Your Baby Is Ugly (and Why You Need To Hear It)

Posted on February 22, 2011 by admin

The marketing industry, like most industries, has some funny quirks. One of the quirks I find most interesting is how few business owners and marketing managers really, really want to hear the truth from their advertising agency.

You see, TONS of business owners understand how a marketing agency can help them increase sales, strengthen their brand and all of that other marketing stuff we agencies specialize in. The problem is many of those business owners treat agencies like a servant rather than a collaborative, strategic partner. They don’t need new ideas, they just need people who can keep doing the work “the way it’s always been done.”

Sure, they’ll say that they want to do whatever it takes to “increase their market share” or “build their brand reputation on Facebook,” but they refuse to budge when you point out that their website from 2003 probably needs an upgrade. Or they might insist that they want their materials updated with a new look, new colors, etc., but they demand that you leave the logo unchanged because “everybody knows/loves/has tattoos of that logo.”

Here’s the problem with that approach – a good agency should be hired for its expertise and creativity, not for its ability to keep making ugly brochures and forgettable TV spots.

Unfortunately, these business owners are the people who don’t realize their baby—or in this case, their business’s marketing approach—is ugly. And because no one has ever told them so, they never realize they need to fix it (even though, unlike an ugly baby, a bad marketing approach CAN be fixed). Instead, people just make fun of them behind their backs and the business owners never know there’s an issue.

So here’s our advice to you business owners. Make sure you can trust your agency to be honest with you. Hearing that your baby is ugly might not be your favorite news flash of the day, but it’s better than working with someone who doesn’t have the guts to tell you the truth. Besides, one of these days somebody is going to see your baby and react like this.

Wouldn’t your rather work with an agency that helps you fix the problem before that happens?

-Mike B.

Photo c/o AntToeKnee Lacey. Thanks!

The Weather Where I Live

Posted on February 20, 2011 by admin

I live in a quiet neighborhood north of Lincoln High in Sioux Falls, in Minnehaha county, in the Sioux Falls DMA (as defined by A.C. Nielsen), in the great state of South Dakota, on the Northern Plains of the Midwest, pretty much smack-dab in the middle of the United States of America, not far from the geographical center of North America.

But I do not live in Oz or Neverland or Atlantis or Bridgadoon. No, those are all mythical or fictional places, much like KELOLAND. Frankly, I like South Dakota, and while our weather often gets tough, it’s never as bad as what the TV describes in KELOLAND. KELOLAND must be a God forsaken place, constantly battered by storms and pestilence, a place so stark and foreboding they never speak of weather, only storms. I hear it’s that way on Jupiter, too.

As the neatly-coiffed weatherman talks of deep and treacherous snow in Northern KELOLAND and ice and freezing rain in Southeast KELOLAND, I thank my lucky stars I live here in eastern South Dakota where we only got a couple inches of sleet.

- Jim Mathis

Is Your Strategy Kaleidoscopic?

Posted on February 15, 2011 by admin

The other night I had an interesting dream.

In the dream, I was looking through a kaleidoscope. The first thing I looked at was basically a pile of gorgeous rocks and gems. The image was bursting with all kinds of colors and shapes and turning the kaleidoscope made it all look even more stunning.

The second thing I looked at was about as bland and boring as it gets. It was a pile of brown (and only brown) rocks, and as I turned the kaleidoscope nothing really changed at all. I just saw different shapes of brown.

I realized (in my dream, no less) that there was a marketing lesson tucked into my bizarre vision, and that lesson is this: No matter how you try to fancy it up, a boring, bland idea will always be a boring, bland idea.

If your idea is simply doing what has already been done before and it’s as generic as an idea can be, odds are it isn’t going to have much of an impact. Even an array of kaleidoscopic elements—a “viral” campaign, an “innovative” foursquare component, a (pointless) smartphone app—won’t change the fact that the campaign concept or the idea being marketed is, like a pile of brown rocks, generally unappealing.

The important thing is to make sure you pull together a pile of beautiful gems and stones (i.e. – great ideas) before the first turn of the kaleidoscope. From there, just like a twisting kaleidoscope, the right strategy will make your great ideas stand out brilliantly.

And then everybody’s happy.

-Mike B.

Photo by Clyde Robinson. Thanks Clyde!