Great marketing is never a given. To produce great work often tests your ability to argue, cajole or plead. It may even require you to put your job on the line or “fall on the sword”, so to speak.

Perhaps that is why marketers can be a very misunderstood lot particularly by business journal editors and general managers. They may think we simply enjoy prettily packaging any half- baked idea and selling it to the unsuspecting masses, but we actually value smart strategy, originality and the fortitude to take a stand when others won’t.

Case in point: Back when I was running advertising for Symantec, one of the product groups came to us create a campaign for a new product launch. The product happened to be a popular flat file database whose upgrade was two years behind schedule. At that time, PC applications were a profitable business, typically selling for about $299 through the channel. However, Microsoft had just changed the game by launching Access, a relational database product priced at $99.

We eagerly anticipated the meeting with the product group, as we knew we had a fight on our hands to hold market share. So what was the strategy? The product group told us to produce one ad, buy four placements and to promote the product price at $249. Huh?

Now the easy way out would have been to quickly put together a pretty, feature-driven ad and be done with it. But that just wasn’t our style. Given that we only had four placements to make an impact, we went for a gusty idea. Knowing that reviews of Access were very poor, our concept showed a knife through a box of Access with a yellow post-it not saying, “You owe me big time.” The product team was horrified. No way were they going to disparage Microsoft like that to make their revenue objectives. But the odds were stacked high against the success of the product launch. so we fought back. I ended up in the CEOs office with my job on the line but I didn’t back down.

The ad ran. And for at least two weeks it was the talk of the industry. People actually bought magazines just to see the ad. We got way more impressions than we bought. And the ad definitely hit upon the sentiment many people had (and still do) about Microsoft products.

We won the fight but lost the war. The product group was shut down two months later as the pricing strategy was an unrecoverable failure. I learned a valuable lesson from that experience. Good marketers have guts. They stand up for the right strategy when it would be far easier to just go along.

Posted in Marketing Mentor |

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