Willie And Me Would Rather Follow The Money, Thank You

As you may have surmised from reading previous columns, there are schools of marketing and then there are Schools Of Marketing, and just because you get straight A’s in one doesn’t mean you’re not going to flunk the other.

For instance, I had one client who graduated from Dartmouth’s school of marketing but washed out of Marketing For Morons at the Roger McGuinn School Of Marketing (“To everything there is a season/And a time to every purpose under Heaven”). I had another who matriculated at the knees of Mr. Proctor and Mr. Gamble themselves and had a Harvard MBA besides, yet he could not have gained admission to the Little Ricky Nelson School Of Marketing (“You can’t please everyone, so you gotta please yourself”) if he had crab-walked from Cincinnati to San Francisco.

It works the other way, too. I’ve worked with cum-laude graduates of the Bob Dylan School of Marketing who couldn’t pass the entrance exams for a correspondence course.

The only difference between the two groups of grads is that the Bob Dylan U. grads have summer homes and boats the size of three-bedroom ranches while the Dartmouth guy … well, he has a boat the size of a four-bedroom ranch and a four-bedroom ranch the size of a paper mill. But only because he had a good tutor.

So out of all graduates of the various schools of marketing and Schools Of Marketing, what would be the ur-marketer, the Mary Poppins, the Michael Jordan, the Mac, the standard by which others are measured?

I’d take a graduate of a Big Ten university who did his graduate work at P&G and his post-graduate work at the Willie Sutton School Of Marketing.

The Big Ten education (and full disclosure: I don’t have one) is just right: not too big and snooty and not too small and easily denigrated. I don’t want my ur-marketer to have to struggle uphill or coast downhill right out of college.

P&G teaches you everything you need to know about marketing consumer products – and any marketer who says she doesn’t market consumer products is a liar.

The Willie Sutton School Of Marketing … now that holds a special place in my heart.

You all know the origins of the Willie Sutton School Of Marketing, don’t you? Okay, some don’t. Those that do, excuse me a moment.

Willie Sutton was a bank robber. When the police caught him and asked him why he robbed banks, he looked at them like they were a bunch of South Carolina Tea Partiers and said, “Because that’s where the money is.”

So many of the tough decisions in marketing aren’t tough at all if you simply couch them inside the question, “So which way is the money?”

Here; perfect example. We had a client that made licensed merchandise, and he had a choice: pick up a license quickly and relatively cheaply to make licensed products for a brand that was a household name but not necessarily something that you could envision as a licensable brand (no, not Preparation H), or spend considerably more time, money, and effort to be one of several licensees for a brand that’s been a licensed-products staple for decades.

Even though my client would have the cheap license all to himself, we recommended that he expend the effort to compete in the larger arena.

Why? Because that’s where the money was. It was such a huge money pie that even one-seventh of it would be significantly larger than all of the other pie.

Our client found that out the hard way. He went against our advice not once but three times, and was out of business within two years.

Here’s another example. My consultant friend Mike was telling me about a case he was cleaning up. A new marketing manager took over at a reasonably large-sized manufacturer and was faced with an immediate choice: roll out new products or redo the advertising for the current stuff.

She didn’t have the resources to do both, and didn’t want to split efforts between the two. And the company was doing fine; there was no overriding reason to do either one, other than the drive that possesses all marketers to do something.

“I know what I’d do,” I told Mike. “I’d do the products.”

“Me too,” Mike said. “But she did the advertising. And I’m doing the cleanup.”

In this case, doing the advertising was a cost that didn’t get anyone closer to the money. It was an exercise in portfolio-padding. Doing the products would have been immeasurably harder and less glamorous, but done properly it would have provided a direct line to the money.

You can guess the rest. The marketing director split when the bean-counters asked for ROI, the product-development process rusted up, and Mike was called in at no small cost to knock off the rust and do what should have been done in the first place.
One more example, and then I’ll shut up. One of my clients was deciding whether to expand into new markets or try to extract more from its current customers.

There was plenty more to be extracted from current customers, at little or no incremental cost. The dollar amounts to be had there were at least as great as those possible from the new customers. But man, the idea of new markets sure did sound appealing.

You know this one, too. We recommended grabbing the money that was being left on the table. The client opted for the new market. Acquisition costs have been through the roof, customer retention has been lousy, and meanwhile that additional income from current customers is still there, ready as a dust bunny to be sucked up.

It works for big-picture issues, too. Think Apple wasn’t chasing money when it introduced the iPod? The money was going into digital music, and money has been going into portable music for 75 years. Apple went ingeniously and stylishly into portable digital music – where the money was.

Here’s a contemporary example with implications for the future. Media – and money -- are rapidly heading toward a Three Musketeers model: One media for all screens, and all media for one screen. How is your marketing message going to thrive in that environment? How are you going to extract an advantage from that environment – or is your competition going to extract an advantage at your expense?

Do me a favor. From now on, if you ever have a difficult marketing decision to make, ask yourself: What direction does the money go? Things will snap into focus more clearly than the view from under a pair of Blue Blockers.

Which, coincidentally, got where they were by following the money. It’s everywhere.