Ode to Magical Event Making

I spoke with the team that wants marketing’s help

Here’s what I learned – sit down and don’t yelp

It’s not even half-baked

Is it alliance a or alliance b?

Is it a roundtable or  a forum?

Is it sector a or industry b or cross OG?

Where, when, why, who knows?

We just want to do something for clients and prospects to come together and share

I’m sure I was a downer, I told ‘em I’m chicken little, but here’s what it takes

12 weeks from baked

200 contacts for 20 to show

That’s a 10% response rate which might be a bit low

But no shows and cancels will diminish attendance

Mid-Oct to Mid-Nov we’re jammed with programs

Mid-Nov to Dec you just don’t do programs

Breakfast not dinner and certainly not lunch

Short not long and not in NJ

(the last Enterprise program was at the Murray Hill Center…way out of Manhattenites’ way)

They said don’t over complicate

We’ve done this before

We have all the content

We have all the contacts

We just need to know that marketing will help

Cuz marketing will bring our wands and magic fairy dust and voila

We’ll make sure you have program success

Never mind if you’re naked, no one will care

No need for a plan or things like a pitch

People will come and they’ll come ready to share

They’re gonna regroup

Get a grip and resolve some of those questions

I’m gonna think about location and talk to Ted Meaney

Your gonna flip and tell me I’m nuts

I’m gonna say betcha 10 bucks…

And we’ll all get together next week and see what’s what

I bet they’ll decide it’s too hard

...based on true events.

Conscious Marketing

Lately I've been thinking about transiency, impermanence and corporate gardens. You know - those miraculous oases of green and color contained in the marble lobbies and plazas of urban office buildings. On the positive side they are nice to look at and create jobs and income for the people who grow, plant and maintain them. On the downside they are unnatural, wasteful and environmentally unsound. Tulips and evergreens are meant to last. They are not ornaments to discard at the end of a season.

But these states - transience and impermance - are useful to market making. In my parable about Eliza the Flower Seller I observed that her buyers, the ones with pain or need and coin, include business owners who want to make a certain impression. The less permanent the product, the more frequently the need to purchase, the better for Eliza.

In my post on DNA and Death yesterday at http://ruffsonlife.blogspot.com/2011/05/on-two-recent-health-headlines.html I suggested that advertising and the consumer economy have created a false sense of want. And in http://ruffsonlife.blogspot.com/2011/05/split-personality.html I commented on the different and incomplete faces we present to the world. Reconciling market making as I define it and the pernicious nature of acting on - activating - manipulating emotions to create markets is going to be hard. But I'm gonna give it a shot right now.

I like to justify the kind of marketing I do as more honorable, with more integrity because corporate buying decisions are based on rational choice with built in controls on the purchase side to limit bad decisions. Except of course there's all kinds of evidence to dispute that. Companies make terrible purchase decisions for all the wrong reasons all the time.

Then there's the economic myth of the rational man. Consumers behave irrationally and often against their best interests when making so called buying decisions. Is it really a decision when whim, want & impulse are the drivers? That same mythical rational man is running our corporations and making buying decisions on behalf of the company. We coach our sellers that all buyers are people, implying they therefore are subject to those same impulses - and perhaps manipulation - as well.

In professional services the many smart, ethical people responsible for selling and delivering work often have a distaste for sales. I think it is for just this reason - the implication of manipulation in the selling (and marketing) process. It is an oft stated objection that consultants are not used car salesmen. They are trusted advisors who help organizations solve problems that impede growth and help unlock high performance. Lofty goal that.

The thing is, without finding buyers with need and coin and communicating with them to convince them to part with that coin which they value more highly than they value the solution you promise, said consultant would soon be out of business.

One less bloodsucking consultant is no loss some might say. But it is a loss of income in the form of jobs and taxes. Business is necessary. It's not inherently evil or immoral or unethical. It is human nature to work, create and do. And cooperation not competition tends to provide a stronger basis for a successful economy and a stable society.

So therefore conscious marketing should be a fundamental part of any economy. Market making on actual need or pain, not manufactured or manipulated need or pain and respect for the intelligence, irrationality and higher self aims of the buyer can be a way to reconcile that rant and this reflection.

Marketing is not evil, it just is; the more commerce, the more intermediaries, the more marketing. Like politics, commerce is inevitable whenever you get more than two people together, especially in survival. Bartering the skill and output of one with the skill and output of the other is the naturally efficient way humans adapted to ensure not just survival but the good life. Moral, ethical, philosophical and legal systems exist to support or mitigate man's baser instincts and irrationality.

You can't have commerce, markets or economies without marketing but you don't have to manipulate to make the market.  Just as organizations can come together for a goal other than to make money or integrate a more socially conscious or responsible (or at least do no harm) goal along with the money making, marketing can be useful, illuminating and exactly what those lofty consultants aim for.

Eliza's Success

When last we met Eliza, she was on the verge. She was expanding her channels and distribution networks and her daisy was becoming a well recognized symbol of her perfect flowers business.

She is now a wealthy successful business owner. The florist to the aristocracy. She's gained a royal warrant. She's expanded locations, products and distribution. When new forms of communication are created, she makes sure her daisy is there. When new forms of technology are invented to make shipping, distribution or production cheaper faster better, she takes advantage to maintain her competitive edge.

Eliza and her sister do eventually marry and have children to whom they pass down the business. Today her descendants still run the business. 1-800-Flowers.

Nah - I made that last part up (okay so I made the whole thing up). But you must admit it gives the parable a certain elegant symmetry on which to end the story.

In the Parable of the Flower Seller, at every step, Eliza has done the same thing:

1. Gotten the word out (communicated)
2. To customers with need or want and coin to buy (connected)
3. To sell her perfect flowers (unique offering or solution)
4. For enough money to grow and diversify (exchange something of value)

No matter how large or complex the business, the offering, the buying process, fundamentally it's still the same action.

Communicating to connect. Finding buyers with need & coin. Exchanging something of value - your unique product for their money. My retelling of My Fair Lady aimed to make a basic point about marketing. Eliza never lost sight of the premise for if she had, she would not have been in business very long.

Rather than waiting for rescue from the white knight (or in Eliza Doolittle's case the urbane teacher), Eliza took action and stayed focused and built an empire. Can I get a you go girl? You can take exception and call my parable a fairy tale and you would be correct. My Fair Lady upon which the story is based is but a fantasy.

But I challenge you to prove the parable wrong.

Connect, Connecting, Connections

I was going to write about Eliza today but I've been thinking about my theory of marketing and about an interesting debate I had with one of my key stakeholders at work. I contend that marketing is about connecting buyers and sellers and that there are dozens of ways to do that. He believes that all we need to do is crack the cabal and we'll be invited to every deal we want. I have some thoughts on this.

Cabal: that secret (or not so secret) inner circle in any given market that is connected to every major player in that market.

Crack the Cabal: if you (the seller) get in with this group, you will be able to connect with all the buyers you need or want.

Now my first reaction to this was definitely from a place of female minority. Cracking the cabal sounds distinctly exclusionary and perhaps a bit conspiratorial as well. I should mention that the word choice is mine. He called it the network which is far less inflammatory a word than cabal. That I heard cabal when he said network tells you a lot about my perspective.

Since I am occasionally aware of my biases and sometimes even recognize that I am being crazy, I gave his notion some consideration. There might be something to this idea. After all, the parable started as a story of market making. What's more of a cabal than wall street? So I decided to do some Internet research.

I found some interesting sociological and economic papers on the subject. There is apparently an entire field of thought dedicated to cracking the cabal. It's called structural embeddedness. This guy Mark Granovetter made a plea to economists and sociologists in 1985 to view economic action in ways that take into account its strong links to social structure. He argued that the economy is structurally embedded in social networks....

Another thinker on the subject (Dalhia Mani) takes the connection beyond the firm's immediate network and looks at the overall network of ties in which firms are embedded. It becomes a veritable spider web of connections, doesn't it?

After finding and reading a series of scholarly papers on the subject I realized we are just talking about social networks. I figured there must be some books out there that have translated that scholarly work into English.

There are. May I recommend Linked and Bursts by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Nexus by Mark Buchanan and Six Degrees by Duncan J. Watts?

Now you say: ah ha! Who hasn't heard of six degrees of separation?

I haven't actually finished any of these books yet. They are not the point of this post except to say that this concept is not only not new, but also is getting some serious attention given our newly connected mobile world.

How does this relate to cracking the cabal? Anyone heard of LinkedIn? It's the same principle. Duh, if you just make more connections, eventually you will have a network big enough to reach whoever you need to reach to exchange that something of value with relative ease.

This is kind of stating the obvious: the more people in your market, the more likely you'll find a buyer. The more people in your network, the more likely you'll find just the connection you need.

That may not be getting in with the in crowd but it does give credence to the notion that there is a network - a core network - that is connected to the entire market. It might be a really big network and it might not be located in Tammany Hall but it probably exists.

I no longer think that cracking the cabal equates to an evil empire seeking to oppress the masses and exclude most sellers from the market.

Instead I think there are probably some interesting and surprising connections that might give the appearance of a network. Probably there's not a singular network that is connected to all business in a given market, but I may be proven wrong even on this radical notion. Several of the books seem to think there's some truth to this idea.

Still, from this view, cracking the cabal becomes a simple numbers game - similar to connecting buyers and sellers. The more people you touch, the more connections you make, the more likely you will find the person who wants to buy what you are selling, or the connection who will invite you to sit at the table with the in crowd.

Called Out!

My new boss is a smart lady. And she covers all bases. So when I referenced my blog in my new hire announcement, she checked it out and then she ixnayed the sentence with the comment that I hadn't updated my blog since August. Too true.

Time to change that!

I will continue with the tale of the Eliza in future posts but today will digress with an observation about how similar job hunting is to marketing.

As a 20+ year marketing veteran, it is no surprise that I've had a number of different jobs at a number of different companies. What may be surprising is that this is the first time I've actually had to go get a job. And it is a truism that to get a job you have to market yourself. But since I’d never gone out and gotten a job, I didn’t realize how exactly like marketing job hunting is. Let me explain.

My first professional job way back in the late 80s - the best job ever - I got the old-fashioned way - via my step-mother's connections. I was there for a good number of years in a bunch of fun roles that seemed to fall into my lap. Sure I had to interview for some of them. And provide writing samples. But really it wasn't the same because it was all internal referrals.

After nearly 10 years I got some good advice that if I was going to focus on marketing & business development in professional services, I really needed to go to an accounting firm. I'm not sure exactly how I found my next job, but I think it found me. Or maybe I found it and applied and got really lucky because I had the exact skills they wanted (I knew what a proposal was!). Anyway I made the move to the big time.

So there I am, working away for a few years and I get a call from a recruiter. Voila! I am recruited to another firm. That was such a flattering experience. And again, pure luck.

In that next job I took ownership of my career and remade myself a couple of times. Had the benefit of great colleagues, great training programs, terrific challenges, fun work, a few really excellent managers and a couple of good opportunities. And then they hired an outside consultant to reorganize and they hired a bully to be the boss of me and they made it really expensive for me to stay. So I took my package and left.

But not before I got a call...from a former colleague about an exciting new opportunity....Has anyone else had such dumb luck in their lives?

On I went to my next job (the last one before this one). Did great things. Met great people. Worked for a great man. Learned a whole lot. They got acquired, we had a strategic parting of the ways, I left. Sad face.

Alas I was adrift without a lucky call for the first time in my career and in the worst economy since the Great Depression. There were a lot of people unemployed. I'm in NYC and we had our great recession the year before the rest of the country and thanks to the bailout the city's economy was revving back up. So there were jobs. But I figured since no one was calling me, I had to be aggressive.

I wrote tailored letters. I called people. I leveraged my LinkedIn network. I took people out to lunch. I shared ideas and insights with possible employers. I followed-up religiously. I updated my LinkedIn profile. I mined job boards and websites. Nothing all that unusual for a job search, right? But what struck me through it all was how like a marketing campaign it was. It really hit me when I sat down to create a list of firms I wanted to target. Oh yeah - light bulb moment.

Once it clicked a few things happened. I knew what do to. I knew it would take a while. I didn't take silence or rejection personally. I knew the more opportunities into the funnel, the more likely I’d get appointments…the more appointments, the higher the probability of an offer.

Now I’m not offering this as a fool-proof plan or panacea for getting a job. I know I was lucky. I found opportunities that were exactly what I wanted to pursue and was successful in getting one. I’m not saying if you do this, you’ll get a job.

What I am saying is that it was a rare experience for me to actually test what I do with a real life subject (me) to see what it takes and how it all works together to market something (or someone). It really isn’t rocket science.

And it really does take good blocking and tackling.

And you must have a well-defined brand with a clearly articulated message.

And you must communicate, communicate, communicate.

A plan, complete with target list, also helps. And so on and so forth.

Everything that I (and people like me) always advise our clients to do—

Have a goal, create a plan, execute
Craft a story and tell it (frequently)
Launch multiple arrows in a semi-coordinated fashion

It’s all true. And that's how marketing and job hunting are similar.

I've said it before and I’ll say it again. Marketing is about connecting buyers with sellers in the exchange of something of value.

There’s an old adage in marketing – something about half the spend is wasted but you can’t tell which half, right? There’s also a recent Nobel Laureate who won for the not so surprising insight that the employment market is inefficient (it’s too hard to connect employers – buyers – with job searchers –sellers). Both marketing and job hunting are inefficient but you’ll never find a buyer or a job if you don’t do any marketing.

p.s. did you see how many times I used the word "luck"? Marketing, job hunting and life all take a little magic. There is no if / then paradigm or alogrithmic model that ensures success in any area. It does help if you like what you do and have fun with it. That's what I did when I was looking for a job and that's what I'm doing now.

p.p.s you know what's really interesting? As I re-read my post I see that my career reads likes a series of different marketing strategies: first there's relationships, then there's referrals, then there's entering a new market with a unique solution, next is a bit of reputation, then it's back to relationships until finally I actually had to do some marketing. Most of my professional services marketing colleagues will recognize that pattern!

Eliza's Daisy

Since no one took the bait and responded (hey, it's early days yet, I'll build a following. eventually), I'll tell you how she did.

After a few years of trundling around St. James and now Mayfair and some other respectable neighborhoods, Eliza's built a nice reputation for herself. She's reliable and consistent and unique. Her supplier has cultivated a few other perfect flowers and bred them in all of the popular colors of the day so they have become de rigueur for society weddings and debuts and the like.

Unfortunately things in the flower market have become difficult. Other vendors have tried to sabotage or copy her business. Once even her entire supply of flowers was destroyed by an irate seller who was frustrated that she was the exclusive supplier of these perfect flowers.

So, since she's saved enough money, she decides to open a store. A place where she and her sister can live above and where her customers can easily find her. The place she buys also has a workroom where new creations and arrangements can be made. Most important, she has a beautiful sign made - a sign in the shape of a daisy that says "Eliza's Flowers." She hangs it over her door.

She also has card made with the daisy and places announcements in ladies newsletters, also using the daisy.

Pretty soon she's doing a thriving business. People are as interested in the lovely sign as the flowers themselves so she is inspired to add flower themed gift items and flower holders to her offerings. And for her special arrangements she even offers packages - flowers plus attractive containers. These are especially popular with the rising middle merchant class who are unlikely to have heirloom silver or crystal but do have aspirations to the good life.

After a few years business is so good that she's hired an arranger, opened two other locations so that her best customers - housekeepers of the good houses - don't have to leave their neighborhoods to get their weekly supply of perfect flowers. Plus she's worked out an arrangement with her supplier to do special order deliveries to out of town locations where the hoi summer or winter.

Her daisy is instantly recognizable on the side of his deliver cart, on the boxes and wrappers she uses to delivery her flowers and in the weekly special's advertisement.

Rethinking Eliza Doolittle

You remember her - the flower girl from My Fair Lady. There she is, all waifish in the market trying to get a few pence to eat and find a place to sleep that night. Okay maybe she's more cheeky than waifish but she's a pretty young thing just begging to be rescued by her knight in shining armor and turned into a proper lady.

Forget that story. This is the alternate version of Eliza's story - the one where she makes it on her own. You've heard of Shakespeare's Seven Stages of Man? Well the parable of the flower seller is about the evolution of Eliza.

So picture her there, sitting in the busy London square offering her daisies. If she's lucky someone will buy a few. She's calling out to passersby from her corner, encouraging them to buy her flowers.

Because she's pretty and young and works hard and sings a lovely song, people buy from her. Plus she's got these unusual daisies. They stay bright and strong and beautiful for exactly one week and then they disintegrate. So people come back every week and she starts to build a regular customer base.

But there's lots of competition in the square because lets face it, it's easy to get and sell flowers, the square is busy with wealthy people, restauranteurs and funeral directors and so she's getting crowded. She needs to find an easier way with a more reliable revenue stream.

So she takes a look at her business and makes a few decisions. She:

• decides to go door to door - or kitchen door to kitchen door in St. James since a lot of her buyers have been the housekeepers of the wealthy

• decides to try to reach a standing agreement with the restauranteurs, funeral homes and churches for regularly weekly orders

• uses the money she's managed to save to rent a stall in the flower market and installs her pretty younger sister there so people always know where to go to find her daisies

How do you think she'll do?