Here's Your Christmas Bonus

Sorry, gang, but I'm taking a short break from Here Lies Marketing, both because of the holidays and because I have a kids' book that was just released titled Jake The Grizz And The World's Fastest Snowboard that I should probably help market. If you want to know more about the book check my LinkedIn or Facebook pages. Until the next time, thanks, and Happy Holidays!

Bridge On The River Why?

Too many people confuse marketing with a nerd’s first date. 

I feel I can speak for the lank and bespectacled folk of the world, the squeaky of voice and pigeon-toed of foot, having been a brother on the march with the SAT scores to prove it, and I know what some of my first dates were like. What started out semi-promising as dinner and a movie ended up in a one-sided debate on the noumenal concept in pre-Victorian English literature. 

I find way too much of this spirit in much of what I read on marketing. 

Take this heaping helping of marketing-related letters and punctuation marks, from a recent article on MediaPost: “’Marketing tends to be preoccupied with staying on track with individual tactical executions or traditional marketing fundamentals like lead generation, campaign execution and content or creative development,’ sums up Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council. ‘However, today's demand chain requires a new mix of digital, direct, and retail distribution, fulfillment, measurement and tracking capabilities to maximize customer contact, conversion and interaction.’”

That’s a whole lot of summing up there, Mr. Donovan Neale-May. I believe you and I dated, and bored, the same women. And whatever happened to the concept of marketing as the way stuff gets sold?

Let’s take a giant T-Rex step backwards and try again. If marketing tends to be preoccupied with staying on track with individual tactical executions or traditional marketing fundamentals like lead generation, campaign execution and content or creative development, it’s bad marketing. 

Not that lead generation isn’t important. If it wasn’t for lead generation I’d be four-foot-three and have the brain power of a handful of Brussels sprouts. Oops; sorry. I confused lead generation with lead poisoning. If it wasn’t for lead generation I’d be doing exactly what I’m doing now, because lead generation is one of those tasks deemed to be a little bit too creepy-close to sales for comfort. It’s like the revelation that Abraham Lincoln slept with another man in a single bed for four years before he was married. It’s factual; it’s just not appropriate. 

Let sales generate their own doggone leads, in other words.

Marketing turns into bad marketing when it begins obsessing on the means rather than the ends, when they wrap themselves like a ball python around the axles of campaign execution and creative development.

It’s fiendishly easy to do, in part because there are so many toys to do it with. When all you have is building blocks there’s no question about what you’re going to play with today. Some kids say, “Rats – blocks again,” and sulk like a wide receiver spurned. Other kids build the Eiffel Tower. 

On the other hand, when you have blocks and LEGOs and Barbies and Polly Pockets and K’Nex and Hot Wheels and Uno and a Leapster and Twister and Trouble and Sorry! and an iPod Touch, you’re more likely to chuck the whole lot into a corner and watch infomercials for The Perfect Brownie.

It’s about playing, in this case. In the other case, the one over there being held by a supermodel, it’s about marketing. 

When you have so many ways to do marketing, you forget how marketing is done. Marketing is done with whatever tools are at hand to accomplish the current task, with the ultimate goal always being increasing sales, or something akin to sales, for your company.

William Holden in Bridge On The River Kwai was trying to blow up a bridge, but only because he was trying to win a war. He didn’t like the sound of the blast or the thrill that comes with watching a steam locomotive plunge into a gorge. He harbored no illusions that he was going to win the war by blowing up the bridge, but he felt pretty sure he was helping the process. 

The difference between that and dysfunctional marketing is that William Holden did what he did with the ultimate goal firmly understood and in sight. He also used dynamite more liberally than most marketers. 

Although it’s been said many times, many ways, it needs to be said again: marketing is the targeted application of common sense. It is only about the targeted application of Twitter or metrics or Q scores or best practices or apps or widgets or digits or Donner or Blitzen when it makes sense to apply them.

Put more simply, it’s not about the pencil. It’s about doing the right thing with the pencil. And you know what the right thing is.

When marketing is approached from that direction, which is approximately three degrees west of west-northwest, all the stuff that concerns Mr. Donovan Neale-May and all the stuff that Mr. Donovan Neale-May believes marketers should be doing miraculously converge.

Digital media generate leads. Campaign execution is measured. Customer interaction increases.

It happens organically. It happened even when all marketers had were a wagon full of Playskool blocks and a hammer, but we’re not supposed to talk about that, since marketing has a shorter memory than Troy Polamalu after a helmet-to-helmet hit. It’s how marketers keep their jobs. 

Even the best marketers lose sight of the goal, which is another reason why the goal should be as crystalline as the Lake Superior sky at night. Even the best marketing chops get stiff with disuse. But marketers shouldn’t blab that fact to the world. There’s too much to fix as it is.

Welcome To Heck. Here's Your Manual.

A friend of mine got a new job last week, which was great. He earned it, and absolutely deserved it.


As part of the congratulatory phone call, he asked, "So you got any advice for me?", not expecting anything, because what sort of advice do you give the man who has everything, when everything in this case is a job he needed and wanted?

Well, I can't not give advice in a situation like that, not anymore, not since I've been a blogger. For better or worse, thinking I have an audience for these weekly rants has given me that awful feeling that everything I say is a pronouncement. I have to pinch myself and remind myself that I'm really still a peon, and sometimes I pinch myself because it just plain feels good.

So he asked, and I told him, "Communicate in person. Don't pick up the phone or send an e-mail for the first month unless you absolutely have to."

I've talked about the benefits of in-person communication before, and I'm going to keep talking about it until you get the idea. There is nothing that makes a better impression and carries more weight than in-person communication.

Communicate in-person with the people in the mail room, the people in maintenance, the administrative assistants and the miscellaneous service providers, and not only will they know who you are, they'll be extra-willing to help you negotiate the maze of procedures and rituals that make up a corporate culture. If you bring chocolate you may just make friends for life.

Communicate in-person with the people at your level in other departments and you start forging those cross-disciplinary ties that will help you hit the ground running and keep running, even when other new hires have hit the wall.

Communicate in-person with the people above you and they'll know who you are – and that never hurt.

You're in marketing, and marketers have two main duties: to unite disparate elements and to communicate. Supporting sales is the goal; communicating and facilitating are the ways there. The best way to get a head start on your core duties is to talk to people right out of the gate.

It doesn't have to be heavy conversation. Ask a basic question about how do do something that you know they know how to do. Establish them as an expert. Put them in a position of helping you. Almost all people in an organization, even the evil administrative assistant and the extra-evil frustrated mid-level manager, when addressed as an expert, will share what they know in a supportive manner.

One more tip: There's a branch of communication research called Uncertainty Reduction Theory which states that people will try to find common ground in a conversation because it reduces feelings of threats, and once they find that common ground, communication becomes more more effective and purposeful. Use that theory. Try to find common ground and build on it. Remember that common ground the next time you talk. You'll be amazed how quickly you get acclimated.

Don't take the expedient way out of this one. Sit down with people. Talk, and most of all listen. Oh, and good luck with the new job.

We Have Met The Enemy And He Is R&D. And Operations. And Finance. And IT, Too?

While Peanuts continues its run in the newspapers for all eternity, or at least until we run out of newspapers, other funnier, more satirical and more insightful strips from the great days of newspaper comic strips get pushed by the wayside, or at best get shoveled into Fantagraphics collections (which are marvelous, by the way).

A prime example is Walt Kelly’s Pogo. As a kid I found Pogo tough sledding sometimes. The dialogue seemed apropos of nothing and seemed to trail off down the same hole from whence it came – and it’s still a little like that. But Pogo also produced one absolute freshwater pearl of a line, a line with a million uses, a line that treads on the border of cliché without ever quite crossing over.

I am referring, of course, to, “Huh? Um … what? I … uh … mm.”

Actually, I’m referring to – say it with me – “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

That’s the way of it in marketing sometimes. People on the inside not only don’t approve of your efforts, they are to your marketing efforts what Sarah Palin is to the English language – an active antagonist, running around with a dynamite plunger in one hand and an internal memo in the other.

 What do you do when internal forces are hard at work tearing down your marketing efforts? I know what you want to do, and we won’t get into that. Plastic explosive does not heal all wounds, and it doesn’t even, in the marvelous words of Nick Lowe, wound all heels.

The process of not merely getting folks on the inside to buy into the plan but to keep them from tearing down the plan starts the way most marketing things do – with communication.

Number one, everyone on the inside needs to know the plan. A solid three-quarters of the opposition to Marketing comes from people not knowing what Marketing is doing or why they’re doing it. Let other departments keep their plans to themselves, as is their wont. Your marketing plan, or a version thereof, needs the widest possible circulation within your organization – because if your marketing plan is one of the good ones, it will outline the corporate mission and the on-the-ground goals and how marketing can address both.

Next, remember Dorothy Parker. “You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think,” she replied when asked to use the word “horticulture” in a sentence, and the same applies to your internal audience. Don’t assume that because they’ve been given a copy of the plan they will actually read the plan. This is like assuming that just because no one has ever escaped from Stalag 17 that no one will try.

What you as marketers need to do to keep other factions on board once they’ve been given the plan is to do a little marketing. I’m amazed at the marketers who don’t market their marketing plan. There are a million ways to do it, but why am I telling you this? You’re marketers – do what comes naturally. Keep it simple, keep it honest, use common sense, and you’ll be just fine.

It goes back to what I used to hammer into the trading-card companies back when they were making money, before they jumped on the death-spiral merry-go-round: Listen, if you don’t believe your product is the best, whatever your product may be, either do what you can to make it the best it can be or don’t sell it. And marketers very often have the unique power to optimize products – especially when that product is your very own marketing plan.

But don’t stop there. The No. 1 most effective way of communicating to people is face-to-face, so as you make your rounds of the company as you as marketers do, ask people, “Did you see our latest brochure? What’d you think? Did you see the ads? What about that new product? Did you see the article?” Ask but then listen, not only to what’s being said but how it’s being said. Look for any vocal or non-verbal cues to get a feel for how your work is really being perceived, by executives and line workers alike.

Okay, so what if sharing the plan, marketing the plan, and then doing field work don’t work? Well, the plastic explosives are still a possibility, but before hauling the gelignite out of the desk drawer, try a couple more things. One is to isolate recalcitrant units and bring them into the process. Think The Producers, and you’re the skinny guy. The way to get the money from the widow is to put on her show. Certainly there are pet projects favored by your antagonists that you can advance without too many barnyard odors. Ease those up the ladder and see if it makes a difference. It may not. They may be playing you. C’est la vie. Sometimes you have to rise above, even if you are a marketer.

As you battle the enemy that is us, remember this: You really are the good guys. You really are trying to move the organization forward in a reasonable, well-researched fashion. If it turns out that you have to be satisfied with that, it's a lot. It can carry you through.

The Complexities Of Simple

I was going to put “Here Lies Marketing” on hiatus for the week on account of the election results, and the way that certain marketers showed themselves to be more adept at pushing night soil than I will ever be, but after a day off I started thinking again, and here I am.

The election results did stir up in me a weird convergence of Steve Jobs and H.L. Mencken.

Mencken coined the phrase, “the Booboisie,” which has never been more apt, and he also noted that “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” which could also be amended to state that, “no one ever lost an election underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

Honestly, how else can you describe the election of, among others, a millionaire sweatshop owner with the personality of a pellet stove who captivated the populace by lobbing shibboleths like, “Let’s get America moving again”? (By all means, let’s. Let’s disconnect the ol’ tectonic plates and hook up with Europe again. It worked for the pre-Visigoths.)

Jobs’ contribution came in Apple’s early days, when its product designers were directed to wear shirts that read, “I am not the target audience.” It was an unsubtle reminder to not design a computer that causes women with a half-mile radius to spontaneously undress and requires a Rushmore-sized noggin to operate.

I was not the target audience of most of this election’s campaign ads. I have a job, an FM radio, and a brain. That would also make me uncharacteristic of the American public, which is where Mencken comes back in, and where the marketing lesson for the rest of us emerges.

It’s reasonable to assume that your marketing audience in most cases is not comprised solely of Rhodes scholars and Phi Beta Kappas. There is bound to be a George JaMarcus Walker Russell Bush in the crowd.

Given that your crowd is probably going to be a mixture of Ph. Ds and former NBA first-round picks, how do you dumb down appropriately so that you don’t lose the former New Jersey Net who happens to be your venture capitalist?

The answer is: Don’t dumb down. Simplify.

There is a difference. Dumbing down requires you to abrogate respect for your audience. Simplifying is what you should be doing all along.

I f you want to see my face turn Crayola shades, hit me with a directive to dumb something down – or its twin sister, the directive to obfuscate a product or a marketing approach.

I realize that the order to dumb down may seem as stupid as Peter Frampton’s “I’m In You” but may have a kernel of sense at its core, much like Australian Rules Football or John McCain. It may be a sign that the original approach may be unnecessarily complex. But when it’s couched in the philosophy that dumbing down or muddying up is the only way this pig is going to fly, then it’s time to play a little corporate Red Rover and call over the CMO.

You can’t run from the fact that people are afraid of simple and hide behind language to look smarter or fancier or somehow more worthy. Think of the inept mid-level manager and his 5-million-word memos. The challenge is to remove 4,999,899 of those words, get all the salient points across, and retain the proper tone.

One of the most important things you can do as a marketer is embark on an eternal quest for simple. Simple marketing materials. Simple mission statements. Simple product attributes. Simple press releases. Simple pricing. Simple Web sites.

Simple means distilling the many into the precious few. Simple means saying what you have to say and getting out. Simple equates to easy. And easy is the holy grail of marketing.

If you are always simple you’ll never have to dumb down – or if you are called to dumb-down there will be no question but that the authorities should be notified. Furthermore, simple stuff means fewer questions, less confusion, a clearer picture of what your organization is and why it’s special – the stuff many organizations go through elaborate machinations to not quite achieve.

The way to get to simple, if you’re looking for a way, is to continually ask yourself, “What am I trying to say here?” You will almost always give yourself a simple answer. That answer, polished to a dull sheen, is what you go with.

You may spend your entire marketing life on a quest for simple, because others are forever turning your simple personal computer into Brainiac VII. However, it’s a quest worth taking. And it begins with a simple step. Literally.

I'm A Ham? Well, You're In Sales

If you’re a regular reader of this column, you know I like music and music metaphors. If you’re an irregular reader may I suggest a sparkling glass of Sal Hepatica.

I have many favorite album titles, including Anywhere You Are, There You Is, which I wrote about in a column that can be accessed by engaging the down arrow like so. One of my favorite titles is from the guitarist Don Dixon, whom I should like far more than I do.

Dixon’s record starts with the artist as a very young man of about 10, arguing with his brother over music. At one point his brother accuses Dixon of being a ham, to which Dixon replies, “Yeah? Well, if I’m a ham, you’re a sausage.” And that’s the title of the album.

Believe it or not, there is application for this in the wacky world of marketing, with just a few minor changes to selected words. Instead of, “If I’m a ham, you’re a sausage,” may I suggest, “If I’m in sales, you’re in product development.”

It’s a fact. Of the two broad duties performed by many marketers, sales continually stresses to marketers that they’re in sales, while no one stresses anything to sales because sales can’t be found. Or they’re at Panera Bread for the eighth time this week. Or they’re out of range.

Okay, consider this a shot across sales’ well-dressed bow: You’re in product development. Everyone in this man’s corporate army is in product development.

The trick is engaging sales and the other non-lunching members of your organization in product development without actually having them design a product.

You want sales actually designing your product less than you want cholera. The Microsoft Kin is a perfect example of sales designing a product. It accumulated more bells than St. Mary’s and more whistles than a Brazilian thong and sold for a lot more than it should have at the start and less than it did but still too much after Microsoft had a product launch and nobody came.

You could tell this product was a technological kamikaze. No kid will buy a cell phone for kids. Kids buy adult cell phones and find new and amazing things to do with them, like use them as remote controllers for cage-fighters while simultaneously listening to the Kings of Leon and broadcasting, “I have arrived at Dairy Queen!” to the world.

Along those same lines, you do not want programmers designing a product, nor do you want call-center employees or the building-and-grounds staff.

The result would resemble the KFC Double Down sandwich, with a third piece of chicken added for the programmer in the Star Trek shirt.

So everyone’s in product development but you don’t want anyone actually developing product, huh? How do you talk your way out of this one?

It’s a simple two-stage process. First, find all the smart people. Second, give all these departments pieces without ceding control of the whole.

I know this is an amazing revelation, but not all the smart people in your organization are in marketing. Similarly amazing, not all the halfwits are in sales.

Smart people are smart people, regardless of their position. They’re like the nondescript Minneapolis musicians who backed up Bob Dylan on Blood on the Tracks. Just because they’re not famous big-shots doesn’t mean they’re not any good.

One of the most important internal tasks you can perform as a marketer is to use your “smart radar” and find the smart people in every department. Once you’ve done that you can use them to mobilize areas under their control and engage them appropriately in the product-development process.

Take R&D. They came up with the core idea, the basic improvement or innovation that is going to make this product sing two choruses of “California Girls” (the Katy Perry version). However, you don’t want R&D going any further than the idea stage, at least not without changing out of that shirt. You don’t give them veto power over packaging, for instance, unless you like your toaster oven wrapped in a schematic. Yet there are people in R&D who think beyond the D, who can grasp the marketing implications of what they do. Use them to communicate back to their teams ways of making what they do more marketing-friendly. I guarantee that the next time through the process will be better geared toward a marketable outcome.

Programmers and Web designers are a perfect match with call-center employees. Why? The call-center employees are most closely attuned to what’s happening on the ground; the programmer knows what can be done with the air. Left to their own devices they aren’t much; the call-center folks will refer callers to the Web for guidance, even though the Web site has been given over (by the programmers) to YouTube videos of kittens running for public office, while the Facebook page runs a guess-the-celebrity-earlobes contest. Sit down the smart programmer with the smart call-center person and watch what happens. The celebrity-earlobes contest ends sooner than expected, for one thing.

Another great match is ops and sales. Operations can figure out the processes to support the extra orders sales brings in before they happen. Imagine that. And because it’s part of the development of the overall product it falls under marketing’s purview – or at least, you can pretend it does. It’s your until they make it not yours, anyway.

Does this work? Well, at one organization I was associated with the marketing department went through a detailed internal process aimed at identifying the opinion leaders within departments, they were brought together in a room with an independent facilitator, they were encouraged to brainstorm way outside of their silos, they engaged in freeform discussions and more structured development sessions, and … nothing happened.

Nothing happened because the group had no power to make decisions or spend money, and it was controlled by its organizer, who wanted the group to rubber-stamp his ideas.

And there’s the rub in everyone-a-product-developer theory. Everyone-a-salesperson theory works because it suggests that everyone in an organization should be engaged with the outside world on behalf of that organization. The every-one-a-product-developer theory forces everyone back inside, to make what they sell more appealing to those on the outside. That threatens existing protocols and structures and makes people stiffen into organizational Republicans, vowing to fight to the death for the right to write SQL as they see fit.

It's hard to encourage people in an organization to think of themselves as product developers, but if they don't, the organization runs the risk of hitting the street with products that no one inside the organization believes is the best product possible. And believe me, you don't want that. That and cholera.

... And Featuring Brett Favre As Photography Editor

There was a major problem at work yesterday involving marketing. In short, we screwed up, with consequences embarrassing to the organization. Imagine Brett Favre being in charge of brochure production, and printing 50,000 copies. Or public relations taking on an alternate, much older, meaning.

It was not, as Winston Churchill said, our finest hour. We tried to fight them on the beaches only to find they were back at the hotel. It was just one more precipitous slide to death on the roller-coaster that is marketing.

Needless to say, there were some long faces among those in the department that didn’t ditch the office in favor of the ball game. But it got me to thinking: Does it have to be a darkish hour? Can marketers put a spin like a Cliff Lee curveball onto our own stupidity?

There is something that suggests we might be able to, and it comes from jazz, of all places.

The jazz guitarist Barry Galbraith once said that a jazz musician is never more than half a step away from the right note. In other words, wherever you happen to be you can get to a good place with a fairly small amount of work.

So take our faux pas (or, as a boss of mine was fond of saying, a "foopa"). How does a marketing department hey-Jude it – you know, take its sad song and make it better?

By taking a page out of Barry Galbraith's Big Book of American Standards. By taking it a half-step up.

Start by tracing the root of the problem (assuming it was a problem and not just a random act of senseless senselessness). Was it a breakdown in people or procedure? If it's a breakdown in procedure, encourage the Powers That Are to resist like Pope Benedict at a Christina Aguilera concert the overpowering urge to add more procedures to the existing procedure.

Instead, channel the late greats Tom Bosley and Barbara Billingsley (and then they kicked Florence Henderson off of Dancing With the Stars; have the fates – and that little Italian twip -- no respect for parental units?) and guide them gently, with pearls around your neck, toward excising the surplusage from existing procedures.

For once in your life, be a Republican. Lift the onerous yoke of excessive regulation. Let the free market rule! No taxes on incomes of $250,000 and up! Opportunity for everyone! Guns for all! And I command the sunspots that cause global warming to vanish!

Sorry. I had a Sharron Angle moment there.

Marketers are creative people. They need latitude, they tend to resist layers upon layers of documentation, but they don't shirk accountability if it's leavened with empowerment. Give them the smallest amount of procedures necessary to do the job, give them control of the money and let them sign their name to the bottom, and they'll knock it out, singing Swiss mountain-climbing songs all the way.

So take a mistake as an opportunity to re-examine what you do and make it work better – even if it means instituting less control -- and then announce it to the world as a re-examination of policies and procedures.

If it's a people problem, again use it (or suggest to your supervisors that they use it) as an opportunity to re-examine who's doing what. People need to own some facet of what they do. It needs to be wholly and totally theirs and the working world needs to know it. A mistake is a great opportunity to see if the right people are assigned to the appropriate tasks – that Chris O’Donnell is in charge of communicating to your Wiccan stakeholders, for instance.

Match the skills with the duties and see how well they line up. If some need more, give them more to own out of the pool of shared responsibilities. If some need less, construct the less out of high-profile assignments that are in their wheelhouse – and get them the training they need to do the rest.

A mistake is not just an opportunity in disguise. That’s being too kind. It’s also not one more thing to be spun. That’s too crass. A mistake is another chance to do what marketers do best: apply common sense to a situation that needs it. Even if it’s a situation of your own making.

The Return Of Ziggy Salesman And The Pimple-Flavored ABC Gum

My friend Skip was telling me about strategic planning at his place.

You know strategic planning. That's the process you don't get to take part in because that would be the end of it right there and a million billion consultants would be out on the street, begging for your watch so they can tell you the time, at $275 an hour.

Really now: Is there anything you do in the course of carrying out your assigned marketing duties that isn't strategic planning? You're always strategically straddling departments and responsibilities and projects, and reconciling manufacturing and operations and sales, speaking pinto to the bean-counters and CAD/CAM to the engineers and faux jive to the sales dudes, and toggling between the quark-level view and the view from heaven, which provides definitive evidence that the CEO is not God.

Because you're doing strategic planning all the time I'll bet you're good at it, whereas when executives try strategic planning they look like pitchers batting, and their sessions deliver the goods about as well as amateur night at Beansnappers.

And guess whose recommendations get served up to the CEO on a silver tray? Certainly not the recommendations of the guy who just played the role of the cheek-biting native girl in The Man Who Would Be King.

(Spoiler alert: The cheek-biting native girl draws blood, thereby proving that Sean Connery is not God. Connery is pitched off a cliff. No comment on real-life applications of this information.)

That's neither here nor there, but in the immortal words of The Ol' Duke, it does get to sticking in your crawl after a while.

So anyway, my buddy Skip relates that part of his company's strategic-planning process involved role-switching. The head of operations became a designer, and the head engineer became a customer-service chief, and his boss got to deal with IT and the HR director became a salesperson.

On one level it was no sweat for these highly trained executives, because they could simply tell their subordinates to do what needs to be done, just like back in their own cozy departments.

On a different level, Skip reports, it was far more interesting, primarily when it came to other departments' perceptions of how money actually comes in the door.

The predominant perception was that products dropped from the sky like frozen turkeys in an episode of WKRP In Cincinnati, and money flowed up to the sky on an electron beam, at which point it condensed and fell back to earth, where it was sucked up by bankers carrying large gasoline-powered contraptions that resembled Rush Limbaugh.

In other words, there was no disconnect quite like the disconnect between the stuff and the sale of stuff.

Distribution force? Forget it. They might as well be the Power Rangers Strike Force? Third-party resellers? You mean, like H. Ross Perot back when he was running for president with that senile Army guy?

Companies that ultimately have to sell things often forget the most basic premise of their operation: that things actually get sold. And the burden for educating them falls, like all burdens, upon marketing.

Why marketing? Because marketing, rightly or wrongly, is positioned as the mouthpiece of sales. Sales is the New Headshrinkers; marketing is Captain Lou.

So what can marketing do to bridge such a basic knowledge-and-reasoning gap?

First, get other areas of the organization involved in the sales process. Start by having executives from other areas of the organization accompanying the sales force on calls.

Oh, yeah. I can hear the howling from here. Sounds like Hüsker Dü. The executives aren't going to understand why and the sales force is going to flat-out hate it. Anything that brings home-office staff into a salesperson's territory is going to get the same rousing reception as a Barack Obama appearance at a National Association of Loudmouthed Chuckleheads convention.

They way to handle that situation is with some strategic planning. While good salespeople believe they could sell anything, even pimple-flavored ABC gum, they don't mind having better products to sell and a more compelling story to tell. Sending people from other areas on sales calls will at the very least give the salespeople more stories to tell. Most of them will be flat-out lies about how they licked IT or Operations with one hand tied behind their back, but fine. That's how salespeople manage to work up enthusiasm for the latest piece of industrial hot lunch foisted upon them.

You would hope on the other side that the ops person would come away with a firm knowledge of how money actually comes in the door, but don't be too sure. You may also hear something like, "Well, all they did was talk." Yeah, it's nowhere near as substantial as clicking and dragging a trapezoidal shape, but it'll pass.

It's never stated in your job description, but an essential part of your job is making sure all the silos in your organization share the corn. Sometimes you have to physically haul it from one silo to another. But the payoff in understanding is worth the effort.

How To Communicate Practically Anything To Practically Anybody. For Less Than $100,000. Guaranteed.

The shrink was in yesterday, talking about personality styles and what they mean, and the tactics a good and faithful employee needs to employ to communicate successfully with the people around you. This information was filed dutifully with the last go-round from this particular shrink, and the Watson-Glaser results, and the Meyers-Briggs, and the Good Whale guy, and the Five Love Languages, and the Flag Page dude, and the Women Are From Mars, Men Are From Venus schtick, and the lessons learned at the fall-backwards-I’ll-catch-you workshop (lesson No. 1: don’t fall backwards), and the reams of academic stuff from grad school, and the proposal for a dreamstorming session at church involving large Post-In Notes and a potluck, and the last missive from my wife wondering why I don’t listen better.

How can I listen? I’m way too busy trying to figure out what to say and how to say it.

Not only are the hills alive with the sound of music, they’re alive with the peripatetic movements of communication consultants brandishing their valid and reliable instruments and practically giving away the secrets of how your employees can talk more gooder at only $100,000 per secret. But only if you act now.

There’s an academic term for this: ick. That money should by all rights be going to you, because you know how people can communicate more effectively, and if you don’t now you will soon, because I’m going to tell you.

There’s no discounting the importance of good communication. Good marketing is based on consistently effective communication. Unless you’re selling Lady Gaga on a stick you can’t just hold up your product and have people flocking to you waving fistfuls of cash. You have to tell them something about your product in such a way that they want your product. And that goes whether you’re indoors, in the friendly confines of your office, doing reenactments of Care Bears episodes with the folks from Operations, or outside, making sales calls.

Okay, so what’s good communication?

Good communication successfully delivers all dimensions of a message successfully to its intended recipient. So in order to make that work you need to understand all the dimensions of a message and how they’ll be perceived by the person on the other end. And in those two components you can find all the contents of the highfaluting theories being peddled by so-called communication consultants.

Or, simply, think before you speak.

Think about what you want to say, boil it down to one or two essential truths, and then think about how to say it in such a way that those essential truths come across unsullied.

One of the reasons bombshells are so heavy is so that the explosive will explode when it’s supposed to. Yes, the shell makes a fine crackling noise when it explodes, and the boiling-hot, deadly shrapnel is a huge bonus, but it’s all about the gelignite, and getting that to go when and where it’s supposed to.

Think of your communication acts as bombshells. I realize it’s almost illogical flattery to think that a memo informing the design team that lines 12 and 13 have to be moved a eighth of an inch would be a bombshell, but the person who put lines 12 and 13 there for a reason would like to see you outside. And bring your playbook.

Something is always going to be offensive to someone. Ham it up and a vegetarian sees red. But if you enter into your communications knowing there’s a risk of offense you can plan a defense. It might be for you to tell them to – in one of my favorite phrases of all time, courtesy of the Canadian parliament – go forth and multiply themselves. If the essential truth you want communicated is, “You’re an idiot,” and you decide upon careful consideration of all alternatives that saying, “Go forth and multiply yourself” is the best alternative, then by all means, be my guest. Here are your white gloves and opera hat. But leave me out of it.

So step one is understanding that your message is the chocolate that melts in their mouth, and the medium and the words chosen are the candy shell that guarantees the chocolate melts in their mouth and not in their hand. Step two is realizing that some people don’t like brown M&Ms.

The shrink would tell you some people don’t like brown M&Ms because their brains are wired to not like brown M&Ms, and you have to avoid brown-M&M-speak when talking to these people. I’m telling you that there isn’t some sort of psychiatric field hospital where you can tie these people down and perform a Meyers-Briggs with the spring from a ballpoint pen and some dental floss. You have to communicate on the fly to a broad spectrum of M&M lovers, and you have to push the chocolate through the candy shell, regardless of its color.

Understanding that someone will invariably misunderstand your intent and your content, here’s what you do: Use short sentences. Avoid adjectives. Eschew surplusage. Offer to show your work, but don’t show your work. Stress tangible outcomes. And always communicate via the richest media channel available.

Media-richness theory is one of the pet concepts I got out of grad school in exchange for $20,000 and a permanent case of writer’s cramp. It basically states that certain communication channels can carry more information than others, and that a key to effective communication is choosing the appropriate channel to carry the message.

Simple, but I can eschew even more surplusage: Say it face-to-face whenever possible. Walk down the hall and talk to people. Don’t send an e-mail. Don’t pick up the phone. Don’t hide behind convenient media because they’re convenient. Do the hard work, take the extra step, and you’ll be rewarded for it.

Face-to-face is not a panacea. One of my clients could reduce a Harvard MBA to a plate of aspic in face-to-face settings, and he knew it. But those people are far between, and the alternative is often worse.

So there you go. Say it in person, keep it short, emphasize the bottom line, offer more. Do that and you can communicate professionally with just about anyone.

Try it, and if it works, don’t thank me. Just send me the hundred grand you don’t send the communication consultant. Heck, I’ll settle for fifty.

Reinventing Reinventing The Wheel

The problem I have with most of the marketing blogs I read is that they seem to be geared for a marketing department whose CMO is Tinker Bell. And Ms. Bell must be in a bit of a rut, because she keeps touting the same solutions to all the world’s marketing problems.

For instance, “Anyone can use social media to build their brand – any brand -- into a powerhouse.” Oh, yeah? Start tweeting about Hardrock natural-gas nipples and see if anyone shows up but the crowd from outside FAO Schwanz.

Or here’s another one: “The key to effective marketing is to turn your best customers into brand evangelists.” Really? If a guy buys a million cubic yards of black dirt from me he’s going to become an Al Sharpton of my black dirt, and he’s going to tell all his competitors, who would disembowel him as much as look at him, to buy my black dirt, and they’re actually going to do it? Maybe if they’re just coming off of an acid trip, but otherwise they’re going to tell Rev. Al what he can do with his black dirt, and it’s going to be a stretch to fit a million cubic yards of topsoil in there.

Either that or the solutions sound like they were taken from that Monty Python sketch on how to rid the world of all known diseases: “Well, first of all become a doctor and discover a marvellous cure for something, and then, when the medical profession really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there'll never be any diseases ever again.” I can make a lot of marketing problems disappear by throwing a million dollars at them, but I guarantee the mill will disappear faster than the problem.

Where’s the real-world stuff – besides here, of course? Well, no matter, because it’s here and it’s going to stay here.

Now here’s a real real-world question: When is the right time to start from scratch?
You know what I mean. The workaday marketing challenges have nothing to do with the launch of an epochal new product, backed by barcode scans and mobile ads and celebrity appearances and product placement on Regis and Kelly and pre-rolls on YouTube and Super Bowl ads and ooh look skywriting. Instead, they’re questions like, “How do I communicate this subtle product change to a niche audience using the least amount of time and money?”

The easiest way is to rely on the past. If you communicated the change from a 1/8-inch flange to a 3/16-inch flange using a modified sell-sheet and an e-mail blast, chances are you can communicate the change from a ¾-inch washer to a 25/32-inch washer the same way. You can probably even use the same sell-sheet and e-mail templates. The world will forgive you for not hiring Cameron Diaz to get this point across.

However, overreliance on this tactic is a trap. If you treat nothing as truly special and new, eventually your audiences will get the idea that there is nothing special and new about you, that you are the K mart of your particular market and you deserve the K mart treatment, which ranges between derisive scorn and leper-like screaming avoidance. Unless chocolate-covered cherries are on sale.

The answer to this question is obviously somewhere between never reinventing and constantly reinventing, but the real answer is tied in with the answer to this rhetorical question: If you don’t believe in your product, how can you expect the outside world to believe?

I was the defacto marketing department for a company trying to build its cash coffers in advance of an IPO. As a green-grabbing tactic it was flooding the market with products that, in Dave Barry’s immortal words, were “clearly an industrial prank. It was all the people on the assembly line could do to not shoot rivets into each other, they were laughing so hard.”

When we rolled out the latest batch of sheet-iron one-liners to the sales force with all the straight faces and go-get-‘em enthusiasm we could muster on a weekly retainer, we were greeted with a universal message: “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Only they didn’t say “kidding.”

The products were worse than molybdenum on a stick. We knew it, but we had to put give them to the sales force anyway. The sales force knew it, and they had to put on their best sales face (i.e., lie) and tell their customers that these were the best thing since chocolate-covered bacon on a stick.

You can only ask your sales force to sell (i.e., lie) so much, and this was too much. This was lying of an immense scale not seen since the ads in this morning’s local newscast. Though the spirit was willing the flesh was weak, the products tanked, the company filed Chapter 11, and we moved on to a different weekly retainer called unemployment.

I’m not saying that none of this would have happened if the sales force had believed the howling mongrels we gave them were presents from Santa. I’m saying you need to market to maximize everyone’s belief in what you’re marketing.

So the answer to the question is a question: When do you reinvent the wheel? When it’s necessary for everyone to believe that this product or change or report or brochure really is special and important.

Let’s be honest: If you make embroidery floss, there’s not a lot that you can do to your product to make it more special and important, unless you put a vial of KISS blood in every red dye-lot. The status quo will probably do just fine.

However, there will come a time when sales have plateaued and enthusiasm likewise and you need to give the product a kick in the slats. That’s the time to put on the creativity hat, reach for the magic wand (I have one at my desk – doesn’t everyone?) and change things around.

Similarly, there are a number of reports I produce every year. They’re basic research that outlines our market, its demographics and competitors.

For four years I used one basic format for the reports, and things trucked along swimmingly. No one had any complaints, nor would they have if I had replaced all content back of the table of contents with plain paper.

This year I totally redid the format and went the extra step of replacing all content back of the table of contents with plain paper. And you should have heard the complements roll in.

Obviously, the crack about replacing content with plain paper is a lie – rather, a sales tool. But the rest is true. The content of the reports changed only in the sense that there was less of it. In the delightful phrase coined by the auto industry, the reports were decontented. However, they looked much more special and were treated that way by their audience.

There are many legitimate reasons for letting the status quo rule: time, money, marketing objectives, sales goals, even inertia. Understanding when those are no longer reasonable excuses requires sensitivity to organizational culture and external needs. Good marketers are doing that already.

The real marketing world is about nothing so much as decisions. What gets the attention, and what goes begging? The good news is that if you didn’t before, you now know the questions to ask to make your decisions. Now, good luck explaining that to your boss.

Le ROI Has No Clothes

Like everyone else in this wide wired world I spend a lot of time reading marketing blogs. Now I realize that reading marketing blogs is, to paraphrase the comedian Lewis Black, like videotaping yourself spewing about marketing in front of a mirror so later you can spew about marketing while watching the video (he didn't say "marketing" but something very close to marketing), but I do it anyway. It gives my boss something to hold against me at evaluation time.

Okay, so yesterday I was reading something that came through the marvelous life-giving portal known as adage.com which stated that marketers now have so many things they can measure to prove ROI that they can't prove ROI because they can't figure out which numbers are meaningful.

Well, whaddya know? Here’s the very quote:

"’What's making everything much more murky is the amount of data that's available today,’ said media consultant Erwin Ephron. ‘It just blows the mind. It's very hard to think constructively about media planning when you have 500 different research sources telling you what's going on, because you can prove anything you want. We need to get back to a simple set of measurements that in fact identify response.’”

And furthermore, “A fundamental problem across all metrics is settling for what actually can be measured rather than measuring what actually contributes to the ultimate goal: sales, Mr. Ephron said.”

Hear that? That's the sound of the pendulum swinging the other way.

You knew this was going to happen. You knew that the rise of Barack Obama would spawn the anti-Obama(s), you knew the NBA would jerry-rig the free-enterprise system until it resembled Baksheesh Sunday in Monrovia so that three of its biggest superstars would wind up on the gateway team to the largest international market in the Western Hemisphere, and you knew, you just knew that as soon as a marketing universe was created where everything could be measured someone would come along and say that none of it meant anything. It was as obvious as the repartee in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.

Mr. Ephron is a smart man. His blog (ephrononmedia.com) is one of my favorites. And he cuts like Dr. Kildare to the heart of the matter, which is: It’s about sales. It’s not about measuring the amount of oxygen consumed by consumers watching videos of focus groups discussing tweets related to your product. It’s not measuring the space in hectares occupied by all your Web pages printed out and laid end-to-end. It’s about figuring out what people want to buy and selling it to them.

And here’s the kicker to that, previously mentioned but worth repeated nonetheless: You know the lion’s share of that, without measuring as much as a single click-through.

In almost every case you know more about your business, and selling, than you give yourself credit for, in part because you’ve been conditioned to believe that if you can’t quantify it, it doesn’t exist.

If you know about your business and think about your business – the two aren’t the same -- you develop hunches, and you can’t quantify a hunch any more than you can quantify what makes my son love applesauce on his spaghetti. But your hunches are valid. Much as the numerologists would prefer otherwise, you know things about your business that defy quantification and measurement.

The problem is that someone at a level of biological development rivaling the slime mold will eventually demand that quantification and measurement, and when you say, “I know because I know the market,” they will tell you it’s not good enough and boot you down the stairs with their prehensile foot.

This has to stop, and if Mr. Ephron is right it will stop. People who know their business, their products and their markets need to once again be given credit for their knowledge. The outsourcing of credibility to a cockeyed phrenologist who claims to be able to establish a movable concept called “ROI” must stop.

After all, what is a reasonable return on investment? What constitutes a return? All sales, or only profitable sales? Sales plus inquiries? Increases in name recognition or brand awareness? A swell in social-media volume? Any and all of them have been measured under the guise of ROI – but are they equally valid?

And here we go again: What constitutes an investment? Spending of dollars? Expending of resources? Thought time? An idea might have percolated in someone’s brain for a decade before exiting relatively full-blown and ready for the market. How do you measure that as an investment?

And to paraphrase Bill Clinton, what do we mean by “on”?

Have an aspirin; it’s good for your heart. And while it’s dissolving, a story.

My pal Carmen told me about a meeting she had with a marcomm manager/client that was looking for help launching a slightly modified version of one of its least popular products. Carmen told her, “The first thing we need to do is come up with internal and external communications plans for the product launch.”

The manager/client blanched –parboiled, maybe – and said, “Well, what’s the sales goal for that? There has to be something we can measure with this, if we’re going to do it.”

Carmen said, “It’s just a plan to create materials for a product launch. There’s nothing to measure. If the product takes off, is it because we did good telling your internal people what we’re going to say and who we’re going to say it to? It’s the things you do that matter, not the things you say you’re going to do.”

“Yeah, but how much more are we going to sell if we do this?” She still didn’t get it.

Let me make it easy for you. The three things you need to keep track of are your budget, your sales goal – overall, if you please -- and your actual sales. What are you spending money on? Does it line up with what and where you’re selling? And does what and where you’re selling line up with what and where you were planning on selling?

A budget tracks dollars, not time, and that’s as it should be. Everyone spends time on something at work – your projects, other people’s projects, eating, the Internet, Facebook, phone pranks, something. But fewer projects usually mean more time spent on each one, doing the same things to achieve the same end.

In other words, time is elastic. Dollars aren’t.

Even though sales goals may be created in a place somewhere south of Gumdrop Valley, they’re a number as firm as the calves of a Dancing With The Stars partner. Actual sales are harder than the payments on a BMW 7-series. And it’s easy to tell where sales are coming from.

So here you go: Three hard numbers that line up if things behave the way you think they should and don’t line up if they don’t behave. Measure away. And think of all the actual work you can do in the time you’re not spending measuring all that other junk.

Once you get off of Facebook, that is.

Which Came First: The Chicken, Or The Budget For The Chicken?

Every Monday I scratch my head and wonder what I’m going to write about this week, and usually by Tuesday it’s figured out for me.

This week no sooner had I raked the dandruff from my scalp when a marketing pal came despairing my way, crawling barelegged through the berber, his personal electronics trailing behind him, clutching his bewhiskered throat and gasping for air.

“Marketing-plan time again?” I asked, and he nodded. His throat and tongue were too parched and swollen for him to speak.

I gave him a swig of Diet Mountain Dew and he perked up imperceptibly. “What is it now?” I asked. “Budgets?” He nodded. “Projects – to-do list?” He nodded again. “Sales – as in, how does all this mesh with what sales wants to do?” He nodded one more time.

“Sit down,” I said, though he preferred to remain in a fetal position on the floor. “I know just what you’re going though.” And from there I proceeded to enlighten him thuswise:

Marketing plans are bigger minefields than the Afghan interstate system. They are the no-win document to end all no-win documents. If they’re detailed, they’re unreadably long. If they’re kept short, they’re vague and unsubstantiated. If they involve other departments they’re too ambitious. If they stick to marketing-department actions they ignore the intertwined reality. If they only focus on marketing tactics to achieve sales goals they ignore the broader picture. If they speak too much to achieving the corporate mission they ignore sales. If they’re designed to function within a budget they lack vision and creativity. If they reach for the moon they’re dismissed as pie-in-the-sky twaddle. And you’re gonna be held to what you say, unless we decide to hold you to something else – but if we do decide to hold you to something else, we’re not going to tell you.

And not only does a marketing department need to have one of these delightful documents, they need it done and on the CEO’s desk by Monday.

Here’s the deal: You’re not going to win with a marketing plan. You just aren’t. Five people are going to complain about strategy, three are going to rip on tactics, accounting is absolutely going to lay one down over the budget, and at least one yabbo is going to grouse over the cover design.

Confronted with all that, what do most marketing directors do? They say, “To heck with it,” and call in their cum laude graduate of the Garden Party School of Marketing (motto: “You can’t please everyone, so you gotta please yourself”) to do the marketing plan.

Bad wrong, or as they say in Australia, wrong bad.

Okay, the first part is right. The essential first step in creating a minimally unsuccessful marketing plan is acknowledging that a marketing plan exists so people who aren’t in marketing can hold you accountable for things you shouldn’t be held accountable for. The success or failure of a product, for instance. Now, marketing is at the locus of taking a product from the lab to the market, but if the product is bad when R&D says it’s good, is it marketing’s fault? If the sales force treats the product the way a threatened senator treats a presidential visit, is it marketing’s fault?

You know the answer to this question. It is: Yes. You should have seen it coming. Acknowledge it and move on.

The second imperative is to treat the relationship among budget, tactics, and outcomes like you really understand it. Essentially, a marketing plan says, “I plan on doing x, costing y, to achieve z.” At some point you’ll be asked to defend each component as well as the logical string, and the circumstances which made this necessary in the first place, but that’s no surprise. You simply have to be prepared to answer the questions -- and it’s your choice whether you do it inside or outside of the marketing plan.

The nice thing about intertwining budget, tactics, and outcomes in a marketing plan is that you acknowledge that marketing costs money (which accounting loves), and that expenditures and tactics – “hard” tactics like products and “softer” ones like press releases – are going directly toward outcomes, which sometimes go by the sobriquet of “sales.” This makes Sales happy, though Sales is easily pleased. In the corporate menagerie Sales is the Poky Little Puppy.

To justify the title, this approach acknowledges that if you want a chicken you have to budget for one. You can’t simply hope that Product Development lays an egg.

The third point, which is less an imperative than a really strong suggestion, is to minimize numbers everywhere in a marketing plan, forward and background, hard numbers and projections, dollars and units. You can hide behind numbers; I get that. And so does everyone else. Besides, marketing departments come in two flavors: the kind where they believe your numbers and the kind where they don’t. If they believe your numbers you don’t have to put them in the marketing plan because if people believe your numbers they believe most everything else you say. If they don’t believe your numbers all you do by putting numbers in the marketing plan is open yourself up to ridicule.

You’re going to be questioned, so you might as well say, “This is the way it is,” using words (revolutionary, I know), and then haul up your numbers to answer a specific question.

I know it seems counterintuitive in the age of MEM (Measuring Everything Marketing) to eschew numbers in a marketing plan, but a marketing plan isn’t about hitting numbers; it’s about employing strategies to get to a point where the numbers will occur. It’s about doing to achieve; costs are a throughput. In the movie Chicken Run the nutty prisoner professor chicken lays out the mathematical case for a chicken flying, but when they actually launch the chicken according to the numbers, what happens? Chicken splat. The chickens don’t get off the ground until they ditch the math and devise strategies for getting off the ground.

Sweet philosophy, but you can’t abandon numbers entirely in a marketing plan. However, if you save the stats for costs and outcomes and let your vendors supply the former and Sales the latter, you can keep building the road. Math will tell you how fast to go in the corners.

Employ this strategy and you can get through a marketing plan in five pages – 10, tops. If you’re not there, try axing the season recap and the eight pages of market-share pie charts and the Post-It budget and five years of sales numbers and the SWOT analyses of competitors’ janitorial services and see where you are. You are not your organization’s Homer. You are not writing the definitive history of Wiffman’s Waffles. You’re starting at a spot and moving forward in a tightly defined direction, and describing the path as succinctly as possible.

“Yes,” my parched friend croaked. “Yes, but – what do you do when what you say you’re going to do next year doesn’t line up with what you’re doing now?”

“Choose,” I said. “Actually, you have to build in a change of direction, wrap up what you’re doing now if you need to, and then lay out where you need to go from there. You can’t ignore the present, but you also can’t spend so much time and effort documenting what got you to the present that you lose sight of what’s going to make for a better future.

“That do it for you?” I asked, but my friend, still curled in the fetal position, was unresponsive. Dead – or worse.

“Plumb tuckered out,” I whispered, leaving the office and closing the door softly behind me. “And the CEO still needs a plan on his desk by Monday.”

Tomorrow's Media Today

As Ira Gershwin noted, things have come to a pretty pass. My technologically backward friend Jim who would not tweet if his life were dependent on his being able to say “Help!” in less than 140 characters now has a blog.

Actually, it’s a sort of a blog. It’s blogesque, a demiblog. It may just be other people doing his blogging for him, if Jim’s first post is any indication. It’s a call for all his friends to submit their thoughts on the future of media.

In the words of Texas-swing fiddler Johnny Gimble, “Well, wind me up.” I haven’t written out much on the future of media, though it’s a subject that’s dear to my heart – and wallet. I used to make my living through the media and would like again to make my living through the media, in one form or another. I even have a plan in mind of how this might occur, which I am not sharing with anyone who is not willing to pay me for it, and the chances of that are less than the chances of me dressing up like Prince and playing a guitar shaped like an Egyptian fertility symbol. In church.

This is a synopsis of what I wrote for Jim (which I haven’t written yet, but not for lack of want-to), spun towards marketing. Because while marketing is not media – a fact of which I must be continuously reminded – marketing cannot exist without media providing the conduits of information from seller to buyer (and, don’t forget, buyer to seller).

When considering the future of media, remember that media don’t die. True, the telegraph is dead, and there’s not a lot of traffic in jungle drums and smoke signals. But those media channels were highly content-poor and technologically backward, and there are modern channels that do what they do better. Text messaging, for instance.

So, in other words, in five years we will still have the opportunity to consume every form of media we currently consume. All the talk of media going away is hoohah. That’s not the way we behave. When it comes to communication we’re a civilization of ragpickers. We take what we like from here and there and build a sort of media lean-to that serves as our communication structure. I just bought a new turntable so I can record my vinyl onto a CD, which I send via USB to my phone, where I can share it via Facebook – though I may then turn around and write about the experience for a magazine.

What media could go away?

Not the magazine. The magazine will survive. An iPad app may offer more interactivity, but a printed magazine is a more engaging sensory experience. I read The Complete New Yorker on my computer, but I also check out the back issues from the library. The completeness of the DVDs is a plus, but the computer is unable to duplicate the experience of reading an actual 80-year-old magazine.

The newspaper will survive, but not all newspapers will survive. Most current newspapers sell a sort of immediacy, with a lack of interactivity, eye appeal, reporting depth, and writing skill as a tradeoff. That’s not good enough. For a newspaper to survive in print it’ll have to be better-looking and better-written than its online competition – more like a highly local magazine, in other words.

Television will survive as one of many screens. I ascribe to the theory that visual content will become more and more standardized and only the size of the screen will change. The distribution channels are working their kinks out, but how could you not bet on Apple, Amazon, and Google/YouTube being the winners, with Facebook coming up hard on the rail?

Media savants NRBQ are fond of reminding us that there ain’t no free, and we are bound to learn that all over again in the next five years. iTunes showed the way for iTV, and with a little help from Amazon and Microsoft the market has been established. Songs cost 99 cents. TV shows cost 99 cents. Books are $10 and the book reader is $100 and falling. It won’t be long before long-form journalism articles from content providers like nytimes.com are 99 cents, and a full magazine for the iPad stabilizes at around $3. Cats riding skateboards may still be free, but enjoy free concert footage, movie clips, and TV shows while you can. They’re not long for this world.

But what about the savior of us all, the game-changer of the epoch, user-generated content?

User-generated content is hardly a new thing. And not only that, but the readership numbers for old-school user-generated content are hardly worse than the numbers for new-school content. Blogs, tweets, texts, uploads, and postings are the new letters, sent to slightly more people with slightly less personalization, and with the middleman – the post office -- cut out. Bad time to be a mailman, business as usual for everyone else.

With blogs on the periphery and 90 percent of consumed content coming through controlled (and metered) channels, the crackpots are reduced to the status of crank letters, which is about where they are now, only we don’t see them that way because we’re so consumed by the newness of form that we miss the oldness of content. As the channels consolidate the need diminishes for search as we know it. Each channel will have its own dedicated search, and if it’s not coming through one of those tubes you probably don’t want it.

Advertising has a place because there will always be some organization wanting to own a piece of one or another channel and disinclined to believe it’s a total waste of money.

That leaves marketing. Marketing uses advertising as one of many tool groups, with each group made up of specific tools. Think of advertising as, oh, the chisels. What kinds of chisels – I mean, advertising – do I like? Pre-roll ads. Mobile ads. Crawls and banners on TV shows. Interstitials in e-books. Outdoor. In-hand. (Basically, anything you can hold in your hand.)

Then there’s public relations. There’s an article in today’s New York Times that public relations is more important than ever. I don’t doubt it. It ought to be.

Then there are the wide range of materials aimed at augmenting face-to-face meetings. More important than ever. As people consume more media and are increasingly bombarded with marketing messages as a result, the face-to-face meeting gains importance as an oasis of interpersonal interaction.

If my crystal ball shows the media model returning to a conventional form where a few big players control the most important channels, it does not show that it’s Turn Back The Clock Night all over the media firmament. Things have changed. Marketing through media has changed. But the advantage to the savvy marketer is in understanding how it’s changed.

It's About Being The Best. Really It Is.

This probably wasn't supposed to happen, but today I saw the advertising agency's concepts for my company's national–advertising campaign. And all of a sudden I didn't have to worry about a column for this week.

The agency, which is a reasonable agency brain-wise and not so large that it's completely substituted billing for caring, delivered four concepts fleshed out into print advertisements.

Now you can argue convincingly that of all the promotional material an advertising agency could show a company which does not sell consumer packaged goods, full-page print ads are the least applicable to actual, you know, marketing. Our organization has a national print campaign, but neither myself nor my colleagues have seen any evidence of it, and that campaign isn't going more high-profile in 2011. Show us a sample Twitter feed, a Facebook page, a video, a banner, anything but a print ad. Or a direct-mail piece. But I digress.

The four concepts neatly sum up the prevailing approaches to advertising, both in graphic execution and in the fact that three of the four are completely wrong, and one is partially wrong.

The first concept was a continuation of the current campaign and slogan. Cover up the copy – and really, only about three words of the copy – and you can't tell whether the advertising is selling credit cards, feminine protection, or cheese. It’s all canvas and leather, made to look handmade and old when it’s really mass-produced and brand-new. And Chinese.

The second concept used graphics and small pictures in a late-'50s/early-'60s sort of way on a heavy solid-color background. The execution was semi-playful while remaining unfocused, and the copy once more was apropros of nothing. The complete concept could only be considered powerful if you sold orange ink.

I can't tell you anything about the third concept, because I can’t remember it.

The fourth concept got a little closer. While it shared the nondescript graphic look of the first campaign, its message had bite. We're the best, it said in so many words, and no one else can do what we do.

The message lacked fear, which made it seem so fresh and strong and atypical, because modern advertising and marketing lacks nothing so much as courage.

It takes zero intestinal fortitude to go the modern route and say, “Come to us for solutions,” because most of the problems these solutions purport to solve aren’t problems. Dancewear solutions? Final-expense solutions? Really? If you gotta dance, clothes aren’t a problem. Gene Kelly pulled it off as well in a tux as he did in a unitard as he did in a sopping-wet sack suit. And if you can’t afford a coffin with a USB port a pine box will suffice just fine. Trust me.

The moxie level takes a leap when you say, “We’re the best. Come get us,” yet that’s where the money is (and as anyone who’s matriculated at the Willie Sutton School of Marketing can tell you, you market where the money is).

Organizations invest vast sums in training and infrastructure. They hire the best people, provide them state-of-the-art tools, sweat every detail down to the molecular structure of Tab C, yet when it comes time to proclaim how wonderful and category-leading it all is, they can only muster enough courage to say, “We provide extruded-die solutions.”

Stop with the faux modesty already. People want to buy the best. They want to associate with the best. Your organization needs to find what it’s best at, and if it’s something that matters to its customers, your organization needs to proclaim that to the heavens.

There is no okay-right-fine-whatever in this statement. It needs to. Sales are at stake. Dollars are at stake.

The only company that ever got traction out of not being the best was Avis, and it actually took a roundabout way to bestness by saying, “We don’t sell the most, but our service is best.” Service is a tangible asset in the car-rental business, as anyone who’s stood in line at midnight in a stifling off-airport rental hovel can attest. Avis’ roundabout way worked, but try it again and prepare to have your lunch handed to you.

It’s like playing king-of-the-hill. The kid who sits at the bottom of the hill because he doesn’t want his stocking cap pulled off never gets his stocking cap pulled off, but he never gets to be king, either.

Some organizations need to sit at the bottom of the hill and guard their stocking cap. I get that. But they are one in a squillion. The rest of us need to be fighting for that hilltop, and once we’re there we need to shout, “We’re on top!” to the world.

The world will come and get you, and try to knock you off. The world always does. But the world’s coming to climb over you anyway. As long as they’re gunning for you, you may as well give them something real to shoot at.

If you’re good, say it. Say it in your ads, your e-mails, your mission statement, and your social-media marketing. (And, yeah, in your print ads, too.) Make sure your salespeople buy into it, and make sure they’re telling their customers.

Several lifetimes ago, in my packaged-product days, the sales VP handed out note pads and T-shirts with the slogan, “It’s About Being The Best.”

Now, “It’s About Being The Best” is no “Coke Adds Life,” but it’s truer. It is about being the best – and then when you get there, it’s about having the courage to say you’re the best. Say it, though, and you’ll discover that it’s the sales message that outsells all the rest, and always has.

The Needle And The Damage Done

It’s sacrilegious to say this in the context of a marketing blog, but I’m 99 percent sure we marketers spend way too much time reading about marketing and way too little time actually marketing.

With that said, I can’t say what is the right amount of time to spend marketing. Some of the marketers I’ve known were actually better off when the reading-about-marketing /marketing mix was 90/10. And their clients were way ahead.

Still, the lure of the next great marketing article draws us in ever deeper, and what are we rewarded with? Another excursion into the lands of Morpheus disguised as an examination of pay-per-click metrics. A series of jolly anecdotes on how the Old Spice Man is transforming modern marketing, on the back of a horse. An interview with the developer of the Preparation H mobile app. The back of Seth Godin’s head. And a little story I ran across on how marketers are confusing marketing via social media with Social-Media Marketing.

Well, of course they are. I haven’t met a marketer who doesn’t sometimes mistake the sandbox for the sand castle. Before there were social media, people were mistaking selling on the Web with Web Marketing. Before that it was selling through the mail versus Direct-Mail Marketing. Selling using TV versus TV Advertising. And the grandpappy of them all, selling versus Advertising.

As God is my witness, I love the Jordan Playboy ad. “Somewhere west of Laramie” et cetera, like to send a chill down my spine. But do you know how long the Jordan Playboy lasted after that ad appeared? Two years. Fewer than 100 Playboys were sold.

The greatest ad of all time, and it couldn’t sell 100 units of anything. Because it wasn’t written to sell.

Say you get it. Please say you get it. It’s the difference between the tool and the job, the accordion and the polka, the needle and the damage done, and today’s marketers have more glittering needles than ever at their disposal. Anyone who’s surprised at the unprecedentedly high level of infatuation with the type font at the expense of the letter has not been paying attention to history or the here-and-now.

The article cited Snakes on a Plane as proof, but I can think of a score of others. Skittles’ abortive abandonment of its Web site for Twitter and Facebook. The Old Spice Guy. The “pants on the ground” dude. More embarrassing branded Facebook pages than there are Republicans in Utah. More embarrassing branded Facebook pages than there are embarrassing Republicans in Utah. And yes, even the Subservient Chicken.

Great ideas, for the most part. Brilliant execution, except for that picture of the pelican on the dental-insurance Facebook page. Additional products sold: not many.

Maybe it’s time to rock this place back to the studs and remember why we market. We market to sell. Marketing is successful when someone buys what we want them to buy. Whether it’s a product or a message, they buy.

Marketing itsownself I’ve defined many times as the targeted application of common sense … in service of a purchase. What makes the most sense if we want Tibetians to buy iced coffee? If we want Gen Y to buy burial vaults? The question may not always be logical but the answer has to be if the marketing is going to be successful.

If we answer the first question, “Drop 10,000 Espresso Shots from an airplane,” we are not using common sense, unless we are with the Chinese government. On the other hand, if we answer it, “Fill every begging bowl from here to Lhasa with iced coffee,” we’re getting somewhere.

Short of equipping coffins with USB ins and guaranteeing cell reception, I can’t think of an answer to the second question.

The role of social media in this process is to serve as word-of-mouth on steroids, to take our common sense and throw it around. Social media works best in marketing when it’s used to spread the simple message from friend to friend, “This product is good. You should buy it.” The most successful social-media campaigns have been among the least publicized. The greatest contribution social media has made to marketing is the citizen review. The most overrated is the viral video. If the dudes making the trick basketball shots wore Skechers T-shirts, would Skechers sell more shoes? A couple of pairs maybe – yet that’s the sort of stuff that’s being passed off as Social-Media Marketing.

Which it is. It’s using social media to come up with new ways for marketers to justify their worth without actually selling anything, which marketers have been doing as long as there’s been marketing.

Tawdry as it is sometimes, we are salespeople all. We start the morning unemployed, and we make our wage and save our job through the course of the day. Of all the things we can’t lose sight of in marketing, that might be No. 1 with a bullet.

Anyone Want To Fund A Chair At The D.L. Menard School of Marketing?

I love Cajun music. Now, I realize Cajun music is really just polkas with fiddles and steel guitars instead of wind instruments, so, by extension, there is no reason why properly played Polish polkas should not be every bit as cool as Cajun songs, but I love Polish polkas too, so at least my yin equals my yang in the ethnic-music department.

One of the all-time greats in Cajun music is D.L. Menard. D.L. Menard is no relation to John Menard, the genius behind the Menard hardware chain and the bankroll behind his son's rotten racing career. However, D.L. has it all over John when it comes to knowing his marketing.

My favorite D.L. Menard album, both from a musical and marketing standpoint, is titled "No Matter Where You At, There You Are."

Think about that from a marketing standpoint. Marketers expend a tremendous amount of effort trying to deal with the crisis at hand. On the ground, most of the true marketers I know spend 80 percent to 90 percent of their time dealing with the fire du jour. The rest of the time they're in meetings, getting excoriated for not moving the organization forward.

I have a good marketing friend who is ostensibly a product developer -- and he'd be a crackerjack product developer if he'd ever get a break from fighting fires long enough to develop a few.

Hey, you can't move the organization forward if you're always dealing with the here. In D.L. Menard's terms, you can't be where you are and where you're not at the same time.

And you want to know the funny thing? If you don't deal with where you at you're still going to be there ... because, according to the D.L. Menard School Of Marketing, no matter where you at, there you are. So you may as well move the organization forward.

Now, this is not a call to indolence. I'm not saying every Tom Marketer, Dick Marketer and Jane Marketer should respond to a call for instantaneous action by saying, "Sorry. I'm focused on moving the organization forward for the next, oh, five years."

That's not in most marketers' DNA, for one thing. In my experience, marketing people and engineers actually get things done in organizations. Everyone else is along for the ride, more or less.

However, it is an encouragement to meet those constant requests for fire-fighting with something like, "Okay, but if I do x I can't do y. Which is more important to the organization?"

The assumption most non-marketing people make about marketing people is because they can do x, y, and z, they should be doing x, y, and z, and right this minute.

Well, sorry. Take a number. If you leave it up to the marketers, the good ones will do what is best in their view for the organization, no matter how hard it is or how long it takes. The bad ones will do whatever looks the best to the most people. The plodders will do whatever's on top of the pile.

However, all marketers, when given the chance, will move the organization forward. The engineers too. There's a lot of sense in leaving both these groups to their business and spreading the aggravation earmarked for them among other entities in the company.

Assuming you want to be somewhere other than where you are, that is.

Service In The Age Of Facebook

Yesterday someone was supposed to come from the cable company and install the converter for cable phone service. They never showed.

Later yesterday a sales rep from a door-to-door knife company was supposed to come out the house and sharpen the expensive set of knives we bought three years ago, and replace one broken knife. He arrived an hour late, unapologetic. “I can’t keep the phone number of every service call I have,” was his non-excuse.

Sorry, but you can. In the age of mobile everything and constant connectivity and 8 GB of storage attached to your pen, you most certainly can. You could even when phones were in booths and storage was something that required a shed. It’s a minimum expectation of service.

Service, as everyone knows, is an extension of a previous sale and a preparation for a future sale. It’s the sale between sales, in other words.

The cable company didn’t lose a sale by not showing up. We’ll likely do business with the cable company for as long as its business model holds, which ought to be about a year.

The knife salesman? He’s not coming back. His products are staying, but his chances of a future sale went away. And with word-of-mouth reviews capable at the touch of a button of being spread to infinity and beyond, his chances of many future sales are in jeopardy.

Of the two faux pas, the knife salesman’s mistakes are the most egregious. He lives in a business world of door-to-door sales. Every time he steps into a house or makes an appointment to step into a house, he is engaging a client. He is both servicing and selling, on a turf that is not his own. The only thing he can do to level the playing field is provide a level of service capable of taking people’s familiar surroundings and making them unfamiliar, to use service to create enough imbalance or weakness to make a sale possible.

It’s been that way since the day of the Fuller Brush Man, and it hasn’t changed today. In fact, it’s more important today than ever, because it can now be monitored and measured as never before. We have more ways of defining and measuring good service, but do those definitions and measurements really draw a box around good service – or is truly good (or bad) service beyond our ability to measure?

Good service on one level exists on the Potter Stewart model – you know it when you see (or encounter) it. It may not be how quickly the phone was answered, or that the problem was rectified with one phone call, though both these numbers are eminently measurable and often thrown around as measures of superior service. It’s how the service experience made you feel.

The knife salesman/sharpener gave us no opportunity to feel good about anything. He sharpened the knives promptly without need for a followup visit (and actually, he played himself out of any future contact), but he tried to make us feel like his being an hour late was our responsibility.

Contrast this with another service experience. Two weeks ago my 11-year-old son broke the back window of our station wagon washing the car. No, he was not emulating his father by trying to wash a car with a hammer. He sprayed cold water on a hot window and the thing blew.

The station wagon is old and the tailgate had issues beyond having a blown window, so we decided to replace the tailgate with a tailgate from a junkyard, which has now rebranded itself as an automobile recycling facility. Whatever. Tailgates are cheap there.

There was, remarkably, a matching 15-year-old tailgate just down the street, but it was the wrong color and a trifle rusty. However, in Oshkosh, an hour and a half away, there was a nicer tailgate in the proper color.

I knew this by using an inventory search on the Web site of the mega-junkyard that owns the tailgate. The idea that a junkyard has indexed and computerized and made searchable its junk is sit-you-down-son amazing. I mean, it’s junk. What’s next? The hairs on your head? Ants? Grains of sand?

We called the toll-free number of the mega-junkyard and someone in their sales department – yeah, a junkyard has a sales department – said, “We’ll have it all ready for you. Just drive down to Oshkosh and pick it up. Two hundred twenty-five bucks.”

Cool. We hopped in the car and drive to Oshkosh – only to find that this junkyard, a wholly owned affiliate of the mega-junkyard, was a pull-it-yourself place. Bring your own tools, yank your own parts. I was in a polo shirt; my wife was in sandals. We were not prepared to pull a tailgate off a hulk.

We went to the office and, after a long wait, explained our conundrum to the lady working the desk. “Oh, they’re always forgetting to tell people that,” she said, and sympathized. There was no way we could get the part today, either, she said. We were unprepared to pull the part, and the part-puller had knocked off for the day. We’d have to come back.

At that point my wife offered her cash to circumvent the mega-junkyard people and sell directly to us. After a moment’s hesitation, the desk person quoted $175. My wife said, “Oh, no. We’ll pay you one-eighty.”

Did you get all that? We paid more than we were offered to get a part that we couldn’t even get that day.

In no way were we satisfied, on a superficial level. We had to drive an hour and a half home, then repeat the process on Monday, to pay above asking price. The problem wasn’t solved quickly, it wasn’t solved on first response, and the solution did not involve us getting something for nothing, or a significant discount. (While the tailgate did cost less, it didn’t cost as little as it could have.)

However, we were satisfied. We felt understood. We were united against a common enemy. The customer-company relationship had evolved into something infinitely more human. In fact, my wife wanted to give the desk clerk a hug.

Good service is not problem-solving. Good service is a communicative act that seeks common ground in order to elicit a positive human response.

Initial communication between strangers searches for common ground; once that common ground is found, substantive communication can proceed. The knife salesman/sharpener never got there, because he never tried. The junkyard desk clerk tried and got there, and profited as a result. How much time and money do service personnel waste by not first searching for the common ground before proceeding with the problem-solving?

There’s a simple moral to this story: Measure customer service all you want, but acknowledge that much of its power lies outside the realm of measurement. But the good news is, you can get there from here.

The Thurber For The Thing Thurbered

I really like Keith Olbermann. I have reasons: He wrote for me on occasion when I was editing sports periodicals, and he's a wonderful writer, as clean and crisp as someone who's written for broadcast all his life should be. His knowledge of sports cards is encyclopedic, as I found out whenever I confused my Turkey Reds with my Ramlys. I also admire his politics, and the fact that he doesn’t have to resort to a “This Machine Kills Fascists” T-shirt to get his point across.

I like Olbermann doing the highlights on Football Night in America (the best thing to happen to football since Hardy Brown invented the snot-knocker), I liked him on SportsCenter, I like his tweets, I like him in a box, I like him with a fox (but not at Fox) ... you get the idea.

Another reason I like Keith Olbermann: He loves James Thurber and is committed to plugging Thurber to readers and Tea Partiers alike. Hey, so am I. In fact, one of my favorite Thurber pieces is the subject of today's column.

No, it's not "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" or "The Night The Bed Fell." This piece is called "Here Lies Miss Groby" and is about that all-time knee-slapper, parts of speech.

Thurber writes about how his English-composition teacher, Miss Groby, spurred his obsession with that part of speech known as The Container For The Thing Contained -- and its rarer sub-species, The Thing Contained For the Container.

His example of the former was, "Friends, Romans, countrymen -- lend me your ears." His example of the latter, which he thought up hisownself, was, "Get away from me or I'll hit you with the milk."

You gotta read the piece. You'll laugh.

Thinking about that piece the other day made me wonder: How much of your marketing effort should go toward selling the container, and how much to the thing contained?

At first blush, that doesn’t seem like much of a question. If you run a dairy you’re in the business of selling milk, not the bottle.

Oh, really?

Eighty percent or more of milk is water, and in this case at least, water is water. Without marketing, the remaining 20 percent is an assortment of subtlties so subtle that you could be presented with a lineup of milks from a dozen dairies running the gamut from Sunshine’s Hand-Milked Holsteins to BGH Acres and not be able to tell one from the other.

You can take this too far in the other direction, too, and place so much equity in the Container that you forget the Thing Contained has virtues as well. It’s easy to get so wound up in the fact that a Rolex screams six-figure income that you forget it does a hell of a good job keeping time under extreme circumstances.

Now that we’ve established the extremes let’s head to the middle, because that’s where the interesting stuff is.

When you’re given a product or service to market you invariably start with the product attributes. Some may be The Thing Contained and quite tangible – this garbage disposal has titanium blades – while some are the less-tangible Container – our airline is renowned for personal service.

Now, neither The Container nor The Thing Contained guarantees anything beyond itself. The titanium blades may be attached to a motor made from dental floss and spittle, for instance, and the airline that prides itself on personal service needs to deliver personal service because all its planes are two hours late.

If you over-promote The Thing Contained you run the risk of being copied. Other companies can make a disposal with titanium blades, and make the motor out of cardboard and malted-milk powder to boot.

If you over-promote The Container you effectively place a halt on progress. Think of the hoohah that ensued when Kentucky Fried Chicken got a face-lift. You’d have thought they replaced the Colonel’s 11 herbs and spices with D-Con.

The answer, then, is to put everything where it belongs. Put The Thing Contained in The Container.

Oh, sure. Put The Thing Contained in The Container. Will do – right after solving global warming and finding a cure for cancer.

Here’s what I mean. Promote the product attributes as a subset of the brand attributes. Orville Redenbacher’s microwave popcorn tastes great because it comes from Orville Redenbacher. The cheese experts at Kraft make Kraft macaroni and cheese the cheesiest. You’re not going to die in a T60 because it’s a Volvo.

My favorite example of this is the Southwest Airlines “Bags Fly Free” campaign. Southwest took a hot-button issue – charging fliers for every bag they put on an airplane – carved out a unique position – we won’t charge for extra bags – and tied it to their overall brand identity – because we’re Southwest.

Bags fly free on Southwest. The Thing Contained squarely in The Container.

This is slam-dunk marketing, but it requires some ingenuity on a marketer’s part to weave a product’s attributes into a brand’s attributes. You can’t always say, “X exists because of Y.”

Let’s take an example where this sort of marketing is rarely done: beer.

A lot of beer advertising is built around the theme, “Our beer tastes better when you spit it out your nose ‘cause you’re laughing so hard.” How much more effective and long-lasting would the message be if instead beer marketers said, “We’ve been helping you have fun for the last 150 years. We’re gonna get this right”?

You can argue drinkability versus triple-hops brewing all you want. You can’t argue with 150 years of hangovers.

Just like hitting your spouse with the milk, The Thing Contained is almost always more effective when it’s in The Container.

James Thurber would understand. So would Miss Groby. And I know Keith Olbermann gets it.