“And I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar; we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick,” proclaimed our president this morning in an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show.

Some people may object to this remark because it is coarse. I object because it is disingenuous and clearly the brainchild of a media relations team. “President Obama! The American People think you’re an effete intellectual. They think you lack emotion. They want to see you get mad!” And, “The American People do not want to hear about experts or scholars. They want you to get out there and KICK ASS!”

President Obama, polls or no polls, please speak with your authentic voice. Work with BP, work with everyone who can help clean up this terrible mess, build some regulations, kick some ass if necessary, but don’t talk to us as if street fightin’ is your way of life. Get real.

Don't try to manage complexity in a vacuum.

I know. You have no time. Your marketing budget is spoken for, or maybe you don’t have much of a marketing budget this year. You already have a marketing firm. You don’t want to suffer through a high-pressure sales session. It’s easy to come up with reasons NOT to meet with that marketing consultant who requests your time.

But there are at least three reasons why you SHOULD meet with a good marketing consultant.

1) Marketing has changed drastically even in the last two years. If you’ve been trodding more or less the same path for the last couple of years, there’s a better-than-even chance you’re not up to date on something you ought to know: how to use social media press releases to improve your Web site rankings, how to narrow-cast your updates to immediately support sales efforts, how to cut expenses by leveraging new interactive advertising techniques, how to direct mail to smaller audiences for better results… and lots more.

2) A good consultant will clue you in to very specific programs that are working for other companies. Maybe you’ll learn something new about affordable search engine optimization (SEO), advertising on Facebook, targeting top prospects by holding private events during trade shows, customer loyalty-building programs, opt-in email campaigns, company blogs, or who-knows-what. You’ll get the inside scoop quickly and painlessly.

3) Networking with people who have services you may someday desire – even if you don’t want them today – is forward-thinking. To be an executive or business owner with vision, you need inspiration. Personal relationships provide a source of inspiration you’ll get nowhere else.

Remember, you can set the ground rules for this meeting. For example, prior to agreeing to meet, specify: You have 30 minutes. You’re not in the market to buy services today. You’d like this to be a discussion rather than a sales session. You name it.

Have a great meeting.

If you’re like many US company executives or entrepreneurs in 2010, you bet you are. And for good reasons.

-Shareholders are demanding results after a tumultuous run
-Cash flow is… eh
-You’re itching to hire, to grow revenues… in short, to do what companies do best

Even as you focus on the immediate, you’re no doubt aware that you mustn’t lose sight of the more distant horizon (the cross country drive vs. the drag race). How can you align the two?

-Don’t accept today what you don’t want to live with tomorrow. Cutting your prices, appealing to a less-desirable customer or client echelon, conducting down-and-dirty marketing and sales campaigns… these choices may allow you to meet short-term goals, but if they harm your firm’s market profile or long-term prospects, think twice. In fact, think about Wall Street investment firms and how some of them look to the public today (thanks in some measure to basing bonuses and such on short-term results).
-Even when you’re generating the quick buck or the immediate sales, have your five-year game plan not only in mind but also in writing. Where does your company need to be? What is the path from A to B to C? Post Great Recession, it may be time for a new marketing plan, perhaps even a new business plan. Talk with us.
-Get some help. Create an advisory board, talk with a well-reputed business growth consultant, watch what’s going on in your industry and similar industries. Remember that 2013 will look as different from 2010 as did 2007. Conditions are changing as we speak.

We welcome your perspective, either as a comment to the blog or through a private email to our offices.

Synergy and momentum matter.

Just as there is arithmetic to recovering in the investment market, there is a logic and arithmetic involved in business recovery. Specifically, it’s often easier to lose ground than it is to win it back.

In the investment market, if you lose 40% of your $10,000 investment, you have $6,000 left. When that remaining investment adds 40%, you have… $8,400. What a bother.

Similarly, a recession can create business losses that are challenging to recoup… and they aren’t all strictly in the numbers.

For example, a large business customer may pull its business “temporarily” during a recession. Getting that customer buying again can be an uphill battle. Getting the customer back to or above its previous level of purchasing can be even tougher. During the customer’s hiatus, it has probably been courted by your competition, with great deals, low prices and – gulp – perhaps a fresher approach.

Many businesses reduced their marketing and hence shrunk their visibility during the last difficult quarters. Now they need to regain what they’ve lost in terms of being “top of mind” – ramping up marketing will require serious, insightful and ongoing effort now if it’s been shelved or minimal in the last year or two.

Were your engineers busily designing the next great thing during the slowdown? Great – you can come out shining. However, if the malaise meant that R&D was stalled and that even the best minds in your company were dulled by lack of sales and incentive, it’s time to refresh your approach and your offerings, because your competition will or has done so already.

Has the sales team been keeping in touch with all its customers and prospects, or has it, as in the infamous sales saga of Glengarry Glen Ross been waiting for the “good leads” and better times? There is no time NOT to be selling.

Today… while the past certainly affects your firm, days gone by matter now primarily as a lesson. Starting today, you have the need and you’ve absorbed the arithmetic. You know that a concentrated, energetic and smart effort distinguishes the companies that will soon regain their momentum and reach new heights from those that will not. This is true even if your revenues are down, your staff is reduced and you’ve borrowed money. It will take more work and more applied intelligence to gain ground than it took to lose it, just as it does in the investment market.

How is your company addressing the recovery? Please comment or email us privately with your thoughts.

Maybe it’s because the business climate is hardening, or perhaps it’s because vSA as a company has reached the ripe old age (25) when we’re much hungrier to do what’s right for a client than simply what’s expected. But in either case, we’re encountering an increasing number of situations in which we feel called upon to give our clients answers to questions they may not have asked.

Typical issues include the continuation of business models as well as sales and marketing programs that have become limp remainders of what they used to be. Very basic examples in the sales and marketing arena have symptoms that include dependence on non-working outreach: large commitments to print industrial directories or yellow pages, networking through local chambers and other organizations that haven’t updated their thinking or memberships in years, cold calling for rareified services, and keeping salespeople who cost more than they bring in. More problematic instances involve selling products that have become overly expensive compared to foreign knock-offs, perpetuating processes or technologies that are being washed over by tidal waves of newer ideas, and trying to get more and more work from fewer and less prosperous customers. The most intractable problems are faced by companies struggling to sustain a business service or product line that is – well, today’s typewriter. Products are becoming obsolete faster than ever. A glance into the computer graveyard in vSA’s storage room (or perhaps your own) is ample testimony to this reality.

The need for tough solutions and big shifts in business practices has altered vSA’s work as well, making it harder and yet more rewarding. Marketing is certainly enjoyable when we bring exciting new sales and opportunities. Today, rewarding and fun strategic marketing has married the stern face of business consulting. This partnership has become crucial because when clients call upon us to develop programs to build their sales and market share, we occasionally see that structural changes to their business processes, model or offerings are required before outreach is appropriate. Our work begins further upstream, supporting change to meet the spoken and unspoken needs of the client’s prospects, customers and other influentials.

So, that’s where the courageous consultant comes in. Just like a physician telling a patient that change must start with quitting drinking, losing weight or controlling his mood swings, vSA professionals do the right thing by helping clients build or rebuild for the wild and crazy future. In those cases, we don’t simply put a bandage on the client’s offerings and start marketing whatever we’ve got. Not when the stakes are so high for our client.

To read or not to read...

… and I’d like not to be worried. After all, for me, the smell of a Barnes & Noble is nearly aphrodisiac, and I consider the buying, reading and piling up of books and magazines my birthright. I confess to not having a Kindle or similar device yet, but I know that’s coming. To me, format matters, but content matters more. That’s why I found Fortune’s cover story The Future of Reading particularly thought-provoking. I can’t believe it… could it even be possible… that people will ever lose interest completely in reading? Let it not be so.

Fortune, of course, is speaking largely from a business perspective, especially regarding journalistic concerns. I noticed that I couldn’t find the text of that March 1 lead article, which I first devoured in print while waiting at my allergist’s office, online as I wrote this – since it’s this week’s issue, Fortune would no doubt like us to buy the magazine and thus support the advertising. I certainly understand this. After all, a great deal of vSA’s work is in public relations, media relations in particular. If there is no revenue, there will be no publications. Plain and simple. Fortune, and even Broom, Brush & Mop magazine – difficult as it is to believe – are not mere labors of love.

Here’s my educated guess, based on the cosmic and not-so-cosmic shifts I’ve seen in my decades on this earth and at my desk (including the door-on-file-cabinets that served as my vSA desk in those first daring years of entrepreneurship): Reading will not die. The stature of Amazon and my beloved Barnes & Noble are evidence to that. Sadly, small bookstores and publications large and small have suffered and will continue to do so. The media will continue to adapt, with false starts and many casualties, to new models for advertising and other revenue generation. More and more of our reading will be done on notepads and online. People will continue to love video in all its forms, and many – okay, most – will prefer it to the written word.

But there is a magnetism to writing and to reading, and, despite the challenges of doing it well, there is a certain simplicity and joy to creating stories – just think, most children compose tales and essays as soon as they can wield a crayon or navigate a keyboard. We love our news (both the important and the supremely trivial) and we relish our rehashing of information, much of which will continue to be in the form of articles, opinions and other text.

Fortune, by the way, agrees, by and large: Reading – somehow, someway – will live on. What’s your take?

Will it matter if I send or delete?

So much work, so little time. On a good day, we’ll reach out or get back to five or ten clients and prospects with consulting documents, articles, interactive marketing efforts, design comps, and estimates. Plus, we’ll respond to several dozen more clients and associates about business-related matters, and initiate contact with a few companies we’d like to get to know. Much of this happens by email.

Some days, what we get back bears so little resemblance to what we send out that we must naturally assume that our emails got scrambled and sent to the wrong recipients, and that in return, we’re getting emails meant for someone (who???) who wants to know:

I See Website You Need to Meet

Work from Home for $10000/month!

Start Your Heart Automatically

There are only a few reasons I can fathom for this disconnect, the first being a technical glitch so mysterious that even the most universally admired computer wonks (and you know who you are, don’t you?) can’t figure it out.

The second is that vSA works at a pace so much faster than ordinary humans that our missives shoot out almost as if into the future, and it therefore takes some time for our recipients even to receive them. Asynchrony of time, we’ll call it.

The third, less likely, is that our clients and prospects are variously busy; occupied with other, even more urgent projects; or, in rare cases, disinterested in what we’ve sent. While this is difficult for us to imagine, we’ve heard from other professionals that they’ve had the same impression.

It’s sort of like parallel play among small children – I email you what I’m thinking about. You email me what you’re thinking about. The emails are like two ships passing in the night. This year, some of our marketing programs are fun – really fun. We’re hoping this transitions the ships passing in the night to ships honking, waving and shouting words of affirmation to and fro: “This is great! Gotta do it again!”

I’ll be waiting at my in box, smiling.

Not the meeting you were hoping to have today.

Anecdotally, we’re hearing that it’s vicious out there, yes, even more so than usual. Dog-eat-dog business conditions, shall we say? We’re suffering (hopefully) the last moans of a long, wearisome recession, and after all that business has contended with during 2008 and 2009, the fun-meter of commercial endeavor is running on low for many a company.

Certainly, brand loyalty has taken a hit: Just four out of 10 brands held on to at least half of their highly loyal customers from 2007 to 2008, according to the study from Catalina Marketing Corp’s CHKHDC.UL Pointer Media Network, which gathers purchasing data at 23,000 stores nationwide. But the news is more dire than that; the power has shifted away from companies with even the greatest brands. As George F. Colony, CEO of Forrester Research says, “You can no longer own your customer — your customer will own you.” This is true in B2B situations as well as B2C; the win-win balance is way off, bad customers are ruling the roost and, as social media marketer Jeramiah Owyang blogs, sometimes the seller must cut the cord – even during times when you’d think every penny was worth tolerating a lot of nonsense and indignity to attain. He’s talking to marketing firms, “hearing from a few vendors and agencies, that they’re letting go of their least wanted clients. Why? During a recession, vendors are focused on being efficient with all resources, and in some cases, some clients are net negative in time, energy, resources, and morale.” Net negative – that’s a good term to remember.

Too, many of the 8.2 million employees who’ve lost their jobs during this slump are unconvinced that their loyalty to the job meant much when times were tough. To quote a line from the upcoming movie Up In the Air, a fired employee asks the hired gun who’s there to dismiss him, “What are you going to do this weekend? You have money in your bank? You got gas in your gas tank? You going to take your kids out to Chuck E. Cheese?”

It’s not just actions, though, it’s attitude. How many of your price discussions with suppliers or customers have turned unpleasant? How much of the integral way you run processes has been questioned and turned inside out by customers demanding to “see it done better”? How many days do you and your associates go home exhausted and stressed?

There’s another viewpoint about the current economic climate and its impact on win-win relationships, however. Some businesspeople believe that the recession will forge new, stronger partnerships as business becomes more reliant on very solid partners to get the job done in a world of scarcity.Richard Lambert, Director-General of CBI, the UK’s leading business organization, says that, “In a more collaborative, less transactional world, closer relationships with customers, suppliers, employees and shareholders look like becoming the new norm.”

At vSA, we suspect it’ll cut both ways for some time to come – scrappy, messy business deals for many, collaboration for a few lucky others. Firms that want to become increasingly vital and not be pushed around like the youngest kid on the playground must identify their genuine strengths, empower themselves with offerings as unique as they can muster and be nimble… ever more nimble.

Your thoughts?

Once upon a time, all was well with the world.

Once upon a time, tech start-ups talked about their “burn rates” a lot, as in, “How much money will we flame through before we get the next big round of funding?” Some of them had bubbled glass in offices for people who’d never completed the development of the product being funded. Delicious lunches and indoor soccer were not out of the question. Then the tech bust hit  around 2000, for many start-ups signifying the beginning of… The End.

Fast forward to now. We’re kind of deep in the latest recession, a Great One to be sure. Oh, perhaps we’re swimming toward the surface now. But will business be the same as it was before the fall? Or is RESHAPING a more accurate term for what’s ahead than RECOVERY alone?

Well, not ALL is not all fog and mystery. In a time when vSA staff is asked more days than not what WE see ahead, we’re happy to talk about the reshaping (and that touch of recovery) that we, as marketers in the thick of it, are party to…

•   Businesses moving forward with cautious optimism. Maybe not happy-ever-after-times, but better times are coming. Whether, in the lingo of economists, it’s V-shaped (quick), U-shaped (gradual) or W-shaped (another dip ahead) is unknown. However, we’ve likely hit bottom and are on the way back, however gradually, to prosperity.

•   Marketers using the Web. We’re seeing a major surge of Web-related business coming in the door. Why not? People are going online to reach prospects quickly and efficiently. Whether creating an online catalog, interacting with customers or getting your Web site into Web 2.0 or beyond, it’s a smart place to start.

•   Worn-out ways of doing business… flying out the window. Businesses are scrutinizing everything. Are the salespeople delivering the right message? Is the company even selling through the right channels? Does print advertising work at ALL for this company? Should the company focus on its stronger offerings and (gulp) scrap other products? Tough times create tough questions – as they should. We’ll continue to see seismic shifts in businesses – from big mergers to dropped lines and brands, and even to more door closings – as well as hot new companies popping up like mushrooms.

•   Speaking in an authentic voice to build relationships. In a rough environment, trust rules. Savvy marketers are building relationships with the people they need most. They’re using public relations, social marketing, sales conversion programs, and customized grassroots outreach.

•   Executives, coming out of their back-office meetings to communicate new direction. And THAT is good news. Direction, after all, suggests movement. Reshaping, too.

Imagine for a moment that the communication in question isn’t marketing. Imagine you’re at a social event, talking with a stranger you’d like to know. What will keep this stranger talking with you? Will allow him to become intensely interested in what you have to say?

Talk about a topic in which the other person is very interested. (“Oh! You collect spiders?”)

Not only BE truthful and sincere – project it. Interestingly, even when you ARE being genuine, people don’t always believe it, probably because they have been exposed to so much that is false.

Hear and respond to the other person. Answer his or her questions directly, rather than swerving back to what you wanted to say anyway. Eventually, you can get to your message, but don’t force the matter prematurely.

Inspire curiosity. Be interesting enough that the person wants to learn more, and to continue talking with you, and to resume the conversation another time as well.

Now – let’s get back to the discipline of marketing. The principles are the same, but the barriers are higher. When you have something for sale (or, shall we say, “skin in the game”) you face the challenge of appearing biased. Gosh, wonder why! So it’s all the more important to project that you are telling the truth. The type of communication we’ve described above is a slower, more authentic way to build relationships than old-school hit-me-over-the-head-with-it marketing. But IT WORKS. Banks and financial service companies need solid relationships with customers and clients. So do companies whose products require a major commitment of time or money, or a switch to a new technology platform. So does your company, I’ll bet.

Think about the many types of communication you employ – from speaking engagements to webinars, editorial coverage to white papers, social media to sales meetings. Each of these can be studied and, as necessary, retooled to more clearly and effectively speak in an authentic voice.

In a time when trust is rare and business is still recovering from a nasty year or two, is it worth your time to make sure your communications resonate? At vSA, we’re voting yes-absolutely-yes, and the nature of our clients’ communications increasingly reflects our focus on building trust as we build their brands and sales.