I’ve long believed that marketing is harder than it looks, and
for those of you reading this who are marketing professionals,
suffice to say you have my deepest sympathy, respect, and affection. (Readers
who know me personally also know that I’m married to a senior advertising/marketing
executive, so the "respect and affection" come from the heart.)
Despite all the stereotypes about wacky, non-conformist, fun-hound
marketing people, yours is often not a path trod gaily. Which
brings me to: What do I mean by "harder than it looks?"
Simply that the most brilliant campaigns often look blindingly
obvious in hindsight. Take the iconic Miller Lite campaign: "Tastes
great, less filling." You could have thought of that,
right? Well, not so fast. I once was acquainted with
some of the people who produced that campaign and it was the product
of blood, tears, and sweat, as they essentially had to perform
a perceptual lobotomy on a category (light, a/k/a low-calorie,
beer) that was conventionally seen as the tasteless, pallid, low-octane
choice of simps.
Marketing—and its most high-visibility component, advertising—can
suffer the same unwarranted and unfair critique that the
cliche has people throwing at abstract painting: "I could
have done that!" And it’s certainly true that
there are few hard and fast rules of marketing, which is all about
credibility, perception, positioning, esteem, and attitudes: In
other words, all about intangibles.
Some of the conventional advice about marketing isn’t much better. I’ll
never forget the moment in marketing class when I was studying
for my MBA at NYU when the professor announced with severe gravity
one of the most important principles of marketing: "Make
it easy for your customer to do business with you."
And for this I’m paying how much in tuition?
You now know as well why I write quite infrequently at "Adam Smith,
Esq." about marketing. There are few valid generalizations
about it that aren’t pluperfectly obvious to anyone who’s thought
about it even briefly, and "Adam Smith, Esq." is not about reciting
obvious generalizations.
So today I’m not here to give you generalizations; I’m here to
give you three specifics. These are three things your firm
can actually do.
- Free days at the client. Take the lead
partner, or better yet the whole team, working with a client
and extend this offer: "We’ll spend a day or two—you
tell us how long and set the schedule and agenda—at your
offices meeting and talking with whomever you select, at no charge. We
want to get to know and really understand your business better
and we’re confident this would be a valuable investment of our
time. So
you tell us who we’re going to be meeting (it doesn’t have to
be, and indeed shouldn’t be, limited to in-house counsel) and
we’ll show up with an open mind and a blank notebook."If this doesn’t return multiples upon multiples of the cost of
the billable time sacrificed, I would be stunned. - McKinsey’s 100-day rule. I get no credit
for this one, but it’s brilliant, and brilliantly simple. McKinsey
has a list of firms it would like to work for, and any time one
of them gets a new CEO, it waits one hundred days and then calls
upon them to hear about what they’ve discovered and what their
priorities are going to be for change and growth going forward. Implicit
is of course, "and we can help." Why 100 days? Because
it’s long enough to figure out what needs to be done but too
soon to figure out how one’s actually going to accomplish it.So henceforth the same 100-day rule should apply at your firm,
but for "CEO" substitute "CEO or GC." - The figure-skating judge analogy. Next
time your firm is competing for a significant piece of business,
either in a formal review or otherwise, pretend it’s an Olympic
figure-skating competition. Getting 9.7’s across the board
for competence, experience, depth of bench, etc., may sound great
but they won’t get you the gold: They’re table stakes.
To get the gold you truly have to stand out.Make sure your team understands it needs some 10’s in this league.
And to help focus their attention, remind them that actually there
will be no silver or bronze; the second and third-place firms
will go home completely empty-handed.
So good luck and Godspeed with these. And let me know how
they work for your firm.
