LECHTANSKI.NET

I had it out with my dog this morning.

She barked at the dormant lawnmower, and then looked up at me.

I was like: You’re only doing that for the attention…

And she was like: Woof.

And I said: I can’t believe I actually thought for a second that my dog thought she was sneaking something past me. Her actions are pretty transparent. Of course, she’s occasionally sneaky, but when she is it’s for food or attention. And she’s just so cute when she does that.

Anyway, I put my cynicism in check and officially started my day over.

Music solves a lot of problems for me. In this case I was humming “I Just Want to Celebrate” from Rare Earth before I even got back in the house. I’d moved on to U2’s “Beautiful Day” by the time I was pouring the food in Maggie’s bowl.

Now? I’m going for another cup of coffee.

Imagine a spectrum. On one end you’ve got Apple, Coke or any of the Forbes 500. On the other end you’ve got your local mechanic, accountant or any of the small businesses you pass on the way home. One end employs marketers-o-plenty, and maybe even a Chief Marketing Officer. While small businesses have the marketer/owner - the barber or bartender. Al Ries and Jack Trout write for one group. Jay Levinson writes for the other. This is for the big space in the middle: the mid-sized marketer.

I’ve read Guerilla Marketing, Marketing Warfare, 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. I’ve read how GM has worked to be/stay #1, how Miller and Budweiser duked it out in the 70s and the dot coms spent billions of dollars buying Superbowl ads and vinyl wrapped cars. But it takes some effort to find the nuggets in there for the mid-sized marketer. And that’s strange, because I think the number of mid-sized marketers outnumber mammoth marketers.

I for one, after living in Bellingham and paying attention to local business media for ten years, am occasionally surprised by another $10-15 million company within five miles of my house. They are all over the place. And they are surprisingly small, say 20-30 people.

If you walk down the aisles of your favorite Best Buy, Wal-Mart or Fry’s, once you get away from the TVs and cameras, you’ll stumble on tons of products from mid-sized companies all over the country and the world. Greeting cards, vitamins, glassware, candles, ladders, the list reaches into every consumer interest category.

Let’s look at some traits I’m assigning to companies of this sort:

• National, if not International.
• Not too concerned with local media, since their market is not concentrated in the local population.
• Want to play with the big boys by building a web presence.
• Might outsource some marketing, public relations or advertising.
• Quite possibly a marketing department of one.

There’s a lot to be said about a marketing department of one. It’s not all good, but there is a lot to be said about it. Your work is high profile, but there’s also some confusion about what you do in the company. You get a lot of credit and a lot of blame. You get to be both creative and analytical.

I’m going to spend some time here in the next few weeks and share some things I’ve learned as a mid-sized marketer. The freedom I’ve garnered, the successes I’ve managed and the flops I can call my own. And this is because I don’t think there are enough props shown to the humble mid-sized marketers of the world.

So here it is. Here’s the well-deserved shout out to the mid-sized marketer. There are more of us than you think.

Every other month there’s a new technology trend that marketers are supposed to jump on, corrupt and make dirty. That’s not how marketers talk about it, but that’s what happens. Marketers have a long history of soiling new technologies. Mail service has its junk mail. The telephone has its telemarketers. TV has commercials and (shiver) product placement…

But the web has made it easier for everyone with an idea to try to make some money (check out Commission Junction and Constant Contact). So everybody’s a marketer. I read this marketing trade magazine called B-to-B. And there is a predictable series of articles about any new tech fad.

• Check it out. This new thing exists.
• The smart people are doing this. Are you?
• Everyone should be doing this.
• Why isn’t everyone doing this?
• Slow down, Bessie. It’s not all about technology, remember the marketing part.

That last one is usually written in a condescending tone by some young marketing professional who “gets it” that this Blogging-thing is actually not the best thing since duct tape.

Podcasting is cool and new. I have a few friends who created their own. And now people are asking if Podcasting is the next great medium for advertising. And the extension of Podcasting, Video Podcasts like Ask A Ninja and Rocketboom are a lot of fun. But they are little tiny TV shows. In fact, RocketBoom was available for your iPod Video before The Daily Show. Keep in mind Jon Stewart’s audience is way bigger than Amanda Congdon’s, but holy cow is it smaller than Brian Williams’. But who is going to watch all of those Podcasts? I’m reminded of the 500 cable channels I was expecting, which are now consolidating into nine because of lack of an audience. (But here’s a thought, are Video Podcasts the bush league for Network TV and Cable).

I’m thrilled people can find a way to support themselves by making these great little clips. But once you put the plastic Coke glass in front of you and start talking about how great those Reebok shoes feel, the luster will come off. There are only going to be a few people making money, and most of those are the people already making money in other mediums.

Most new technologies are shinier versions of stuff we’ve been working in for a hundred years. Yeah, there are variations: the web is the perfect micromarketing tool, mass-customization, viral marketing and such. But after the first two weeks of marketing’s invasion, none of these technologies are any different in that decades-old marketing principles should take hold. Look at some of the best web advertisements. They look startlingly like the best magazine advertisements. Look at the web-only commercials that take the world by storm. First of all, they reach no where near the audience of even the crappiest commercials shown on network television. But secondly, of the most memorable ones, people don’t remember what product the commercial was for. That’s crappy marketing.

Yes, technology is cool and fun and all that. You can get creative and get exposure for little money, but just remember that little sock puppet from Pets.com. I saw him doing a commercial for a cut-rate car loan place on early morning Comedy Central yesterday. So, everyone calm down. Technology is fun. Play with it. Pet it. Love it. But control it. And make sure you’re paying attention to how it affects and complements your brand and your other marketing efforts.

NOTE: Yes, I do realize that as a marketer, I am at this very moment participating in the sullying of a perfectly good technology tool: blogging. Hello, everyone. My name is Jeff, and I’m a recovering hypocrite.

So a couple of years ago, I was a Verizon customer. I’m not going to link to their homepage, because a) you can probably figure their web address, and b) I’m still mad at them.

I was having phone problems (it was not working) and I still had three months before I could get a phone upgrade, and Verizon offered no help, even though I was not able to use my phone service. So, I calmly waited for my contract to expire, and walked over to a friendly Cingular store. I have since learned a few things about the meanings of the contractual obligation, and the eBay options for getting a new/used cell phone, but that is for another day. As well, I’m sure there are several people who have just as tainted view of Cingular, as I have of Verizon, but whatever, this is my blog.

The main thing I learned in my Verizon experience is this: the warranty on a new cell phone is for one year, but the commitment to the cell phone company has grown to two years. So for that second year, please, please, please, little cell phone, please don’t break. Otherwise you’re hosed, and need to find a solution with no help from the service provider.

So, on my switch to Cingular, I first got a Nokia phone and was not satisfied. Inside of two weeks, I exchanged it for a Motorola V551 That was 11 months ago. In general, I’m very happy with the phone, but for a couple of minor quirks.

V551 problem number one: I could no longer hear the person calling me.
V551 problem number two: the screen sometimes didn’t work.

But, here’s the good news. I am still within the one year warranty. So I thought I’d try something. I thought I’d get a new cell phone for the second year of my commitment. And Cingular made it so frickin’ easy.

I clicked on a link on their web site, and faster than I could have ordered a new book on Amazon, I had requested a replacement phone. Two days later, the UPS man dropped a little brown box on my porch. Check out these contents. New (well, reconditioned…) phone, return shipping label, reprogramming instructions… everything. They even included a strip of tape to reseal the shipping box. They solved my problem and didn’t even make me work for it. Sweet.

Cell phone companies get a bad rap, frequently because they tend to be large uncaring corporations that are only concerned with their absolutely huge bottom line, and the occasional spurned customer will not really have that large of an impact. And even if someone at Cingular was not personally concerned with me and my phone problem, they’ve got this thing down. They’d rather send me a new phone immediately, rather than deal with the ten half-hour telephone calls that would have ensued. One visit to their web site, and a happy customer am I.

Let’s pencil it out:
Happy customer with problem immediately solved = cash in the bank and good karma for all.
Satisfied customer with problem talked about, bantered about and marginally solved = Cash until contract runs out and bad blog entries-o-plenty.

Looks like Cingular has won a customer for at least another year or so. At least until my contract runs out in May 2007. Even then, I’ll give them first right of refusal…

My goals of running sub-eight minute miles, cycling at a 20-mph average and swimming for an hour all originate from one Seminole moment. One day in the spring of 2005 I jogged up a flight of stairs and was out of breath. And I’m not a big guy (6 feet, 190 lbs).

I was breathing hard, I was disgusted at how little it had taken and I had a new goal. I wanted to be able to jog up a flight of stairs and not be winded. So I started running four or five times a week around my neighborhood or Lake Padden. Twenty minutes, a half-hour, maybe 40 minutes if I was feeling crazy.

But the goal of not being winded when I jog up a flight of stairs got old. It’s not that exciting. And on days when I wasn’t feeling up to running, it was easy to put it off because there was no hard date, or ultimate test of my efforts. So, then I started thinking about races. And I started getting a little bored with just running. I started cycling. This was made a little easier by the fact that the company I work for also owns Softride, a bike company geared toward triathletes. So I got a great bike, pretty affordably. And co-workers told me about a local Triathlon at Lake Padden. So I also started swimming-cycling-running, just to see if I might feel up to racing in a competitive triathlon.

Well, I did it. Last year I participated in two Olympic distance triathlons. Lake Padden and the Baker’s Breakfast Cookie International. I would have done a couple more, but I had scheduling conflicts and whatever. I even hunkered down for the last couple of months of 2005 and toughed out my first running marathon in Seattle.

I have plans for more this Summer, at Lake Padden, Tri Without Borders and maybe Lake Stevens, Black Hills or Black Diamond. The Disneyworld one would be awesome.

So now my goals have become to post better times than I did last year. For example, in the Baker’s race, the Bellingham Herald, our local paper, published the top 15 finishers in each age group. I finished 16 out of 23 missing the top 15 by one minute and 23.5 seconds… or so. No newspaper ink for me. This year I want to be in the top 15!

Just so we can keep track, my goal of posting an Olympic-Distance Triathlon time under 2 hours and 40 minutes stems directly from my goal to not be winded after running up a flight of stairs. Make sense?