Looking For Problems

One of the dangers successful brands face is falling into the hands of a dumbass marketer.

Successful brands are usually created by an inscrutable recipe of hard work, good product ideas, luck, and competent marketing. After a period of success there is always a second (or tenth) generation of marketing. Looking to make an impact, many new generations of marketing make the same mistake. Before we get to that mistake, let's talk about baseball.

In Major League Baseball's National League, pitchers have to hit. They are very bad hitters. Not because they lack athletic ability, but because they usually didn't hit much in high school, college, or minor leagues. Hitting major league pitching is indescribably hard. If you rarely hit as an amateur, hitting in the major leagues is a nightmare.

Because pitchers are such bad hitters, National League teams usually have between 3 and 5 automatic outs in every game they play. This is a significant hardship because in every 9-inning game you only get 27 outs.

But baseball people are smart. They don't spend a lot of time trying to teach pitchers how to hit. Yes, they have them take batting practice to keep their timing up, but they figure that there's a limited amount of time to be spent in training, and it's best spent improving a pitcher's pitching technique rather than his hitting technique. In other words, there's more benefit in improving what he does well than in trying to improve what he does badly. Many marketers don't understand this.

Every company has strengths and weaknesses. The temptation to focus immoderate amounts of time, energy, and money on tweaking weaknesses rather than maximizing strengths can be overwhelming. To wit...

For many years I did advertising and marketing work for a large fast food corporation. Marketing regimes at large corporations like this don't usually last long. In my 16 years in their stable of agencies, I lived through several marketing regimes. As each new marketing regime took control it was inevitable that they would look at research and discover that - surprise! - the company did not score well with consumers on healthfulness. What fast food company does? And the wild goose chase would begin.

Instead of focusing on improving what they could do well and try to deliver a better hamburger in a cleaner store in less time, they would go on a "let's pretend we're healthy" kick which would go nowhere. Months of work and zillions of dollars would be wasted because time and money spent on a non-productive exercise was not spent on making the good better.

When new marketing "leadership" shows up at a successful brand, it is highly likely that the very first thing they will do is try to identify what "the problems" are. It makes them seem smart. If left unchecked this inevitably leads to trying to fix what the company does poorly instead of maximizing what the company can do well.

In other words, they try to turn pitchers into hitters.

Bob Hoffman's new book, "Advertising For Skeptics" will be published next week