Small Talk

June 17, 2010 »

Impatient For Success

Wouldn’t it be nice to get rich quick?  Infomercials and print ads and dubious websites give us plenty of choices to consider, and they all make it seem so easy.  We know better, don’t we?  Maybe not.

Lately, I’ve been hearing from more and more potential clients who are looking for immediate success from our programs, hoping we can provide a silver bullet to their marketing plan, and magically create something for them that helps them achieve their brand objectives.  We’re always up for a challenge, but unfortunately, as we all know, success takes time.  Overnight superstars actually spent countless hours perfecting their skills before they were noticed and discovered.  You can’t just have 9 women work really hard for one month each and expect to have a baby.  Plenty of diets promise that you can lose 10 pounds this weekend or that you can learn a language in a week - but does that ever really happen?  I don’t think so, and I’ll bet you agree with me.

This same logic holds true for any sort of marketing endeavor, and building amazing word of mouth programs is no different.  It takes time to attract the right people, engage them in a meaningful way, and learn from their activities.  This course-correction should take place month after month with the goal of finding just the right cadence to the communication, and continue to improve the project over time.  But wait - you want success now!  Sorry, it just takes time. 

My parents are celebrating their 48th wedding anniversary today, and I think that is a pretty phenomenal achievement.  They have built their own sort of ‘brand’, and it continues to grow and succeed over time.  I realized that their brand of marriage can teach us a lot about what makes good brands great.

They started a long time ago - 1962, actually - with a core fundamental objective and strategy.  They’ve established their identity, and worked hard over time to built it into something that was trustworthy and commanded attention and respect.  They grew their brand when they were ready with line extensions (that would be my brother, sister and me!).  They acquired plenty of stories worthy of promotion and PR, they established a certain level of involvement, created a culture around their brand, and they continued to ship their ‘product’, year after year.  They evolved through mergers and acquisitions (we’re all married now), and are involved in some exciting co-promotes (their 7 grandchildren) that keep their brand fresh and vibrant to this day.

So if my parents decided today to get married with the hopes of accomplishing all that they have now, what could they reasonably expect by Thanksgiving?  Perhaps a solid foundation, maybe some good ideas for what’s ahead - but it would be foolish to expect much more than that.

Your brand is really not so different.  You can visualize what you’d love to see happen with your brand, but making that happen is really hard work.  It’s far simpler to embrace the get rich quick approach, and do the easy stuff.  Instead, imagine what you can tell your family and friends over turkey this year, next year, and the year after that?  Did you create something remarkable that people are talking about and that got you promoted, and made you feel really good about your job in marketing?  Or are you still wondering instead about how to lose those 10 pounds?

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