The United States of Marketing

On Wednesday, the US Capitol will be the the venue for the first time in history for a Broadway show. A Super Bowl. And an Oscar extravaganza all rolled into one Busby Berkeley dazzler.

This very special Chamber, this joint session of Congress, is generally reserved for States of the Union and declarations of war.

On this occasion, it will be reserved for an Act Of Marketing.

The American public is demanding a single page of paper, listing in plain English, the top five or so components of health care “reform” the President is campaigning for. This is the least the citizens of our noble democracy, the oldest enduring republic in the world, can ask for from our elected public servants.

Instead, producer-in-chief, resident marketing maestro David Axelrod, is planning a Grammy Awards show.

The President will enter the solemn chamber. Hail to the chief will play. The Supreme Court will be there as big name extras. The media will train its cameras on the leader of the free world. The Vice President and The Speaker will demand a dozen curtain calls.

The great orator will speak for an hour and say nothing. A joint session of Congress will never again reclaim its special and profound stature.

All we want is a single sheet of paper.

The United States of America:
2009. Leadership as marketing. Marketing as leadership.

God bless us.

Mark Stevens
CEO

A Pilot Lost In Fog

The hardest thing about learning how to fly a plane is learning how to fly with instruments. And what makes that so challenging is that you have to abandon all of your instincts, forgo everything you have been taught to do to that point, and trust the invisible.

There you are flying through fog, through dense clouds, you can’t see up, down or straight ahead. Nothing but white out. And it feels, almost for certain, that the plane is tilted wrong, or pointed earthward or upside down. And you want to steer through it, to correct what feels wrong, to get back on course, but the rub is that the instruments say all is fine. You are flying right. All is well.

And although you can’t see a damn thing, you have to trust the instruments and stay the course even though its feels as if you are nosediving toward disaster.

People spend their entire lives seeking to avoid this sense of uncertainty. Of refusing to trust what they can’t see. Of staying planted on the ground, out of the skies, nowhere near the clouds. They believe the choice is simple: know precisely where you are at all times, that you are flying right, straight and true — or never let the wheels leave the ground.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could be a more devastating deception they play on themselves.

The fact is, we are all pilots in fog at times. Some embrace this as part of the adventure of life. And as a state of adrenalin rush that is the difference between watching the evening weather report on TV and falling in love. Or starting a business with your own money. Or reinvesting in one that’s clawing its way through a rough patch.

Let’s take the romance part. Recently, I heard someone say that they didn’t want to fall in love because “It might not work out.” And then they said, “If I fall in love and it doesn’t work out, well that would be like a car accident. ”

The message was, stay out of the fog. Well, excuse me, that means stay out of one of the best things life can possibly offer us.

LOVE.

Here’s what I see as the point: there is no point. Just life livers and life pretenders.

I wish the best for the latter but they bore me to tears. They leave the earth no better than when they inherited their space in it. They take up space. There are no medical centers named for them. They have never built an enterprise. They did not write Imagine. They don’t know how to collaborate on an opus like that. They may be sweet and kind and brush their teeth and iron their clothes and send Hallmark cards and be politically correct and pass the social litmus test invented by liars and hidden atheists, but. But. But.

They have never had a snowball fight in fog. They need order, and there is no order in that.

Failing Rock Group Games The Web

So I think Counting Crows is one of the best bands of the past two decades. No Led Zep but who is or was? At their best, Counting Crows was genuinely good, original, and at times (Recovering The Satellites, Anna Begins) exceptional.

And then they lost the artistic magic or Adam got tired or who knows what but a devoted following sat in disgust listening to Hard Candy, the first Milk Dud by a group of guys who seemed incapable of sinking so low.

Ok, so they had a loser. Everyone is entitled to a bad day now and then and so the devoted waited for the recovery album. And waited. And waited. And nothing…..

Until late last month when the band on the run released Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

It is a clunker. It is a once seamless band that made magic instinctively now trying too hard. You can hear the hard work. You can hear all the old riffs repeated here.

I think they knew it. I think they recognized this was January compared to August And Everything After.

So what do they do to breathe some life into a wounded bird? They try all kinds of traditional PR, which will drive some heightened anticipation for sure, but it’s sales they want. You can’t take anticipation to the bank.

They know a little secret about the Internet. You can listen to it. You can hear it. So they take the only hook song on the album, You Can’t Count On Me, create a landing page, give you a link to download and viola, digi does what print can’t even touch. (It’s not called a hook for nothing). It sells songs.

There is still a huge place for traditional PR in traditional media. And we should play it like it’s 1953. But with one hand, while the other is on the mouse. Because that “huge place” is relative and gets smaller every day.

And if you can’t hear the hook, you ain’t buying.

Think about it. The Web sings…..literally.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Revenge Of The Risk Takers

Today, I had lunch with two people I had never met before and it was one of those unusual encounters where the conversation zipped through a nanno second of small talk and zoomed into the heart of things. Into what’s this crazy thing called life all about and how do we leverage it to the hilt.

And I found myself ripping into one of my riffs about the two kinds of people on the planet. So now I’ll do it again to you. (At this point you may want to hit delete because this may be the musing of an overly philosophical mad man?).
So, the two kinds of people:

* Those in the “life protection” business.
* The tiny minority in the “live life like a reckless adventure” business.

The former want to be safe. To protect themselves from life’s curve balls.
To avoid risk. To be middle managers. To wear sunscreen. To drink wine spritzers. To do business as usual on the job because, well, it’s safe. To follow the rules. Anyone’s rules. Oh God, those rules are comfort food for the life protectors.

The latter say, I can’t protect against the vagaries of life. I can only wander out into the great blue unknown and revel in it. And if the sands shift or the plates slide or the bets come up bad or the curve balls come flying one after another, so what the hell. What the hell. What the flying hell. I will find a way to deal with it. I will see it as reason to think harder and smarter and cagier and to find a way to reinvent the wheel or to paint a gorgeous picture worthy of the Museum of Modern Art. I will walk right up to the safe middle managers so smug about their blemish-free performance record (never wandered from the straight and narrow, never made a single mistake) and I would break a rule right before their eyes. A sacred company rule. And then I would know how Picasso felt when he started turning French women into African masks. And when he made love in the middle of the day with a paint brush in one hand and a bottle of Bordeaux in the other.

Life needs livers. Risk takers. Dangerous minds. Total crazos. Lindberg.
Disney. Lauder. Houdini. Bezos. Jobs.

And we might as well all join category two. Because the life protection business doesn’t work. In the end, we all end, but the space from the beginning to the end is where the action is. And the action belongs to those who laugh at risk. Who jump into the water without a life preserver, swim the English Channel, stare down the sharks, best the world’s speed record, invent a novel category of software, put their chips on the line, fight to make it work and do it all again the next day.

That’s the arena. Everything else is like watching a concert atop Yankee stadium. Now that’s scary!
Mark Stevens
CEO

Customer Service, In Search Of The DNA.

A few days ago, I was bestowed with a charming and old-fashioned gesture: A wish to “Have a Wonderful Weekend.” The problem is, the gesture was plastic. Literally. It was stamped on a bag of band-aids and toothpaste I’d purchased in a local pharmacy. Perhaps I am a cold-hearted SOB, but I don’t get the warm and fuzzies when a bag whispers sweet nothings in my ears. In fact I wanted to, and ultimately did, tell the pharmacy they would be advised to replace the weekend “love note” with one that reads: Whatever You Need, Whenever You Need It. Just call us at xxx or visit us at pleasingyoumakesushappy.com.

Why wasn’t this done at the outset? Why won’t they do it ever? Because what used to be one-on-one customer service that came from a culture that truly respected and appreciated customers as the soul and the lifeblood of a business has been reduced to a series of monotonous and superficial scripts that come from nowhere near the heart:

Have a nice day.

Please hold, we’ll be right with you.

If you would like to talk to a live person, press the pound key.

Well actually, I would prefer to talk to a dead person-or even a plastic bag- than push ten more buttons until I find someone totally annoyed that they have to DEAL with a customer. What’s really happening is that businesses are so focused on consummating transactions that they spend no time building enduring relationships. Plastic bags can’t do it. A “Thank You For Your Patronage ” note stamped on an invoice can’t do it. The only way it can be done is if Management develops a culture that truly embraces customers.

The classic customer service survey asks people:

1. Do you like our products/services?

2. Would you buy them again?

3. Would you recommend them to a friend?

What they don’t ask goes to the core of great business, of extraordinary companies:

Do you have faith in our company? Do you think we are committed to you?

They don’t go beneath the surface, the superficial, the scripts because they don’t want to know the answers. They don’t care. The DNA of true customer service, of businesses built on relationships as opposed to transactions, has virtually disappeared. Sadly, today’s managers think it’s all in the plastic bags.