising. Maybe it’s the plain fear of the word “no” that has led companies to skirt the question. Think about it: if you never ask for the business, you can never get shot down. Sounds like high school.

The savvy marketer should be ready to hear no and follow it up with a why. “No”’ indicates failures of the brand to connect. “No” indicates a pocket of influence that is not swayed. “No” teaches us not only that the ship is listing but where the leak is.

Marketers need to stop being afraid of their own shadows and instead begin to stick it out there and ask for the sale. That next inquirer may be a future fan or user for life, but you’ll never know if you’re not actively trying to spur action. Perhaps one day people will just know everything they want and need and we advertisers won’t need to educate customers and ask for their business. Until then, we need to ask.


Snowden Tatarski is a brand consultancy based in Athens, Ga that focuses on the development and implementation of the whole brand experience. The agency offers marketing research, marketing strategies, advertising creative development, media strategy and planning, sales consultation and the production of advertising, sales collateral, broadcast and interactive systems and materials. Information online at www.sn-ta.com