In the summer of 1993 I was getting ready to begin my senior year of high school. Like many others, I had chosen to take an art class as one of my electives. As you might know back then and still probably today art is taught in large classrooms with all the students sharing tables and working on similar assignments.

However, I was lucky. I was the first students at my high school to take Art IV AP and since I was the only student in this class, the only option was for me to have class in essentially a large storage room adjacent to the classroom that I had all to myself. I had the best of both worlds: access to people if I needed them but also a perfect 1 hour a day study where I could be without any distractions. You’d think my work might have suffered since the teacher let me do my own thing and I worked a lot less with other students but the exact opposite happened. That year I got an A in Art IV AP, won 11 awards at the biggest local art competition and received several scholarships to art school. I owe a lot to Madeline Chapman for helping to create an environment for me to be successful.

Many companies were set up like the mainstream large high school art classrooms. And those that aren’t are trying there hardest to incorporate the open office themes of other large corporations. Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer recently announced that everyone had to work at the office. No more people working from home.

According to Susan Cain’s book Quiet you’re way more likely to get interesting creative by an individual introvert over many people working together. Check out her TED talk. In it she points out that there’s no mistake that some of the most creative people including Darwin, Dr. Seuss, and Steve Wozniak all created many of their breakthrough ideas from solitude.

Where does this leave your company’s marketing department? If you have been wondering why you hired all these people that can’t come up with anything original you might want to start looking how their environment might be impacting them.

A few ideas:
• If you have creatives on staff see how you can better configure their work environments to eliminate distractions and give them more alone time.
• Utilize creatives in-house as essentially a production staff to update existing templates created from outside agencies or remote staff designers.
• Allow some of your brightest creatives (in house or external) to occasionally help you with some of your other business problems. This will give them other outlets for their creativity and may give you some extra key insights.
• Realize that having designers working remotely may help you get better quality work. Most any designer I know does not like working in a typical office.
• Stop thinking that because you have many people on staff that you need to do everything in groups. You’ll get much better results if you find a good creative, give them some space and trust their intuition.
• Stop thinking that because you are high up in a company it means that you’re creative ideas are more valid than other professionals.
• Be willing to let your creative team take some risks. Give them a chance to try something different if they think they can improve something in your communications.

Yes. Pro athletes must not have wanted to be left out. Have you noticed that many of them want to be Superman? There’s Shaq who years back got a large superman tattoo on his upper arm, Dwight Howard that wore a cape at an all star game, Cam Newton who celebrates TD’s by acting like he’s Clark Kent turning into Superman and finally RGIII who wore Superman socks to the Heisman Awards.

I’m sure each one will want you to remember them as the only Superman (they’ll even argue about it) but it probably won’t happen. As more athletes will come down the pike wanting to be named Superman the less sticky the name will be.

The smarter choice would be for one of these athletes to pick a nickname off a lesser known superhero or catchphrase that they can own and be remembered for.

Remember John “the Spider” Sally? Michael “Air” Jordan, George “the Iceman” Gerving or Marshawn Lynch turning into Beast Mode? How about Calvin Johnson’s Megatron? They’re all memorable names that no one else has.

So how can this work for your products? First off it won’t be easy. Your bosses and co-workers might want to take the easy way out and copy all the other businesses. Just like Superman and all the other athletes. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

A Couple Questions to Ask Them:

* How is this name, product, marketing position setting us apart from our competitors?
* Where else is our product going to be unique if we are the same in this area?
* Is this wording or branding already associated with a competitor’s product?

What Makes Your Product Unique:

* Gather all words, stories and images that come to mind.
* Siphon these ideas down to a solid value proposition for sales.
* And then assimilate content and marketing strategies.

Expressing Your Marketing Strategies:

* What thought leaders could enhance your brand by being associated with you?
* How can you make your blog images look more polished than stock images?
* How can your display ads be more specialized in look and position to get better attention?
* Is your content on target to your proposition and also interesting enough?

Be Fearless:

* Top brands like Coke incorporate failing into their marketing culture so they can be first to a great strategy.
* Seth Godin believes those who don’t take enough risks will lose out in the new connection economy.
* Ben Affleck said it well when he won Best picture for Argo. He said, “it doesn’t matter how you get knocked down in life. Cause that’s going to happen. All that matters is that you gotta get up.”

Dylan’s reluctance is more with his music. Over the years he’s dabbled in every rock related genre imaginable. He’s put out country albums, sang christmas music, gone religious, and created a firestorm when he went electric from folk. He also distained the media for trying to pin him down. Once he was asked how he defined himself. His sarcastic retort: “I see myself as a song and dance man.”

So what lessons can you use from these two for your marketing? It’s fair to say that companies used to utilize their branding in such a way that everything looked similar and had the same message. But that’s not the case anymore. Nike and Coke have been using multiple campaigns for years. And it’s time that more marketers step up their game and implement multiple campaigns in a more interesting and effective way.

The same can be said for many non-profits — and businesses. Even though they don’t use the term “Really!?!” in their campaigns they have all piggybacked on a popular slogan that Katya Andresson wrote about in her book Robin Hood Marketing several years ago. In the book Katya did a great job explaining how many non-profits mistake a mission statement for a slogan and demonstrated how using something simple like “change a life” could be much more impactful to donors looking for a great reason to support their cause. The problem is like “really!?!” every non-profit is now saying “change a life”.

While it’s great that they have moved away from mission statements. It’s time for them to take the next step and start creating positioning that is truly unique to their group like businesses do.

A couple ways to get this going:

Identify how you stand out in your cause. It used to be that the American Cancer Society was the only non-profit for Cancer. Now the Lance Armstrong Foundation, V Foundation, Susan G. Komen For the Cure, and St. Jude’s all are looking for donations to fight cancer. But if you know each non-profit you can guess what kinds of demographic and psychographics they speak to. Each new non-profit has been able to thrive because it’s positioned out a niche within Cancer. One speaks to breast cancer, one to children with cancer and so on.

Notice what key words and catchphrases your competition uses to sell their cause. When you craft your messaging make sure you stand out from their words because more likely than not you are working in a niche. Make sure than niche stands out by utilizing good but also unique words and graphics.

Seldom do marketers talk about improving their product which is not only the first of the 4Ps in marketing but also the most important. Without a great product there is usually no great marketing. Marketers should be more involved in the process of product maintenance. Here’s the third of three examples that I’ve run into recently.

Most people that are involved with non-profits will tell you that they aren’t as organized as they’d like to be. It’s hard not to empathize with them because they are usually for a great cause but are dealing with a huge lack of resources, time, and money. Unfortunately, this can create havoc on one of their main products which tends to be events or fundraisers.

I’ve been involved with some great events that were well planned in advance and had sufficient funding and I’ve also worked with many that were last minute. I’d always like to think we still did the best we could marketing an event even under difficult circumstances but I usually always think about what we could have done given more time.

One group I was involved with won several national awards for our programming two of the years I was on the board. In some of those situations we were able to do a podcast interview of the speaker, create direct mail campaigns for the event and reach out through various digital channels. Some of those speakers worked for well known companies or were speaking about top of mind issues. It made the promotion much easier and more successful.

Conversely, we had plenty of occasions where we really had to scramble with our event and marketing for it. Not matter how great the marketing was it was not a substitute for a great event. To really have a great event we needed a great product and time to promote it.

So I was looking around the web the other day to find who was really doing a great job incorporating social into their websites and social strategies. And boy was I amazed at Coke.com.

It’s been argued by several leading authors (Grouped by Paul Adams and Likeable by Dave Kerpen) that likes are more important than just about anything else on your companies efforts and that includes clicks to buy products. But nowhere else have I found an example of a company that truly takes this to heart on their homepage and facebook presence like Coca-Cola. Lets look at what they are doing compared to some of their category competitors.

Beverage market share websites: 17 % Coke , 9.5% Pepsi , 6.8 % Mountain Dew

The first thing that I noticed at Coke is that there is no traditional push messaging. Immediately they want you to connect with them on facebook. The main rotator switches between helping them help to save polar bears or to send a digital postcard through facebook for a coupon off Coke products. Below that they have a twitter link to their inventor, a mobile scavenger hunt game, and a facebook window showcasing three areas that people recommend within facebook. To the right of this we have more social buttons to add. Of course there is more to the site but overall as you can tell the main focus is to engage with them on several platforms.

Now lets look at Pepsi. Initially, you a window that is trying to sell Pepsi Next to you. It says “Real Cola Taste” and also “drink it to believe it”. Once you close out this window you are taken to their main screen where at the top the want you to go to the xfactor, go to refresh everything (a campaign to help people through grants it seems), then go to pepsi on facebook or youtube. In their main rotator they alternate between pepsi shop, pepsi on facebook, pepsi music index, contact us, pepsi ads, email signup and more. Overall the focus seems to showcase partnerships with the xfactor and get people to sign up for facebook or twitter and shop at their store.

Mountain Dew comes up with two contest ideas featuring diet dew’s partnership with espn and facebook. they dominate the page. But in very small secondary are a mountain dew games, music and a throw back design. There is also a twitter and youtube feed at the bottom. But overall the goal seems to get people involved in their contest to win big prizes and engage with the brand by playing games.

Of these three are you surprised by anything? I was big time at first. Coke is really trying to get you to do good things like give someone a coke, help out the polar bears or just like them. There was no traditional contest or push to tell you what was so great about Coke. So why would their sales team allow them to do this?

The top beverage seller is positioning themselves to sell their product to Gen Y or millennials. And they know this target group doesn’t like traditional push campaigns. But they do like Brands that do good things and they like to share things with their friends especially free things. Connecting any dots now?

If other soft drink brands want to compete with Coke they need to better embrace what younger people care about. What large good cause is Mountain Dew going to undertake? When will Pepsi quit asking people to add them to facebook or twitter and start to engage them socially like Coke did with their postcards idea? The longer they wait the further behind they’ll get.

He then looked at the girl and said “excuse me, I have to stop — drop — and roll.” He then began to roll around on the ground and attempt to put the fire out. Finally he got up dusted himself off and to his surprise the girl was nowhere to be found.

Maybe this isn’t the best way to win the heart of a girl but it was a great way to create a story that gets attention. And that’s an important distinction in marketing. Most of the time we are trying to get attention but going about it in a too tentative way. I can’t tell you about how many people I hear want something to go viral but aren’t willing to do anything out of the ordinary.

Think about it. Most of what does go viral is extreme. Therefore it creates strong reactions one way or another. Extreme can be in content with a crime against humanity or an irresponsible parent. But it can also be an amazing act of kindness or showcasing a remarkable skill. You can also choose to communicate in an extreme way.

Seldom do marketers talk about improving their product which is not only the first of the 4Ps in marketing but also the most important. Without a great product there is usually no great marketing. Marketers should be more involved in the process of product maintenance. Here’s the second of three examples that I’ve run into recently.

Most of my favorite restaurants in Charlotte are a bit of a hike from me so I tend to end up getting my meals from the grocery store more often than not. Many of the stores use all sorts of different strategies to engage consumers from social to apps to blogging. One of the stores had some really useful content that was buried in their website. It was about food choices helping people to overcome health issues. Since my own family has dealt with cancer a lot I understood where they were coming from with nutrition.

Oddly, there was nothing in the store to let you know about these stories. So I got curious and wanted to know what the marketer thought about the stories on the site. I talked to her and she wasn’t interested in looking into them. So instead I casually surveyed people I knew that went to their store and a few customers in the store. Funny thing was most of the customers had no idea about the stories (about 80%) and around that same amount wanted to know about them. One person didn’t even know they had a website.

Here’s a great product that the store has that clearly most people want to hear more about but the manner of communicating it was ineffective. The cost to create some in store tie-ins or partner with other digital communications would be minimal. It’ll be interesting to see where they go from here.

A couple years later though a funny thing happened. I returned home from college and started noticing what people were wearing. The were slowly all getting into the Hawaiian shirts craze. Only it was 2 years after it was in style on the west coast. Sure enough, a year later everyone was wearing a conservative version of a hawaiian shirt in Charlotte. So we’re not the most fashion forward community out there. In fact, we tend to wait on everything whether it’s fashion, architecture, music or design.

I’ve had several people look at some of my work and tell me I can’t do that in Charlotte. “Too edgy” they’d say. But they are missing the point. Being conservative works great in many aspects of business but it’s suspect in creating attention for your product.

Interestingly enough years ago there once was a musician from Charlotte who was pretty talented. He played in a local band with his brother and eventually went off on his own to New York where he struggled, and then came back to Charlotte. He was just a regular musician in a rock band but having a hard time making it. So he decided to reinvent himself. He created a character which was a combination of a redneck, womanizing, gun toting, vampire, criminal that played rockabilly music. He dressed the part, created a thick southern accent based on people he knew and created a public access show to promote the character.

Twenty years later his character is still touring, has his own signature guitar and the Cartoon Network uses his voice for one of their main characters in one of their shows. His name is the Unknown Hinson. He is proof that no matter where you are taking smart risks makes for good marking. Here’s some links to some of his work: his website tv show

I’ve played soccer since I was 5, over 30 years. Several years ago some folks across town built a great indoor soccer field. At the time it was state of the art. Instead of a typical smaller indoor field with astroturf in a hockey rink they made a large field with grass-like “NikeTurf”, no walls and two scoreboards. It was crazy.

Over the years though the indoor facility started to change. They added an annual $20 player card, shortened the field to make way for a golf facility, and then began to tweak the playoffs so that some teams would have to play three games a night. The field was wearing down too. Eventually they had a decision to make: rebuilt it as it was or do something else. They decided to downsize the large indoor field and turn it into a small average indoor soccer field with walls.

Through all these changes they never asked players what they thought and whenever questioned they became defiant — almost like they knew what was best for us. To my knowledge they never did any marketing or surveys.

As you can imagine, as time went on the league got smaller and smaller. The competition that was once the best in Charlotte became only average.

There’s another league that I play in that’s not perfect either. They do have a nice outdoor field with similar turf as the other company but parking can be difficult, some of the teams play a bit dirtier and they don’t even have a scoreboard. However, amazingly, they go way out of their way to do nice things for their players. They create all these social trips by partnering with local bars, music venues and promotional companies. Every month you’ll find a newsletter with at least three low cost or free events they are doing to create fun social activities for their participants.

I get equally frustrated with both leagues from time to time but it’s always much less with the second league and it’s probably because they go out of their way to create all these social activities for me. All this makes me wonder if the first soccer facility has a clue with marketing. They built such a fantastic product to start off with they may not have needed it. However, as their field got older and rebuilt as an average indoor field their product will become how they treat people. So far they have some work to do.