Olympic Marketing Series Part 1 Strategy to Success

A little background about Jay; on top of being a long time friend of myself, and we’ve worked together for many years, Jay is a veteran marketing and advertising executive. He got his MBA at Harvard University and has over 20 years experience marketing national brands like General Motors, Keebler, MCI, Lockheed Martin to name a few. His agency background includes Leo Burnett Advertising, Arnold Communications and Rainmaker, and currently growing quite a nice business with J Street Consulting as VC. Thanks for being on the phone with me today, Jay.

Jay Kerness: Hey Michael, thanks for having me, this is a great opportunity, I appreciate it.

Michael: Sure. As a matter of fact we were just talking about this the other day, about this series of information articles podcast we’re going to be releasing called the Olympic Marketing Series and we started talking about strategy, as we always tend to do, and discussed a really great point and for the life of me I don’t know why it escaped me to not start with strategy. I was actually thinking about something a little bit different, but having you on the phone is a huge cue to everyone to get a little bit of information of information about where people need to be with their businesses before they even kick anything off really.

Jay: It’s not surprising that you forgot, because a lot of people do, a lot of people, we like to say, forget to do their homework upfront and want to jump right to doing their logo, or their brochure, or whatever creative deliverable they’re looking for and there’s just a few steps involved before we get into doing the pretty pictures, as we like to say.

Michael :It’s a little silly though considering that with all our projects with our clients we have them go through a questionnaire about nailing down some of the key topics so we have a better idea of what their strategy is and where they want to go, so that’s why I felt silly about the whole thing.

Jay: Everyone who does a creative project has their own methodology in terms of interviewing the client and making sure that they’ve got all the messaging right and got all the key strategic points, but there really is a lot of drafting that has to come upfront; why are you doing this, why do you need a logo, why do you need a brochure, what are your business objectives – all sorts of stuff that we do in our business before we ever put pen to paper on anything, so the chance to talk about that for a little bit with you this morning is great, I’m looking forward to that.

Michael: As a matter of fact, I’ve had a client come back to me and after a delay actually starting on a project, because after they read the questionnaire they’re “oops, I think we need to think about this some more”. We don’t want to waste any time and effort going down the wrong path.

Jay: Well, it’s true; people waste so much time and effort and money with the “show me another picture” strategy, where people say, “well, let’s look at this design and let’s look at that design” and they haven’t taken the time to set the litmus test or give them the criteria to evaluate what’s right and what’s wrong, because there is a right answer to what you need to do for your marketing. My business partner, co-founder of J Street with me, Jim Wolfe, he’s a veteran business consultant, one of the big name consulting firms are in his background and he is the Professor of Entrepreneurship over at George Mason University.

One of Jim’s favorite mottos is “begin at the end” and that’s what we always do; what are we trying to do here, what are your business objectives, what are you trying to achieve a year from now after you’ve run this marketing program, or used this logo, or done whatever you’re doing from a marketing standpoint, what’s going to constitute a win? And not just fluffy answers to that like, “oh, we want more sales or we want higher awareness”, but Jim actually works with clients to pull out the spreads, you can say, specifically on a quantitative basis, “how do you want this marketing to affect your bottom line and then what is the real hard-nosed , clear business objectives that you’re striving for?”

And that’s our approach to marketing, I think it’s many people’s approach to marketing, it’s not pretty pictures; it’s not just designs, but it’s actually a strategic tool that is yet to achieve clearly stated business objectives, and it can be a very powerful tool when it’s used right. So whatever you’re looking to do in your marketing communications if it’s done in the context of really understanding what you’re trying to achieve from a business standpoint we think it’s going to be more effective and it’ll certainly be more efficient from the amount of money that you’re going to spend and the resources you’re going to put into it.

Michael: It’s interesting, because in a lot of different project types there’s a front end that’s done. Interestingly enough that same idea for some reason is not applied, or at least not about as an umbrella in a business, an example would be creating an enterprise level website. Before any colors are chosen, before any design is undertaken there’s an information architecture that needs to be developed, an outline of a website and the theory behind it, and I can’t quite quantify this to actually build a strategy upfront for numbers, but the time you spend upfront doing this outline for a website can save you three to four times the amount of time down the road, because you’ve worked out all the details and all the information you need to nail before you can get to that step.

Jay: I wish there was a formula. There’s probably a similar formula for, let’s call it a corporate brochure, you’re doing a eight page brochure that’s going to define a new product line or a new business. There are so many trends we see strategy by brochure where people get right into the writing and right into the development of a creative piece, but they haven’t taken the time to think through the whole process; to think through exactly what they want to say, what’s the key differentiators, what makes us better than our competitors, what we want our targets to do when they read this brochure. I mean if you do all of that in discussion, in facilitated sessions and capture it all in a Word document, I’ll tell you right now, you’re going to save x% time and money developing your brochure because all the thinking is done and all the thinking has been approved and vetted with management before you spring in the creative team. And sometimes it takes two weeks, sometimes it takes two months, sometimes it takes longer depending upon a lot of the questions that need to be asked. I mean, have you spoken with your customers, do you understand what they really need and does your product or service that you want to market fit with what they’re looking for, have you done the competitive review to understand what your competitors are saying or doing and making sure that what you’re doing fits with them and competes with them effectively and have you done the internal homework, talking with the stakeholders to understand where leadership wants to take the company or where the brand management team wants to take the product?

All of that being done upfront translates into efficiency, it translates into saving people time and money and translates into more effective marketing down the road.

Michael: Now that you’ve hit on those, I think we’ve beat the horse on the importance of strategy, but it is so important I think it needs to be repeated multiple times over and over again. Let’s give a couple of the nuts and bolts about this.

Jay: Absolutely.

Michael: About doing the homework and just hit on the key points of those. And I know one of them you mentioned was clarifying your message, defining your target audience, also your goals and how you tie all of those into objectives. What kind of things can you impart to us about helping businesses when they’re starting off to clarify their message?

Jay: I’ll give a little case study story. I’m not going to mention any names, but a particular client came to us and they wanted to run a newspaper ad and I think the circulation of the newspaper was going to reach 500 or 600,000 people or something along those lines. And that was great, you can certainly go ahead and develop this newspaper ad, but we went back to the beginning and said what are we trying to achieve? Well, we’re trying to achieve x% revenue growth for next year. Okay, how many customers do you need to get to achieve that revenue growth? And the number was 1,000 customers, something along those lines, and out of those 1,000 customers how many do you currently have relationships with? And you keep doing the math and at the end of the day the answer was there were about 500 people, names and addresses, people that they needed to reach with their marketing and they knew exactly who these people were and they had a fairly good idea of what they were looking for.

And in that context it made for a much more efficient effort, meaning instead of running a newspaper ad to the masses you run a very targeted marketing outreach campaign to the 500 individuals who you know you’re going after and it all comes out of what you’re trying to achieve. So thinking through it almost surgically and methodically to figure out who your target group really is and what makes them tick is one way to dive into this, I mean what are you trying to sell to whom and what can you say to that group to get them to buy it, but so many times people come in and say, “but let’s just scream this to the world” when the fact of the matter is after you think through it and do a little of this kind of homework you realize that you’ve got a much smaller audience and that has significant implications for how you spend your marketing resources.

Michael: You know the concrete numbers are really important when you’re defining those things. I’ve had clients multiple times where we just like to tell them, “stop making assumptions, especially when it comes to marketing and advertising, because there’s radio, TV, newspaper, etc.” and we have clients all the time go, “okay, we need to grow our business”, I mean that is the purpose, everyone is trying to increase their business and make money and the first thing they do is go, “we’re going to a trade show so we need a brochure”, and everyone thinks that because that’s what everyone has there, or “we need to do a print advertising or we need to do TV”. They make an assumption that they need to do this, because that’s what people do as opposed to crunching down the numbers and saying, “what’s the goal, what do we need to achieve, based on that what’s the best way to accomplish?”

Jay: That’s right and the answer to “I’m going to a trade show, I need a brochure”, well, if you think through the strategy upfront, the short answer is, I’m going to a trade show and maybe instead of a brochure I need to have ten outstanding meetings with key prospects and it’s at those meetings that you really need to accomplish at that trade show not handing out brochures to all the people on the floor, so that changes what you might want to do from a marketing standpoint. And I hate the marketing word; it’s outreach, it’s communication, I’m not exactly sure what the right term is.

When you say marketing, people automatically think brochures and advertising campaigns, but the fact of the matter if what you need to achieve at the trade show is make ten big sales then it’s about getting the right PowerPoint presentation in place, making sure you have the right setting for those meetings, making sure you have the right leave behinds and so importantly, making sure that you have the pre-meeting and post-meeting follow-up program in place.

So many times we’ll have a great presentation and then there isn’t the mechanism with the discipline in place to do the follow up calls, to do the follow up mailings, to see that one meeting is parting is part of a program, because we all know it takes multiple contacts with a target to move to the sale. So it’s that type of thinking, it’s asking the question why to your point, if you can’t make the assumption we need a brochure, well, the first thing we ask clients is why do you need a brochure? Are you sure you need a brochure, maybe you need a postcard, 3 x 5, that sends people to a short website where you’ve got a one minute video that explains what the product is, maybe you’re not going to spend the money on the printing press, maybe you want to spend it in web development, why do you need that, why do you need a brochure, why do you need to advertise, why do you need to go that trade show? I mean ask why and if you challenge those assumptions you might find that there’s going to be smarter, more efficient answers.

Michael: To ask why is a very, very powerful question.

Jay: Yes, and that’s the strategy. If you really need to step back and say what is doing the strategy homework upfront mean? It means asking yourself why; why are we marketing? We’ve had clients come in and say we want to do this big marketing program, then six figures on doing the full bulk, the print advertising, the radio, all that, and we’ve gone through the strategic piece and our answer at the other end was don’t do any marketing, you want to hire a new sales force, you need some internal operations, you need some different management changes, it’s really the intersection of the business consulting with the marketing that leads toward the right answers. That’s why I hate using the marketing term, because to a certain extent any way that you can reach a target, whether it’s a customer, or an investor, or a partner company, any means of reaching them is marketing in the broader sense.

When I was at Leo Burnett, the Heinz Group, Heinz Ketchup used to say that a bottle of ketchup on the refrigerator door was more important marketing than running the actual advertising. You open the door, there it is. I mean, if there’s any way you can get in front of a target with your message. And now with the internet there are so many ways to reach people now and the days of having two seconds to get your impression across, sometimes you’re down to a nanosecond, to just get a very quick idea about who you are and what you stand for out there on the branding front. So you ask the question why.

Michael: Do you see any particular stumble blocks that your clients tend to face when they’re trying to clarify their message or define their target audience, because I know it’s one thing to think what you’re target audience is versus what it actually is?

Jay: Yes, I think our clients try to sell their product too much and I’ll be very specific about what that means. We often say and I write it on the whiteboard many times when I’m facilitating strategy sessions; stop selling your product, stop explaining why your product is great, stop explaining what your product does. Obviously sell the benefit, and we all know this, but not what the product does, but what it does for the target, what problems it solves, what challenges it overcomes. And not just the left brain stuff, but the right brain stuff, like it gives you piece of mind or it allows you to go home from work at five o’clock every day, [if we expect to happen]. But don’t explain, especially in the technology world, the software world, brilliant engineers, brilliant technicians with products that really are amazing, your jaw drops when you see what some of these technology products can do, but you can’t just go out and explain it, you have to really dive into what the benefits are and there’s a translation process, you have to translate it into English, you have to translate it into language that all of your target groups are going to understand from the technically minded folks to the executive management to Wall Street, so stop selling your product, sell the benefit and make sure you’re speaking in a language that your target understands.

Michael: Let me ask you this, what information do you think would be helpful in a business defining the target and I ask this because I know when we started off that there was an idea of the definition of the target and essentially our kick off was freelancing for the larger agencies before we gained our own client base, but it wasn’t until after the client bases started building that it was easier to define. Now, we knew who we wanted to go after and how, but the end results of what it became were a little bit different. So when you’re a new business and you have a product or a service and you haven’t established that yet, do you have any ideas that would help a business, help define their target?

Jay: There’s no clear cut answer obviously and there’s always the danger with the new business – it’s not the danger, it’s the temptation to bark at every car that goes by – to let your business be defined by the opportunities that are out there and while on paper academically it makes much more sense to have a set plan in terms of what you want to do and how you want to grow the company, there has to be a certain amount of barking at every car that goes by, because you need to get revenue and you need to build the business. But to define the target and to define the messaging, there’s really three main considerations.

The first is internal, why are we here, what is this company all about, what is our mission, is this a lifestyle company, are we going to flip it down the road or are we looking to turn ourselves into a multi-billion Dollar corporation, what are the founders there for, what are you really good at and the whole internal perspective? So when we diagram the strategy, the first place we start is with the internal stakeholders and we’ll do a full day summit with the leadership and all the stakeholders to ask those questions; what is this all about, what are you trying to do as a company and what is the brand all about, everything from the specific exploration of the benefits that the products provide to all of the right brain imagery things, where actually people cut pictures out of a magazine to show what the picture of the brand looks like and list the adjectives. And it’s amazing when you sit down with an internal stakeholder group and have them do that together how much clarity can come out of it and sometimes how fundamental a shift in strategic direction can come out of one of those sessions.

We had one client who was head of technology product and he was in the protection arena and their image that they had of themselves was a military image, like a sentry stationed at the door to protect the fortress, so there really was that level of security, it was a security company. And after we went through this exploration with them we realized that it wasn’t this military type security that the company was all about, it was a much softer type of security; it wasn’t a soldier, it was more like mom on a winter day with a nice bowl of soup, it was one of those things. And when you think about that in terms of defining what your new company is all about, are you best represented by a soldier at the door or best represented by the warmth of a fireplace on a cold winter day; same product, same message, security, but the imagery and the branding and how you present yourself in the marketplace, fundamentally different. It can be the exact same product, but it’s presented in two different ways, so that type of internal exploration happens.

The second piece is obviously talking with targets. One big mistake company’s make is not talking to the targets. We’ve got the world’s best mousetrap, it’s going to sell itself; it ain’t the case, you’ve got to spend time, whether it’s formal research with a marketing research company or just mother-in-law research where you get a bunch of friends together and buy lunch and ask him about the product and the service that you’re selling. It really almost doesn’t matter what the folks internally think when you put it in the context of what their prospective targets are looking for. So you have to asses the internal stakeholders, you have to asses the targets and what they’re looking for and really understand their needs, what makes them tick, their mindset, what their lives are like, what kind of cars they drive, what kind of magazines they read, take a real understanding of who your target is. We often write up target profiles statements so you can get a mental picture of who those folks are. And Michael, you know from the creative standpoint, having a mental picture of who the target is, it really helps strengthen the creative effort.

And then the final piece – not to prolong – this is the competitive piece, once you know what you want to do internally, once you know what your targets are looking for, how to look at the whole competitive landscape. It could be four other companies that are doing exactly what you want to do, there could be a nice open area in the marketplace that you can go and occupy, but you have to know what that landscape looks like before you really develop a marketing effort. So a little long winded, but if you think of those three specific areas, the company, the target customers and the competitors you really examine each of those three areas, but the definition of the homework that needs to be done in advance of your creative assignment.

Michael: I’d like to go back and underline three things you mentioned. Number one was in the messaging, and that is creating the imagery. You talked about a soldier at the door versus the warmth of the fireplace or our mom in the kitchen with soup, and that is a very, very strong element that a lot of people really tend to overlook. They sit down and they put words on paper, but they don’t actually create a visual image in their head or actually put that on board to actually help define what their message is, because that imagery is really strong in helping all the other pieces out, you have to keep in mind a single picture that defines everything, the picture is worth a thousand words. I hate saying that, but it so true with the imagery part of that.

And the other thing I’d like to underline is your mother-in-law focus groups, which is a fantastic idea that’s so simple about getting some really great feedback. When I was at other companies you would sit down with the art director, copy writer, you sit in your little bowl, you create ideas that you think are fantastic and then we used to take them out to the receptionist or other people outside the creative department and put it in front of them and say what do you think? And they just look at you sometimes quizzically and go, “huh?” and you’re like okay, forced from the three type thing, you get some external input to help you really get back on track, especially in internal and everyone’s on the same boat, but no one’s seeing it from an outside perspective.

Jay: I put a lot of value in focus groups. I grew up at Leo Burnett and we used to do focus groups on Keebler Salty Snacks, watching people take different bites of chips or General Motors cars and just sitting behind the glass and listening to people talk about the product, I often find that process, that’s where a lot of the “ahas” comes from in the creative element.

And back to the imagery piece, I couldn’t agree with you more. I think the imagery is the tiebreaker. I mean you have to assume that there are three other products that are just as good as yours out there and there’s three other companies that can give you all the facts, they can give you all the rationalizations and explain to you up and down why their product is the one you should select, but then people are going to pick you product or service not only because of the attributes of it, but because they like you, because they make a connection with you.

Why do people pick Ben & Jerry’s ice cream over other ice cream? Well, you walk in there and there’s this feeling of god, it’s giving back to the community, we’ve got social consciousness, a little Grateful Dead, I like walking into Ben & Jerry’s. Is ice cream better than Häagen-Dazs or better Baskin-Robbins? I don’t know, but I feel like Ben & Jerry’s is a brand that I fit with and that element, that ripe green element of not only does the product fit my needs, but I like these folks, I trust these folks, I want to hang out with these folks.

Oftentimes clients just disregard that and I’ll turn the table around and say, that may be in many cases the reason why people pick you, because it comes down to building a relationship and especially with a service company. So that’s the tiebreaker and that’s something that should be considered in the mix of all of your thinking through; figure out the right brain elements as well as the left brain elements.

Michael: One last thing I’d like to cover is we’ve talked about strategy, and when you get information down about defining a message and your target and your imagery and you receive the feedback from your mom, a formal focus group, you’ve done all the ask whys, you’ve tied in all your messaging into your objectives and it all comes down to actually start getting to more of a – I guess depending on your perspective – the fun part of okay, now that have this now we have to define our business name, we have to create a logo and then hopefully creating some sort of slogan or tagline that helps wrap this all up into a nice little package. And if you can just give me some input on that part of it, the name, the logo, the slogan, because I know people think, “we have all this information and I’ve got an idea for a logo, I’m going to go spend $50 and knock this thing out” and then they just think, “I’ve got it” and they just keep going and then they tend to glean over it a little too quickly.

Jay: Once you go through the strategy piece and you document it and you get agreement and consensus to it and then you stick with it, it becomes very easy because there’s a right answer. And I’ll give you a scenario and it’s very common in, we’ll say, the technology arena. For a piece of technology it can go down the innovation road, this is the most innovative piece of technology that there is, whatever it is, it’s most innovative, or you can go down to the customer service end, we’re going to give you the best service, it’s going to make your life easier piece. The same piece of technology, but you take a right turn and go innovative in terms of the way you position yourself or you can take a left turn and go customer service.

Those two different roads point to right and wrong decisions on you name it; on the name, there are names that sound more innovative and names that are a little softer and sound more friendly, there are typefaces that are stronger and more innovative than others, there are colors, there’s imagery, it begins to form the way you want to develop your name and your tagline and your logo based on the strategy. And the strategy of course comes from what your customers want and all the stuff that we just talked about, but you have to choose one path that’s right for you to focus on, put that up on the wall and evaluate everything against that, so does your name sound innovative and technological, when people hear the name they say, “wow, that’s really 22nd century and makes me think of high technology” or does that name make you think that you’re going to get taken care of?

Use it as the litmus test to define and make the decisions on everything in your marketing mix from the name, to the logo, to the advertising, to the people that you hire, to the way you answer the phone, to where you hold your company meetings; it becomes brand. I mean the branding word is – there’s so many definitions of it and there are so many companies that do a great job with branding whether it’s a strategic piece or the design piece, but if the company is picking that branding and internalizing it and making it part of their DNA, with that kind of focus I think you’re going to be better off. It’s certainly going to give a little more clarity and certainly going to help you make decisions. And that’s what strategy does, it gives you a compass and a set of parameters to help you make decisions, and when you know what the right answer is it gets so much easier, because it’s not subjective. We all know one of the hardest things to do is to do a logo, because it’s so subjective; I like red, I like blue, I like green, everyone had their own opinions and there’s no right or wrong, but if you do the strategy piece upfront, if you define what the right answer is it helps and it saves time, money and results in more effective communications.

Michael: And it’s funny when you come to logos and imagery you have a lot of people who will lean toward “I like red”. They tend to forget – and I’m just ambiguous color choice there – but they tend to forget it’s not about what you think, it’s about what your targets think, because their targets, based on who you’re going after, may hate red, so you have to put your own inclinations aside and stick with that strategy regardless of if it goes against — if it gnaws at you and it’s nails on chalkboard, if it’s right for the target, that’s who you really need to stick with.

Jay: That’s exactly right. Your targets like red and your competitors, everyone is using red or no one is using red, all that needs to be considered. And at J Street that’s what we do, Michael, you know that, we’ve been working together for quite some time. It’s thinking through these issues, it’s making sure that companies from Fortune 500 down to early stage start-ups think through this work upfront and it sometimes it’s two days, sometimes it’s two weeks, sometimes it’s two years, it really depend on how big the task is, but doing the homework makes all the difference and it’s our approach and certainly what we recommend to clients and to our partner companies that we work with.

Michael: Jay, I really appreciate your time on the phone today. I know you’re trying to pack up the family to go to Europe for a couple of weeks, good luck with that one.

Jay: Yes, it’s going to be quite an adventure with three young boys and we’re going over for a family wedding and it’s going to be an adventure, so I’ll let you know how that goes, but I do appreciate the time as well and the chance to talk about this, because it’s what we do and it’s always good to have the forum to discuss it.

Michael: Again, Jay Kerness, President of J Street Consulting, that’s J Street Consulting and it’s jstreetconsulting.com and again I really appreciate the call and I’m sure we’ll be talking more later with all the other stuff we’ve got going on right now. Thanks everyone for downloading and listening, I appreciate taking time out of your day, hopefully you got some good information out of this. I know every time I talk to Jay we tend to impart some excellent information to stick into our bag of tricks and to apply to other projects we’re always working on. And we’ve got one series coming up, we’ll be covering all sorts of things from you, we’re going to be doing a lot of basic stuff, everything from domain registration, your business location, logo design, marketing materials and onwards, so I’ll be looking forward to sending you some more information, so be looking through your e-mail box for when that’s coming down. Again, thanks a lot Jay, have a great trip and we’ll talk to you real soon.

Jay: Thank you very much, Michael, it’s been a pleasure.