Month: August 2010

Here’s what you think about marketing (if you’re like most people): The job of marketing is to make shit up.

Granted, it’s not the responsibility of marketing to be brutally honest about the company you work for. As Seth Godin himself says, All marketers are liars.

Case in point. In a recent interview on Fresh Air, Jonathan Eig, the author of a new book on Al Capone, refers to the work marketing teams do in a not entirely flattering way. (I know, try to suppress your surprise). In regard to Al Capone:

[Hoover] understands the public relations value in taking out the man that Chicago business leaders have dubbed Public Enemy Number One, and that’s really a phrase that the marketing team in Chicago has come up with to try to put more pressure on the government to come after Capone.

And in reference to Eliot Ness, the putative hero responsible for capturing Capone:

But these stories were really only very, very loosely based on the truth, and Eliot Ness was the beneficiary, really, of just a great marketing team that went to work for him late in his life.

Ness, it turns out, actually had very little to do with Capone’s capture. In fact, he apparently wasn’t even much of a cop, according to Eig:

Ness was a prohibition agent during the 20s. He got the job because of nepotism. He was really not qualified for it, particularly, and he wasn’t very good at it either. Early in his career, he did some undercover work that just ended disastrously… He never came up with any evidence that was useful to the prosecutors who were trying to build their case against Scarface Capone.

So to portray Ness as the hero responsible for bringing Capone to justice was varnishing at its best.

Eliot Ness really only became famous later at the end of his career… he was fortunate enough to run into a man who rewrote his story for him. And this ghost-written story of Eliot Ness became a very successful book and was turned into the TV show and then, of course, the movie later, with Kevin Costner.

But here’s the thing. Ness never benefited from that great marketing job. Well, the real, living Eliot Ness never benefited. You could argue that in the historical perspective perhaps he did, because he became a legend, a hero, the stuff of novels and movies. But Ness the man? “He never actually lived to see the fame that would come his way,” says author Jonathan Eig. If the marketing team makes shit up for the company they serve and the company doesn’t benefit, is that good marketing?

Let’s take a step back. If not Ness himself, who was it that benefited from the marketing of Eliot Ness?

You guessed it: Hollywood. And who is Hollywood’s target market? Consumers like you and me, people who want entertainment, escape, stories of heroes, of good guys and bad guys. If we’re going to have a story in which Al Capone is the villain, we need a hero. Every bad guy needs a counterpart, an opposite, someone as badass as he is (but in a good way), who can bring him to justice. That’s the story we want.

In fact, we crave it. So the creation of Eliot Ness the Legend, the man responsible for bringing down Al Capone, is more than anything the marketing of a fictional story for an audience that craves that kind of story.

In this respect, Seth Godin is right again. The role of marketing is to discover that authentic truth about the client that the target market wants to hear, and to tell that story in a way that the audience will respond to. Marketers, he writes, must “focus on what people believe and then work to tell them stories that add to their worldview… The reason all successful marketers tell stories is that consumers insist on it.” In the end, he says,

…great stories agree with our worldview. The best stories don’t teach people anything new. Instead, the best stories agree with what the audience already believes… (“All Marketers Are Liars,” 2005)

In this respect, it’s a mistake to think that Eliot Ness was the client, “the beneficiary” of a great marketing team “that went to work for him late in his life.” The client truly is the entertainment industry (book publishers, TV, Hollywood). The target market is entertainment consumers. And marketing did its job, in this case by telling us a great story – the story we wanted to hear.

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Postscript. The marketing of Al Capone as “Public Enemy Number One” is also a good lesson.

The client is the group of business leaders in Chicago.

[Chicago’s] business leaders were tired of this man destroying the city’s image. And they went to Washington and they met with Herbert Hoover almost immediately after his inauguration and said, ‘we need your help…’

The target, of course is Hoover himself:

[Hoover] came to office promising to clean up Americas broken justice system and promising to enforce the laws of prohibition… And so he makes this a priority, and he orders his administration, not only to reform the justice system, but to go after Capone, to make a symbol of this man.

It may have been Hoover’s persistence that brought Capone to justice, but it was the marketing of Capone as Public Enemy Number One by the Chicago business leaders that moved Hoover to action.

Now that is good marketing.

I mean, apart from the obvious.

Clearly the company failed at times to take proper safety precautions, valuing cost savings over safety, according to a number of critics. As a result of the Gulf accident, 11 people lost their lives; the gulf shrimp and fishing industry has been crippled; many families have paid a tremendous price; thousands of miles of coastline have been damaged. Recovery may take decades.

It’s a heartbreaking story, of course. But that’s not why I’m writing about it here. The BP mess also provides an important lesson in branding. It reveals the importance of aligning message and action.

A recent article by TalentZoo provides insight into how message and action became disconnected at BP:

“Branding is all about creating alignment of your company’s business processes with its corporate culture. British Petroleum (BP) provides a case in point of a brand that got way out front of its business process and culture to produce tremendous exposure to risk.”

Let’s unpack those statements a little…

Branding is all about creating alignment of your company’s business processes with its corporate culture.

A company’s corporate culture is ultimately an expression of its values, a reflection of the company’s beliefs and ideals. For example, how does it value profit relative to employees? Does it value revenue over sustainability? Does it value transparency, openness, and trust above market share? How does it balance social responsibility with shareholder value? Where do customers fit in the company’s value system? Those are the kinds of questions that get at the heart of a company’s corporate culture.

Business processes, in this case, is really about behavior. Is there alignment between the company’s actions and the values it discusses in its annual report? Does the company act on its principles? Or is there a disconnect? A lot of companies, for example, talk about being customer-centric; but when you call them to get help, does the person who answers the phone attempt to resolve your problem to your satisfaction and show you that you’re important to them?

BP provides a case in point of a brand that got way out front of its business process and culture to produce tremendous exposure to risk.

What the author of this article is referring to here is BP’s ad campaign and brand strategy, “Beyond Petroleum,” which it launched in July 2000 as an attempt to project an image of the company as environmentally responsible, dedicated to alternative energy sources, fundamentally a “green” company. The problem, as the author suggests, is that these values were at best stretching the truth.

You might argue that BP was doing what every company does in its ad campaigns: projecting an image of itself that the company hopes will influence how people perceive it. Isn’t that what branding is all about?

Indeed, that is how many marketing organizations operate – but it’s a misunderstanding of the true purpose of branding. And it’s a risky approach.

It’s risky because it can backfire and create distrust. For example, when you talk about yourself as being concerned about the environment, but you do things like cutting corners in safety and even paying off inspectors to avoid fines, your message may come back to haunt you.

People lose faith in your company. They realize your message doesn’t align with your company’s true values, and they see your marketing message as hollow and insincere.

How do you avoid this situation?

Start by taking a hard look at at what you do, who you are, and why that matters. “Look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself what you stand for,” says Rodger Roeser, president of Cincinnati-based Eisen Management Group, a public-relations and brand-development firm.

After you figure out what you really stand for, what values you hold as an organization, tell that story. Base your message on that idea. When you do that well, your message will ring true with your external audiences as well as with your employees.

If you really are a responsible steward of the environment, if that truly is a core value for your company, you won’t create the kind of disaster that BP did. And when a disaster does occur, one that’s truly beyond your control, you’ll respond to it in a way that demonstrates genuine concern – and doesn’t sound like a press release.