I heard a savvy quote a couple of days ago:
“A good jockey can’t make a bad horse win, but a bad jockey can make a good horse lose.”

That’s true of marketing. A company that produces mediocre products and delivers poor service won’t last long, even if it hires the best marketing minds in the world. The agency may end up with some great work to show off in their portfolio, but the client and their customers are no better off than when they started.

On the other hand, there are some wonderful organizations with dedicated, talented people offering unique products and services, but whose outdated brand is sending a negative signal to potential customers. Or perhaps they do no marketing at all, or the wrong kind of marketing, and are leaving millions of dollars on the table.

In these scenarios, the good horse (the company) is being ridden by a bad jockey (bad marketing). The good horse never gets the chance to win. The fans (customers) never get a chance to see what the horse can do.

That’s why smart, creative marketing is so important. It gives the good horses a chance to compete. Non-profits, small businesses, multinational corporations…if they’re good horses, they merit a great jockey. They deserve to run and win.

The recent Live Earth event has clearly set the bar higher for integrated-media, world-unifying events. Two billion viewers, nine million initial web streams with an anticipated total of 300 million video web streams expected before it’s all over.

From the standpoint of massive visibility with a friendly audience it was a success. But I’ve got grave doubts about the bigger questions of what good it really did—what net benefit to the planet was actually realized. The carbon footprint caused by the excessive, even conspicuous, consumption of energy was greater than all the light bulb changes and grocery bag re-use will ever be able to compensate.

Here at The Creative Alliance, we’d call that a bad ROI…that is, if the real goal was to save the planet. If, on the other hand, it was an effort to revive some flagging music careers (Madonna) or make a political point, maybe Live Earth achieved something.

This was a classic example of egos, ambition and showmanship replacing real substance. That’s the definition of an inauthentic brand.

What’s so sad is that the event’s organizers lost the chance to really change a paradigm by having the whole thing run digitally on the Web—no massive traffic jams to get people physically transported to events, no gratuitous light shows.

Put simply, this was an event that actually contradicted its own stated values. They preached to the converted and made fools of themselves to those all-important swing consumers. This is the kind of mistake big, terrible corporations and politicians are supposed to make.

Fortunately, many smaller organizations are learning how to truly make energy conservation a reality by having more online events and by taking other common-sense measures. The lesson here is that BIG almost always corrupts—it’s true of corporations, of religious organizations, politics and multimedia celebrity events. The real key to success is usually found on the small scale of life, in unrecognized acts of consistency, thoughtfulness and ingenuity.

That’s true of marketing and branding, too. Great customer experiences, thoughtful expressions of gratitude for a client’s business, meaningful investments in the community. These are the virtues of a truly great organization and an authentic brand.

Today’s guest installment comes from graphic artist Dave Willis, who admits he caught a mild case of iPhone fever.

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Well, the Great Product Launch of 2007 is behind us, and a lot has been said and written about the iPhone. So let’s talk for a minute not about the wondrous new toy itself, but about the smart PR behind it all.

Apple’s rumored 500,000 to 700,000 iPhone sales over their first weekend were driven not only by traditional marketing tactics like big advertising campaigns but in great part by generating an infectious buzz among consumers and the media. Of course, Apple has a great advantage—swarms of loyal fans just dying to see what they’ll come out with next. But Apple earned that advantage in large part by developing products that are truly groundbreaking, elegant in design and are user-friendly to the extreme.

So taking advantage of their position of strength, Apple wisely let frenzied consumers, giddy reporters and the blogosphere at large do much of the talking—a bunch of third-party endorsements for a product no one had even seen, generating a buzz louder than anything Apple could have achieved in the voice of its own marketing department. In fact, too much “sell” from the Apple folks could probably have dampened the excitement—having exactly the opposite of the intended effect.

I’d say this a great example of using the right PR and marketing tools at the right time, and an amazing example of how a strong brand with fanatical customers can reduce a company’s marketing spend. So maybe it’s worth the effort to do that branding/loyalty-building stuff after all…

-Dave Willis

As a marketing, PR and design firm, The Creative Alliance is home to experts on many aspects of each of these subjects. I’ll plan to start adding their voices to my own in this blog space, since it’s the combination of all our talents here that makes us great. Our first guest installment comes from Barbara Fusco, PR specialist and client services manager, with thoughts on the Fourth of July and communicating with customers and prospects.

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What did you do on the Fourth? For most of us, I’d hazard to guess it was some mix of a barbecue, a parade, perhaps, some time in the sun, fireworks, with a little red-white-and-blue bunting thrown in for good measure. It requires no special genius to divine, of course – that’s the thing about the Fourth, and other national holidays. They represent some of the increasingly few times that the U.S. population shares a kind of communal experience.

Throughout our history, in fact, the Fourth has been leveraged to spread messages among the populace. The launching of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad on July 4, 1828 was a forceful way of making people feel good about the march of technology, tying it to our most patriotic holiday. (Ninety-year-old Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, laid the cornerstone.) By selecting the Fourth of July, 1946 to grant independence to the Philippines, an American colony since 1899, the country aimed to shore up its image as a globally beneficent leader.

In a communications context, a widely-shared experience like the Fourth is actually a powerful reminder of the decidedly fragmented environment in which we work and live. Now more than ever, the magic is in the mix – the marketing mix. Print communications, in their myriad formats, for general and highly-targeted audiences; websites – macro and micro; community events; merchandising; outdoor advertising; PR – they’re all essential at different times and different ways to reach our customers and prospects when they’re not conveniently lined up on Main Street to hear what we, as marketers and communicators, have to say.

-Barbara Fusco