And it keeps coming back to me when I look out at the sea of cliché and noncommittal brands in the marketplace these days. Very few companies stand for anything. This ambiguity kills any chance for retention in the minds of possible customers, which means wasted marketing dollars.

For the sake of sanity, we mentally categorize each message we come in contact with throughout the day. We throw it into a box, slap a label on it and put it up on a shelf in the back of our head until we need it. If your brand doesn’t stand for something, your audience won’t know what label to put on the box and will never be able to find it when they need it (like when it’s time to make a purchasing decision).

Companies need to plant a flag and build a brand around it. And if you really want to build a great brand, the land should be undiscovered territory. Find some land nobody owns and build a fortress so strong no company would dare invade.

So maybe a lot of you are thinking right now, “My company stands for something. We provide great service.” Or “We care about our customers.” Or maybe, “We have superior quality.” Want to guess how many items are already in those boxes? Make your customers create an entirely new box for you so when they pull it off the shelf, you’re all that’s in it.

Stand for something. Better yet, stand for something different. Good lessons for business and for life. Which reminds me, my daughter is turning five this month. I think that plaque is in a box somewhere in my attic…

In reviewing the work of our agency over the last three years, I began to see a pattern. In our desire to help clients get ahead of the curve, we have often promoted ideas that were viewed as too risky. So the conversation goes something like this:

FG to Banking client: (seeing the regulatory environment loosen up and allow more competition plus the trend in online banking) “We think you should change the name of your bank to UnBank. We’ll advertise that you’re a new kind of bank – completely transparent, with no hidden fees or evil practices. Unbank takes the pain out of the banking relationship for the customer. You’ll launch new products with no minimum balance requirements, no penalties for early withdrawal or loan payoffs, no ATM fees, etc.”

Client: “What? But how will we make money? We can’t do that!”

FG: “You’ll make money the traditional way. Plus you’ll add some new services. And you’ll do it all online, so you’ll dramatically increase the number of customers you have without adding any significant overhead. You don’t even have to increase your advertising budget by much at first. You’ll be putting your ads online, a much more cost effective way to get the word out.”

Client: “We’ll give it some thought.”

FG: (six months later) “Have you thought about it?”

Client: “We’re still thinking about it.”

FG: (six more months later) “Have you thought about it?”

Client: “We’re still trying to figure it out.”

*Banking crisis happens.*

FG: (six more long months later) “Time is running out. Someone else will do it first.”

Client: (thinking “That’s ridiculous, no one will ever do that.”) “We’ve decided it’s not such a great idea. We’ll just hunker down until things get better.”

And then we see a commercial on TV for Ally Bank:

Sigh.

In hindsight, it is easy to see why clients would hesitate in taking our advice. As much as they want to believe our Challenger Brand philosophy and beat the competition, there are never any guarantees of success when you are blazing new trails. No way to measure anticipated ROI. No way to review what others have done, because they haven’t. No way to avoid other people’s mistakes.

We totally understand the client’s point of view: it’s troublesome to think you might not succeed. Sometimes the barrier to doing provocative things is fear of being laughed at or ridiculed. Well, actually, that’s a given…competitors will definitely ridicule and laugh at you…until you succeed. Then they’ll stop laughing. We know this because we have lived it.

There are reasons for clichés such as “no guts, no glory” or “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” We don’t make our recommendations lightly or without serious thought to the business consequences for the client. And we walk the walk.

Senior Designer Andrew O. Ellis loves Pittsburgh. Read why.

I may have been one of the only kids in Michigan to have this card on purpose.

If you don’t mind, I’m going to spend the next few paragraphs patting myself on the back.

Why? Because I’m part of a small and exclusive group. I’m a young person who moved TO Pittsburgh and stuck around. And more than that, I did it before it was cool.

You see, I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. One Christmas during the early 1990s, we came to Pittsburgh to visit relatives who at that time lived in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. I don’t know if it was the rivers or the hills or the dinosaurs or what, but something about this town captured my imagination for the rest of my childhood. Pictures of the skyline adorned my bedroom walls. Bridges became more fascinating to me than cars and trucks, and the Pittsburgh Penguins became my hockey team – a move, in Red Wings territory, that was about as popular as being, say, a Cleveland Browns fan in Steeler Nation.

In Detroit, most of the art and design schools were rumored to be straight recruitment lines to the now-crumbling automotive industry – a path I wasn’t eager to follow. It seemed almost too perfect that I’d end up attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. I still had friends questioning the move as my high school graduation loomed, but I was feeling the sort of satisfaction that you feel when things start falling into place.

Art school is funny, though, because there’s a large hipster population in a place like that. People for whom it’s simply not cool enough to be into what’s cool; you have to have been into it BEFORE it was cool. Sure, maybe you love the current chart-topping rock band or hip-hop artist, but unless you were listening to them on bootlegs before they even signed with a record label, you don’t really GET them. Digging that movie that just came out? Shame you didn’t see the director’s early black & white short films – they were so much purer in vision. Naturally, I couldn’t aim for this kind of ultimate coolness, and I’m not sure I wanted to be that big of a snob anyway. Still, everyone wants to appear to be ahead of the curve.

In branding and advertising, of course, it’s ESSENTIAL to be ahead of the curve. Not TOO far ahead as to alienate people – but not so far behind that your audience finds your message to be old news by the time you get it out there either. There’s a happy medium to be found. A few years working in this business taught me that, but still, a desire to show that my personal life demonstrated some kind of inside knowledge lingered.

That doesn't look anything like a Primanti's sandwich, but good effort, Jon.

A few weeks ago, Fitting Group’s own Belinda wondered if the G-20 summit would elevate the city’s brand. Now, in the wake of the event, I can only confirm that it has. For weeks, the iron city was profiled positively in the international news media. NPR stories name-dropped beloved haunts like Jerry’s Records, and Jon Stewart used Primanti Brothers sandwiches in Daily Show punchlines. Sure, there were some unruly protests and some arguably overzealous reactions from law enforcement, but Pittsburgh was on the map again. More than that, Pittsburghers themselves reacted and prepared in a way that, I think, spoke well of our citizenry and showed that we’re ready to be taken seriously as what Newsweek called “America’s Venice,” or more poetically, as what a piece of confusing sidewalk-chalk art called “America’s Phoenix.”

I can’t tell you if the G-20 accomplished what it set out to do on an international level, but I can tell you that it did, I think, exactly what City leaders here hoped for. It showed that Pittsburgh isn’t a smoky steel town anymore, but a historic, cultural city with a bright economic future and a finger on the pulse of the green movement. It’s something that I figured out almost a decade ago now, settling down here years before even cutting-edge companies like Apple and Google set up shop in town. It’s a move I’m happy to have made, as well as one that I hope thousands of people my age and younger will be making in the near future. And yeah, I feel sorta cool about it. Maybe not pre-DeStijl-White-Stripes cool, but let’s say buying-a-home-and-putting-down-roots-in-an-upwardly-mobile-city cool.

Awards for a job well done are the calling cards of excellence that communicate our worth to clients, prospective clients and competitors. They’re also motivators for employees to keep up the good work.

Entering to win awards is a tedious process that takes up valuable agency time, but awards can pay off with agency and brand visibility. When we win, it demonstrates the valuable partnerships we’ve developed with our clients. When we don’t, we learn what others are up to in our industry and why they’re excelling.

Most recently, Fitting Group won two awards on behalf of Butler Health System for the marketing plan behind the launch of their new Heart & Vascular Center

No, this is not George Elish.

I have often talked with executives who believe that a marketing agency’s fee should be determined, at least in part, by sales results. When I hear this, I immediately think that they really do not understand the role of the marketing agency, and more importantly, perhaps, the fundamental difference between marketing and sales.

It also underscores why I believe that marketing and sales decisions are among the most difficult that executives have to make.

Marketing professionals don’t make sales calls or close deals. They develop marketing programs designed to build brand identity and interest in a company’s product or service. The value of the sales leads or buzz generated by an effective marketing program is determined by what happens next. In short, a company’s marketing program will not be successful if it isn’t supported with an equally serious commitment to sales.

I believe that all companies, regardless of what they make, distribute or service, should see themselves first as lean, mean, selling machines. Without strong branding, marketing initiatives and continuous, robust selling efforts, a company simply cannot maximize its sales revenue.

Fitting Group Account Coordinator Molly Schaefer blogs about branding & books.

Before I became a Brand Spanker here at Fitting Group, I was a graduate student studying literature at Carnegie Mellon University. People who know this often ask me how I ended up at a branding agency and if I’m able to apply my degree to my job. There are lots of answers to these questions – my education has made me an effective communicator and a strong writer and researcher, important skills in my field. And, while marketing and literature are very different, if you’re in tune with both, it’s easy to find instances where they overlap. Here are a few of my favorite examples:

• The billboard in The Great Gatsby. When F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the jacket art (above) for his novel (it was completed before the book was), he loved it so much that he wrote it in – creating the billboard that displays the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The billboard’s effect on the characters – it judges them, reflects their desires and values, and sees everything they do - shows that Fitzgerald knew and appreciated the impact of advertising.
• The poetic (and promotional) writings of Charles Dickens. When Dickens was 12 years old, he worked 10-hour days at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse in London, pasting labels on bottles of shoe polish for six shillings a week. Years before he began selling his short stories and novels, this was his first experience selling to consumers, and he didn’t overlook the importance of marketing his goods. Here’s an example of a promotional poem Dickens wrote during this time:
• James Joyce’s Ulysses. Leopold Bloom, the central character in Joyce’s famous work, is an advertising canvasser. The stream-of-consciousness style that helped make this novel groundbreaking is therefore chock full of Bloom’s every thought about advertising and advertised goods. Like Dickens, Joyce wrote advertisements early in his career – he owned a theater and often wrote the ads for it – and the importance he placed on marketing to consumers came through in his novel.

A more modern example that I’m looking forward to following is Twitterature, a website launching in the Fall of 09 that will retell classics in 140 characters or less.

Truly great literature is recognizable and beautifully written – two very big advantages if you can translate them into an ad campaign. Check out how Shakespeare lends Vick’s VapoRub a hand in this advertisement:

Marketing and advertising are affected by thousands of influences from history and from everyday life, including literature. I’ve been able to use my interest in all things literary to enhance the work I do for our clients, and Challenger Brands can do the same. The brands that Andrea talked about in her last blog post, small companies that lack a marketing focus, can use what they know to enhance their brand – especially since often what they know best is their customer.

Inspiration for building brands and creating marketing campaigns can be found in unexpected places. If you want to combine what you’re passionate about with your branding efforts, I recommend doing what I just did – channel your inner grad student and see what you find. Your passion and your brand may have more in common than you think.

Apple does not rely on focus groups.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use focus groups, but it does lead to an important point: Apple is sure of its brand.

Apple has had a tumultuous history. Today, the company has a solid brand, direction and products that people clamor for.

Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates and Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs in the 1999 cable movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley"

The 1999 made-for-cable movie Pirates of Silicon Valley is worth a rental or even purchase. Two statements from it stand out to me at the moment. One, from Bill Gates, I can only paraphrase: “a good product with great marketing can overcome a great product with good marketing.”

And, from Steve Jobs, “Real Artists Ship.”

“Pirates” came out in 1999 – two years before the launch of the iPod, which has had a huge impact on, well, everything. Learning lessons, it seems, Apple solved the database challenges of iTunes, delivered an easy-to-use interface for both the computer and the iPod, found a price point that worked – and, most importantly, nailed it on the marketing piece.

Delivering at the right time and place certainly helps, but the brand of Apple seemed to have evolved to Passion, Vision and Execution.

Still, I believe that focus groups can be helpful. As a “company therapy” process, you can get a sense of how your brand is perceived among your current or potential customers.

At my public radio station, WDUQ, Pittsburgh, we learned that both our NPR news brand and our jazz brand were core to our identity and a part of what people found admirable about us. The group that helped us with this evaluation were bright 20-somethings under the leadership of Dr. Robert Swinehart of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. They liked us – they really liked us!

Armed with the information and confidence that WDUQ had some unique, positive traits, the next step was execution fueled with growing passion. Over the course of the next decade, we worked to deliver quality news and jazz programming, partnering on a high level with scores of other like-minded groups and individuals in Pittsburgh to build and grow our civic and cultural goals.

Our staff jumped in to the telling of our story, our vision – to brand and market what we were about, including great work with Fitting Group.

A bit more than a decade later, WDUQ doubled its total audience. The jazz side of the station has more listeners than the whole station served in 1996.Through our news and community connections, we reach out, every day, linking a diverse array of people, activities and ideas. We have a vision for an engaged, aware Pittsburgh that connects with the world, and we hustle to live up to that vision, every day.

To get love back from your customers, passion helps a lot. But, in the end, great brands deliver.