Today Bishop’s is mailing out their acceptance letters for next fall, and they’ll be directing kids to check out the new video we just created – which gets at the heart of what makes Bishop’s kids tick. I’m sure there are a few hundred kids in La Jolla anxious to see if they’ve gotten in. And I hope when they see the new video, it will inspire them to sign up to be part of the incredible Bishop’s community!

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Gulati’s research at the time focused on the difference between an outside-in (customer-centric) approach and an inside-out (product-centric) approach. In order to explain his case for the outside-in approach, he used the example of lettuce manufacturers who kept trying to improve their product by asking about where people would prefer to buy it or how much they’d pay for it. One day, they took a step back and asked their customers about how making and consuming salad fit in with their busy lives. By shifting the question away from the product and understanding the larger context of people’s lives, they discovered that people wanted to eat more salad but didn’t have time to prepare it. This insight was the inspiration for all-in-one bagged salads, which solved the real problem – the time it took to get a salad on the table.

Today, bagged salad represents a multibillion-dollar industry. But this approach applies far beyond the leafy green category – Gulati found that between 2001 and 2007, the customer-centric companies he tracked delivered shareholder returns of 150 percent while the S&P 500 delivered 14 percent.

So all we have to do is focus on the customer, not the product…which is easy to say and hard to do. By definition, marketing is about promoting and selling products and services. The more time you spend thinking about the product, the easier it becomes to focus on the product rather than the customer. But Gulati’s research proves that it’s worth the effort to shift your focus and keep refocusing over time.

January is a big month for resolutions. It’s a time to reflect on the past and think about how we can be better versions of ourselves in the new year. So this year, I’m adding a new resolution to the list – to truly understand a problem before looking for the solution.

The post How marketers learned to sell more lettuce and why it matters appeared first on Holland-Mark.

Family chatering away.

Me waiting for dessert.

Everybody thanking people, pets and food.

Thanks for nice things, kindness, family, friends, my pets, food and water.

Thanksgiving means a time to be happy and thank people for mabe just being there or even more. Also, thanksgiving is a good time to appaliges to people.

“I’m sorry”

“Thank you Friend”

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The only thing better is when the client loves it just as much.

Right now, we’re working on a microsite and admissions brochure for Colby-Sawyer College. And we were excited about this blog post from the school’s president, Tom Galligan, on the success of their new branding initiative and our creative work.

Colby-Sawyer’s mantra is now “Always Learning.” At Holland-Mark, ours is “Work that is love is not work.” It’s fun doing what you love. And when people recognize you for it, that’s just the bacon on the filet mignon.

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One day, as artists do, we were sitting around smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. Discussing the latest cool shit. Talking about how profound our music was. It was on such another level that regular people just wouldn’t get it. They couldn’t comprehend. It was too far out of their frame of reference. So far ahead of their time. (It was mediocre rap/rock at best).

That’s when he said it. He was trying to tell me how much he valued our friendship, but what he said was “I’m not gonna let you become one of those.”

He was talking about people. The 9-to-5ers, the ones consumed by tasks. The ones focused only on their families, and what khakis they would wear the next day. The ones with dry cleaning to pick up. To him, that was the ultimate creativity killer. The loss of time to focus on being creative, the monotony of life taking over, and killing your drive, your need to create, your soul.

I’ve heard him say that over and over in my head for the last 20 years. Whenever shit gets monotonous, when I’m focusing on minutia and I wonder, am I one of “those” people? The fact that I am wondering about it kind of confirms it. I don’t wear khakis, but I do have dry cleaning to pick up.

And you know what? I’m okay with it now. Because what I’ve realized is he was both completely full of shit, and 100% right.

What he got right is that you have to keep working at being creative. You have to keep making shit. You have to fail. You have to be in a mediocre rap/rock band. You have to explore, you have to give up, and start all over again. You have to push past the expected ideas, and plod on to new ones and perspectives you haven’t even considered. And then and only then will you create. And even then, that idea might not have the impact of the Bible or the Beatles. It might just be passable, respectable. But it might be “Hey Jude”.

But he was also completely full of shit. Because what he missed was that all those things “those” people do (that I do)– that’s where our greatest inspiration comes from. Family, obligations, caring about something or someone other than yourself – that’s what connects us with our art, and connects us with others. Because you can’t be a poet, or a designer, or a writer or a communicator, or any kind of creative, if you have no life experience to draw from. You can’t just write songs about writing songs, or art about making art. Because ultimately the only people who will care about that are other artists. To connect with the other human beings on this planet, you have to be one first.

So to my friend from my 20s, my Richards, my inner voice, I say, “Thanks, but I’m good.”

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In its simplest terms, Johnny Cupcakes is a t-shirt shop. The concept behind this growing brand is also very simple: cupcakes. But what makes this company great is how far the idea has been pushed. When customers walk through the doors of the “bakery” they find themselves standing amidst retro-style bakery refrigerators with t-shirts displayed on cookie sheets. All the designs created by the brand have a cupcake incorporated into a pop culture reference. These satirical designs are bold and compelling, making for a very unique and unexpected experience, especially when paired with the atmosphere.

After purchasing a t-shirt, the clever product is wrapped in tissue paper then packaged in a pastry box with the Johnny Cupcakes logo on the side. Everything about this box looks like you’re picking up treats for a mid-morning meeting. The concept of this brand has been carried out across all avenues of its identity. The idea is disruptive and creates interest among potential customers. To be successful, every brand must own something that differentiates themselves from the rest of the world. But more importantly, they must take that something and run with it, trust it, or as our friend Johnny might say, let it bake all the way through.

WARNING: Cupcakes may shrink after washing.

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Finding a rallying cry may not be as easy as it was for Banana Dang! co-owner Than Than Dang, who was born with part of it. And the idea of the store was born in 2007, the Year of the Monkey — and those guys just happen to love the main ingredient of every smoothie made here: bananas.

A rallying cry doesn’t have to be a proper name. Actually it almost never is. But it needs to make people do something. Since 1985, people have been shouting, “Don’t mess with Texas!” This mantra from the Texas Department of Transportation reduced litter on Texas roadways by 72% in its first four years.

Sometimes it’s about getting people excited, like the U.S. World Cup team that had fans across the country cheering, “I believe that we will win!” about its unlikely advancement in the tournament. Or the Last Comic Standing contestant who earned rave reviews for demanding the audience to “Tell it to my balls!”

Often it carries more gravitas. Today’s rallying cries are all the more potent because of social media. Dan Savage’s 2010 YouTube video to LGBT youth started the message “It gets better,” which inspired 50,000 user-created videos viewed 50 million times. In April of this year, when 276 Nigerian girls were kidnapped by the radical group Boko Haram, #bringbackourgirls sounded across the globe. Or just this week, when the final words of Eric Garner who died in a chokehold by NYPD captured on cellphone video, were used at his vigil: It ends today.

In our industry, a rallying cry can cost big bucks. Colin Baden, CEO of Oakley sunglasses, whose company spent over $11 million in advertising last year, chose San Fran’s Eleven as its Agency of Record and tasked them to come up with its own version of Nike’s Just Do It for Oakley’s 2015 brand campaign.

I’m still working on my own rallying cry. (As a writer, I really wish I had thought of Weird Al’s Word Crimes.) Timing is everything, though. You need just the right cry at just the right moment for it to stick. I’m waiting for my moment.

P.S. I found out yesterday that Banana Dang! will no longer be in Puerto Rico after this month. How hard am I kicking myself that I didn’t buy the “Dang it! Puerto Rico” bumper sticker now? All is not lost though. Banana Dang! is moving to San Diego. Maybe that’s where I’ll find my rallying cry.

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Just today in my inbox I had two examples of what not to do. One email came from a marketing consulting firm noting that I had opened a previous email and therefore must be interested in their company. Well, I did open an email, but I open every email and that includes lots of emails I’m not interested in.

The other email was from an SEO company whose site I had visited and downloaded some information. While I do appreciate the follow-up, I don’t like the presumption that downloading a single piece of content means I’m now ready to schedule a meeting.

What’s missing in these kind of on-line interactions is some adherence to off-line social norms. In a relationship in real life, you don’t go from saying hi to someone in a bar to assuming they want to marry you. Let’s hang out, have a beer first and get to know each other.

Then, let’s build a relationship together.

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But of course building a great team is easier said than done. To attract the best and brightest a company needs to offer employees more than just an opportunity to work on what promises to be newer, faster, better – because that’s what the competition is promising too. The best and brightest aren’t just looking for a job – they want to be part of something meaningful, to create an impact, to change the world in a positive way. Attracting a quality team requires a motivating context for the “newer, faster, better”; a mission that articulates your company’s core beliefs – beliefs that you and your employees can share and embrace together.

So I thought I’d take a quick look at Troiano’s $1b club and see how well they’ve articulated their missions. Is it possible that they’ve built great companies and great teams based only on “newer, faster, better”? Or have these leaders found a way to communicate something more meaningful, providing, at a minimum, some anecdotal proof that at least one component of these $1billion success stories is a brand that stands for something more?

With the liberty of a little editing, here’s what I found:

iRobot designs and builds robots that make a difference.

TripAdvisor . . . enables travelers to plan and have the perfect trip.

Wayfair offers a zillion things home. . . and helps people find the perfect product at the right price.

Akamai . . . removes the complexities of technology so you can focus on driving your business faster forward.

“Robots that make a difference” . . . “a perfect trip” . . . “the perfect home product” . . . “driving your business faster forward” . . .

Pretty good I think. These are missions that best selling author Dan Heath might say, “are worth getting out of bed for.”

So whether you are pushing towards that billion dollar club or still have fewer zeros on your balance sheet, take the time and make the effort to write your mission. It’s a core piece of the brand building work we do at Holland-Mark and sets the stage for building a great company and attracting a quality team. And for you DIY’ers, Heath has a great video he calls, “How to Write a Mission Statement That Doesn’t Suck.“

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Imagine that you run a news organization — a legitimate one that’s been objectively reporting on important global issues for more than 100 years. And all of a sudden, people are creating and reading content all over the place. Accessing news and views instantaneously from wherever they are. Often not paying attention to the source or finishing what they start. Do they still need you? Want you? Even know who you are? How can you possibly break through?

When we started working with The Christian Science Monitor in 2012 it was at the height of frenzy in the world of news media, with mobile usage exploding and people reading more news than ever before — and turning to new sources and media channels to do so. Brand loyalty and willingness to pay for content was going down, down, down.

We developed a brand strategy for the Monitor to help them stand out in this content-saturated world. The strategy is centered around the impact that their unbiased, balanced reporting has on people: Monitor content helps people understand important issues from multiple perspectives, it motivates them to shift their thinking, it helps them form their own opinions, and it even gives people a way get directly involved with the issues they care about. In short, Monitor content moves people.

Once the brand strategy was in place we re-energized their visual identity with new colors, fonts, graphic icons/conventions and a new tagline to help them evoke the feeling of a brand that has the capacity to move people. This new graphic identity was the foundation for the work the Monitor did with BEAM Interactive to redesign their website. The new site launched last week and it’s amazing! New features like the “Take Action” section are not only well-aligned with the strategy, they’re truly distinct in the category.

Congrats guys. Glad to have played a role in it all!

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