All Marketing Generalizations Are Obvious

I've long believed that marketing is harder than it looks, and for those of you reading this who are marketing professionals, suffice to say you have my deepest sympathy, respect, and affection.   (Readers who know me personally also know that I'm married to a senior advertising/marketing executive, so the "respect and affection" come from the heart.)

Despite all the stereotypes about wacky, non-conformist, fun-hound marketing people, yours is often not a path trod gaily.  Which brings me to:  What do I mean by "harder than it looks?"

Simply that the most brilliant campaigns often look blindingly obvious in hindsight.   Take the iconic Miller Lite campaign:  "Tastes great, less filling."  You could have thought of that, right?  Well, not so fast.  I once was acquainted with some of the people who produced that campaign and it was the product of blood, tears, and sweat, as they essentially had to  perform a perceptual lobotomy on a category (light, a/k/a low-calorie, beer) that was conventionally seen as the tasteless, pallid, low-octane choice of simps.

Marketing—and its most high-visibility component, advertising—can suffer the same unwarranted and unfair critique that the cliche has people throwing at abstract painting:  "I could have done that!"   And it's certainly true that there are few hard and fast rules of marketing, which is all about credibility, perception, positioning, esteem, and attitudes:  In other words, all about intangibles.

Some of the conventional advice about marketing isn't much better.  I'll never forget the moment in marketing class when I was studying for my MBA at NYU when the professor announced with severe gravity one of the most important principles of marketing:  "Make it easy for your customer to do business with you."

And for this I'm paying how much in tuition?

You now know as well why I write quite infrequently at "Adam Smith, Esq." about marketing.  There are few valid generalizations about it that aren't pluperfectly obvious to anyone who's thought about it even briefly, and "Adam Smith, Esq." is not about reciting obvious generalizations.

So today I'm not here to give you generalizations; I'm here to give you three specifics.  These are three things your firm can actually do.

• Free days at the client.  Take the lead partner, or better yet the whole team, working with a client and extend this offer:  "We'll spend a day or two—you tell us how long and set the schedule and agenda—at your offices meeting and talking with whomever you select, at no charge.  We want to get to know and really understand your business better and we're confident this would be a valuable investment of our time.  So you tell us who we're going to be meeting (it doesn't have to be, and indeed shouldn't be, limited to in-house counsel) and we'll show up with an open mind and a blank notebook."
  
  If this doesn't return multiples upon multiples of the cost of the billable time sacrificed, I would be stunned.
  
  
• McKinsey's 100-day rule.  I get no credit for this one, but it's brilliant, and brilliantly simple.   McKinsey has a list of firms it would like to work for, and any time one of them gets a new CEO, it waits one hundred days and then calls upon them to hear about what they've discovered and what their priorities are going to be for change and growth going forward.  Implicit is of course, "and we can help."  Why 100 days?  Because it's long enough to figure out what needs to be done but too soon to figure out how one's actually going to accomplish it.
  
  So henceforth the same 100-day rule should apply at your firm, but for "CEO" substitute "CEO or GC."
  
  
• The figure-skating judge analogy.  Next time your firm is competing for a significant piece of business, either in a formal review or otherwise, pretend it's an Olympic figure-skating competition.  Getting 9.7's across the board for competence, experience, depth of bench, etc., may sound great but they won't get you the gold:  They're table stakes.   To get the gold you truly have to stand out.
  
  Make sure your team understands it needs some 10's in this league. And to help focus their attention, remind them that actually there will be no silver or bronze; the second and third-place firms will go home completely empty-handed.

So good luck and Godspeed with these.  And let me know how they work for your firm.