When Did You Last See A Really Good Ad? (Introducing The Adcrafter.)

While my brand and marketing consultancy, Cohesion, continues its work in marketing and brand research, strategy and messaging, I have, for some time, continued to concept and write roughly 10 print advertising campaigns a year, along with a smattering of radio, outdoor and TV work. Most of this work has stemmed from my background as a creative director and copywriter in the advertising agency business. A career which several longtime clients have continued to leverage for creative work.

I wrote and concepted the above outdoor advertising for Volvo, advertising that went on to win a Clio and, sell a whole bunch of Volvos. I’ve also had the good fortune of being featured in the Creative Black Book, PRINT, CA, and winning dozens of ADDY’s, and more than 60 TAM awards.

But for the past several years, that work has been more of a ‘passion project’ than a true business focus.

Watching through the strategic lens of Cohesion during the past several years, however, I’ve witnessed an increasing ‘digital marketing focus’ which, while appropriate from a priority standpoint, is killing the quality and effectiveness of traditional advertising in mediums such as print, outdoor and radio — mediums still important and critical to many companies. Mediums which function and behave differently than web and digital. Mediums which, unfortunately, no longer receive the attention (or craftsmanship) they deserve.

Which is why we recently launched, ‘The Ad Crafter, a division of Cohesion.’ I’ll serve as creative director and copywriter to develop and craft better ads for a short list of clients. We’ll be using in-house creatives, plus a short list of nationally recognized art directors and writers with whom I’ve worked in the past.

We’re not interested in becoming an agency, a design firm or other type of creative services firm…simply makers of fine advertising. All developed from the umbrella of Cohesion, a nationally recognized strategy firm. To learn more about The Ad Crafter, please visit:http://theadcrafter.carbonmade.com

To put our expertise to work for your business, simply give me a call at (636) 530-3670, or email me at bcreath@cohesioncompany.com.

The 3 Types of Marketing Firms. (A few words on focus.)

One of the big knocks against marketing firms is that far too many try to be all things to all prospects. For the untrained and/or novice client, this can be an issue. Either in the form of “they’re really all kind of alike to me” or perhaps worse, “don’t all of them do all that stuff?”

This post isn’t about specific disciplines, but rather about discussing the core, driving philosophy behind a marketing firm. For those purchasing marketing services, it’s important to know what kind of firm you’re in the market for — and what kind of firm you’ll be most comfortable with as you engage in any kind of marketing effort. In my nearly 30 years in the business, as much as things have changed, I can still identify three (3) types of marketing firms, which I have labeled below:

RESELLERS: The origin of the word agency comes from the term ‘agent,’ a firm whose primary service was to ‘resell’ media and hopefully, add a little strategic value to that sale along the way. Today, you’ll find this type of firm in the form of agencies that repackage and resell all kinds of private-label services and products.

MANUFACTURERS: I’ll put most agencies and firms in this model. Here, you’ll find companies that assemble internal staff the same way Henry Ford did. Often selling their services by the hour, these firms are built to make things. Ads. Websites. Facebook pages.

ARCHITECTS: (Of which, my firm is one.) These firms, at least the very best ones, exist to provide strategic direction and initial development. They are not built to deliver any one tactic, so their solutions are based on the ‘best possible’ outcome…not just those with which they have the most experience.

Semantics, you say? Yes, I suppose so. But important distinctions. Just ask anyone who has hired one type of firm thinking (or hoping) they were buying one of the other two.

Of course, most firms have aspects of more than one of the three types listed above. (I know we tip slightly into the manufacturing realm.) The big question — and the one you should ask your current or prospective marketing firm right now — is:  Which one of these philosophies best describes the firm’s primary focus?

If they can’t commit to one, that’s a problem. If you, as a purchaser, can’t decided on which is most important to your business, that’s an even bigger issue.

(By the way, if you’re looking for a brand and marketing architect, I know a good one.)

While I’m working on my next post, I hope you’ll read about how Cohesion helps organizations build stronger messaging to increase consistency, lower cost and drive revenue, here.

Quick, What’s Your Message?

“We’re hoping the economy turns around sometime this year so we can work on crafting our message,” an anonymous VP of marketing said to me last week. That’s funny. The reason I contacted this company in the first place was because the lead salesperson (a good friend) told me what he — and the rest of the sales staff — need right now is, “the right story; the right message to tell clients and prospects.”

Marketing has been quick to respond to trimming fat from budgets. But in many cases, these same cuts are now beginning to tear into the meat and bone of an organization’s core message — of its brand and reputation. My salesperson friend says that in lieu of a defined message, he and his staff have been left to create their own. “I think it will be hard to unwind some of the ‘survival mode’ sales tactics we’ve developed by the seat of our pants during the past few months,” he says. “We really need to find and stick with a core message we can all live with — right now.”

We’ve run into this situation numerous time since the start of the recession: Well-intentioned companies that needed to cut marketing budgets, cut them across the board, rather than prioritizing. Strategic planning and core messaging needs vital to the existence of the company were often cut to save a few short-term tactics that management hoped would produce short-term sales. The result: Brands have been driven backwards, and short-term sales haven’t been all that great.

By the way, what’s your message? Has it been left to wither during the past few months? Is it consistent and cohesive at every management, marketing and sales level of your organization? Does it need to be re-crafted to fit a new and changing direction? Regardless of the money you intend to spend on marketing — now and into the future — you will still need the right message. In fact, the fewer dollars you spend, the better and more consistent your message needs to be.

Coincidentally, if you’re looking for a firm that can help you craft and platform that message, I do know a good one.

While I’m working on my next post, I hope you’ll read about how Cohesion helps organizations build stronger messaging to increase consistency, lower cost and drive growth, here.

The Numbers Don’t Lie. (They can’t tell the whole truth, either.)

In a 2009 Ad Age article titled, “Metric Madness: The Answer to Mathematical Failure Seems to Be More Math,” (registration required) brand and marketing veteran Al Ries says, “If you run a company by numbers alone, you’ll run it into the ground. You might be successful in the short term, but never in the long term, as the financial crisis demonstrates.”

Ries is concerned that the marketing community appears to be “drifting from the right to the left — from a right-brain approach to a left-brain approach.” He cites a prominent U.S. marketing executive who has held top marketing jobs at Procter & Gamble and other companies, as recently saying: “At its core, marketing is 70% math.”

Is measurement inherently bad for marketing? Of course not. It’s when measurement becomes a replacement for insight and experience that the problem begins. And today, more and more, that’s exactly what’s happening.

This is a deeper argument than one of science vs. art. Or even of logic vs. emotion. No, this is about the erosion of marketing wisdom. The enlightened integration of the right-brain and the left-brain. (Most humans I know are equipped with both.)

In an article published in this month’s Inc., leading corporate consultant, Charles Jacobs discusses how brain structure can impact business management: “Objective decision making is a myth. When the area of the brain responsible for logical thinking is activated, it also receives input from the area responsible for emotion. Without input from your feelings, you can’t think long term. You don’t learn from past experience; you can’t empathize. The more complex the problem, the more of the brain should come into play.”

Marketing wisdom accepts that an illogical thought can succeed. That counter-intuitive strategies can work. That some ideas cannot really be tested.

Marketing wisdom is not a replacement for measurement or analysis, but rather the totality of instinct, experience and observation, tempered by logic and data. You cannot google wisdom – it takes time and must be learned. Perhaps that’s why it’s no longer in style.

Marketing is still a business run by humans, for humans. To the dismay of marketing science, so is measurement. Which means, necessarily, that ‘the numbers’ are still open to interpretation, manipulation and sometimes, fraud. (Just ask Bernie Madoff’s accountant.)

Measurement for measurement’s sake is every bit as wasteful as creative for creative’s sake. Just because we can, does not necessarily mean that we should. I know of no company that ever measured its way out of an inferior marketing effort.

As we look to economic recovery, it’s critical to remember: Metrics are not the overarching context through which marketing decisions should be made. Wisdom is. It’s the thing most lacking in marketing today. And, the most valuable, too.

(By the way, if you’re in the market for a bit of wisdom, I know a firm that can help.)

While I’m working on my next post, I hope you’ll read about how Cohesion helps organizations build stronger messaging to increase consistency, lower cost and drive growth, here.

Business is Changing. (How relevant is yours?)

It’s the question on the minds of nearly every C-suite executive we talk with: Is our business (brand) as relevant as it should be?

It’s been our experience that most organizations are actually quite good at making and/or sourcing marketing materials. It’s when the challenge is developing and articulating comprehensive strategy that many companies struggle. The reality is that far too many companies lack a consistent and successful method for designing and maintaining positions for their brands, products and services.

Companies that have developed successful positions, tend to have one thing in common: Before the first tactical thought begins, these companies concentrate their marketing focus on structure, strategy and messaging. Not coincidentally, these three (3) critical elements are the focus of our business, as well.

If you’d like to help your organization broaden the practices of brand strategy, positioning and messaging beyond marketing — and into comprehensive, organization-wide internal and external efforts, I know a firm that can help.

While I’m working on my next post, I hope you’ll read about how Cohesion helps organizations develop more relevant and differentiated positions, here.

Marketing Gurus Are Giving The Really Good Ones A Bad Name.

Have you noticed an increase in the number of marketing gurus? Geniuses, too. Perhaps you’ve also noticed that these labels are often self-proclaimed, or bestowed by a book publisher or publicity firm. Funny. The smartest people I’ve ever met in marketing never considered themselves gurus, or geniuses. Then again, they were too busy successfully practicing the craft of marketing with real businesses to consider such fodder.

Practicing? Yes, the business of marketing is a practice. Tempered by the fires of time and experience. Integral to a commercial enterprise. The business of being a guru, is about…well, I’m not really sure what it’s about.

As this post is written, Google returns 751,000,000 results for “marketing” books. Some are seminal. Some are important. The majority are not. But increasingly, our culture embraces any kind of celebrity–warranted by deed, or not. And the realm of marketing is no stranger to this trend. Unfortunately, as more people seek ‘guru’ status and vie for attention, the points of view they espouse have become increasingly obscure, and in many cases, simply wrong.

A business writer once referred to me as a strategy guru. Back then I laughed. Today, I denounce my title.

As the adage goes, “those who can’t, teach.” Apparently, they also write books. And give seminars. And speak at conferences. Problem is, building real brands and real businesses is a bit more challenging than delivering a PowerPoint to 30 people at the Dayton Ramada Inn.

Nope, for my money (and I hope yours), give me the practitioner. The one who folds trends and new points of view into a long history of marketing perspective. The one who can think and do. The really good one, not the guru.

(By the way, if you need strong marketing practitioners for your business and brands, I know a firm that can help.)

While I’m working on my next post, I hope you’ll read about how Cohesion helps organizations build stronger messaging to increase consistency, lower cost and drive growth, here.

Brands Are Dead. (Really?)

[Originally posted on May 18, 2009]

“Brands Are Dead,” according to Jonathan Salem Baskin, who wrote, “Branding Only Works On Cattle.”

In a post from the blog, ‘Business Pundit,’ Mr. Baskin says, among other things, “Nobody carries brands around in their heads. Nobody has a relationship with a brand. Or lives a brand lifestyle. Brands aren’t conversations, and they’re not bought, possessed, or coveted. Companies don’t own them. Neither do consumers or shareholders.”

Funny. As I drove from Walmart through McDonald’s to the Apple Store the other day, I could have sworn he was wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a guy playing devil’s advocate to sell a few books; but c’mon, dead?

No, brands aren’t dead. Placing a unique label on something to: a) claim ownership over it, and b) differentiate it from similar items won’t die any time soon. But with any luck, the term branding will.

For the past 15 years or so, I have watched as marketing directors, CFOs, CEOs, ad agencies, design firms and others shifted from talking about brands in the abstract to branding in the specific. Branding was put into the hands of those who only saw (or perhaps understood) its tactical manifestations: colors, logos, taglines, ads, websites, etc. The more this happened, the more these surface items became a proxy for the brand itself. The terms ‘brand’ and ‘branding’ came to be used interchangeably. As this deterioration took place, ‘branding’ became synonymous with fluff. And rightly so. Problem is, this artificial concept of branding never had anything to do with what a true brand is in the first place.

As the economy grew, non-marketing people saw a quick buck in what they understood branding to be. “Gimme a logo and a tagline and a few cool ads and we’ll go sell some stuff.” With no hope of a differentiated position. With no intention of investing in one. That’s not a brand. That’s a house of cards.

You can’t brand a brand. You can position it. You can advertise it. You can publicize it. You can even promote it. But ‘brand’ is a noun, not a verb. It is the essence of a company, a product, a service — a shortcut path to all of the emotional and logical benefits a thing possesses.

Says Mr. Baskin, “…brands are simply irrelevant in a world wherein people know that one airplane seat looks like another, different clothes and PCs are made in the same factories overseas, and that most companies expect customers to help themselves. Or when price and availability matter.” True brands carry an emotional appeal — something that Mr. Baskin’s argument does not. (He does know that human beings are involved here, doesn’t he?)

Interestingly, true brands — those built for the right reasons that stand for the right things — are on the verge of a major renaissance (but that’s a post to come).

While I’m working on my next post, I hope you’ll read about how Cohesion helps organizations build stronger messaging to increase consistency, lower cost and drive growth, here.

The Business of Complexity: How to Leverage Change.

After more than a decade of consulting to some of the country’s largest organizations, Cohesion’s approach has been refined to accommodate and leverage the most difficult positioning and messaging obstacle of all: Complexity. The kind of complexity that often comes from acquisition, multiple businesses and brands, shifting categories, and more.

Cohesion uses research to build stronger positioning and in the end, to create more efficient and cohesivemessaging. To build broad, strategic communication platforms that can be utilized by an entire organization, not just marketing and sales.

“For our organization, Cohesion developed a core strategy, and then developed specific positioning and messaging that helped us optimize the value of the whole rather than only the value of the individual pieces/divisions/brands, etc.,” says Rob Shively, former president of SM&P Utility Resources, Inc.

Many times, Change is the trigger that forces an organization to address complexity. Said one Cohesion client in the life sciences business, “After 10 acquisitions and faced with a category that was changing on an almost daily basis, marketing just didn’t know what to say anymore.”

Here, Cohesion developed a positioning strategy that was flexible enough to evolve over time. Additionally, we created a Corporate Brand Platform inclusive of all positioning and messaging for this multinational company.

If your organization faces complexity, Cohesion can help build a more simplified path to differentiation and relevance. A path that can immediately begin saving you money and time; a path that can insure everyone understands where you are headed. To learn more about how Cohesion can support your efforts, contact Brian Creath at 636-530-3670, or email him, here.

“Your messaging is really bad and everyone is afraid to tell you.”

It happened a little less than a year ago, when we were engaged by a mid-sized company to help them build a new position for their entire (and very complex) business. Hired under the label of a ‘re-branding’ effort, Cohesion went to work: first to understand the issues and situation and then to develop a new positioning.

As we interviewed employees and partners, we began to uncover an interesting theme: the people that knew this company well had a relatively clear (and common) understanding of what it was and what it could be. The problem: absolutely no one had ever taken the time to develop a way to articulate that understanding. In other words, no one knew how to talk about this company and its products — they had no way to tell its story. Worse yet, senior management didn’t believe they had a messaging problem – they wanted to believe it was solely a positioning problem.

Our solution: 1) Quickly solve the positioning issue, which was little more (in this instance) than stripping a really sound idea of the poor messaging that surrounded it, and then, 2) Address the more complex issue of delivering a detailed messaging platform disguised as a positioning effort.

The result: A re-branding effort that really wasn’t one at all, but rather, was a complex (yet concise) architecture of how every internal and external audience should be addressed, through the myriad of situations and issues this company faces. A tool and approach that this company now uses successfully on a day-to-day basis.

This is the work of Cohesion. If we can do it for them, just imagine what we can do for you.

‘Tis The Season. (For strategic planning.)

As this difficult economic year winds to a close, many companies will tell you they are happy to have simply survived. But as CEO strategist Dr. Rick Johnson writes in a recent article, “…now is not the time to dig deeper into the bunker. Now is the time to start thinking about revisiting your vision.”

In, “It’s Time to Revisit Strategy,” Johnson talks about the critical need for strategic planning: “A strategic plan is not a business plan and it is not the same as your annual budget with departmental objectives. However, these vehicles become a part of the tactical support for meeting strategic objectives once the strategic plan has been approved and implemented. To be successful in this century requires a heightened sense of awareness about what is going on both inside and outside of the business.”

But many organizations don’t readily see the value of strategic planning when change is rapid and profits are lean. Says Johnson, “Executive teams become so immersed in the day-to-day activities of running the business during a recession that strategic thinking with respect to long term planning is often not a priority. However, effective leaders recognize the value of strategic thinking backed up by a strategic plan.”

At Cohesion, we’ve watched as companies have come to view strategic planning as either “outdated” or something they will “get around to later.” But as Johnson points out, the need is more urgent — and more organic: “Strategic planning is a disciplined effort to support fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does and why it does it, with a focus on where it wants to go and how it is going to get there.”

As Cohesion shifts its model from ‘agency’ to ‘messaging company,’ more and more companies are seeking our strategic planning services. As part of an overall approach, Cohesion helps organizations develop insightful and practical strategic foundation in three phases:

1. Strategic Direction: Refine current business, brand and marketing strategy (based on the timing of your fiscal year), and lay the groundwork for next year’s plan.
2. Positioning/Messaging Direction: Refine the various brand, service and product positioning and messaging needs for your organization.
3. Tactical Direction: Based on your organization’s needs, develop specific messaging and tactical templates for internal execution — or turnkey development for you.

Should your organization update its strategic plan? From a positioning and messaging standpoint, are you living and driving your core purpose? Are you working toward every business and brand goal you’ve planned? If not, perhaps you could use a little help getting there?

While I’m working on my next post, I hope you’ll browse the archives. I also hope you’ll visit Cohesion to find out how we help organizations build stronger messaging to increase consistency, lower cost and drive growth.