Exceptional marketing looks effortless and easy—deceptively so. It is fluid and right and appears to be natural. It never calls attention to itself but only to the product or service being marketed. The seams don’t show, the medium flows into the message and the only discernable voice is that of the product or service. Good marketing is also simple. There are ten or twelve fundamental rules about how to do it right. It’s simple but not easy. I cannot say it any better than David Ogilvy did in his book, Ogilvy on Advertising:

“I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Æschines spoke, they said ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march against Philip’.”

Any marketing guy who paraphrases Plutarch is OK in my book. But beyond that, “so interesting that you buy the product” is the thing. Seamlessness, fluidity, and transparency to the point that all you see is the irresistibility of the product—there’s the elegance, the art and the hard part, made all the harder by our technology, our knowledge about that technology and our culture.

Technology—especially the CGI animation technology that blurs the possible and the impossible and our commonplace knowledge of it (if not how it’s done) constantly raises our expectations of visual presentation. Our culture leads us to disconnect emotionally. Climb on a city bus. There was a time when anyone over sixty or carrying a baby or a big package would automatically be provided a seat. Today you will see legions of young men and women wearing branded clothing with hundreds of dollars worth of electronics and phones plugged in their ears staring blankly ahead. We have become a society where it is entirely legitimate to give a damn only about yourself. What is curious is that while this is going on, there is a good deal more warmth in the air, albeit manufactured warmth. Recorded voicemails exhort us to “have a great day” and commercials say, “I want to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.” Emotionally troubled youth are known to take on commercial television characters and employ advertising slogans in every day speech. These creative uses of the medium may be trying to tell us something.

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Here’s what I believe:
• You cannot market your way out of business problems.
• Marketing is not manipulation; marketing is not telling lies and conning people to buy your product.
• Marketing is not sales; sales is just a part of marketing, just as market research, advertising, internal marketing, etc. are a part of it.
• Hard work trumps good luck in the long run; hot-dogging is good—consistency is better.
• The point of your work day is to create value; the point of your personal day is to do something good for someone else and not get caught doing it.
• Nothing ennobles a man like having daughters—nothing.
• If you follow the Boy Scout Law, you’ll more than likely be alright.
• If one is to lay any claim to character, he must live his convictions daily, reflexively, in a hundred small ways.
• Character bats last.
• The two greatest, living American poets are Smokey Robinson even though recent photos are unnaturally, eerily free of wrinkles; and Merle Haggard even though he has become uneven in his dotage.

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Business models fail; businesses that are great through-and-through don’t fail. Great ideas alone are not enough. Great ideas rolled out with passion, diligence and complete execution win the day. Gone (or going) and soon to be forgotten businesses: Hollywood Video, MAXjet, Air America, Pay By Touch, Sofa Express & More and Delta Financial Corporation.

The reasons they are gone or going are many – serial venture capital raising combined with a supersonic burn rate; plenty of money but no vision; more ego than brains; inflated expectations; complete, jaw-dropping mismanagement; or playing “me, too” on a shrinking playing field. (“We are just like Blockbuster but not as smart and not as well funded.”). Then there’s the value of persistence. In 1923, a 22-year-old animator in Kansas City, Missouri directed a one-reel comedy entitled “Alice's Wonderland,” in which a young girl visits a film studio to witness the creation of a new cartoon. This was no ordinary cartoon though. It blended animation with live action. Despite the technological breakthrough, the young filmmaker’s company, Laugh-O-Gram Studios, went bankrupt. Walt Disney left the Midwest and brought his vision to Southern California.

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I graduated from the University of Texas in a year I do not wish to cite here. Let’s just say that, at the time, taking Computer Science classes involved carrying around a lot of punch cards. I’ve been a marketer since 1976. Marketing is, at the end of the day, results-oriented. It’s about making the sale and keeping the customer coming back. If you can’t measure what you’re doing, it doesn’t mean much. I’ve had the great good fortune to be associated as a marketer with businesses that worked: Barnes & Noble as VP of Marketing, Blue Tulip, Xlibris, Publisher Alley, Texas Monthly, Random House; sometimes as an employee, sometimes as a consultant. Even as a writer (just a few small things in Texas Monthly). The one thing they all had in common was exceptionally sharp focus on the selling proposition and achieving revenue goals. The reason I’m entering my third year at Starr Tincup is that the company’s values, strategy and methods are totally in sync with my own—enough so that the principals choose to keep me.

Right before coming to Starr Tincup in 2006 I was a terms negotiator for Baker & Taylor Information and Entertainment. The objective of my job was to bring additional margin dollars to the bottom line without my employer really having to create additional expense. It sounds harder than it is. Being very focused on margin for a period of time allowed me to clear my head of highly theoretical marketing notions and keep my eyes on tangible results. It also made me hone my listening skills; not surprisingly, sitting across the table for hours at a time making sense of the limits and business needs of another company makes you an astute listener.