To Brand or not to, Brad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A brand is a system of meaning.

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

A brand is not a logo.

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

A brand is not just for mass communication.

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

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

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

A brand is everyone’s business.

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

Brad vs. the CVB.

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

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

The dog and phony show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The person in charge should be in charge.

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

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

Tell the agency to stop kissing your assets.

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

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

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

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

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

A partnership is two sided.

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

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

PETA hates the dog and pony show.

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

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

http://www.hsus.org/

Just imagine everyone is naked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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



Make a mobile or a poster.

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

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

If you really feel like streaking, go for it.


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

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

Today’s lesson might get a little nasty.


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

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

Et Tu, CMO?

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



A fish stinks from the head.



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



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



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



None of us is as dumb as all of us.



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



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



The soup sandwich.



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



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



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



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



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



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



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

The Aristocrats.

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



Hah, Hah. Real funny.



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



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



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



That sounds a lot like hard work.



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



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



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


Kids say the darndest things.

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

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

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


The Monocle Popper

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



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



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



Unexplained Celebrity

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



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



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



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

Customer Cam 2.1

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



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



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

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

The whole effect of the spots is indescribably dumb.


I Believe in Believing in Believing

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



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

The Discerning Lifestyle

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



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



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


Insert punch line here

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

“What’s it about?” says the director.



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



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



The man nods.



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

Rip Rah Rega.

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

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

I knew I was home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re like us. We’re like you.

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

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

You’re either with us or against us.

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

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

Together we’re heavy.

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

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

Nissan losing their following. Yup.

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

Thank you sir, may I have another?

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

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

The Lexus and the Olive Garden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The nexus at Lexus.

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

Toyota listened and they reacted with insight and tact.

The world is Fiat.

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

Good marketing plans tell the customer that you care.

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

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