The Downturn May Not Be The Only Thing Keeping You Down

No doubt about it -- the piss-poor economy is wreaking havoc on lots of businesses. But in some organizations, the biggest contributor to disappointing performance is found right in the corner office.

A percentage of marketing groups are run by dictatorial know-it-alls who clearly don't know it all. Year after year, they fail to test new techniques against tired approaches that should have been replaced ages ago. Try to introduce something fresh and they claim they've tried everything. (They haven't.) Ask to get a discussion going about changing things for the better and it never happens.

Yep, your father's command-and-control paradigm is alive and well. In some businesses, autocrats rule with a fear-based style that attracts and retains yes-men and yes-women but expels dissenters with the potential to transform outcomes. In these cases, the biggest obstacles to recovery are internal, rather than external.

The solution? Unfortunately, in the majority of these situations, the old dogs aren't about to learn new tricks, and the best move is to move on to a non-dysfunctional organization.

What do you think?

Comments

[Josef Katz]

I agree with you. I would just add that the energy of a company comes from the top and the nonverbal queues set the tone.

I wrote something related to your thought on my blog the other day.
http://www.trumpuniversity.com/blogs/marketingmaestro/post/2008/05/no-one-knows-our-business.cfm

Let me know what you think when you have a minute.

[funDiva Christy]

As a sole dictatorship myself, I see too many people just "following the herd" - taking their marketing strategy from the big boys, millions of dollars with no tangible or trackable results. Which, while some of the major companies can afford to throw that kind of money away, a comparable effort from a small business could spell disaster.

This post reminded me of The Persuaders hosted by Douglas Rushkoff
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/view/
90 minutes free to watch in full online

More from the author
http://rushkoff.com/books/
of which I read Coercion and Get Back In the Box

My solution? Try new things even if untested, focusing on my values and the way I would want to be marketed to. If it flops, I can keep inventing. Worst case scenario, I cave in and do it the traditional obnoxious tricky ways!

[Tom Messner]

Any organization larger than one person takes on a life of its won, free for better or worse from the dictates of the CEO-OWNER-FOUNDER-DEITY.
As for the pisspoor economy, this could be the first recession that requires a redefinition of recession.
Classically, a recession was defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth in GDP. We haven't yet experienced one consecutive quarter of negative growth.
But everybody feels bad, and the politicians look at every economic phenomenon as a bad result.
Example: housing prices are falling. Good or bad? The other day one of the candidates for President decried home prices going down.
You can do this sort of thing with every occurrence in a contemporary economy.
They are caught in the belief that everything is zero sum and for every fortune there must be someone it was stolen from.

[Robert Rosenthal]

Josef: On your Marketing Maestro blog you brought up an important topic relating to this stuff. Hope you found my comment useful. I'll do a follow-up post.

funDiva: It's amazing how relevant the Golden Rule is to marketers and everyone else.

Tom: We shall see if this downturn ultimately meets the definition of a recession. Since you were on Reagan's Tuesday Team, I've been meaning to ask what you thought of this:
http://adage.com/campaigntrail/post?article_id=126886

[Tom Messner]

Re: the ad age piece.
Lupinacci is an excellent copywriter and an interesting guy and from what I am told the McCann guy is a tuff competitive fellow who will exert himself to win.
As for the reference to me in the piece, I told Ira that I have no recollection of being on anything as august as a board, but i do remember doing quite a number of commercials...both positive and, later, some negative and comparative spots. I also told him that I--somewhat sarcastically--did one spot (Reagonomics versus Mondalenomics) that only cost $235 to produce, sarcastically because the expenditure of big time production money was one of the traits they (the pols) associated with Madison Avenue.
What is very odd, though, is that McCain's top guy (Mark McKinnon who has two presidential runs behind him and is very good--he did the anti-Kerry spot about voting for the 87 billion before he voted against it) says he is quitting if Obama is the nominee. He likes him too much.

[Robert Rosenthal]

Tom: This time they'll be messin' with email advertising, YouTube, blogs, Facebook -- stuff that didn't even exist when your Tuesday Team helped re-elect Reagan nearly a quarter century ago.

[Tom Messner]

But don't forget I alo worked on William Henry Harrison (Tippecanoe and Tyler, too) in 1840 when we had no television, no radio, no national magazines and had to do with putting our slogan on a bedsheet and portraying ol' patrician William Henry as having been born in a log cabin.
Presidential elections today in the U.S. are, to the extent advertising means anything ('88, '96, '04), are won and lost on television. Altho four years ago, radio played a surprising role. It is on television that the uncommitted can be engaged, where expenditures can be placed where the electoral votes mean the most and where they can be moved.

[Robert Rosenthal]

I've been meaning to find out who wrote that little jingle for FDR ("Happy days are here again..."). It apparently worked like a charm at the height of the Great Depression.

So, I guess you don't agree with the pundits who've been calling this the "YouTube election."

[Tom Messner]

The only (arguably) You Tube election was the Virginia Senate Race in 2006 when George Allen was caught on camera (or whatever it was, a phone or a watch) calling a representative of Webb's campaign a macaca. (Possible spelling error there.)
As a result, Allen was exposed as something less than he purported and his campaign fell apart.
BUT---it was multi-media that promulgated it and You Tube was only a part of that.
You Tube is--my opinion--a preaching to the converted medium. As such it might be a good medium (like radio) for getting turnout of your base, making sure they show up on election day.

[Mark Chapman]

Robert and I exchanged a couple of Facebook messages.

I'd agreed with Robert about the piss-poor economy saying: "no doubt about it -- the piss-poor economy..." - you have to be applauded; i've not known (m)any professional (US/UK) marketers swear in their blogging intros - it's maybe a measure of the state of things generally! Well done - some things are pretty bloody wrong at the moment, methinks... how to change things?

And Robert said: "Good to hear from ya. Some things are pretty bloody wrong indeed.
How to change things? Start by associating with people who aim to do the right thing.
Thanks for getting in touch."

So I got back and said: "Inspired, I added the Never Give In speech from Churchill after seeing it in your (Robert's) favourite quotes to my anti-knife crime blog.

http://knifecrime.blogspot.com

Another step forward! Cheers."

Feel free to view the speech on my blog if you need help in (work) life too! It starts...

""From the legendary Prime Minister Winston Churchill, thought I'd add a few words of inspiration in the battle against knife crime - and, if it helps, maybe this is useful for other life battles...

"... surely from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never ........""

Let Robert / me know if it's any use any time...

[The marketing guy who drives sales]

A provocative headline, indeed.

I think that all professionals become a bit overconfident and set in their ways over time as they become more and more proficient at what they do. The older and more experienced we get, the more "new" marketing tactics or channels start to seem the same or similar to things we've tried in the past and the less likely we are to try these new things and measure them for effectiveness.

At some point, we also tend to want to minimize the risk of failure for fear that we'll be replaced by somebody newer, sharper and/or more talented.

This, of course, flies in the face of what good marketers should do and as you said, testing is the key. Marketers need to test new things and measure them so that we understand which tactics work and which ones don't. The dirty little secret is that we should expect to fail more often than we succeed but once we find that winning campaign that delivers high ROI we should invest in it as much as we can. Too often egos cannot allow people to accept the inevitable failures that we must sort through to get to the winning campaigns.

Speaking of testing, by what metrics are you measuring the "piss-poor economy"? Is it the very low 5.1% unemployment rate (nearly full employment), an economy that is growing (granted, not by much but at least it isn't declining) or GDP growing at a projected 2.1% throughout 2008?

Maybe "a fear-based style" has more to do with one's world view than it does an autocratic style. Maybe, just maybe, presuming to "know" performance without actually quantifying it is part of the problem with marketing execs.

I don't mean to be confrontational because certainly we can point to the mortgage crisis, high price of oil, etc., but sometimes the difference between trying to change things for the better or sticking to the old, autocratic style is nothing more than optimism and openness vs. pessimism. Sometimes it is nothing more than challenging our own world views and asking ourselves, "What if I'm wrong?"

[Tom Messner]

Great comment.
What we need are definitions.
I.e., piss-poor economy: one in which the prime rate is
21%, inflation is at 12%, gas lines are common in urban areas, unemployment is 7%, and economists create a new notion: stagflation. There we have it: 1979.
A very very piss-poor economy is unemployment at 25%,
inflation at -5% or deflation. Like 1931.

[Robert Rosenthal]

I could wheel out statistics (see budget deficit, national debt, home foreclosure rate, bank failures, energy costs, health insurance costs, percentage of uninsured children, families below the poverty line, homelessness, consumer debt, trade deficit, foreign-held debt, consumer confidence, job losses, minority and rust belt unemployment, household savings rate, real family income growth, minimum wage, college affordability and yes, real GDP growth) -- but if I've learned anything over the past seven plus years, it's that some folks will support this administration no matter what.

As for the Carter era, Jimmy never started a war, which to me is way more important than any economic statistic.

Now want me to tell you what I really think?

[The marketing guy who drives sales]

I'm certainly not defending a political administration here. Simply challenging a stated premise which seemed to be the whole point of the original post.

Words mean things and we as marketers need to choose and use them wisely, never just to arouse emotion or grab attention.

We do agree on your fundamental point, though, that if the person in charge of marketing in your organization is not open to testing and measuring new ideas and marketing tactics, then you can either stay and beat your head against a wall or move on to an organization that better understands the risk taking and frequent failure that comes with good, solid, progressive marketing management.

The trick is to test things on a small scale until you get everything working (list, message, media, etc.) and then only roll-out in a big way once the ROI numbers are in your favor. Failure is expected and needed, as long as you are not betting the farm.

Betting the farm, by the way, is something you need to watch out for in your original scenario. If you do stay and beat you head against a wall with an old-school manager, they might just give you what you want one day just to shut you up. If/when they do, make sure they do not set you up for failure by betting all the greenbacks on a risky campaign that has not been tested small first and that has too many unknown variables. Over-funding an entirely speculative marketing campaign is probably even worse than not trying anything new at all. It just reinforces the risk-averse behavior.

[Tom Messner]

I don't remember supporting Herbert Hoover's administration or George Bush's, this one or the first one.
I was just trying to remember piss-poor economies.
And 1929 to whenever onward came to mind, in which 25% unemployment was hard to argue with. But hey, the great thing about the depression was there was no inflation. (Economic joke, that.)
Along with 1970-1971 (Nixon's price-wage controls).
And 1957 (that horrible Eisenhower administration balancing the budget on the backs of the working man).
There are higher expectations today, I suppose.
The problem, as you note, with arguing stats is that someone could make an argument that each of the things you listed are better today than at some other time in history. Even high gas prices are better than WWII when you couldn't get gas or the 1970s when the lines wove around for three blocks.
Getting back to advertising: Claude Hopkins made more than $300,000 a year during the Depression. Now that was the power of direct marketing.
Max Sackheim sold bibles by mail. Sending a leather bound free sample bible with a price tag of $2.99 and saying for an extra $2.99 you could get the leather bound edition instead of the enclosed cloth bound. Worked every time.

[Robert Rosenthal]

Marketing Guy: I couldn't agree more with what you said in your last post. Thank you for offering up that sage advice.

[Robert Rosenthal]

Tom:

- My parents lived through the Depression and told their sons all about it. I'm totally certain that you and I have never experienced anything in that realm.
- I can't believe Nixon - the guy who bought his wife a "respectable Republican cloth coat" - enacted wage and price controls.
- I remember those gas lines and how Jimmy Carter threw on the sweater, turned down the thermostat, and tried to get Americans to change their habits.
- I wouldn't be surprised if the highest paid copywriter in America today is, like Hopkins, a direct marketer. It could be some Internet marketing jockey playing with Google AdWords.
- I think it was Sackheim who also said, "Put the meat in the window." He was talking about headlines. I have his autobiography, "My First 60 Years in Advertising." The old man knew his shit.

You should go into direct marketing. Screw retirement. Our industry needs Tom Messner.

[Nancy Arter]

Yikes -- you throw out the word piss-poor and it starts quite the ruckus. See, this is the beauty of blogging -- idea exchange.

I totally agree that there are too many dictatorships in marketing. Too many people sticking with old ideas -- hence NOT measuring what is or isn't working. Just going along and spending marketing budgets unwisely. I guess they have the money to do it despite the piss-poor economy!

I wish we could get some of those folks engaged in this conversation . . . unfortunately, I don't think they believe in blogging . . .

Great post, Robert . . .by the way, we gave you a shout-out on today's post on our blog. Good stuff!