All Hail the Fort!

The first fort was a half-fallen-down chicken shack. My childhood buddies and I stumbled upon it while walking through the woods that bordered our neighborhood. By the time my family had moved to the area the official bird of the city had become the Viper Car Alarm, but it hadn't always been that way. Duluth was very rural just previous to the housing explosion that we surfed in on. And it was for this reason that rabid little suburban children, such as us, might happen upon old chicken shacks and turn them into forts.

The first fort was also a death trap. The wood was rotted and plenty of sharp, rusty things jutted out to snag your jeans or neck. From even a casual glance, the limits of the first fort's potential were obvious. Enthusiasm waned.

But then we made a fabulous discovery. The second fort was larger; you could actually stand up in it. It had what appeared to be horse stalls, stairs and a locking door, which is important for securing all the junk artifacts kids find in the country woods. The pickaxe and case of glass jars that we would soon be throwing at trees and each other would be safe from other marauding bands of children.

The second fort was an inspiration. Because it was sturdy, we formulated plans of how to add on. So we added a porch. And a second entrance. And a rooftop shooter's nest where we could shoot BB guns at friends as they approached. We even built a stove that should have convinced our parents that we were all destined to become engineers. That is, if our parents ever found out that we were setting fires in the woods. The stove used an old drum with a fashioned door, an external air input that drew air from outside (instead of pulling through the cracks of the walls), and a insulated metal chimney that exited the exhaust. When you fired it up full blast, it could thaw out Antarctica.

We had old basement furniture from Mike's parents' house but we never really sat on it because you never really sat down. The whole fun of the fort was building. If we didn't know what to build or add on, we built it anyways. And the fort grew into what appeared to be the Swiss Family Robinson's safe house, where they might retreat to if the government ever got on to them for smuggling weapons.

The difference between Fort Version 1.0 and Fort Version 2.1 was that original structure it was built on. Fort 1.0 looked like someone wrecked a burning saloon full of manure into some trees. Fort 2.1 was sturdy and strong, which is important when you are nailing several hundred pounds of "found" construction materials to it.

If some cheesy business executives were wandering through the woods, they might look at the new fort and say we had "really thought outside the box". Then they would be shot with pellet guns and we would smash glass jars in the trees above their heads.

I hate the cliché, "Think outside the box". I think the people who say it don't fully appreciate its meaning and they themselves are thinking inside a box because they have to conform their ideas to lame business clichés. Is not thinking outside the box, thinking beyond constraints like, say, clichés?

I have heard all the fun alternates, like, "Don't box the neck", or, "Don't put your brain in a box". It's fun to play at wit. Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not asking you to fly in the face of this little business pearl. I don't want you to think inside the box, per se. I want you to think inside the fort. Fort 2.1 to be exact.

The reason for 2.1's success was its strong base. We had something with which to start. Sure, the fort took on a much larger life after we nailed tons of particleboard and rusty sheet metal to it. It didn't even look like the same place. Yet all the while, under the surface, sat a strong base built by someone we never met.

Like Fort 2.1, great businesses also have a strong base. They have a root which is securely planted in a particular place. They have an anchor that holds everything else up. And great businesses are always cognizant of their base. Products, services, operations: everything attaches to that secure base.

When was the last time you reevaluated your fort? How strong is it? Can it support the weight of everything you've nailed to it? Is the design consistent and is it functional?

Let's take a look.


Build a shooter's nest first.

It's easy to have your head down over whatever you're nailing only to ignore a pending threat or opportunity. But the front lines of whatever you're building need to be watched. Had we kept our heads up, we might have been able to outrun that sheriff's deputy who came to give us lip over being on someone else's property.

For businesses, it's not always the fuzz (though for an unfortunate few it might be...). Instead, it is a changing market place or a savvy competitor. Sometimes it's even a problem with your own construction that you might never see. Getting a good view of yourself and your surroundings is a continually needed task.

I recommend you have a constant watch of research professionals. Find out what customers are saying. Find out what your biggest critics are saying. Continuously examine the structural integrity of your fort. Nothing is more embarrassing than standing next to a collapse while insisting, "Nothing's wrong".


Build on a hill. If you can't find a hill, build one.

The worst issue I have found in constructing brands and strategies is when companies stand for and own nothing in the minds of consumers. Sometimes I think people get scared when I tell them to take their business, find a hill and take it. It is as if we in business have become scared of our own shadow. Are we so afraid of some competition that we would rather go out of business? Get serious. Get your BB gun out. They want our fort!

Your company must stand for something. Have a set of values, beliefs and objectives as well as a good understanding of your role in the marketplace. This is the box you not only need to think within, you need to use it to nail things to. Once you have this structure, many other decisions become easier to make and many other opportunities become apparent.


How far does the addition extend off the foundation?

In the maturation of every fort and business, there is a desire to see how far you can go. Companies see opportunity and hope that solidly built brand equity can be stretched to support something two or three trees away. This is a really bad idea. Customers have a peculiar way of how they allocate brand affinity. Just because you make a nice truck does not mean they will care about your car. Just because you run a nice casual restaurant does not mean customers will support your upscale or quick service efforts as well. In fact, the further away something is from the base, the harder it is to support.

Business thinkers have known the perils of line extension for years, yet businesses seem doomed to repeat it. The temptation is for businesses to expand their offerings as they grow more successful. The better idea is to continue to focus and take a stronger ownership of a position as credibility and brand affinity grows. To put it simply, dance with the one that brought you or you'll go home with no one.


Today, we think inside a new fort.

Fort 3.0 is by far the best. We have working plumbing and a heater. We have a conference room, production room and an awesome lounge with surround sound. And instead of building makeshift booby traps, we're building brand strategies that we hope will snare up our client's competitors. However, there are some things from Fort 2.1 that remain. We still look for strong, supported beams before we try to nail something to it. We still confer on the overall vision of the fort before we build anything. And we still welcome anyone who is interested in building something strong and lasting.

But you might want to make some noise or call out before you get too close. Otherwise, Richard might shoot you with a pellet gun.

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.

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.