Real Marketing Starts with Bold Choices
Dan Schultz
Agribusiness Psychotherapist | Keeper of the Language | Closing The Category Gap In Agriculture
“Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.” - Shakespeare
In September 1994, Danny Meyer traveled to Dallas, Texas, to begin a tour promoting his new cookbook, named after his successful and contrarian New York restaurant, Union Square Cafe.?
He was seated next to Stanley Marcus, the then-90-year-old retail mogul who had spent the last 50 years growing his family’s business, Neiman Marcus, into one of the world’s best-known luxury department stores.
It should have been a great night for Meyer. He was getting to speak to an entrepreneur whose business he deeply respected, but he was distracted by the bad press his new restaurant, Gramercy Tavern, was receiving and the shaky performance of Union Square Cafe in his absence.
He admitted his frustrations to Marcus, saying, “Opening this new restaurant might be the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.”
Marcus set his martini on the table, turned to Meyer, and said, “So you made a mistake. You need to understand something important. And listen carefully. The road to success is paved with mistakes well-handled.”?
Hearing those words from Stanley Marcus was a turning point in how Danny Meyer approached business. It wasn’t necessarily that he had previously believed in perfection. He knew that mistakes would happen. It was that he hadn’t realized that the mistakes were not there to be avoided; they were the entire point of being in business. Business is not problem-avoiding; it’s problem-solving.
The most common reason people create bad marketing is that they are trying to avoid mistakes.
They want to de-risk what they’re doing. They don’t really want to stand out because, deep down, they don’t actually believe in what they’re doing or the value they are delivering.
This is the real reason we need to start with a clear point of view. Not just because it will clarify our messaging in the future or help us outline our strategy for new hires, but also because it serves as a potent antidote to the human impulse to fit and fail to take a position at all.
In the past, it worked to look just like everyone else - only a bit cheaper. You could keep your head down and basically say the same thing as everyone else. You could leave out the promise or make one that you could never actually come close to achieving. The biggest shift in agriculture today is the reality that everybody isn’t buying anymore. They want something that is unique to them. Something that solves the specific problem they face. For a long time, agriculture has been hiding under the guise of “ag is different,” but the jig is up. Our customers are calling our bluff.
This requires that we take a different approach to the market.
It means that we need to make a choice about what problem we’re solving and what change we’re making. It means that we need to decide who we’re making this change for - and, critically, who we are not making it for.
In other words, it turns out that we need to actually start doing some marketing.
But I’m not talking about the shrill, nasally screaming most of the industry is engaged in. I’m not advocating for stealing attention or blasting our customer’s offices with meaningless pieces of material that they have no interest in receiving. I’m talking about doing marketing that changes things for the better. That helps our customers achieve their dreams, realize their visions, and raise their expectations for how they run their businesses. It’s not more advertising. It’s not more social media posts. It’s not another templated email with the customer’s name misspelled. It is a fundamental realignment of our organizations to stand behind what we make and believe what we say.
Our aim should not be increasing the personalization of our marketing - to do more targeted advertising. It should be to make what we do personal.
The most successful companies really believe in what they do, and that is their marketing.
Because the true magic of marketing is not in flowery prose or eloquent taglines built to outpace our competition for existing product demand but in the ability to build a solid case for our teams and our customers to take intelligent risks in order to say something meaningful and to create a future worthy of pursuit.
That is marketing. That is what we need more of. Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.