by David Heitman
President of The Creative Alliance

Yogi Berra’s malapropism points to a great truth about organizational success, including a company’s marketing: it’s worth taking the time to plan. Getting an early start on the next great marketing idea isn’t much good if it’s going the wrong direction.

The word “strategic” has been so overused that I’ll try to avoid it here; but the concept is right. As someone once said, “You never go into battle without a map.” A clear understanding of the destination—asking what does success look like if we do marketing right?—is not an option unless you have a fortune in marketing dollars to burn through.

At the risk of over-simplification, posing that one question and then reverse engineering to get there is the key to marketing success. Throwing money or advertising or Twitter at a problem may work, but if your success is anything like my brackets in this year’s NCAA Basketball Tourney, that’s not much of a guarantee.

Planning doesn’t automatically guarantee success. It just minimizes the likelihood of failure.

That may sound a bit pessimistic, but there are many things we can’t control: macroeconomic forces, what your competitors will do, or what Miley Cyrus’s next haircut will look like.

What we can control is the elimination of unnecessary risk, excessive caution, reckless spending and boring brands. (Members of Congress, please take note.)

Planning is thus an insurance policy. It sharpens the edge of every marketing tool. It makes every ad dollar go farther. It empowers and equips employees to be advocates for the brand. It finds ways to add to the lifetime value of every customer.

Planning usually involves research, questioning assumptions and a vision of what success will look like. That takes a few days or weeks, but it is well worth it. All the tactics make sense and work more effectively after that initial investment of time and effort.

Then it’s showtime! A bias for action replaces a penchant to ponder. As Roger von Oech would say, it’s time to put off the artist’s beret and wear the warrior’s helmet.

Just make sure you’re on the right train.

by David Heitman
President of The Creative Alliance

Like many people, I’m a big fan of Leonardo da Vinci’s technical drawings. These visual intersections of art and science are fascinating to contemplate. This one in particular caught my attention as a metaphor for the work we do here at The Creative Alliance. It is a device Leonardo developed that converts circular motion into linear motion.

Da Vinci's slider device

That’s pretty much why clients hire us.

They are looking to direct the ideas and discussions, dreams and ambitions they have pondered at great length internally to us as an objective outside resource able to convert these circles of discussion into one linear direction of a vital brand and clear marketing direction.

Converting circular to linear.

This is not to disparage the “circular” part of the process, which is actually indispensable. It’s a process of vigorous debate, of refining of ideas and of making hard decisions about what a company wants to do and who its audience really is. Our job is to join in a few rounds of these circles, and then develop a linear approach to establishing goals and creating the strategies and tactics to get there.

In other words, there comes a time to end the circular discussions and choose a linear route. New clients that hire us instinctively know that this time has come. They are ready, as Stephen Covey would say, “to start with the end in mind.” Then, together, we reverse-engineer the most creative way possible to achieve that end.

Whether launching a new company, revitalizing a brand, or grabbing a bigger chunk of market share, the process is that of getting folks from where they are today to where they want to be tomorrow with da Vinci-like ingenuity.

By David Heitman
President of The Creative Alliance

The days of a company being held hostage to its ad agency media buyers and webmasters are over. We live in a user-generated, client-empowered era—one which has caused marketing firms like ours to adapt. I’m proud to say we have been leading the charge for some time.

We were client-empowering before client empowerment was cool.

Four ways that we are equipping our clients to be as self-sufficient as they want to be are:

1. Easy-to-Use Content Management Systems. Every new website we create enables our clients to edit the content using best-of breed content management tools. Sure we handle the heavy lifting of major design or structural changes, but we’re saving clients thousands of dollars by enabling them to make multiple content adjustments to their sites.

2. Graphics Standards. When we deisgn a new logo, we do so knowing that the new logo must work in a wide variety of situations—from business cards to billboards; television commercials to crop circles. We create a set of guidelines, templates and usage recommendations that allow our clients to produce much of their own marketing communications while keeping the visual brand consistent—a key to brand identity.

3. MarCom Libraries. There is still a role for print. We’ve spoken to that here in this blog a few times. But printing thousands of brochures that become obsolete before the last box of them is opened is untenable. While we continue to produce award-winning print pieces to this day, we also create marketing tool libraries with high-resolution PDF files that a company’s sales and marketing team can download and print on demand. Good for the planet. Good for the bottom line. Edits and updates mean new PDFs, not new print runs.

4. No Media Commissions. While we’re huge fans of AMC-TV’s Mad Men, we don’t have booze carts, don’t chain-smoke in the office, and we don’t charge media commissions. We’re tough media negotiators here at TCA, and our clients pay us for the time it takes to put the best media value together. But they keep the commissions. It enables them to save money or make their ad dollars go farther. If we recommend TV, radio, web or print media, it’s not because we have a finacial interest in it.

While other agencies and advertising trade magazines lament the new client empowerment, we welcome it. It puts the focus squarely on the two parts of our business we like best: Partnering with clients strategically, and then developing and implementing big creative ideas.