by David Heitman
President of The Creative Alliance

Marketing is always about envisioning a better future.

It is growth-oriented. Goals and objectives are constantly in view. It’s about better results tomorrow than are being experienced today. It’s about the future more than the past.

Sure, you may refer to past successes or your stellar track record; but the assumption—unlike the disclaimer you hear on investment company ads—is that past performance is predictive of future results.

For the most part, when you are marketing your product, service, organization or policy, you are ultimately asking people to envision a better future—one that depends on embracing your idea.

That’s why weight loss programs always show a BEFORE and AFTER picture. It helps you envision a better self. Without even thinking about it, we mentally Photoshop our own heads onto those new, sleek, ripped-abbed, cellulite-free bodies in the AFTER picture, and voila! the future will clearly be better than the past.

This means that marketers are all a bunch of raving optimists, ‘cause hey, there’s no point marketing something unless a bigger, better, brighter future is out there to be grasped.

What this means when crafting a brand is that it should be developed to reflect not so much who you are today but rather who you will be tomorrow.

If you’re a start-up, it may be necessary to position your company as major player. People shouldn’t be saying, “Oh, who are these new guys in the industry?” Rather, when they see your website or advertising, they should be kicking themselves asking, “How in the world did we miss these guys? Add ‘em to the short list.”

If you’re an established market player losing market share to a few upstarts, then craft your brand to reflect who you’ll be in the more nimble, fluid, competitive future.

Marketing is also future-oriented as an ROI proposition. As Jodee, our VP of Creative Services said in a meeting recently, “For a client, writing a check to an ad agency feels like buying a very expensive lottery ticket.” Retaining a firm like ours, hiring in-house marketing talent; making a big media buy, or reserving a pricey booth at a trade show—these are all heavily leveraged bets that you’ll make more than you spend.

So what does a smart, visionary, optimistic marketing bet look like?

1) It builds on the authentic DNA of your organization—the thing you are passionate about, will uphold at all costs, and that you’re better at than anyone on the planet. Things to which you’ll always be true, now and forever.

2) It promises a shared better future for you and your customers—a win-win partnership where you and your customer build a better world together.

3) It anticipates the inevitability of change and your company’s/product’s/policy’s ability to adapt to that inevitable change. You’ll be as relevant tomorrow as you are today because you look and feel nimble, adaptive and creative enough to survive cataclysmic change.

It’s all about being future-focused. Pessimists need not apply.

By T Taylor
Founder of The Creative Alliance

My wife Teresa had a dream about having a live music venue. After years of saving and planning, we built one from scratch. It was the most difficult business we’ve ever been in. For almost five years, we did everything we knew to make it profitable, but the best we could muster was a breakeven proposition. Still, with all the difficulties and losses, not a week would go by without a customer declaring, “You must be so successful.” I would say, “Depends on what you mean by successful.”

Success. It’s what we shoot for in business and in life. It’s often discussed but rarely celebrated. Even though most business people associate success with bottom line financial growth and profitability, it means so much more. We’ve all seen people celebrate after winning something, or even attaining a goal. But success is illusive. Do you see people celebrating after reaching success? Not really. It would be like celebrating a concept.

People get awards, but not for being successful. Memorials and obituaries list activities and achievements, but don’t say if the person was a success.

I had a client for 15 years. We worked together diligently to reach lofty goals, and typically we would reach them over the years. The last goal was a big one, yet when we finally hit it, they were quick to start talking about the next thing. I took them out for a surprise dinner the next day and told them I wanted to stop and bask in our success.

My old boss set a revenue goal of $100 million for our company. I don’t think we ever quite got there (it was close), but he was considered quite a success in the eyes of many people. Yet he rarely seemed happy. Hmmm.

How do you measure success? If success means you hit a certain financial goal, maybe that’s success to you. If you want to help find homes for orphans and you do it, that’s most likely success, too. Just being happy in your job could be a success.

Some of the greatest, most successful people in history (Jesus, Jefferson, Einstein, Gandhi, etc.) were practically penniless, or even in debt when they left this world. So if success is measured by money alone, it’s at best a fleeting victory.

Success appears to be intrinsically measured by the experiences of a purposeful journey.

How does your journey impact you and others? Is it helpful, authentic or meaningful? What lessons are learned? Teresa’s dream was to have a music venue. She achieved that. Her success wasn’t measured by dollars, but by countless customers whose lives were enriched by their experiences.

That’s good enough for us.

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.

By David Heitman
President of The Creative Alliance

The current BMW advertising campaign takes an interesting departure from its traditional “ultimate driving machine” message. It is now selling “joy.” Or as one television commercial puts it, what’s important is “not just what we make, but how it makes you feel.”

Walmart has done a masterful job of evoking a mood that moves saving 10 cents on toilet paper way up the Maslovian scale by asking “What are you saving for?” This transformation and transcendence of low prices into fulfilling a child’s dream is nicely illustrated in their hockey mom webisode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sS_zalCXaI

With so many products and services eventually turning into commodities, the promise of a new experience or a new feeling is a great way to promote those products and services. It “de-commoditizes” them and holds far greater promise than just having a bigger list of features than the other guys.

It’s easy to get absorbed with promoting features and benefits, but then fail to tell the bigger brand story.

This is where marketers can turn to poetry, drama and narrative for the proper inspiration. Features and benefits need to be sewn together into the fabric of story to really get traction with an audience.

Adidas does it with a tagline: Impossible is Nothing

Apple does it with an ongoing dialog between Mac and PC personified.

Liberty Mutual does it with beautiful pay-it-forward vignettes in their inspiring television commercials.

One of the ways we start the branding or re-branding process with our clients is to create a brand story book. It lifts the conversation above the bullet points and feature sets. Those will come later. We’ve seen this approach work with everyone from tech companies, iced tea bottlers and educational institutions, to non-profits, architects and BBQ restaurants.

Story is universal. Everyone loves a good story.

I’ve seen some of my most tedious presentations immediately rescued by a good story. Storytelling is like blood-doping for communicators.

Every company has a story. It could be the unlikely origin of the company; or perhaps how an organization rose from the ashes of defeat to become a success. Or maybe the story to tell is how a critical moment in the company’s history shaped its character and redefined it forever.

When you stop merely marketing what you sell, and instead tell a story that projects what people will feel or experience, they can plug into your brand story and you’ve gained some valuable mental real estate with your audience.

Two Minutes for Entrepreneurial Leaders

by The Creative Alliance Founder and CEO, T Taylor



This weekend I experienced the Super Bowl media phenomena in south Florida. For two weeks leading up to Super Bowl Sunday, there was more national media coverage, more analysis, and more analysis of the analysis than any other entertainment program in history.

Yes, there was actually a game played on Sunday—for just 60 minutes. It featured some of the world’s most skilled, best-conditioned and highly-paid athletes competing for the distinction of being called the best professional football team on the planet. Mixed throughout the hour-long game were celebrity appearances, performances, and approximately three hours of commercials with a $3 million dollar price tag for 30 seconds. With estimates of up to 150 million viewers, the Super Bowl was also the world’s largest stage for big advertisers.

Who were the advertisers?

Here’s a partial list: 1. Doritos, 2. Hyundai, 3. Coke, 4. Budweiser, 5. Google, 6. E-Trade, 7. Snickers, 8. Motorola, 9. Go-Daddy, 10. Focus on the Family, 11. VW, 12. Dr. Pepper (okay, that’s all I can remember).

What were they trying to sell us?

Honestly: 1. heavily-seasoned corn chips, 2. cheap Korean-made cars, 3. highly-sweetened carbonated drinks, 4. beer, 5. who to use when you search for something, 6. another online way to play the stock market, 7. highly-sweetened chocolate, caramel and peanuts, 8. electronic communication devices, 9. web naming and hosting services, 10. traditional Christian-based communications, 11. German-made cars, 12. yet another highly-sweetened carbonated drink.

Here’s what the advertisers really wanted us to buy…

1. chips from a hip company, 2. an inexpensive car that looks expensive, 3. the drink for everyone young and old, 4. the emotional favorite choice for beer, 5. the name for searching is also your friend, 6. the stock trading service that stands apart because of the funny talking babies, 7. fun, tasty candy bars with energy, 8. way cool electronic stuff, 9. the web naming and hosting company with sexy girls, 10. winner Tim Tebo is a good guy and you can find out why, 11. German cars aren’t stiff like Germans/they are fun and hip, 12. the band Kiss is cool and rebellious—so is this extremely sweetened carbonated drink…

It’s no secret that the advertisers want us to associate with these attributes (and they bet millions we will)—so each message is carefully crafted and designed for us to have certain, emotional connections to their brands. Studies prove that they work, too.

Is there a silver lining to our overly-hyped (and easily-fooled) culture?

Yes, many people simply like Coke because of the taste. Same with Snickers. Hyundais save you money. We like an online stock company because we remember them in a world of media messages. VW’s do have cool colors. And so on.

But here’s the one I like best…

Most businesses have brands with attributes (features and benefits) that are more genuine and actually fit the company, product and/or service. Unlike these giant, consumer-based companies who must create associations to make us think their products/services are fun, cool, memorable and even shocking—most smaller entrepreneurial companies (that make up for 80% of all American businesses), succeed when they deliver on their more authentic brand attributes.

So, even though the (advertiser’s name here) Super Bowl half-time show featuring the rock band, The Who, sang “We won’t get fooled again,” my guess is that we will. We’re key players in this game of advertising, as we want to be hip, cool, fun, loved, and a winner. Associating with things that are perceived that way makes us feel better.

Everywhere you looked on Super Bowl Sunday there were black and gold clad Saints fans, and blue and white dressed Colts fans. Monday it was all black and gold.

by David Heitman

The Who will be performing during halftime at the Super Bowl this weekend, and I have to admit it’s a bit disconcerting (or should I say dis-concert-ing) to see one of the rebel bands of my youth shilling for the Bridgestone Tire corporation at the biggest media spectacle in the world…but I’ll save that for another blog…

So while we’re thinking about The Who, let’s stop and think abut the HU.

No, not a Chinese tribute band to the British rockers. The HU is the key to those marvelous brands that find a way to connect with people when other brands put folks to sleep. Without The HU, ad campaigns miss their mark, direct marketing gets dumped in the trash, and PR is met with a collective media yawn.

The HU stands for: HUmanity, HUmility and HUmor.

You might think of it as the secret ingredient necessary to make marketing stick. Put another way, the HU-factor is the magic element that produces all-important “make-me-care” reactions that advertising, political persuasion and PR must achieve.

The problem, of course, is that virtually every audience knows it is being marketed to. Even if people have requested information about your product or service, their early warning defense mechanisms are fully engaged. Trust and interest will have to be earned the hard way. But the HU-factor goes a long way toward gaining that interest and trust.

Humanity
Unless people can relate to your organization or brand on a human level, it remains a thing incapable of a relationship. Humanity means your product or service evokes feelings, connects with felt needs, addresses self-actualization, identifies with the fears, passions, dreams, and aspirations we all share. Sometimes products and services need to be anthropomorphized. Apple’s commercials where one actor is a PC, the other a Mac is a creative expression of the human element. The human “Mac” is relaxed, confident, stable and virus free compared to his nervous, unstable counterpart, the human representing the PC.

Humility
Consumers and voters expect overstatement, hyperbole and exaggeration. They even expect a substantial amount of deception. Humility is a refreshing and unexpected posture to take with your audience. Understatement, acknowledgement of limitations, and humble language are a welcome relief. A Volkswagen billboard I saw recently leverages this brand humility with exquisite perfection: Next to the picture of the new Beetle, the billboard reads “Zero to 60. Yes.”

Acknowledging that the Beetle is no high-performance sports car with this humble admission vaults the Beetle over its competitors as an accessible, fun, comfortable car to drive.

Humor
Every speaker, preacher, teacher or politician knows how quickly humor can disarm an audience. It’s true of marketing and advertising as well. In fact, advertisers have become so adept at this, that advertising humor is an art and we have all become critics of the form. That’s why so many folks watch the Super Bowl for the commercials—more than the game itself according to recent research. The phenomenon of, not just the Super Bowl commercials themselves, but the buzz that surrounds them before, during and after the game is a testimony to our culture’s love of humor. The lesson? Take yourself too seriously and you’ll lose your audience.

So really it’s pretty simple. A marketing effort’s chances of success can probably be improved with a good dose of the HU-factor. Maybe not all three components in equal parts—a funeral home may want to take it easy on the humor part of the formula. Looked at another way, the HU-factor is a great filter through which to evaluate every new marketing effort before it launches to make sure it connects with people who want to get to know your brand.

Or in the words of The Who’s 1978 chart-topper:

“Tell me, who are you? Who, who, who, who?
‘Cause I really wanna know. Who are you? Who, who, who, who?”

By David Heitman

We’re feeling grateful to have recently landed three new clients who are arguably the thought leaders in their respective fields: an electronic medical records (EMR) innovator; a modular casework manufacturer; and an IT services pioneer. All are poised for dramatic—not merely incremental—revenue growth.

We’ve been inspired by their vision…and just a little intimidated by their genius.

Our work consists in distilling these companies’ innovative leadership into unique messaging capable of gaining traction with their audiences. Beyond having developed superior products and services, they still need to compete for mindshare and brand recognition.

As we do our discovery process with these smart people, we always end up identifying the one indispensable thing they bring to their customers and prospects—the one thing that their industries would be diminished by if our clients did not exist.

Only true market leaders can claim this rarified air, but any company that takes the time to dig deeply into its core values and unique virtues can potentially reach this pinnacle.

One of the ways we jumpstart the conversation that leads to this kind of brand discovery is:

“If your organization did not exist, what would the world be missing?”

The answer to that question is at the heart of a company’s brand. If it can’t be answered, perhaps more work needs to be done defining exactly what the organization really does best.

Another question we ask is:

“What values are you willing to hold at all costs, even if it means losing business?”

While this is essentially an ethical question, asking it has enabled us to uncover the foundation of a client’s brand, and position them uniquely within their market space. Whether it’s an unrelenting commitment to the quality of their product or the superiority of their service culture, there is always something that leads to an authentic brand that can be communicated with passion and credibility.

By David Heitman

Seems like self-deprecating humility and yielding to the social media-equipped masses are in vogue these days.

Dominos Pizza, in an effort to capitalize on the social media-driven world of “listenomics,” is running a massive campaign that amounts to a mea culpa for decades of making really bad pizza. They admit the old stuff tasted like “ketchup on cardboard.”

We are now asked to believe that they have listened to their customers, and have built the best pizza ever as a result. The integrated television, radio and web effort includes “focus group” tapes where members complain about the old Domino’s pizza and a website where people are free to write their critiques on a rotating, Twitter-like wall of feedback.

While the effort certainly takes some interesting risks, it seems a bit heavy-handed in its delivery. It’s an effort to control and pre-package user-generated content in such a way that only one conclusion is possible: New Domino’s tastes better than old Domino’s. It’s pretty clear the “focus group” comments were story-boarded and approved long before they were taped.

It’s sort of like watching a movie whose outcome is clear in the first five minutes.

The other thing that makes this well-executed, yet transparently manipulated, effort seem insincere is that in previous commercials we were told by Domino’s that “Quality comes first, custom baking each pizza with carefully selected, skillfully prepared ingredients.”

(What exactly is a “skillfully-prepared ingredient” anyway?)

So does all this mean that in another few years we’ll be asked to believe that Really, Really New Domino’s is way better than that old 2010 New Domono’s?

The lesson here is that when companies try to crassly bend customer feedback—real or orchestrated–and try to leverage user-generated commentary to push their products, it usually falls flat.

Example: Microsoft’s TV commercials showcasing “real” people whose ideas were incorporated into Windows, saying, “Windows 7 was my idea and I’m a PC.”

The over-processed, documentary-style approach doesn’t fool anybody. And besides, do you know anyone who would actually say “I’m a PC”? (especially after Apple’s award-winning campaign of the decade in which the PC is personified by a doofy Bill Gates look-alike.)

Simply stated, the Domino’s and Microsoft commercials fail the authenticity test. Like bloodless zombies, they aren’t human, despite their large numbers.

Should the New Domono’s or Microsoft 7 campaigns prove to be successful, it will largely be the result of frequency paid for with tens of millions of media dollars. If annoying local car dealers, personal injury lawyers and furniture stores are proof of anything, it’s that frequency alone can generate results.

The problem is that mere repeition is incapable of building all-important brand attachment. It just confirms that Domino’s is a coupon-driven commodity with no loyalty, hooked like a junkie on frequency.