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.