"Educating" vs. "Marketing"

When companies get together to figure out how to market a new service or product, many strategic planning sessions eventually reach a point that I like to call "Pull the Leash." (Actually, I just made that up, but pretend it's something I trademarked five years ago.)

Pull the Leash happens when everyone in the meeting--Sales, Marketing, R&D, you name it--becomes passionate about the idea that if their customers knew as much about the product's features as they did, they would buy it instantly. It's as if the customer is on a leash, sniffing the bushes of competitors, and you can give them a yank and force them back to learning everything you know.

It's the moment when someone says "we need to educate the marketplace" or "we need to launch an awareness campaign."

Now, as the son of a university administrator and a music teacher, I will never underestimate the importance of education. Nor will I jump to the other extreme and claim that marketing has to be so focused on creating an image or selling a benefit as to be allergic to informing.

But Pull the Leash is almost always a sure sign that your perspective is too internally focused. It's the moment when you need to step outside the office and spend some time living in the same world as your customers. Do you, as an average person, sit around hoping that everyone who sells you something might try to educate you a little more about it? Are you all too eager to turn off The Daily Show after the kids go to bed so you can learn everything there is to know about non-bleach, hypoallergenic paper towels? It might be important for purchases of exceptional interest or cost, but in general, the answer is no.

Your customers' lives are just as busy, noisy and chaotic as yours. To affect their behavior, I think the simplest rule is this:

If you want someone to do something, make it easy. If you want someone to know something, make it fun.

Who's the Decider?

About a year ago, I was hired to name a new product. It was a fantasy project. The product was not only innovative, but entirely ground-breaking from an environmental perspective. I plunged into the job, learning everything I could about the industry, the competition, every technical aspect of the technology involved.

I developed a presentation that outlined all of the thinking that went into my final name choices. I presented them all, noting which I one I recommended most and why. The key to success, I was told by the marketing team who brought me in, was swaying the product developer, a marketing skeptic who loved to chew up agency types and spit them out.

After my presentation, I looked to The Skeptic. He rubbed his chin, seemed nonplussed. After an interminable silence, he finally spoke. "I'm warming to it," he said. By the end of the meeting, he was excited, animated, riffing on all the ways the name could be used. It was a huge success. I was on top of the world.

And then it all died.

Getting past the product developer, I was now told, was only the first hoop. The real key was getting past Person X, who served as gatekeeper to the CEO. Person X didn't like my name.

"Can we get the name in front of the CEO directly?" I asked. No, it has to go through X. "Okay," I said. "But can I at least talk to the CEO, since he's the ultimate decision-maker?" No, only X can talk to the CEO. "Can I meet X then, so I know what he's looking for?" No, only we can talk to X.

As you can imagine, the process quickly descended into chaos. Gone were the well-thought-out ideas and slick presentations. Names were just words, and words were commodities. "We need 15 more names by the end of the day" became an almost daily request. Alas, a name was finally chosen, and it wasn't one of mine. By the end, the entire company was involved, so it could have come from Marty in Accounting.

I see this situation often, and I always feel for the marketers. They're trying to do their job, but they often serve as little more than gatekeepers, or gatekeepers to other gatekeepers. One day they're trusted implicitly; the next day, they're told not to even decide on the trade show booth carpeting without 10 approvals.

But from the creative perspective, there's simply no substitute for direct access to the ultimate decision-maker. As much as you'd like to think that you're developing ideas for the real audience (the consumer), the hard reality is that if the person writing the check doesn't like it, you're not going to get anywhere.

What Is Web 2.0... I Mean, Really?

A friend and I were joking last week that the next time someone asks, "What is Web 2.0?" we should reply: "A way for young people to make money off old people."

It's a cynical answer, but there's a point. A casualty of the Internet Age is reason; a winner is fear. Change happens so quickly, each micro generation growing up with a better version of the web, that older generations grow increasingly confused and fearful. The result: A 24-year-old agency wunderkind can sit in a meeting and jabber about "social bookmarking" while his older account exec exclaims "you mean you don't have a YouTube?!", and the fearful marketing director will buckle--especially if he was told to "do something with Web 2.0."

Fear need not apply. Web 2.0 a simple phenomenon. You just have to look at it from a psychological (rather than technological) perspective:

No matter how old you are, but especially when you're younger, whom do you trust the most? Your friends. From a marketing perspective, Web 2.0 is simply this: a way to make it easier to trust your friends.

The revolution is real. The younger the person, the less she trusts any authority, at least directly. Today, Facebook is the epicenter of all social interaction. Next year, it might be something else. The point is that the web now gives everybody a powerful stamp of endorsement. If your friends don't endorse the movie, the video game, the political candidate, the car, then neither will you. (That sound you hear is Roger Ebert losing his relevance.)

As a marketer, your job is exactly the same in one way and completely different in another. You still need to influence people. You just have to do it in a different place and in a different way. It's not about shouting from the rooftops. It's about a new concept both shocking and hilarious in its irony: "perceived authenticity."

Do You Suffer from ISS?

Books could be written about the psychology of promotional campaigns--not the campaigns themselves, but the interaction between the organizations and agencies that create them. The most interesting phenomenon is what I call Interim Solution Syndrome, or ISS.

ISS often starts with a mixture of envy and aspiration. You want to launch a new service or product line. You want it to be just as good as what your competitors did last year, as entertaining as your favorite Super Bowl ad, as edgy as that YouTube video you got last week, as "out of the box" as that company's crazy booth at the show in Vegas.

There's only one problem: The budget isn't there.

This is the germ of ISS. You're stuck between wanting the highest quality but keeping it within budget. If it doesn't measure up to what your competitors did creatively, there'll be Hades to pay. But if it costs a fortune... well, there's no way to slip it by Accounting.

You know you've contracted full-fledged ISS when you start saying the following:

"We just need something for right now, then we can go back and change it."
"This is just a Phase I. We'll worry about that in a Phase II."
"We just need a band aid."
"We want something with great photography like this, but we can use stock."

Unfortunately, the reality sinks in mid-project. The "right now" solution doesn't look so hot. Phase II never comes. The stock photography is all over the map, and if you want to keep using it, the royalty fees are more than the photo shoot would have cost in the first place.

This is the evil of the Interim Solution. Psychologically, it's a salve. Realistically, it's a trap.

Agencies are complicit, because they take the job thinking they'll convince you to up the budget as you go. (Agencies are driven by their portfolios. They want to create work that makes clients happy. But secretly, they're more interested in creating work that wins awards and helps them get new clients.)

So what do you do? Plan ahead, secure the right budget and set the right expectations. Hah! Just kidding (can you hear the howls of laughter from marketing VPs on the verge?).

Just be realistic. As a marketer, don't expect to get a Nike ad for $10,000. As an agency, don't over-promise and under-deliver. Recognize an interim solution for what it is:

An interim solution.

Blog Post for Dummies

Note: This post was inspired by a bathroom ad for Trojan condoms. There, I said it.

Marketing 101 would dictate that one should never insult one's customers, right? Wrong.

Imagine this: A young entrepreneur sits in a glossy 14th-floor conference room and makes his pitch to three suits at a global publishing conglomerate. "Here's the thing," he explains. "People want to know how to do things. We publish a series on how to do stuff, in a really easy format. We could start with gardening."

"Great," the brass reply. "What should we call it?"

"Gardening for Dummies."

Boom! Fifteen jaws hit the floor in unison. "We can't insult our customers! Who's going to buy something that calls them a 'dummy'?"

As it turns out, quite a few (I think I just saw "Making Whole Wheat Pumpernickel Bread With Sesame Seeds For Dummies" at Barnes & Noble). Now Trojan is calling its customers "pigs" and telling them to evolve. I'll bet you anything it's working.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that General Motors go out tomorrow with an TV campaign called, "Hey, Moron, Buy a Chevy!" But in general, people are far more forgiving (and self-deprecating) than we give them credit for. It's another case of "focus" vs. "inclusion." When you have the opportunity to really cut through with 80 percent of your market, it can actually be worth the risk of alienating (or mildly offending) the other 20. Only an idiot would feel otherwise.