Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (16 page)

Accountants do accounting all the time. Salespeople spend a lot of time selling. But marketers, it seems, have a long list of things they do
(budgets, coupons, projections, photo shoots, bizdev meetings, meet-and-greets, etc.) that is technically marketing—’cause I think everything an organization does is marketing—but is hardly in the sweet spot.

Think about the giant marketing successes of our time. From Disney to CAA to Boston Consulting Group … from Ronald Reagan to the Mormon Church to Habitat for Humanity … in every case, these organizations won big-time because of a kernel of an idea, a marketing insight that they built upon.

There are more than 50,000 restaurants in New York City. Perhaps 200 of them are marketing success stories. Yet at the other 49,800 restaurants, the owners spend very little time working on their breakout idea, and tons of time doing stuff that feels a lot more important.

Once an organization is up and running, it’s almost impossible to carve out the time to find the marketing vision that will make all the difference. Are you too busy working to make any money?

This is the biggest one, and the reason for the whole series.

I now believe that almost all marketing decisions are first and foremost made without the marketplace in mind.

That’s a pretty bold statement, but here goes.

I think that most marketers, most of the time, make their marketing decisions based on what
they think
the committee, or their boss, or their family, or their friends, or the blog readers with email, will say.

When I speak to groups, the folks who are stuck or who are not finding the growth they are hoping for, rarely say, “We don’t know how to get the market to respond.” Instead, they say, “My boss or the factory or the committee or the design folks or the CFO won’t …”

Now, of course most of this is whining. Most of this is nonsense. It’s not everyone else’s fault. But that’s not my point. My point is that if you market intending to please those people, you have only yourself to blame.

Great marketing pleases everyone on the team, sooner or later. But at the beginning, great marketing pleases almost no one. At the beginning, great marketing is counterintuitive, non-obvious, challenging, and
apparently risky. Of course your friends, shareholders, stakeholders, and bosses won’t like it. But they’re not doing the marketing, you are.

The same thing everyone else is having, but different.

A menu where the prices aren’t all the same.

More attention than the person sitting next to them.

A slightly lower price than anyone else.

A new model, just moments before anyone else, but only if everyone else is really going to like it.

A seat at a sold-out movie.

Access to the best customer-service person in the shop, preferably the owner.

Being treated better, but not too much better.

Being noticed, but not too noticed.

Being right.

Is that an oxymoron? Is it possible to hold a marketer morally responsible?

Let’s start at the beginning:

Marketing works.

Marketing (the use of time and money to create a story and spread it) works. Human beings don’t make rational decisions, they make emotional ones, and we’ve seen time and again that those decisions are influenced by the time and money spent by marketers.

So, assuming you’ve got no argument with that (and if you’re a marketer who doesn’t believe marketing works, we need to have a longer discussion), then we get to the next part of the argument:

Your marketing changes the way people act.

Not completely. Of course not. You can’t get babies to start smoking cigars and you can’t turn Oklahoma into a blue state. But on the margins, especially if your product or service has some sort of archetypal connection to your customers, you can change what people do.

Now it gets tricky. It gets tricky because you can no longer use the argument, “We’re just giving intelligent adults the ability to make a free choice.” No, actually you’re not. You’re marketing something so that your product will have an edge over the alternative.

Everyone knows about milk. The milk people don’t need to spend $60 million a year advertising milk in order to be sure we all get a free choice about whether to buy milk or not. No, they do it because it makes milk sales go up.

What a huge responsibility.

If you’re a good marketer (or even worse, a great marketer), it means that you’re responsible for what you sell. When you choose to sell it, more of it gets sold.

I have no standing to sit here and tell you that it’s wrong for you to market cigarettes or SUVs, vodka or other habit-forming drugs. What we do need to realize, though, is that it’s our choice and our responsibility. As marketers, we have the power to change things, and the way we use that power is our responsibility—not the market’s, not our boss’s. Ours.

The morality of marketing is this: you need to be able to stand up and acknowledge that you’re doing what you’re doing. “By marketing this product in this beautiful packaging, I’m causing a landfill to get filled a lot faster, but that’s okay with me.” Marketers can’t say, “Hey, the market spoke. It’s not my decision.”

The phone rang yesterday. The recording said, “We’re sorry to disturb you. This call was meant for an answering machine.” Then it hung up. Actually, the marketer wasn’t sorry. The marketer was using his market power to violate the Do Not Call Registry and to interrupt my day (on my machine or otherwise) so he could selfishly try to sell me something. While it may or may not be legal to do this, it’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that the marketer decided that the ends justified the means, and he needs to acknowledge that on his way to work today.

The same way the marketer at Marlboro needs to acknowledge that by being a good marketer, she’s putting her kids through college at the same time she’s killing thousands of people. It’s a choice—her choice.

We’re responsible for what we sell and how we sell it. We’re responsible for the effects (and the side effects) of our actions.

It is our decision. Whatever the decision is, you need to own it. If you can’t look that decision in the mirror, market something else.

1. Don’t run out of money.
   It always takes longer and costs more than you expect to spread your idea. You can budget for it or you can fail.
   
2. You won’t get it right the first time.
   Your campaign will need to be reinvented, adjusted, or scrapped. Count on it.
   
3. Convenient choices are not often the best choices.
   Just because an agency, an asset, or a bizdev deal is easy to do doesn’t mean that it is your best choice.
   
4. Irrational, strongly held beliefs of close advisors should be ignored.
   It doesn’t matter if they don’t like your logo.
   
5. If it makes you nervous, it’s probably a good idea.
   If you’re sure you’re right, you probably aren’t.
   
6. Focusing obsessively
   on one niche, one feature, and one market is almost always a better idea than trying to satisfy everyone.
   
7. At some point, you’re going to have to either stick to your convictions or do what the market tells you.
   It’s hard to do both.
   
8. Compromise in marketing is almost always a bad idea.
   Extreme A could work. Extreme B could work. The average of A and B will almost never work.
   
9. Test, measure, and optimize.
   Figure out what’s working and do it more.
   
10. Read and learn.
    There are a million clues, case studies, books, and proven tactics out there. You can’t profitably ignore them until you know them, and you don’t have the time or the money to make the same mistake someone else made last week. It’s cheaper and faster to read about it than it is to do it.
    

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What every entrepreneur, geek, brand manager, and marketer needs to know about trademarks …

If you Google “generic trademarks,” you’ll find a list on Wikipedia that includes “aspirin, bikini, brassiere, cola, crock pot, dry ice, escalator, granola, heroin, hula hoop, jungle gym, kiwi fruit, pilates exercise system, trampoline, videotape, Webster’s dictionary, yo-yo, and zipper.” Each of these trademarks was worth many millions of dollars, and then, poof, it belonged to everyone.

Some people are worried about this. Jeroen sent me a note and asked me to riff about it. It even has a name: genericide.

In 1999, I invented a trademark and wrote a book,
Permission Marketing
, about it. Yahoo still owns the trademark for Permission Marketing®, but a quick search will show you more than a million matches for the expression. What’s going on?

I had to make a decision. I could have pushed the world to call the ideas I wrote about “Permission-based Marketing.” Or I could have been really flexible and encouraged people to call the approach the same thing I did. I figured it was better to be the coiner of a phrase used by millions than to have a little corner of the world all to myself.

And that’s part of the paradox of a trademark.

The purpose of a trademark is to help consumers by allowing them to be certain of the source of a good or service. When you go to the store and buy some Mentos, you know you’re getting real Mentos, the kind that fizz really well with Coke, not some sort of inferior mento with a small “m.” The trademark doesn’t just help the Perfetti Van Melle company in Kentucky; it helps you, too.

If everyone knows your trademark, it means that your idea has spread. It means that people are interested in what you sell and may very well decide to buy it from you.

In order to make a word or phrase a trademark, most lawyers agree you need to follow a few superstitions (superstitions because there’s no official manual with definitive answers). The first is that you ought to make it clear to the world that you know it’s a trademark, that it indicates that your product comes from a specific source. So, putting™ after your
mark helps … and once per page/interaction is generally considered to be enough. So you don’t have to repeat the ™ over and over and over again in your copy or brochure. It’s tacky.

Adding © after your name is just dumb. It doesn’t mean a thing.

You can trademark just about any word or phrase, but that doesn’t mean it will hold up. The best trademarks are fanciful, words like Yahoo! or Verizon. Next down the list are words that are a bit descriptive, like Whoopie Cushion, Wikipedia, or JetBlue. The worst kind of words are descriptive. Yes, you can trademark the brand American Motors, but don’t expect it to be particularly valuable or long lasting.

Some lawyers will get all excited and encourage (demand!) that you register your trademark. This involves paying a bunch of money, filing a bunch of forms, and earning an ® after your name instead of the ™. While the ® does give you some benefits by the time you get to court, it doesn’t actually increase the value of your trademark. And you can wait. So, when you come up with a great name, just ™ it.

One thing that has changed dramatically about trademarks is the world of domains. If you own
heroin.com
, the brand’s becoming generic doesn’t hurt you so much, because you’re the only one who gets the traffic from the domain.

But now we get to the juicy part. Let’s say you’ve invented a trademark and you fear it will become generic. What now?

My first advice is not to worry. By the time aspirin became generic, the guys who developed it were super rich. If actively protecting your trademark is going to get in the way of making your idea spread, the choice is obvious—spread the idea.

Every trademark that turns generic does so for the same reason: because it’s the easiest way to describe something. People didn’t say, “That’s a sexy Bikini®-brand bathing suit.” Because the idea itself was bigger (or smaller) than a bathing suit, the new thing needed a name. And the name we picked was bikini.

An iPod is an iPod, not an iPod-brand MP3 player. This is a long-term problem for Apple, and suing people who use the word “pod” to describe other devices isn’t really going to help them. The challenge they have is that they invented a brand name for an item that needed a word. Of course, it’s not just a problem; it’s also a huge advantage.

If you had the chance to work at Apple five years ago, knowing what you know now, what would you do? Pick a name like “the Deluxe Apple-Brand MP3 player”? Would you hassle the folks who coined the term “podcast”? Not me. Yes, it’s a great idea to think big, to ensure that you don’t make mistakes early on that haunt you later. But no, I don’t think you should spend a lot of time imagining the bad things that will happen if you succeed and your idea and your name become intertwined.

You can
Digg
this article. Notice that Digg is a verb, because there’s really no easy way to say, “You can recommend this article in a branded social news service like Digg™ by clicking here.” So Digg gets the power of spreading their idea. Nobody says, “reddit this article.”

Back to the paradox. Would you rather be Digg or reddit? Is it better to have Google’s problem (notice that I used “Google” as a verb in the second paragraph?) or to be
Ask.com
and never get talked about?

The best thing you can invent, as far as I can tell, is an idea that needs a name. When they invented the Jeep®, there was no such thing as the SUV. The Jeep became the name for that idea. The lawyers at Chrysler worked super hard to keep the brand from becoming generic. When the engineers cooked up the Xerox®, they had the same problem. Now, people are happy to call it a copier.

You can recover from impending genericide. What you can’t recover from is a clumsy name, or hindering your idea so it doesn’t spread, or coming up with a slightly better idea for something that already has a quite good enough name and idea.

Disclaimers: I’m not a lawyer. I don’t even play one on TV. If you rely on my legal advice, you’re getting exactly what you paid for. I called this post “Godin on Trademark” as a riff on
Nimmer on Copyright
. The irony, of course, is that “Nimmer” became the almost generic phrase for expertise on the topic; you can look it up in Nimmer.