Lairig Marketing

Failure Is Wrong and Wrong Is Failure (Part 2 of 2)

In Part 1 of this (very short) series, we looked at the drivel written about “failure,” suggesting everyone but the Zuckerbergs of the world can safely ignore it (and not to feel bad about it, because the Zuckerbergs of the world already tune out such nonsense).

Today’s topic does, however, apply to the masses. It springs from the false conclusion that some hack bloggers/journalists make that failure and “mistakes” are one and the same thing. Let’s go to the ultimate business source, American Express’s “OPEN Forum” for some real-life examples.

From a blog post titled, “Top 5 Mistakes Small Businesses Make,” look at these beauties:

- Spending too much or too little money
- Ignoring the Internet or social media
- Forgetting the customer comes first

Here are a couple from another, “4 Mistakes That Can Cripple Your Business”:

- Spending too much on business products and services
- Proceeding without a plan

(An aside: does any actual business owner click on an over-the-top headline like that one?)

And some more gems from “Groundhog Day: Ten Mistakes That Small Businesses Make Over And Over”:

- Lack of focus on what your business does
- Hiring the wrong people

Really? These are “mistakes”? Really?!?

An example of a mistake would be deciding to read any of those three posts to completion. These aren't mistakes. We have gone beyond, into the realm of “wrong.” Lack of focus on your business? Or your customers? Not having a plan?

These are all errors – errors of judgment, errors of attention, of experience, of self-awareness, of measurement. They will guide you, or your employees, to do things wrong...or do the wrong things.

And that is the “failure” you should be concerned about.

But don’t expect to read about on the OPEN Forum, or anywhere else. Because simple advice to “just stop" doing these things won't help. Unless you address these issues early in employees’ careers, they will just plod on, doing wrong and being wrong.

They will be the last ones to know. Which is the worst wrong of all.

It’s Back. It’s Back. “Bravely.”

We flipped a coin, and lost. Lairig Marketing is back. Fifty days have passed since we closed up the blog shop, early last December. In all that time, absolutely nothing new has been written in the marketing-sphere.

In fact, it has gone exactly as we said it would in 2011’s final post: All Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, and P&G. And, oh yeah, for the sixth year in a row, this will be The Year of Mobile.

It is so bad, we’ve unsubscribed from Ad Age and AdWeek. If it weren’t for George Parker, there would be no reason to open the computer each morning.

Maybe it’s time to get an academic perspective on marketing. Let’s consult with the #1-rated Marketing MBA program in the U.S. – Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.

Oops.

Last summer, Kellogg’s new dean embarked on a long journey to remake the school. And just like the “new CMO” phenomenon we see so often in the private sector, she spearheaded the development of a new marketing campaign. Complete with a new tagline.

Ready?

“Think Bravely.”

Grammatically suspect, Kellogg’s tagline is one part derivative (see: Apple, circa 1997), and one part off-kilter. As cynical as this might sound, people don’t get an MBA for the experience. The school each one chooses is based on which will deliver the best outcome. How would a Kellogg committee of its best and brightest miss this?

Lead Bravely, maybe. Or Manage Bravely. Or Get Rich Bravely. Whatever.

The "Kellogg Marketing Makeover" team didn’t stop at just a tagline. A manifesto was developed, along with a video touting the school’s new point of view. It would seem the team consulted the famous bullshit generator.

Here is Kellogg’s new brand mantra: “We believe business can be bravely led [ed.: then why not Lead Bravely as the tagline?], passionately collaborative, and world changing.”

They couldn’t stop themselves. Alongside the new brand video is this: “Intellectually Vibrant. Innovative. Socially Engaged.” (Can a person be engaged without being social?)

Perhaps in a later post, we’ll dissect the buzzword-filled, nonintuitive and often contradictory script for the “Think Bravely” video. Or how, in another video on Kellogg’s website, the dean summarizes the new brand essence as “thinking outside the box,” a term so old it now induces derisive laughter when said in a business setting.

For now, though, let’s end with this question: Why didn’t the dean focus on the data that indicates less than one of every five Kellogg MBA grads takes a job in Marketing?

We have enough “innovators” and “collaborators.” What we don’t have enough of are “brave” marketers.

Why Unemployment Will Never Fall Below 8%. Ever Again.

Corporate executives have finally eaten Marketing’s cooking. At last they appreciate what it is that Marketing does – get customers to fall for dubious claims – so now these managers believe they can run their hiring process the same way. How ironic that the shadiest job specifications are for the Marketing department.

Case in point – a job spec for a Director of Marketing at Logicworks, a managed hosting company. Here are excerpts from every line item posted for this opportunity:

"The Director of Marketing will be responsible for the following activities and initiatives:

Product Launches – …finalizing and implementing a more formal product launch process to ensure standardized collateral…

Marketing Events – Plan and execute ongoing events ranging from thought-leadership dinners and tech meet-ups to social gatherings and breakfast presentations...Manage end-to-end…from concept to logistics to post-event lead analysis.

Web Site Maintenance – …ensuring press releases, new product promotions and other announcements are added to the website in a timely and consistent manner.

Collateral Development – Provide copywriting and layout guidance to graphic designers…

Google – …manage the company’s PPC campaigns…optimize the campaigns…implement landing pages that drive higher conversion rates.

Public Relations – …coordinate PR activities with company executives and Sales

Blogs and Social Media – Contribute content and manage the daily production and posting of content for company blogs and social media outlets…

Partner Marketing – Assist in the negotiation and management of joint marketing budgets…

Competitive Intelligence – Maintain close tabs on Logicworks’ key competitors…"

So far, I’d say we are looking at approximately four different people. But it gets better. Check out these excerpts from “Desired Skills & Experience”:

"The Director of Marketing should possess a minimum of five years of hands-on marketing experience in a fast-paced entrepreneurial environment, preferably in the Complex Managed Hosting…arena."

See that? The industry itself has barely been around that long, but you should have already perfected every f*cking aspect of marketing within it. But we’re still not done. The spec includes ONE MORE section redundantly called “Preferred Experience,” with Disney World stuff like this:

"- CRM management and reporting
- Email database management
- Channel marketing
- Working knowledge of the Adobe Creative Suite…and Drupal CMS is a benefit."

That would be more than a “benefit” I would say. More like a fanstasy.

If there is someone who indeed fits every aspect of this profile, and is currently employed, they are already making four times what Logicworks would pay him. (If he is currently unemployed, he wouldn’t even be considered, of course.)

Welcome to the “new normal” for careers in Marketing. This is a job spec for God. Someone who walks on water.

And who will drown trying to get just half of the items on this list accomplished.

Be A Good Marketer: Watch This

In one week another semester begins. It reminds me of the advice I will give the students that first night, which dovetails nicely with the “observation” theme from yesterday’s post.

What I will tell the students, and what I offer today’s readers of Lairig Marketing, is this counsel: pick up your head and look around, all day long. Here are some ideas you can adopt for September.

Real Grocery Shopping
Go to a regular grocery store (not Whole Foods, not the corner bodega). Focus about 5% of your energy on your own shopping and the rest on things like these:

• What is the gender and age make-up of shoppers?
• How many have a smartphone out, scanning QR codes or price comparing on the Web?
• Look in their carts – are 25% of the goods private label?
• At the register, what type of coupon activity is there?

Look Wayyyy Up
For those in urban areas or with highway commutes, take in the billboard advertising for a change:

• What types of companies are advertising – are they the same as the ones on TV?
• How many ads use a true call to action? What kind?
• What percentage of billboards are the digital type?

Look Wayyyy Down
On the bus, subway, in the airport gate area, lunch room…wherever you can find people sitting down, see what they are doing to keep themselves occupied:

• How many have smartphones out and are not making calls?
• What percentage of those in question #1 are playing games? Angry Birds?
• How many are reading and what – Kindles, newspapers, magazines?
• How many iPads do you see?

What Am I Wearing
Really pay attention to what people are wearing (you can combine this one with the first and third examples above):

• How many are in suits/traditional business wear (male and female)?
• What are the top three types of shirts you see? Are men's shirttails in or out?
• What are the top three types of footwear you see?
• Compare all your observations to the fashion magazines…

The ideas in each of these are just starters, ways to get you to forget your own behavior and focus on everyone else. And to give you a better sense of “real world” activity that never, ever seems to jibe with the market research that inundates us with the final word on this or that marketing topic.

Take off the blinders. They are bound to give you the wrong look.

What’s In Your Resume – Part 4 of 4

Because Fast Friday Follow-up is almost here, we’ll conclude this short series on marketing resumes with today’s post (gratuitous link to Part 3 yesterday here).

The biggest news in Marketing today will be if someone DOES NOT launch a daily deals company. We are beyond inundated. This might lead a resume screener to think that “daily deals” would be a useful search term.

Think again.

Prioritizing marketing candidates who tout their ability to give your product or service away seems a bit oxymoronic. If your company is having trouble giving stuff away, there are probably bigger issues to solve for at the moment. A better search term? “Value.”

A candidate with a track record of positioning products at full value and getting high customer response is a better, um, value, for your business. Someone who can make it crystal clear the value you offer: what it is you do better than the competition, and what the customer gets in return (higher quality, more customer satisfaction, more revenue, etc.).

We’ve just described the concept of “value proposition.” Type those two terms into the search box and invite anyone who pops up in the results over for a chat.

This four-part series has been written mostly from the viewpoint of the resume screener/hiring manager, but hopefully the mirror image is obvious to those putting together their marketing credentials. For either side, the marketing resume keyword focus should be on business-based, multichannel, results-oriented, value-based themes.

Not as trendy as “innovative Groupon daily deal mobile marketer” perhaps. But way more useful.

What’s In Your Resume – Part 3 of Many

A crucial part of marketing is the media or channels deployed to reach customers. This yields another set of “search terms” for marketers to consider when screening resumes online. (If you missed the first two parts of this series, look here and here.)

One overly popular channel we’ve discussed many times before on Lairig Marketing is mobile advertising. Given the penetration of smartphones, the mega-gazillions of phone apps downloaded each minute, and the percentage of people who “walk while surfing,” a job candidate would be a fool not to pepper her resume with mobile this and mobile that, no?

No. Here are two counterpoints to consider.

First, for all the trade-press ink (or pixels) spilled on the topic of mobile marketing, it still hasn’t reached anywhere near double-digit percentage of marketers’ budgets. (Funny, isn’t it, how the same people who complain about “annoying banner ads” on a nice 14-inch laptop screen [leading to a 0.06% average click-thru rate] believe the experience will be better and more successful for marketers on a 3.5-inch screen.)

Second, searching for experience on a single channel takes us right back to the “one-trick pony” problem discussed in Part 1. What company can survive on a single customer touch point? What new marketing cycle was invented in the past couple of years that skips over the awareness and consideration and preference phases?

Better candidates are going to have channel experience reflected in keywords like these:

• Integrated marketing, marketing mix, multi-touch or multi-channel, touch point cadence, customer journey, campaign management, channel strategy

Hiring managers who screen marketing candidates on these “search terms” will end up having meaningful interviews with rich conversation. At the least, it beats the hell out of trying to talk to someone who is staring at her hand.

Tomorrow: we wrap up this series with a “Daily Deal!”

What’s In Your Resume – Part 2 of Many

In the first post of this marketing resume series, we discussed how marketers using online resume screeners should search for “business” skill sets rather than one-off applications like “Groupon.” (And, by implication, the former is what job seekers should bulk up their resumes with.)

Next up: A term that has had every last ounce of blood drained from it. “Innovation.”

The term used to refer to some completely new thing introduced to the market – like an mp3 player, a hybrid car, energy efficient light bulbs. Yet every single day there is another charlatan blogging to the tune of “ten killer surefire ways to be innovative.”

What happy horseshit it all is. If innovation were that prescriptive and common, the U.S. GDP growth rate would be on the order of 20%, rather than 2%. Our landfills would be piled high to the moon, as we kept throwing out instantly obsolete goods.

The truth of the matter is this: the day-to-day need in marketing is for people to get the products and services WE ALREADY HAVE purchased more often. Go ask any business owner what his or her #1 goal is – more revenue.

The terms you want to see in a resume look like these:

Increased, improved, successfully launched, boosted response rates, doubled market share, reduced churn…

In fact, “innovation” should be the last thing a hirer looks for since, by definition, the term should show up less than 1% of the time.

Tomorrow: a look at this blog's long-time friend “mobile marketing.”

What’s In Your Resume – Part 1 of Many

With apologies to the folks at Capital One…think of your resume indeed like a wallet. You don’t use it all the time, but when you do, the right stuff better be in it.

An article in an IT newsletter showed how the online career site, Dice (no relation to Andrew Clay), can be used to divine emerging in-demand tech skills by seeing what search terms employers use on dice.com. Turns out that “iRise,” which believe it or not is NOT a new alarm clock from Apple, is #1.

An IT pro with iRise experience, therefore, would be wise to include the term on his or her resume. And so on, down the list of top search terms.

There is no Dice for marketing, so Lairig Marketing will hypothesize how this “search term indicator” would work in our world. However, given the parallel universe some marketers live in, we are forced to set it up as such:

• What terms marketing employers are looking for in candidates’ resumes

Versus

• What terms marketing employers SHOULD BE looking for in candidates’ resumes

First up: “Groupon” versus “Business”

By choosing the first search term (for which you can insert any similar shiny new toy similar to Groupon), marketers ensure they will attract one-trick ponies and trend huggers. After the first Groupon deal is launched, these candidates would have nearly zero value.

By looking for candidates who use terms like “business strategy,” “business acumen,” “business outcomes,” etc., marketers will attract candidates who can link marketing strategy to business strategy, who know the difference between revenue and profit, who can run a true ROI calculation.

Tomorrow: a look at the buzzwordy search term “innovation.”

Don’t Passover Marketing Experience

A wise old rabbi came to the Seder meal, and spoke at length, and in great detail, about the history of the Passover observance. Those in attendance listened intently to the rabbi, often nodding affirmatively at his allegories, deep knowledge of history, and the wisdom of his point of view.

Even better, most of the Jewish and non-Jewish listeners came away with some new insights. Firstly, the wise old rabbi suggested that the modern Passover Seder focuses too much on being a secular celebration of the exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt. Secondly, the often-used reference to a “Jewish people” is incorrect when it comes to the exodus, since the rabbi told us there were, technically, no Jews on the planet at the time.

Where are the wise old rabbis of marketing?

You can be wise, but you can’t be old. Over 45 years of age, unless you have a crack at the top of the agency pyramid (where “Mad Men” still exist), you have been put out to pasture. The Great Recession was a great excuse to accelerate the “exodus,” if you will.

Now, the wise old rabbis of marketing are freelancing and/or running one-person consulting shops, weeping when they come across the hundredth blog in two weeks titled, “5 Things Your Company Should Be Doing On Facebook, Right Now!”

The economy, at least in agency land, is back, and hiring is underway. Articles and blog posts with tips on how to “hire the best” are back also. All running counter to the notion of experience. In fact, last week AdAge ran one from the Antony Young, the CEO of Optimedia, who said the hell with experience – hire someone with “enthusiasm.”

Wow.

We have reduced the field of marketing to nothing but “enthusiasm.”

On the one hand, he could be right. Data released by the GMAT folks reveal that the lowest scores on the test come from undergraduates majoring in – drum roll – MARKETING. Dead last. Even the Humanities guys kicked our butts.

On the other hand, though, the field of Marketing is f*cked if it doesn’t soon recognize its experience problem. A few “grey heads” in the corner office isn’t the solution.

It is long past time to find the wise old rabbis of marketing, and have them mentor the Lost Generation.

A Great Question For Your Next Marketing Interview

Shocking. Frustrating. Devastating. Not enough words to describe the New York Rangers double-overtime loss to the Washington Capitals. After battling valiantly, a tiny breakdown on the Rangers part cost them the game.

The Caps Jason Chimera (what a last name!) flew down toward the left circle and forced a shot on goal. Defensemen Brain McCabe made a great play, partially blocking the shot. The puck bounced and slid toward the prone Ranger goalie, Henrik Lundqvist. Trailing the play was Marian Gaborik, an overpriced player who scored his first goal in a blue moon earlier in the game.

As the puck slid to within two feet of Lundqvist, who would have easily smothered it, Gaborik waved his stick at it. He half hit it. Chimera, who had wisely skated to the goal mouth, received the puck in his chest. It dropped to goal line. Chimera stood there alone, behind Lundqvist, the puck at his feet. Time stood still for Ranger fans the world over. A millisecond later, bam, Chimera stuffed the puck into the net.

Game over. And, if the Rangers lose Saturday and exit the series, this could become Marian Gaborik’s “Joe Pisarcik” moment.

What a nice interview question for your next marketing manager candidate. Show him or her a video replay, then ask: What two mental mistakes did Marian Gaborik make on the play?

Here is what you should hear.

Gaborik reacted as most players are taught to – a loose puck in front of a goalie should be swept away. But Gaborik’s first mental mistake was not adjusting to the environment at hand. With a better sense of awareness, he would have seen Lundqvist was on his way out to, freely and clearly, cover the puck. One more second, and the whistle would have blown for a faceoff.

Awareness and confidence, not only in his goalie, but in himself, would have changed his decision.

Mistake #2 came when Gaborik opted to swat the puck randomly. He plainly did not keep Chimera in his actual sight, or in his mental sight (“I don’t see him, but based on where I saw him last he is probably standing at the goal mouth.”). That’s what it means when someone says “heads up” play. Gaborik’s move was one of desperation.

If your interview candidate doesn’t catch mistake #1, that says he or she may be too much of a rigid thinker for your organization, unable to adjust to new information. If he or she doesn’t catch mistake #2, that indicates your candidate won’t be much of an asset to help you think ahead one or two steps.

If you hire this candidate, you can expect plenty of hard work. Just don’t expect the outcomes to be anything other than devastating. Heads up.