Who is Bill Cosby?

Is he America's funniest dad?

Perhaps he is a purveyor of fine puddings and delicious gelatin-based desserts? Or is he someone with decidedly more sinister secrets?

We don’t know the answer any more than you do, and we watch with resigned sadness as it plays out - we hope - to some kind of resolution. But this unfolding story illustrates a vital point, one we think is applicable to our personal lives, business lives, indeed to all of life, writ large.

Because the truth is, whether we’re talking about Bill Cosby, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton or Billy the Kid, we have to realize that a public persona, or any persona, tells only part of the story.

Lives are complex. That seems simplistic, but it’s actually a truth so profound that it’s worthwhile to frequently ponder all its implications.

Think of it this way — what person, other than yourself, knows you the best? It could be your spouse, your closest friend, or very possibly the church minister or bartender down the block. Whoever they are, and however well they may know you, we feel safe to pronounce: They don’t know you completely. We don’t accuse you of hiding some part of yourself, anymore than we accuse ourselves of the same (this phenomenon is entirely universal). It’s just that we’re all different people, in ways subtle and distinct, depending on circumstances and surroundings.

If this is a truth we can stipulate for people, can we not also apply it to organizations? It seems to us that the complexity must compound when we’re looking at larger pools of personalities.

So — was Enron all bad? Is the Humane Society all good? We’re not taking any stances here (we’re willing to flirt with controversy, but please excuse us from full-on macking)...we’re just posing questions.

Whatever feelings you might have about individuals, organizations, corporations, or even your friendly neighborhood brand-management experts it may behoove you to remember that those feelings were born of isolated experiences. You might remind yourself they probably only represent one small part of a very complex picture.

The C4:
1. One hundred percent good and one hundred percent evil are caricatures. They’re the stuff of comic books and not-very-convincing fiction.

2. Real life is more about subtleties of gray, and of complex ranges of motivation and action. Might not be as satisfying from a dramatic standpoint, but mundane human existence rarely is.

3. It’s well-nigh impossible, then, for any of us to completely, intimately know the personalities of others. We think this is inescapable on an individual basis, and even more so with large groups.

4. Impressions, feelings, even the things you’re sure you know about the people around you and the the businesses you work with might just be incomplete. We’re not saying your impressions aren't valid. They surely are. We’re just hoping you can recognize that other impressions and contrasting truths could be just as valid in their own right.

Sales as Service

The collaborative experience your customers demand

While your attention was elsewhere, your customers became empowered. 

Maybe you were busy tweaking your website or learning new software or integrating your brand into the social networking sphere. No doubt you were confident you were keeping up with the times. Ironically, it’s those accelerating times, and the quantum technology leaps that come with them, that have handed the keys to your kingdom to the customers you serve.

Doesn’t really matter how you feel about that (and hey, it isn’t all bad - after all, you’re someone’s customer too, eh?) — it’s a simple, unavoidable reality. Resist if you like, others have certainly tried. Most of them have already shuttered their doors. 

Today’s buyer is better informed, better equipped, and better engaged than at any time in history. They avail themselves of this ubiquitous tech to compare prices and products and to hunt bargains. That’s the least they can do, with the puniest effort. If they apply themselves just a bit more, if they log just a bit more screen-time, they can learn nearly as much about your business as you know yourself.

Think you can best a buyer like that? Think you can even negotiate from a position of strength? Think again.

It’s time to give up the adversarial selling approach. It’s time to accept this new market reality. Time to transition into the role of collaborator.

Becoming the buyer’s ally is the best, last, and only refuge for businesses struggling to make headway in this evolved economy. It’s the one thing that can set them apart from their less evolved competitors. And it’s precisely what those empowered buyers demand and expect.

Understand that by the time your customer engages with you, their homework is complete and their purchasing decisions are made. Your traditional sales routines are thereby made redundant. What they’re looking for, at this stage, is a partner to help enact their decisions, to usher them through the closing formalities, and to provide the utmost level of back-end service and support.

Understand, above all else, that these are expectations. Your compliance is optional only in the same sense that the continuity of your business is optional.

There are a couple of generations among us now that have never experienced any other kind of market. They don’t know or care that some of us came up in the days when the ol’ hardsell came on hard, and could very much sell. 

That kind of selling is gone, class, and it ain’t coming back. The sooner we accept that—the sooner we turn selling into service, in other words—the sooner we succeed.

The C4:

1. The information age begat the information economy. An economy of information means a liberation of information. It means that information has become the great equalizer.

2. The greatest beneficiary of this has been the consumer—i.e. everyone.

3. Prior to making a purchase these days one has the ability; nay, the responsibility, to equip oneself with all available information to make the smartest possible buy. And the available information for doing so is encyclopedic. 

4. For the seller, the choice is clear: resist and perish. Or accept, adapt, and collaborate...and ultimately thrive.

Hold the presses. Hold the Mayo!

Can a boy do a mann's job? Not without a fight.

Never before has mayo—and the manifestly philosophical quandary of what is and isn’t mayo—been such trending news.

Surely you’ve heard about this. Call it the mayo wars. Or maybe it’s a David v. Goliath story, one of Big Mayo against a lilliputian “maybe” mayo.

In this corner, we have Just Mayo,  a Bay Area condiment upstart/startup, producing a sandwich spread that looks like mayo, purports to taste like mayo...but lacking eggs, it begs the existential question - Is it really mayo?

And in that corner, Hellmann’s, the mayo-magnate division of food giant Unilever. They’ve filed suit against Just Mayo’s parent company Hampton Creek, taking issue with nothing less than the condiment’s very name. If it doesn’t contain eggs, says Unilever, citing the FDA’s definition of mayonnaise’s proper ingredients...then Just mayo just ain’t mayo.

So what do we have here? At first glance we might have a corporation, a familiar brand, standing up for truth in food labeling—a boon for us all.

And we also might have a bit of self-preservation, certainly not a bad thing. A Unilever spokesman, commenting on the suit in early November, frankly admitted the case was not just about protecting the consumer, but “also our brand.” Hellmann’s is the #1 mayonnaise on the supermarket shelf, and there’s an argument to be made that Hellmann’s has a right to protect itself when a competitor enters its market with a fundamentally different product.

But hold that mayo. We’re willing to ask the questions that Unilever should have, but evidently didn’t, before they called in the lawyers.

First: does the truth-in-labeling argument hold water? From a legal perspective, sure it does. But no rational observer really thinks that Hampton Creek was trying to pull the wool over consumers’ eyes. Just Mayo lacks eggs because eggs tend to turn your arteries into pointy little sticks. Some folks don’t want that as a side-effect from their sandwich spreads. Other folks don’t worry about it, and will probably keep buying Hellman’s. But neither group is going to rush to thank Unilever for defending the cholestoral-centric definition of mayonnaise. Not a bit of p.r. cred will be had there.

And protecting their brand? We’ve always been the first to argue that a brand is the most precious of assets, and needs to be protected accordingly. But we also know that one must choose one’s battles carefully. So swatting that Just Mayo fly with a corporate-sized sledgehammer—is it worth it?

Before Unilever sued, we’d never heard of Just Mayo. Had you?

If Unilever wins, then Just Mayo changes its name. Maybe...Almost Mayo...or Just Mayo Minus Heart Disease—there are plenty of options (Hampton Creek: Call Us!). But in any case, the legal headache will go away. And in its aftermath? Just Mayo has received more free advertising than they could ever have hoped for.

Seems like Unilever just didn’t think this one through. We predict they’ll find themselves in the pyrrhic position of winning their lawsuit, but still getting egg all over their face.

The C4:
1.  Just the facts: according to the Food and Drug Administration mayonnaise must include “egg yolk-containing ingredients.” Just Mayo is made from canola oil, vinegar, and lemon juice. If you want to make the argument that Just Mayo isn’t, in fact, mayo...well, you’ll get no argument from us.
2.  Likewise, we got your back when you say you need to protect your brand. Business ain’t tiddlywinks. You’ve got to use every tool at your disposal (you’ve got to break some eggs, you might say) to keep your brand profitable.
3. Oh, but you’ve got to pick your battles, man. Do we really need to tell you that? Didn’t Old Mother Hellmann’s teach you that when you but a wee little jar?
4. Hampton Creek/Just Mayo are in the unique position of being very lucky to get sued. Unilever/Hellmann’s has pretty much turned Just Mayo into a household name. Don’t want to say this but we can’t seem to stop...Looks like the yolk is on them.

C is for Creativity

(Sometimes)

May we call your attention to the large and swoopy black and white capital ‘C’ we’ve placed prominently on this page? If you’ve even a passing familiarity with our company you know we prominently place that ‘C’ logo on all our pages, electronic and otherwise, not to mention abundantly throughout our physical environs. We’re closely invested in a lot of companies’ logos, but this one is pretty special to us. You can guess why.

Or can you? Chances are, if you’ve been blessed with that passing familiarity, you think you know what that ‘C’ signifies. And okay, you’re at least partially right.

But it also signifies so much more. There are the Core values, that we find in common with each other, and with our clients, and our community. There are the Connections which ensue. There’s Communication, the two-way kind (our very favorite), which we strive to build and nurture and propagate.

It’s about our Clients. Their Culture. Their Customers. And—their Challenges.

Hopefully you get the idea. And if you do, you’re probably wondering about another ‘C’—one you’re thinking must be our guiding star…

Creativity.

We can’t deny it. Creativity is our life-force—it’s the spark our team relies on to find innovative ways to tell our clients’ stories. It’s the tool we use to break through the static, to get attention, to stand out, and to get results.

Only thing is…that tool has to be wielded correctly, if the results attained are to be the ones we’ve aimed for. Creativity has to be targeted, according to the clients’ needs. Failing that, creativity can actually be counterproductive.

Marketing guru Drew McLellan raised that point recently, in a blog entitled, “Is Creativity Bad for Marketing?” He makes a fascinating argument, but we’ll go ahead and unleash the spoiler: the answer to his titular question is — No, creativity is not bad for marketing...with a few caveats.

Unrestrained, undirected creativity looks great on museum walls and in private collections. In a marketing portfolio, though, it just speaks of self-indulgence on the part of the agency, and wasted money on the part of the client.

This should be self-evident, but it remains a pox on our industry. How many billboards, TV spots, and glossy magazine ads have you seen that were breathtakingly creative…but did little or nothing to actually sell the product? Or worse — how many ads have left you perplexed as to what exactly was being sold, or by whom?

We are artists and writers who’ve taken on the vocation of marketing. Which means the creativity we wield is wielded for our clients. End of story.

If the messaging required by our client calls for us to dig deep in our creative wells, to compose some soaring prose and render images that’ll make strong men weep, then we’ll do so. Happily.

But if that client requires old-school, boiler-room marketing that spells out features, benefits, and contact info with no added fluff, then we’re on top of that, too. Just as happily.

For every client there is a correct marketing mix, and a correct way of presenting it. It takes savvy, experience, and yes, a certain amount of creativity to divine that optimum strategy. And then it takes a certain amount of creativity, an amount that’s commensurate with the strategy, to implement it.

That’s what we deliver: precisely the level of creativity needed to meet our clients’ goals. Doing so is always rewarding, no matter how inspired or unexpected or creative the work actually is.

Don’t worry about us, though. On those rare days when we haven’t flexed the creativity muscles quite as much as we’d like, we just go home and scribble on the walls. Works every time.

The C4:
1. We really like that big, beautiful “C.” It’s so forcefully, confidently rendered. It is balanced, delicate, yet demanding of one’s attention. It speaks to us. We hope it speaks to you too.

2. Its messages are myriad. It is more than an initial. It is a sigil, a messenger; shorthand for the characteristics and codes that are central to our collective.

3. It also stands for Creativity.

4. But creativity is a heady ingredient. Sometimes just a dash is needed. Sometimes even less.

Coda: We’re connoisseurs at calculating how much creativity is called for, and how cunningly it should be conveyed. Call us. Let’s chat.

Blown Away By Restroom Hand Dryers

Speak volumes with simple truths

Artists and designers tend to notice beautiful images, and beautiful imagery. That’s understandable — it’s a natural and irrepressible aspect of their being. You wouldn’t want to change that instinct, even if you could.

Writers, by the same token, have their feelers out for words, phrases, whole blocks of text, that for them typify the prosaic music that set their hearts to soaring. We’re all fans of our peers and colleagues, you might say.

Marketing writers are no different, except perhaps in one small way: we’re all on the lookout for that one perfect line.

You know what we mean. Or rather, you know it if you’ve seen it. Maybe it’s used in a marketing context, then again maybe it isn’t. It could be used in marketing, regardless of its actual utility, because it’s pithy, direct, and compelling: the very definition of powerful marketing copy.

Most marketing copy is, in fact, pithy and direct and is aimed to compel. But is it all emblematic of that one perfect line? Oh, if only that were so. Truth is, we’re all trying to create that line, that one line of textual punch that sets the tone and carries the banner for all the related marketing efforts that are to follow on.

And we create some pretty good stuff in the attempt. We’re persuasive and informative, and we’re as witty or as serious or as sophisticated as the occasion demands. Our words team with the designers’ images to deliver a multi-media message from our client, the marketers, to the audience they’re engaging with. And in that sense, all is well.

But in the midst of that conversation we’re not always delivering that one perfect line.

On the one hand, it hurts to admit that. But on the other it leaves us ample room to strive. And it gives due honors to the rarity and majesty of written perfection.

So where can you find that line? Expect to see it in the most unexpected places. Public restrooms, perhaps?

High-speed energy efficient hand dryers are now being used instead of paper towels.

Chances are you've seen that phrase so many times it’s become well-nigh invisible. You can no longer recognize, if indeed you ever did,  the elegant truth and beauty inherent in the words.

Shall we break it down? At first glance, it seems strictly utilitarian — a yawn-worthy public notice. There are layers, though, to this onion, this gem, this orchid. Thinking it over, you come to realize there’s a hint of hubris there: a subtle suggestion that hand dryers are on a march of conquest, supplanting paper towels all across the land.

But no, read it again. All that is claimed is that in some cases, in some places, there are hand driers. It is nothing less than the simple truth.

Inside that truth, however, lurks the suggestion that this place, wherein you’ve been lucky enough to find high-speed air and not paper towels, this is the place to be. Those other places, anachronistic hosts to towels made of pulp, they evidently haven’t received the good news about hand-drying efficiency. You might want to skip those places until they get with it.

Some genius writer or a team of them crafted those words, piled those layers, and they knew what they needed to spell out, and what could go unsaid. They knew what you know about the environment, about efficiency, and about the simple yet oh-so important act of hand-washing. They knew they had limited space and time to harness that knowledge and make a profound statement (and a profoundly subliminal one)...and they delivered.

The one perfect line isn't trivial, and it never addresses a trivial subject. It carries loads of information, subtle and overt. It is the pinnacle of the use of language in sharing ideas and swaying opinions. It is to be celebrated, in awe and yes, even envy, wherever it is found.

The C4:
1. We live in the era of one-liners and sound-bytes. Just about everyone is composing pithy zingers in support of their ideas, their ideals, and their hobby-horses of the moment.
2. Some are more successful than others. Some go viral. Most are nothing to Tweet home about.
3. Exceedingly rare exceptions pack a cerebral wallop in relatively few characters. They’re like Zen gardens in the form of words: every element carefully chosen, carefully placed, working together to create deep meaning.
4. Does that really add up to perfection? We’ll allow that perfection is subjective, and perhaps objectively unobtainable. Nevertheless we think there are uses of language that come as close to perfection as humanly possible. We know them when we see them; we admire them no matter who created them, or why. And they always inspire us to seek the same.