Celebration Distillation

The last time I had any real truck with Demon Rum was ’63: A post-Marist graduation visit to what was then British Honduras helped me to an acquaintance of the locally produced product which was pretty raw.

Now, thanks to a tasting with Philip Cusimano, I’ve re-made rum’s acquaintance with a higher caliber product. And wandered again into the world of audience-building for artisan products. Here, the heavy lifting’s done by skill and heart and one-bottle-at-a-time marketing.

Phil (and our hosts at Mo Mong) let me taste three different versions of Old New Orleans Rum, from the Crescent City’s Celebration Distillation. The Crystal is your basic light-bodied rum that’s probably good for mixed drinks. The Amber is fine for sippin’. But the Cajun Spice, the one with the red label – it’s just outstanding…like the website says, “with the kick of cayenne & cinnamon…hints of nutmeg, ginger & cloves…”

My but it’s tasty. Every single-barrel rum is distilled and blended the old-fashioned way at 2815 Frenchman Street in NOLA by James Michalopoulos, a well-known local artist.

One of the “country virtues” of marketing artisanal foods and beverages (cheeses and breads, beers and wines, barbeque sauces and handmade pâtés) is that you can succeed without lots of money. You substitute lots of sweat equity and smarts. Boys and girls, Michalopoulos’s marketing the hell out of this stuff, mano a mano.

Michalopoulos doesn’t have the Bacardi USA ad budget, say, or the Captain Morgan “Morganettes” (Caitlyn, Megan and Whitney, no less).

What he does have is a finely honed sense of local color – the Red Hat Society ladies come to lunch at the distillery, e.g. He manages a comprehensive website and maintains an active blog. Old New Orleans Rum has pages on Facebook (I’ve joined up as a fan) and MySpace. You can purchase bottles online and have them shipped…from New York.

If – or when – Michalopoulos succeeds, he’ll have done it with continuous and clever promotion on a local and regional level, slowly building the rums’ audience through brewery tours, event participation and broadening distribution sites. You can find Old New Orleans varieties in Spec’s here, for example, right along with the shelf-hogging Bacardis and Ron Ricos.

Rum, like wine, is an amazingly available product…it comes from just about everywhere. But hard liquor distilled from sugar cane and byproducts is a genuine New World invention. It played a significant role in the European and African colonization of the American continents.

That these rums remind you of beignets and coffee with chicory is positively part of the brand’s image. The appeal is local (where Elysian Fields crosses Abundance), like Shiner Bock and St Arnold beers instead of Budweiser here in Houston. You gave it up for Tito’s Handmade Vodka, right? Made in Austin, right?

Well, you can buy your rum one of the great big labels and watch your money go offshore. Or you can offer up your drinking dollars and sense of style to NOLA, where artisanal branding is alive and well.

Steen’s Passalong

Yeshiva University decides to field a rowing team. Unfortunately, they lose race after race. They practice and practice for hours every day. Still, they never manage to come in any better than dead last.

Finally, the team decides to send Morris Fishbein, its captain, to spy on Harvard, the perennial championship team. So Morris schleps off to Cambridge, MA, and hides in the bushes next to the Charles River, where he carefully watches the Harvard team at its daily practices.

After a week, Morris returns to Yeshiva. “Well, I figured out their secret,” he announces.

“What? Tell us! Tell us!” his teammates shout.

“We should have only one guy yelling. The other eight should row.”

Thanks for this old goldie to Michael Steen, who writes novels like The Barnabas Nickel under the pen name “Michael Sea.” Good Shabbos.

Guarding Trademarks

For brand marketers, there's a good, quick briefing on the proper selection of trademarks: Read the “What’s in a Name?” article from BevNET Innovation, Issue 2, by lawyer Gregg R Sultan, here.

Long-form, though, it struck me that it’s relatively rare when information technology and copyright protection intersect. Today’s one of those days.

We’re at the dawn of what WIRED is now calling the “Petabyte Age.” That’s when there’s so much information available to us, the sheer mass of data demands what WIRED editor Chris Anderson says is an entirely different approach. He further pronounces: The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world.

Very cool thinking, yes? Except that one of the examples in the WIRED feature article is a DOD program called Essence – the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics. Though “100 megabytes of data come in every day,” the government can’t nail down the source(s) of the current salmonella outbreak that’s clobbered 1,000 people.

Big data may well become miraculous. But mistakes will still happen if your project is “untouched by human thought.” So we come back to creating and protecting a trademark and Sultan’s article. Here’re some snippets:

Businesses tend to pick names which describe a product to immediately alert the consumer to the product’s nature (e.g., “Lemon Lime Soda”)…in the long run, you probably won’t be able to distinguish your beverage from others or protect the name.

Sierra Mist for lemon-lime soda…is considered a suggestive mark because it doesn’t describe the product, but conveys the idea that it’s refreshing. Marks like these are easier to protect and enforce…

As I said up top, the entire article is concise; worth your reviewing as a “best practices” reminder. Radio Corporation of America was fine in 1919. Now, 90 years later, it wouldn’t hold up as a corporate or brand name. This is what lawyers are for in our day and age, along with creative people who understand what makes one brand name more powerful, more useful and more protectable than another.

It doesn’t matter how much data you crunch (and there are software programs that’ll invent brand name options by the thousands). Creating a great brand is a human endeavor; guarding its IP value is up to human beings every time. Every time.

Appreciation to Gregg R Sultan, Esq., for his white paper, © 2008, BevNET.com, Inc. Post art by Prism Design, Inc. Many thanks to Susan Reeves and Stacy Allen. The art is the binary (data) form of a client brand name – a free bottle of wine to the first person who identifies it.

Wood’s Rebuke

I don’t know Bertha Jean Wood of Katy, TX. I’m gonna talk about her, though. First, note what Don Markstein says on his excellent ToonpediaTM website: “There was a time when Americans thought it was okay to poke fun at people about their cultural heritage.”

All too often, this habit took the form of mascots for very well-known brands. Markstein calls them commercial spokestoons.

The clichéd Frito Bandito© brand mascot was created for Fritos Corn Chips in 1967 by ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding. The character, animated by the genuinely famous Tex Avery, lasted about five years. Then in ’71, pressure by Mexican-American groups, accusing Frito-Lay and FCB of playing up racial stereotypes, forced the Bandito into permanent retirement.

Thirty-plus years later, the shoe is on some other foot. Or is it possible you’ve been asleep while the latest Wal-Mart kerfluffle’s been going on in Houston? It’s about the “much beloved” Mexican cultural icon, Memín Pinguín – again.

There’s so many blog posts, so much information on this flap, you can Google it all for yourself. What you do need to know is that Mexico’s past president, Vicente Fox, said back in 2005 that he didn't understand what all the fuss was about over Memín Pinguín. He insisted that Memín’s image was not racist, but a beloved character embraced by all Mexicans.

Out of the smoke of the cultural battlefield comes Ms Wood’s letter to the Houston Chronicle (Saturday, July 12, 2008, page B6). It would be a succinct 44 words if she didn’t have to refer to the paper’s overlong headline. She wrote:

I am glad to read that former Mexican President Vicente Fox sees nothing offensive about the Memín Pinguín character. (Please see “Comic draws charges of racism/Customers ask Wal-Mart stores to remove book,” City and State cover, Tuesday.) The right to free speech should never be compromised. Since we all agree on that, can we have Speedy Gonzalez and the Frito Bandito back? Please?

Thank you, Ms Wood. I hope and expect that you will extend that same incisive judgment to cultural stereotypes, whether they’re good or bad.

When is it time to put aside some beloved icon? Maybe it’s when your stakeholders transform themselves. Or when you’re no longer selling in “your” market. Trick is, discovering when that time comes before everything blows up in your face.

PS: Review some familiar brand mascot makeovers here.

Big Show

Brief note on the annual Lawndale Art Center Big Show, which opened last evening; Barbara and I attended. For this year’s event, the organization received 1,014 submissions by 407 artists and showed just under a hundred of them, from Adelman (John) to Zeigler (Paul S).

It was a full house, livened by people we knew: Hugh McDonnold had two paintings selected; the aforementioned John Adelman; Garland Fielder, Larry McEntire, Howard Sherman, Frances Thiel and many more; way more we did not know at all of course.

I thought two Allen Rodewald pieces were particularly fine – similar to the one pictured above. In fact, I thought this year the Show demonstrated a higher level of technical accomplishment overall. Still, with such a crowd, such an array of art, there’s no doubt that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

It’s not comprehensively eye-popping (though some pieces are). It is a damned good overview of the state of art in Houston. I suggest a visit to 4912 Main Street. Then out for a couple of drinks to absorb the images. We did; used a 2006 Argentine Malbec for this purpose. No advertising - lovely evening.

Painting: “White Black,” acrylic on canvas, 42” x 68” – Expressive Design Studios.

We, together...

Last Wednesday, a colleague of mine was sworn in as a new American citizen. She told me about it on Thursday and I couldn’t have felt prouder at the news. She’s not from around here, you see – and I wasn’t even aware that she was undertaking this step.

Most of us are not “from around here.” That makes me an unabashed fan of the American melting pot. Unless you’re an American aborigine, all Americans come from someplace else, or their ancestors did.

Last Wednesday, hundreds of new US citizens added to the mix that is so uniquely American. In fact, US Citizenship and Immigration officials indicated that they conduct one such ceremony every month – usually about 2,700 people are sworn in as new citizens.

It’s a continual wonder to me and I don’t take the commitments of a US citizen lightly. Neither, I think, do new American citizens. Each of us, in our time, has the opportunity and the responsibility to make our nation better, to enrich the lives of our fellow Americans through good citizenship and good works.

You may or may not believe that the French cynically gave our nation Bertholdi’s Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World as a tourist promotion. To imagine seeing it for the first time from the deck of an immigrant’s ship is spine-tingling. To actually visit it is humbling.

If you read history, you are not necessarily condemned to repeat it – yet that’s what’s happening in today’s divisive debate about immigrants. Yes, the US ought to secure its borders. Yes, many immigrants are here illegally.

But so many are not – and so many take up citizenship and responsibilities which many “born-here” compatriots do not. This is one thing that makes us great: This amazing nation, this melting pot of cultures and languages and rancorous wrangling among left, right and center.

On this day after the 4th of July, remember the arresting sonnet penned by Emma Lazarus in 1883, which appears on a bronze plaque inside the Statue’s pedestal:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land,
Here at our sea-washed, sunset- gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome, her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin-cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she,
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore;
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

On Wednesday, in Houston alone, several thousand people became new citizens. They’re joining us – or we are joining them. Together, we make up everything that is America.

Instead of complaining, what have you accomplished that is good for your neighborhood, your city, your country? Have you lifted your lamp beside our golden door lately?

Since I was on this particular kick, and because Glitzy has such an arresting collection of jewelry, I took the liberty of using another photo of an Amazing Adornments brooch – a 1940s-era Accessocraft pin made for the Kay Dunhill dress company. It bears the Latin motto E Pluribus Unum: “Out of Many, One.” That’s what the melting pot is all about.

Silson’s 4th

After various, more somber 4th of July posts (here, for example), something lighter’s in order. There’s always time for splashing your feet in the backwaters and bayous of History.

You could call today’s post Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Jewelry.

“Glitzy” writes the Amazing Adornments blog. If Glitzy were writing this, you’d probably be able to find who really designed the brooch pictured above, which came up immediately when I Googled “Independence Day Pins.”

In a US patent (#D124416) granted 31 December 1941, Victor Silson portrayed a pin with the Declaration of Independence, Independence Hall, an inkwell and a goose quill pen:

Be it known that I, Victor Silson, a subject of the King of Great Britain, residing in the city of New York, county of New York, and State of New York, have invented a new, original, and ornamental Design for a Brooch or Similar Article…

The pen I mentioned is present in the Silson patent drawing; it’s missing from the pictured example.

I thought the timing was important (just after Pearl Harbor) until I started digging. Silson, it turns out, was a prolific 1930s-40s producer of brooches and pins, military and otherwise. He designed, patented and produced hundreds of brooches, including a handsome series of three locket-pins – one each for the Army, Navy and Air Force – and received patents for these, #D124114-116, in 1940.

The Army pin features a canteen in front of a crossed sword and musket. The locket is inside the canteen. The best views of these are at the N&N’s Vintage Costume Jewelry website.

It’s Silson’s name on the patents. But among vintage jewelry enthusiasts, William Spratling was a well-known Mexican silversmith who was employed by the Silson firm, a “very esteemed jewelry company.”

Glitzy, I’m curious: Is it Silson’s 4th of July design or Spratling’s?

I’ll drop a line to your blog and ask you straight out…I think there’s a neat story here somewhere. Happy 4th of July, y’all.

Photo courtesy of Amazing Adornments.

Cow-Towing

Lord love the English language. It’s one of the most entertaining things in the Western world. John A Sagerian of Pasadena, TX, wrote a letter to the editor in Sunday’s Houston Chronicle (29 June 8, Page E2). A firm and righteous letter, it contains the following sentence:

If syndicated columnist EJ Dionne thinks the Supreme Court is cow-towing (sic) to the right wing, I want some of what he’s smoking.

Now I’m no Bill Safire (who is?). But I’m thinking that what Sagerian intended to use is kowtowing – a quite classic word of Chinese origin, brought into English in the very late 18th Century, that means to act in an obsequious or servile manner. More directly, “to touch the forehead to the ground while kneeling as an act of reverence, etc.”

Sagerian couldn’t have created such a wonderful case of miswording by intention. It has to be a psychological slip. Simply stated, I can’t visualize the Supremes ever using a stock trailer to deliver anything to conservatives, even cows.

If I were cow-towing to hard right-wingers or intransigent leftists, I’d certainly use the 2009 “Silver Star” pictured above by Wilson Trailers, available through Andres Trailer Sales in Alberta – it has exclusive aerodynamics that’d help me cut through the hot air generated by pundits of both parties.

Nevertheless, a tip of the Hatlo hat to Pasadena’s Mr Sagerian for the wonderful slip-of-the-keyboard, or pen or whatever.

Deconstruction – Good

Deconstruction is not automatically bad (he said, continuing the thought experiment from yesterday’s post).

When should you deconstruct? How about when the brand (or the entire system) has become so unbelievably complex that it’s way past time the brand returned to its basics.

You know what I’m talking about. Think about the brand-name string that sounds like a trunk falling down the stairs. Car-makers are notorious for this; e.g., the Audi A6 Avant Quattro SE Sport 2.5 Tdi.

Talk a walk down the grocery aisles and take a look at the brand extensions…messages growing ever more crowded. Drug stores exhibit the same aggressive shouting matches among shelves full of products. Then, consider that I couldn’t create a better post than Creativity magazine (May 2008, Page 32) has already been written about Help Remedies:

Help Remedies, a refreshingly pared down new line of acetaminophen pills and adhesive bandages, provides a lesson for even the most established marketers: Reimagine what you’re selling, not just how you’re selling it.

A former brand development strategist from London, Richard Fine, came to the US from London and brought a hell of a headache with him. According to Creativity, he was:

…scared off by the chaotic, screaming products….He envisioned a softer, calm-looking option sans abrasive color schemes and shocking copy.

His vision, with help from packaging and graphic design firms (ChappsMalina and Little Fury, respectively), resulted in a new brand by deconstructing old-fashioned ones. The result is simplicity itself, and help I have a headacheTM is one of the brand’s products.

In fact, the entire company – and you can browse the website to your heart’s content – is constructed with this simplicity in mind. Another product: help I’ve cut myselfTM contains two sizes of bandages (and advanced eye relief) for the weary shopper who may have just suffered an injury.

I’d certainly highlight the new brand’s Web 2.0 features, like the simple approach to the Help company blog and the online store.

What Creativity called reimaging I would call deconstruction. True, in the case of Help Remedies, Fine and his colleagues have deconstructed an entire category (over- the-counter healthcare products). When your brand is heavy-laden, when it’s dragging its entire history of massive product/service slates and M&As through the first decade of the 21st Century, this is a good time to return to basics.

Deconstruct what the brand is all about and reimagine it in a simpler, more meaningful form.

Can you do that for your stakeholders? Would you make their lives and their connections to your brand cleaner and more direct? Among the benefits could be a clear, clean view of your business model as well as your brand – supposing, of course, that your company’s business model needs…help.

Deconstruction – Bad

Join me in a weekend thought experiment. Here’s a fairly notorious Nike outdoor board. Note the slogan, lower right: JUST DO IT – now 20 years old. Dan Wieden of Wieden + Kennedy is widely credited with creating this famous theme line, which Advertising Age chose as one of the 20th century’s Top Five ad slogans.

Next, let’s presume that your team is assigned to construct a new Nike corporate brochure. In a creative session, one of the top designers says something like: Why don’t we do a separate two-page spread for each of the words? We could explain each word and detail what it really means. We’d carefully explain ‘JUST,’ then on the next spread we’d say what ‘DO’ really means. And we’d finished up with ‘IT’ as the final piece – then, when you see all three spreads, you’d actually see JUST DO IT.

Would you say – Yes! That’s a great idea. Or would you gently suggest that perhaps this process would destroy the intrinsic integrity of one of the Nike brand’s most critical components?

Deconstructing a slogan or a brand statement that has this much accrued meaning would, IMHO, be quite a Bad Thing. You’d spoil the mystique that the slogan has gained over the years, you’d take away all of the visualized meanings that Nike and its agencies have put into building a crucial brand element. In fact, one of the beauties of a slogan such as this is that it is never deconstructed.

Really, the designer’s suggestion is one legitimate approach to creating new concepts. I propose it’s just not a good idea in the case of a strong brand line that resonates deeply with stakeholders.

Deconstruction – as a tool for literary analysis – has caused much more harm than good since the concept was invented by Jacques Derrida back in the early ‘60s. It has destroyed professors’ careers and been the “philosophy of the moment” on far too many college campuses.

In marketing, I urge caution when you try to extend explanations of your brand elements in public media.

Treat your theme line as a unity, whether you’ve got a 20-year-old stunner like JUST DO IT or a more recent slogan such as KEEP ON TURNING (shown here and my thanks again to Wood Group for maintaining its currency). By deconstructing such a strap line, you could confuse rather than enlighten. When you’ve built a slogan that “works,” let your stakeholders envision what it means for themselves. Let them help you create your brand image and meaning – it’s part of the marketing conversation. No deconstructing here, please.

Above: 2006 Nike outdoor ad featuring England player Wayne Rooney. Everything related to Nike, the “swoosh” and the slogan belongum Nike – no poaching.

Social Control

Despite my best intentions, it isn’t possible to capture everything that was presented this morning at “Demystifying Web 2.0: Using Social Media to Reach Healthcare Audiences.”

This summer’s seminar, put on by the Healthcare Special Interest Group of the American Marketing Association-Houston, can be briefly reviewed here. However, the event went for two hours solid and could have gone another two – it was a full house listening to challenging speakers (four of them) with every ounce of attention they could muster at 7.30 on a Friday morning.

The basic plot: How healthcare organizations can or ought to use social media, like blogs; Facebook and MySpace; videos and podcasts to build better interactions between their brands (institutions) and their stakeholders – patients, patients’ families and friends, etc. There are already a lot of players in all these arenas: I wish you could have listened to the presentations.

The moderator was Katie Laird, of sunny disposition, an indefatigable blogger who’s Strategic Advisor for Houston-based Schipul – The Web Marketing Company.

Then there were two speakers each from the hospital side and the social media side – and this is really where deep issues could have surfaced, given enough time.

Hospitals? An exemplary case history was presented by Jennifer Texada of UTMDACC – that’s MD Anderson Cancer Center and a mouthful in any conversation. Texada presented an array of current programs and future plans that demonstrated how MD Anderson is building communities of interest among its patients and well as some of its staff. Chris Ferris countered with warm humor how far St. Luke’s Episcopal Health System has yet to go…although his organization is making progress.

From the Social Media Enablers’ side, passionate Paul Griffiths came in from Boston to present the MedTouch point of view – he’s the firm’s CEO and one of the leaders of social marketing for healthcare organizations. Griffiths firmly believes that information ought to be free, free (as in the “don’t tie me down” school of free) – and that no organization needs marketing copywriters to develop content. You understand that I’m not thrilled with this later idea from the perspective of my life’s profession, but he is a true visionary about the immense capabilities of social media and a thrilling speaker.

He was seconded by the compassionate Jay Drayer of Houston, founder of CareFlash. His firm developed and has deployed very successful “community” tools for putting patients and their families on the Web. CareFlash is remarkable story in itself.

In the seams of these presentations, there were several elemental struggles implied but never explored fully.

One is the issue of control. The healthcare facilities’ very real need for professional and legal control of content in social media environments was admitted – and some institutions can change to accommodate Griffith’s conviction that (eventually) the needs of the patient/caregiver community will win out despite legal departments and HIPAA laws. This is partially an issue of “stodge” and partially of medicine’s attention on cures.

Another issue never quite address was the other leg of the healthcare delivery system – the physicians. Many hospitals today are filled with service teams (nurses, techs, swampers, etc.) Doctors are frequently independent contractors and so are often not even billed through the same system. Unless key parts of a specific institution such as MD Anderson are featured in social media, how do you get doctors to be as socially open as patients want them to be?

Some hospitals don’t even allow patients or their families to access the Worldwide Web from inside the facility – there’s no WiFi, no “public computers” available for use.

It is likely that social media for healthcare audiences have developed way faster than most healthcare institutions or practitioners want or desire. These particular stakeholders see their stakeholders as packages to be conveyed through their systems (as Griffiths pointed out in an illustration of “the old way”).

Maybe this cast will be assembled again, for the edification of other attendees. I think you missed the beginnings of an immensely provocative conversation revolving around issues of social control – a tug of war happening now at your nearby hospital.

Thanks to the Healthcare SIG of AMA-Houston and all the speakers. Photograph © Yanik Chauvin from Dreamstime.com

Pompeiian Correctness

The Pompeii exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston ends in a few days. It’s an enjoyable and often striking collection of materials of all kinds, with lots of visitors. The displays are supposed to help us…connect with the victims whose hopes and fears were not so unlike ours today – that what the Museum’s website says.

After you complete the second-floor exhibit, there’s a short film with voiceover, demonstrating what happens when a volcano like Mt Vesuvius blows up – as it did in the Year 79. After the shots of booming pyroclastic flows and solidified tephra, the voiceover solemnly announces that because so many lives were lost centuries ago in Pompeii and Herculaneum, we (the exhibition’s viewing public) should be careful where we interact with nature.

This is crap. The mountain’s “green, wooded slopes” were home to farms, fields, animals and people for centuries. Until the storied eruption in 79 AD, Vesuvius hadn’t blown in 700 years.

MFAH did a fine job marketing this exhibition. But the victims’ “hopes and fears” are nothing like our own; the eruption caught the citizens of Pompeii completely by surprise.

Frankly, I wished MFAH would go startle somebody else with its witless pronouncements of ecological peril.

Painting: The Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, 1777, Pierre-Jacques Volaire.

Father’s Day

Rather than blog about the considerable advertising surrounding this “also-ran” day – will Xbox sales get a bump out of the Father’s Day event?, e.g. – I wanted something more personal.

On a day like today, I can be as old-fashioned as I like – say, quoting the Earl of Chesterfield’s continual advice to his son. There’s a marvelous Father’s Day column about Chesterfield by Eric Ormsby, in which Ormsby observes: Inattention, for Chesterfield, was a profound flaw and the one from which all others proceeded. “Want of thought,” as he put it, “is either folly or madness.” Why? Because success in the world depends upon quick and meticulous observation.

Or I can take you modern. Contemporary cartoonist Dan Piraro has said, You kids today have it easy. When I was a kid everything was HUGE. My dad was nearly four times bigger than me. You couldn’t even see the tops of counters...Then gradually everything became smaller until it was the manageable size it is today.

Dads don’t get a lot of credit, except when they do – and that’s when we appreciate it the most. (I’m speaking for all the dads ever now.)

There’s a photo that accompanies this post, of Brian Sabel helping son Matthew prepare for his bar mitzvah – by tying his tie. Maybe not the most profound picture ever taken…but utterly and completely true in the moment. There is no inattention here. And even though Brian is “nearly four times bigger” than Matthew now, Matt’ll will discover that things become more manageable as he grows up.

I had time to enjoy my daddy but not enough. I miss him to this day.

(BTW, it was Brian and Joel Sabel’s father, Sherman Sabel, who came to tell me of my father’s sudden and early death. It was Joel who took the father-son photo you see here, last month in Denver. I hope he won’t mind me using it here.)

To dads: Remember if you can that your futurity is in your hands. There’s often more than one kind of tie involved. Happy Father’s Day to you all.

The Client

Grant Johnston, Wood Group Gas Turbine Services, at WINDPOWER 2008.

Wind Power

Marketing and advertising folks presume it is self-evident that marketing is essential to organic growth. That’s not a universal truth, or even a revealed one, as far as many engineering and sales professionals are concerned. But if it’s true, some people at Wood Group Gas Turbine Services are getting it right, IMO.

I did attend WINDPOWER 2008 last week to visit what is now Renewable Energy Services – a new business unit for client GTS. This part of the global energy services company maintains and repairs all types of turbines and generators, from aviation engines (smaller) to heavy industrial units (much, much larger). And effective power generation from the wind depends on…turbines and generators. So Renewable Energy Resources is taking its extensive MRO experience into the wind energy sector.

Prism Design created a booth and handout materials specifically for this new unit, and for this trade show. I’m glad to have participated in it all – particularly since this was another opportunity to adapt the KEEP ON TURNING brand I helped GTS create and maintain over the past two years.

It has also meant that the company can market its brand (as well as its services) much more strongly to an up-and-coming industry sector, like wind energy.

Now, recall what we said here about brand consistency? It’s a good idea (and a good return on investment) to build on elements that are already in the client’s brand vocabulary.

The branding challenges for GTS at WINDPOWER 2008 were graphic – all wind turbine pictures look the same. Susan Reeves, Terry Teutsch and Stacy Allen turned what could have been an ordinary photo into a landscape artfully fitted to the 20-foot-long booth space.

Take a close look at the top photo – a lot of art went into that horizon line. It stretches from one end of the booth to the other and reinforces the KEEP ON TURNING line beautifully.

By using the GTS brand elements in the handout materials, and ensuring that everyone who staffed the booth was fitted out with the distinctive Wood Group “gold” long-sleeve shirt, this new Renewable Energy Services group accomplished two marketing goals.

First, it picked up a bit of a…tailwind…from the Offshore Technology Conference, where Wood Group had a strong presence. Second, it introduced its targeted services to the wind energy market in a targeted – and branded – way. Think of this, then, as brand power.

The real compliment goes to the client, for recognizing what needed to happen at WINDPOWER 2008.

PS: Susan suggested I label this post “Show Turn Two” because it’s a look at another Wood Group Gas Turbine Services booth effect. Cute headline fer shure. But Signalwriter headlines are two words long and I try to stay consistent – even if I don’t always achieve the ideal.

Nail Gun

Do not try this at home – though George Chandler did. A nail gun “accidentally” fired a 2-1/2” nail into the top of his head. Uh-huh.

According to KCCT-TV (Kansas City, MO), this particular mishap occurred last week while Chandler, in Shawnee, KS, and a friend were doing a backyard project: The nail gun hose became tangled, causing the tool to fire one nail. Chandler said Monday he told his friend he didn't know where the nail went, but he felt a sting on the top of his head.

Thinking really, really hard, they soon realized that the nail was driven into Chandler’s head. So they called an ambulance and he was rushed to a hospital. An ER doctor used a common claw hammer to remove the nail.

He’s quoted as saying he feels “very lucky, very, very lucky” to have escaped serious injury. This unusual incident caught my eye because it doesn’t speak very well for the nail gun itself.

Interruptive safety note, via the Compliance Center: Nail guns have the capacity to fire several nails per second at a velocity over 1,000 feet per second. Although these physics will allow a nail gun to fire a projectile almost 4 inches into fully stressed concrete, when accidentally applied to the human body, the resulting damage can be severe…injuries to more critical areas of the body, such as the head, neck, and chest may occur.

That being said, this is a blog about marketing and advertising. Look at Ezinearticles.com for this helpful article: If you're in the market for a nail gun then you've either been watching too many B horror flicks or you've decided that an upcoming project is going to have too many nails for you to hammer in by hand. Choosing the right nail gun…and going to the hardware store or shopping online will be a much better experience for you if you go prepared with a little bit of knowledge.

I love the article – it’s helpful; very clear about choosing a nail gun based on building bird houses or barns – a hundred of ‘em a year. Which leads back what brand we’re dealing with here. It is unknown.

The news article didn’t identify the brand. Was it the Bostich 2-1/2” coil siding nailer (say, the well-known Model N66C-1) or the Max CN565S Coil Siding Nailer, selling new for a pricey $378 from ToolsPlus.com?

(I hope it wasn’t the new Makita AN922 because I had a torrid but very brief relationship – about 55 seconds – with Señorita Makita 2004…the 2008 models are lovely but whew!…this is advertising the old-fashioned way. I swear, though, the poster was for my son Doug, not me.)

Chandler wasn’t killed, thank the Lord. Still, the nail gun doesn’t seem to have done a very good job – or have I been watching too many B movies? The world doesn’t need another ineffective nail gun, you know.

On the other hand, imagine the ads you could do for this particular nail gun. I see a Chandler testimonial as merely the starting point.

PS: Note the last line in the Ezine article: Be safe, have fun - in that order! The x-ray above is not that of handyman Chandler. RLB.

“Poopzapper” Portrayed

Second installment, also from Graham Rust, is an “advanced technology” answer to the Fedog bag set I posted about yesterday.

The most effective solution, Graham wrote, is a team of helmeted guys riding along the pavement on quad bikes equipped with long vacuum cleaners, zapping (rather than “scooping”) the poop, a triumph of form over content.

Then: Rich! By an almost unbelievable coincidence, on the square below our office, Prague’s waste company is running a PR event, and so I have a photograph (above) of the poopzapper to add a multimedia dimension to your blog!

You have the thanks of the world, Graham. Nowhere else (not even on the Prague Municipal Waste Management website – I looked) has this powerful secret weapon in the war against dog poop been revealed. And Prague is doing PR events about it!

Prague Bag

This is a simple post about dogs and the people who love them. Sort of. It’s also a post about cities. Human ingenuity. Advertising. Let’s start with the fact that Rob Schoenbeck brought me a pass-along souvenir from his recent trip overseas: a Fedog bag (that’s it on the left).

In Czech, this is papírové sáčky na psí exkrementy – a paper set for dog crap. It was invented in 1995 because, “The daily amount of dogs’ excrements comes up to 20 tons in Prague alone.”

It’s a combination unit, the paper bag plus scooper plus advertising.

See how it works on the website – it offers an animated demo. “The paper bag is easily degradable in the nature. The scoop minimizes the aversion to pick up the excrement. The bag together with its content can be composted. The full bags can disposed of by burning, depositing in dumping grounds or recycled by composing.” I’m not making fun of the English writing here – I couldn’t even start in the original tongue.

I went straight to my long-time Dialogue International resource, Graham Rust, the great and powerful principal of Rust2 in The Czech Republic. He ‘splained:

Prague is plagued with dogs. It’s not like Bucharest which apparently has packs of feral dogs roaming the streets, but like citizens of all around the world, Praguers just don’t see the problem with keeping a huge animal in a fifth floor apartment in the city centre.

Some time ago the city installed special litter bits with bag dispensers (left) and sometimes you even see them being used.

The other glut we suffer from is advertising, on anything which stays still long enough, so it’s no surprise to see someone trying to sell space on this sharply targeted medium. Not sure there will be many takers. Public opinion on advertising is pretty low, but things are not so bad that we deserve a literal interpretation of McCluhan’s “the medium is the message.”

The engineer in me (of which there is precisely none, really) is intrigued with the concept of putting the carboard scooper inside the bag and putting the whole set in a handy dispenser. The city-dweller in me wishes to see this in the US, though we seem more conscious of the effect of many dogs on local sidewalks – and more willing to do something about it at the moment of generation.

The ad guy says, “This is outstanding – for somebody else’s clients.” And actually, I could see some real value if an entire city program was underwritten by a major veterinary clinic in the area or even a dog food manufacturer like Purina®. I can see Nestlé Purina PetCare underwriting an effort like this.

As Graham notes, the Fedog set is a precisely targeted medium – the smart advertiser could use that to its advantage and add a bit more environmental shine to its brand.

As I said, go to Fedog.cz – Czech it out for yourself.

Boom Brands

I just got back from the Permian Basin and the joint is jumpin’. Barbara and I traveled up to Denver on US 87 through Amarillo and back to Houston through eastern New Mexico to Fort Stockton, then I-10 homeward. I don’t think we drove from one horizon to another without seeing at least one workover under way, sometimes more. Probably isn’t a single truck-mounted rig or vac truck west of the Mississippi that’s available for new work.

At yesterday’s close, oil is $127 a barrel and gas is $11.70/MMBtu. Activity is up everywhere, from the Permian Basin of west Texas to the Barnett Shale of north central Texas and eastern New Mexico as well as in the dusty Panhandle and the Anadarko Basin of western Oklahoma. With so much money on the table, you’re looking at recompletions, infill drilling, installation of secondary recovery projects – and everything else that’ll squeeze more oil and gas out of existing reservoirs.

For energy-related brand-watchers, it’s a boom time. It’s no surprise to see the “bigs” like Schlumberger, Halliburton and Baker Hughes.

But, e.g., I ran into a long-time colleague at OTC: Donna Smith is now Director of Communications for Stallion® Oilfield Services. Having thereby raised my consciousness – and thanks to her efforts for the company – I must have spotted every orange-and-black Stallion logo-ed vehicle and field office from Centerville (outbound) to Ozona (inbound). Key® Energy Services is out there in strength. There are hundreds more contractors and subs out in the field right now and you can play a sort of drive-by brand bingo on the roads out west.

Reading the papers, you’ll recognize that everyone is unhappy with the cost of oil or – more critically – the price of a gallon of gas at the corner station. I’d ask you, as marketers, to think about our “situation” from several, quite different angles.

First, the economic impact of oil and gas prices is creating opportunities for companies (and their employees) nationwide. That’s an economic good…as well as a particularly fine time for strongly branded firms with long-established customer relationships.

Second, this in an excellent period in which you should be building on and communicating the positives of your energy business brand. Let your stakeholders know if you are, in fact, doing well – and why. You’ll be creating a foundation of good brand impressions for the down cycle if and when it comes.

Third – and this is a personal note – maybe once time soon some oil company executive will stand up and ask Dianne Feinstein, “Just what, Senator, is your problem with the concept of profit?”

That’s enough for one weekend. All the best for a great June!

Any omissions or errors are my own. Photo © Jim Parkin Dreamstime.com

Inconvenient Brand

I swear: Driving past the highway off-ramp in lower Colorado at about 75 mph, the green sign said “Loaf ’N Lug.” I even pointed Barbara’s eyes to the exit, saying there was a convenience store called “Loaf ’N Lug.” (It’s the curse of speed, I tell you.)

I thought to myself, well, there are some pretty funny C-store names out in the world…I can see a billboard or TV commercial suggesting that customers “loaf on in and lug some stuff out.” Sort of a country-cousin approach to branding.

Come to find out the name of the outfit is Loaf ’N Jug. It’s a division of Kroger, headquartered in Pueblo, CO, that operates about 175 of them – mainly in Colorado and Wyoming, with a few other stores in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma and New Mexico. (Kroger owns or operates half-dozen different C-store operations, from Tom Thumbs to Kwik Shops, in 16 states. It purchased the Loaf ’N Jug chain in 1986.)

Opinion of one: Kroger doesn’t seem to have done much with the brand except keep the stores up to date. Checking out the website, one among many different Kroger C-store operations, shows a bland face to stakeholders. Google “Loaf ’N Jug advertising” and you’ll read old news about the chain’s support of March of Dimes events – worthy promotions, but not a strong regional brand-builder.

It hasn’t nearly the attention-generating horsepower of, say, Susser Holdings’ Stripes® chain, which I wrote about here. As a convenience store brand, Loaf ’N Jug is not very convenient.

Since I haven’t talked to anyone at Loaf ’N Jug – and the Kroger acquisition is more than 20 years in the past – I can’t help but wonder where the chain got its brand name originally. Rather, I do know; but how odd to find such a classical reference in the highly rural Intermountain West.

If the brand comes from anywhere other than The Rubaiyat, by Omar Khayyam, I would be flabbergasted. I wonder just how many customers, loafing into these C-stores and lugging out some diet pop and Doritos®, recall the Persian poet and his well-known lines:

A book of poems, beneath a spreading bough.
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine,
And thou beside me, singing in the wilderness.

We always forget the last line: And wilderness is Paradise enow.

Somewhere back at the beginning of Loaf ’N Jug, I’d like to think that the chain’s founders imagined they were bringing some extras into Colorado to make the wilderness a bit more of a paradise…even if they decided to skip the poems.