Meanwhile Back at the Ranch

Dear Mr. Cohen:

Thank you for your insightful commentary on CBS This Morning this morning.

Having a member of the legal profession slam the public relations industry for its (lack of) truthfulness is right up there with the pot calling the kettle black. Are you freaking serious?

Did you—a lawyer—really just call me a liar in front of millions of viewers?

And to think you’re a fellow Boston University Terrier. WTF, man?

Seems to me we walked the same stretch of Commonwealth Avenue in the late 80s but I’ll be damned if I ever met you. Or you me. But you call em a liar?

You don’t even know me. You don’t know what I stand for or how I’ve conducted my business for the past 20 years. You don’t know my clients or what we’ve been through together. You don’t know my standards or the standards I’ve established for my company and my people.

And you call me a liar?

Calling all PR professionals liars is akin to any ethnic slur you can pile on any race of people. I don’t suppose anybody’s ever hurled a blanket statement at a person named Cohen, have they?

But I guess the rules of decency, fairness and ethics don’t really apply to you as you say in this 2002 interview:

“I have a little more leeway as an analyst. I try not to say, ‘This is outrageous,’ because people who offer more heat than light tend to tick people off. I’m held to standards of accuracy and fairness, of course. But provided my legal training, role and experience, fairness is defined a little more broadly than a correspondent’s position would be.”

How broadly would you define fairness in this instance, Mr. Cohen? Are you suggesting that lawyers have a broader standard fo fairness than the average journalist? And how do your standards of fairness for journalists and lawyers stack up to those governing PR pros?

I’m curious. 

Give me a call sometime and we’ll talk about it.

Yours sincerely,

BP 

Anyone who’s ever worked in the KC marketing communications industry should take a moment to remember the late Herb Valentine, who passed away last week.  You can read his obit here and a related article from my girlfriend, Jennifer Mann, here.

Along with childhood friend and partner Earle Radford, the late Mr. Valentine founded Kansas City’s first great ad agency, Valentine-Radford, in 1946. For years, “V-R” was Kansas City’s flagship agency, and many of us trace our careers one way or another back to Messrs. Radford and Valentine.

I never met Mr. Valetine, but I did get my start in advertising in his offices back in junior high, when I went to V-R to interview a man named Dave Holt (who was running the Pizza Hut business at the time) as part of a “career day” assignment.

Dave Holt later gave me my first job in advertising when he hired me as a summer intern at Hickerson-Powell-Phelps in 1987. I returned to what became Hickerson-Phelps (Powell left in the late 80s) in 1994 as an AE in their PR division, Henderson/HP.

Reading about Mr. Valentine in this morning’s paper, I am truly sorry that I never had the opportunity to meet him. He was a special person and I’d like to send a special shout out to his family, most notably his son John, who’s been kind enough to share his wisdom with me from time to time, and grandson West.

Rest in peace. 

The Journal has an interesting piece today, courtesy of those nice folks at the Sloan School at M.I.T.

Although their research focuses on free trade coffee and organic cotton T-shirts, one could easily extrapolate the data for just about any business, product or service. The bottom line: consumers care about how you conduct business and “doing the right thing” matters.

And doing the wrong thing will hurt you worse than doing the right thing will benefit you. While consumers express a willingness to pay a premium for ethically produced products, they assign a much steeper discount to unethical companies’ products. 

One other tidbit of note: consumers have come to expect some level of commitment to ethical behavior, be it in the form of environmental responsibility or fair labor practices.

Incorporating “good behavior” into your everyday operations and actively promoting your good deeds is no longer optional.

Your brand promise now extends to every action your company takes. And rest assured that your failure to make or keep your promises has a more profound impact on your business than ever before. 

I ran into Sprint CEO Dan Hesse at the Lyric Opera Ball last night and congratulated him on taking the bold move of publishing his personal e-mail address (dan@sprint.com) at the tag end of the new television campaign promoting Sprint’s new “Simply Everything” plan, which offers a broad range of services for $99.99 per month.

(I had previously met Mr. Hesse when he was head of Embarq and that company had been named winner of the 2007 Kansas City Business Ethics Award.) Good guy.

I asked him how using his own e-mail was working and he said that he’s getting about 500 e-mails a day from a wide range of folks. Some commenting on how Sprint’s new all-in-one service should work; others to wish him well; still others to express their overall displeasure with the company and its services.

I imagine there are a number of e-mails he receives that are unprintable.

Sprint’s customer service (or lack thereof) is well-documented, including the time they “fired” a customer for complaining too much. By publishing their CEO’s e-mail address, Sprint is at least making an effort to engage their customers.

I myself haven’t e-mailed Mr. Hesse, but I hope that those who have do indeed receive a response that at least looks and feels as though it’s coming from The Man himself. Receiving a personal response fom a corporate big wig means a lot to Average Joe. And Sprint’s reputation could certainly use the help.

It’s similar to the steps Dell computer took a few years back after the “Dell Sucks” movement took hold. After ignoring its critics, the company finally learned how to embrace its critics through the blogosphere and ultimately created an envrionment where its detractors were inside the tent urinating out, rather than outside urinating in. Michael Dell launched his own blog and Dell’s product reviews and customer service ratings have both dramatically improved.

Coincidence? I think not.

Based on his on-camera performance, I doubt Mr. Hesse would make it in Hollywood should things not work out for him at the Sprint Minimum Security Penitentiary (aka World Headquarters). But seeing as his predecessor parachuted out with $40 million, I’m sure he’ll land on his feet one way or the other.

I, for one, am hoping that he succeeds. Engaging custoemrs one-on-one is a nice first step.

Good luck, Mr. H. 

My friend Tobin has been on my back to read Seth Godin, and I finally took a look at Purple Cow and Meatball Sundae (only eight more print and four e-books to go), and can understand why he’s been working on me to do so.

Godin’s blog turns up on blogs and blasts I get from the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America), so I’m not totally unfamiliar with his points-of-view, and I generally agree with just about everything he says.

But. I’m not 100-percent on board.

In Meatball Sundae, Godin speaks of how the new Web 2.0 marketing will not work for companies who continue to conduct business according to the old methods in which Company X creates a mediocre product for the mass market, shoves said product down the public’s throats using TV advertising, and then uses revenues from sales to manufacture more product. (I have called this method the “media industrial complex,” he calls it the “TV industrial complex”…and I’d like to state for the record that I arrived at my term independently…so please don’t try to label me a plagiarist.)

And of course, he’s dead on.

There is no middle market anymore, it is difficult and costly to efficiently reach individual consumers through mass media marketing, using these methods won’t necessarily generate the desired sales revenues, and you’ll soon be on the bread line.

The basic thrust of Godin’s message in both books that in order to market most effectively, we need not change the marketing as much as we need to change the companies (or the products and services) we market.

Be remarkable, market your remarkable-ness and the world will beat a path to your door, is his charge.

Which is sort of like saying, be Michael Jordan, practice really hard, and you can win some basketball games.

Marketers should be remarkable. We should be creating products and services that serve the needs of a narrowly selected group of customers who share our passions. We should engage them via the Web or other resources in conversations (over coffee, perhaps?) that enable us to further refine and improve our products and services and enhance long-term customer loyalty.

And we should also exercise more, drink less and mix in a salad now and again.

Web 2.0 is the future, but I depart from Godin when it comes to the so-called mass media, as I feel he places too much faith in individuals’ abilities to find remarkable products and services via the Web. It’s still a numbers game.

And while it helps to be remarkable, I think you can still sell Miller Lite, a Saturn Vue or a moss-covered, three-handled family credenza if you know how to leverage the old ways using the new media.

My last post suggested that by examining online communities, marketers could create online channels within MySpace, for example, that allow for mass marketing on a micro scale, which in turn enable a marketer (remarkable or not) to efficiently generate awareness for his products or services (either through advertising or PR-generated editorial) via channels that appeal to very specific customer segments (e.g., affluent gay men ages 25-29 who love NASCAR).

The goal is to convert these suspects/prospects into customers and then convert customers into advocates. I agree with Godin that an engaging, interactive Web 2.0 site is the best place in which to host the dialogue that enables a marketer to respond to customer demands, improve products/services, engender long-term loyalty and ensure revenue growth and viability.

The dialogue must be customer-driven, but unless you cast a wide enough net or have the resources to wait forever for your customers to find you, you’ll die bored and broke is you do not incorporate some form of mass media marketing strategy in your overall plan.