Today’s tidbit of marketing wisdom deals with why you should hire someone to tell your story. There is an old adage that that says “if you act as your own lawyer in court you’re being represented by a fool.” I would argue that what goes in a court of law is equally appropriate to the court of public opinion. It follows then to put your best foot forward, hire someone to walk in your shoes first. Oops, I hear the metaphor police knocking on my door, but you get the idea.

In politics this concept of hiring spokespersons is well understood, as many of those desiring to be elected to public office or desiring to keep their cushy public jobs only want us to read (see and hear) carefully crafted messages so we won’t get the wrong idea, e.g., learn anything unflattering to them. We all know these messages as “spin.” In fact the desire for public officials to hide behind well-crafted smoke screens has given the term a strong negative odor.

Is marketing just another word for spin? No, and for a very good reason. Spin is assumed by many people to be virtually the same as lying. “Spin Doctors” are considered hucksters. As soon as you automatically start to distrust any form of message it loses its power to shape your thinking…at least in the way that the message intends.

For marketing to do its job it needs to be true, but that’s not enough. But for a truthful statement to have lasting impact on the listener, the statement needs to be made in an artful manner that catches your attention while not putting you off, quickly establishes its relevancy to you so you’ll continue listening, and it must remain in your memory for sometime afterwards.

The hard part for many folks I suspect is accepting that they may not be the best person to tell their own story. Even if you’re a gifted storyteller, your gift may not be appropriate for all listeners. Here’s a quick test. You have 15 seconds to tell a perfect stranger – or an imperfect stranger if that’s all you can find – the one thing about yourself that would be most important for a stranger to know.

Remember, this important thing that you’ve got to tell the stranger is not necessarily what you think is the most important thing about yourself. It may well be not what your close friends, or others who know you think the most important thing is about you. You’ve long since ceased to be a stranger to them – and they to you – so both you can your friends have subjective opinions about you that have been formed by experience and association. In other words they know you.

Back to our stranger. He doesn’t know you, or even know if he wants to know you and you’ve got just 15 seconds to give him a reason to make some space in his crowded brain for the concept that is you. What’s it going to take?

One way to think of marketing, or more specifically marketing communications, is that it’s a means of distilling a few key points of your importance and presenting them for maximum appeal…to strangers. Marketers are in the business of knowing about these folks who are strange to you, but not to the marketer.

Those of us in the marketing trade spend our entire careers studying these strangers; who they are, what they like, how they react, etc. This is more than just research, facts or data. Marketing is about creating relationships between people who are strangers to one another, so marketers find ways to explain you (the client) to the stranger (potential customer) that you may never consider, or have considered and discarded.

Why is the marketer’s opinion of what’s important about you, more important than your own? Because marketers are paid to be objective, or in other words, to look at you as a stranger might. If you have all the customers you need and a guarantee they’ll buy your stuff for ever, then you – unlike Blanche DuBois – don’t need to “rely on the kindness of strangers.” But if you need to constantly forge new relationships in order to stay in business, then you need someone with the skill to effectively represent you in the court of public opinion, that is to say, the court of strangers.

You need to hire someone to tell your story in a way that you can’t. That’s marketing.

The title of this blog is, of course, “Marketing Wisdom.” But if you Google the phrase “Marketing Wisdom,” in all likelihood the first listing of Google’s “organic” results – the left hand column on the first page of search results for those you not hip to Google-isms – will be www.marketingsherpa.com, a Warren, R.I. marketing research firm.

If you Google other marketing-related terms, or even just the word “marketing,” the Marketing Sherpa will be there right there at or near the top of heap. In case you don’t appreciate the significance attached to appearing on the first page of a term-related search…it is the gold standard for an online marketer. Clearly the folks at Marketing Sherpa are black belts in the arcane art of Internet Search Fu.

A few days ago Stefan Tornquist, one of the head Sherpas (actually, the firm’s Director of Marketing Research) was interviewed as part of a Wall Street Journal Report on small business. The topic of the interview was the tendency of so many businesses to cutting marketing efforts in a down economy. I encourage you to look it up on the Journal’s website http://online.wsj.com/public/us. However, if you’d prefer a synopsis of the interview it can be found in the article’s title, “Don’t Back Down.”

In his interview, Mr. Tornquist recounts a number of arguments in favor of investing in marketing during lean times that will be familiar to anyone who’s been in the marketing game long enough to have either heard or used the phrase, “when sales drop the first thing they cut is marketing.” Though Mr. Tornquist doesn’t seem old enough to have accrued much professional experience prior to Y2K (I know this because the online version of the article thoughtfully included his headshot), his points are nonetheless well taken.

So, if we all know that one of the best times to invest in marketing is when sales are down, why don’t more people do it?

Well I think the sad answer is that Marketing – as a category – has failed to define itself. Ask any five people you meet what marketing is and you’ll get five different answers. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said when struggling to explain what pornography was, “…I know it when I see it…” Unfortunately, when it comes to marketing what everybody sees is different.

I just had an experience with a client that came to me over the Internet. He had recently purchased a foundering business and was looking for marketing tips on reviving it with little or no money in next to no time. (I know…I know…that alone should have warned me.) Anyway, like an idiot I agreed to provide him some marketing help. Knowing he had no money and little time for experimentation or testing I didn’t waste his small fee on a formal marketing plan. Instead I sifted through my 30 some years of experience for a number of proven techniques that could be successfully executed by someone with little or no dough and even less time.

His response when I delivered my thoughts? A stream of e-vituperation the gist of which was that what I sent him wasn’t marketing. Not only had he seen it all before, I was ripping him off, and I had no business calling myself a marketing expert. So, we refunded his money. Not that that stopped the angry e-mails…

In hindsight, I should have created some mystique. It was a mistake to understand the client’s problem…too quickly. After 30 years in this business, I’ve seen most marketing situations many times over. The problems and the players are all too familiar. But here’s the lesson that I keep forgetting. Though the circumstances are routine, each of these customers thinks their situation is totally unique. So how dare I hazard any answer to their problem before I’ve gone through some exhaustive process to drag the truth out of them? A process, by the way, which they don’t think they should pay for?

It’s a bit like a combat medic who encounters a soldier bleeding profusely from a wound the medic has treated countless times before, and as he starts to bandage him, the soldier says to the medic, “Wait Doc, you’re supposed to do a full physical, run lab tests and take my medical history.”

My would-be Internet client wasn’t looking for marketing; he wanted a pronouncement from the Great Oz. He didn’t want simple ideas that work if you are willing to work at them. He wanted MAGIC. If marketers are supposed to be shamans, maybe that explains why marketing has so many definitions, variations and flavors. It makes it easy for whoever it is doing whatever they do to call it marketing.

If that’s the case, then it’s no wonder serious business people dump the voodoo when red ink hits the fan.

I loved many cars in my life: the noisy hot rods tearing up the roads of my youth, the rugged VW beetle I drove in College and the Porsche 356B I had as a young man. But my passion for cars began to fade when I realized that there was increasingly less difference between the actual performance of cars and the fatuous hype that consituted most of their marketing.

Granted, I’m in the business that many assume is totally hype. Nonetheless, I’ve always based what I say on behalf of my clients on some reality such as a fact, a personal experience or the inherent possibilities of the product or service. Leaving aside for the moment that the line between hype and outright lying is often hard to find, resorting to hype is the easy way out and generally the trademark of a hack or an amateur.

Of course, some hype is so creative that it qualifies as poetry, but if the customer buys a product or service because he loves the hype one of two things is will be true – he’s either delusional or disappointed.

The subject of delusion brings me back to cars. Vehicles are some of the most extensively marketed of any consumer product. A study of automobile marketing qualifies as pretty good overview of the history of marketing, itself. People no longer have to be told what a car is or how it functionally benefits its owner. That’s because all cars do essentially the same thing, Cars get you from point A to B faster than you can walk or get there by public transportation. In doing so, cars keep the mud off your shoes, the rain off your head and the bugs off your teeth.

This universality of function has forced car marketers over the years to resort ever more hyperbolic promises to potential customers, many of which focus on the attention you’ll get if you buy this or that vehicle. But when I gave this some thought, I realized that anyone who buys a car because of the glory they hope that vehicle with cast upon them covets the attention of…strangers.

Face it, the opinions of your friends or others who know you aren’t changed much by the car you drive. In fact, if you choose a car that doesn’t reflect your persona you could end up a laughing stock – think of the bald dumpling driving a muscle car.

Car marketers live in dread that the public will wake up to realization that cars are actually generic transportation and should by all rights be chosen for features and price. So they resort to ever increasing levels of fantasy to convince us that their products will fill the empty spaces in our lives.

Personally, I think you could boil vehicles down to a few chosen categories based on their inherent function:

1. Foolproof basic transportation – early VW’s filled the bill.

2. Roomy Family car – the Honda Odyssey pretty much nailed it.

3. Hard working truck – a Ford or GMC pickup with an 8’ bed and heavy-duty shocks.

4. Pure driving fun – 1950’s sport car, Porsche Speedster, MG TD are great examples.

5. Off-road tank – WW2 Jeep, Land Rover or Hummer.

6. Cushy highway cruiser – 1950’s Mercedes 300 or Cadillac.

You can quibble with me over my choices, or eras, but you have to agree that these cars delivered their promise and as a consequence not only did they sell well, they defined their categories and became iconic.