Connoisseurs of Marketing Wisdom, whether regular readers of this blog or devotees of more august authorities, will be familiar with the argument that anyone who prizes quality will get a better result from an experienced, professional resource.

I was reminded of this truth while reading an article titled NFL Mascots Get Meaner written by Darren Everson in the January 23 edition of the Wall Street Journal. If you’re interested you can search it on www.wsj.com.

The author postulates that unsuccessful NFL teams might trace their recurring failure to team mascots that don’t look angry enough. As evidence, he sites the Arizona Cardinals who tweaked the bird on their official logo in 2005 to give it a meaner countenance. Some thought the original bird not only resembled a parakeet more than a cardinal, but that it also looked more doubtful than resolute.

Flash forward to 2009 one finds the Arizona NFL franchise making their first-ever Super Bowl appearance. Everson then sites several other NFL teams who reached (and in some cases won) Super Bowls following team mascot makeovers: Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Seattle Seahawks, Denver Broncos and the New England Patriots. In the authors’ words all the new mascot designs are “meaner,” or at least more aggressive than their predecessors.

Perhaps the new team mascots are more menacing but I don’t believe that’s salient difference. What all the new mascot logos really are…are better designs: crisper, bolder and more professionally executed. I attribute this difference between the old and the new mascots to the teams in question hiring better designers the second time around. My guess is that the first time around spending money on a character mascot was not a priority for the team management. Quite possibly the job was delegated to the marketing assistant who was told not to spend a lot of money.

Furthermore, I believe that new logos are less a causal factor in the teams’ success and more a symptom of the team management realization that a winning attitude reaches beyond the locker room – even into the team’s brand identity, and that a semi-professional execution of the teams marketing image wasn’t sufficient to represent a professional execution on the field.

While I wish every success next Sunday to the Cardinals, my point here is really about the value of a professionally conceived and executed brand mascot, or logo for that matter, to any enterprise that wants to win and sees the importance of motivating the team and energizing the fans.

As these NFL teams seem to grasp, an amateur effort is for an amateur team. Any team or business that is serious about what they do should reflect that attitude in all the ways they express their message – even in something as potentially whimsical as team mascot.

Google “Marketing Wisdom” and you’ll find quite a number of authors and websites proffering marketing tips, tricks, reports and services, but precious little wisdom as I understand the meaning of the word. A brief perusal of these offerings suggests that many of these folks believe that successful marketing is akin to your mom’s recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Purchase these (their) ingredients, follow these simple steps and - Voila - you’ll produce a sheet of fresh, chewy, delicious sales.

If, in fact, marketing success could be boiled down to a recipe, someone would have long ago written the definitive book on marketing, which any self-respecting marketer would have long since committed to memory like the multiplication tables and the alphabet.

Actually, some years ago, David Ogilvy did his best to codify the essence of marketing communications in his seminal book, Ogilvy on Advertising. Ogilvy’s work, taken along with Positioning (Ries & Trout) – and for laughs Hidden Persuaders (Packard) – will provide as useful a collection of basics as one needs to solve most marketing challenges.

(Okay, I can hear someone in the back snickering that Claude Hopkins wrote Scientific Advertising in 1923 when Ogilvy was just 12, but I contend that fact only reinforces my point.

Despite that fact that much has already been written on how to get strangers to learn about, develop a need for, and purchase your good or service (e.g., the definition of marketing), the shelves in the “marketing” section of my nearby Borders are crammed with crisp new titles purporting to offer a trove of previously undiscovered secrets and heretofore hidden insights into this (from their point of view) esoteric practice. A brief review of any of these texts reveals… well…little new actually. The authors seem to assume that, like them, we apparently just stumbled upon this thing called marketing. What these books actually do is to confirm that what has worked in the analog past continues to work in the digital present – albeit with some updated terminology tacked on.

My point is not criticize people who are learning new stuff – God Bless ‘em – but to point out that what’s new to you, or me, may not be new to others. Marketing is neither new nor esoteric. It’s as old as the Bible and as fundamental as a handshake. Yet, despite the fact that marketing is a fundamental precursor to economic transactions (maybe all transactions), success at marketing can not be achieved by means of a recipe, or a formula, or an incantation.

In simple terms, marketing is the process of informing people of something’s value and motivating people to buy it. Like throwing a baseball, anyone can learn to do it but very few can do it exceptionally well. Whether you believe baseball is a pitcher’s or a hitter’s game – nothing else of note in the game can happen until the ball is hurled 60 feet, six inches from the pitcher’s mound to a batter waiting at home plate. The same is true with the game of business – marketing initiates virtually all of any given enterprises’ desired goals and results.

So, why is something that is so basic to human so difficult to do well? To answer that I’m reminded of the old joke about the dowager who approached a famous musical virtuoso and announced that she’d give her life to play as well as he. To which, he replied, “Madam, that’s exactly what I did.”

To cut to the chase, what does this mean to you who want to avail yourself of the power of marketing? Simply this: either invest your time, energy and talent into the study and practice of marketing, or find someone else who did. There are no shortcuts, especially not the temptation of turning to some marketing novice, whether they are a relative or friend, who thinks that creating a marketing campaign would be “fun” to try.

One of the recurring themes of this Marketing Wisdom blog is the assertion that transforming a generic business effort into a genuine brand will result in not just a growth of sales, profits and business value, but that doing so will make the newly branded enterprise more likely to survive the economy’s inevitable, cyclic downturns.

Now that we’re all hip deep in the worst downturn in recent memory a number of well-known brands have collapsed, been subsumed by other companies, or have dramatically cut back on services. While some of these brands had been on life-support and thus merely finished-off by last year’s melt-down, the sudden demise of other seemingly sturdy brands caught many people by surprise.

Does this mean that the determination and commitment required to create a genuine brand is a waste of time and money? Or, that any businesses’ viability in the face of economic calamity is beyond our pitiful means to influence? Well, if you’re caught up in with the pervasive media hand wringing I suppose the answer is, “yes.” But if you resist the herd negativity, or if your memory extends beyond ten years, the answer is a resounding, “no!”

History proves that genuine brands have, do, and will stand the test of time. The secret to brand durability is (and has always been) to figure out just what it is that your brand stands for, and then stand by it in the face of strong temptation to stray from the narrow path of brand authenticity.

Granted, like pretty much all real wisdom, marketing or otherwise, this discipline is easier said than done. To complicate matters, many companies who once believed in this wisdom, and grew to prominence following their brand’s true path, abandoned it once they became successful. Among many watching from the sidelines this sort of behavior can lead to the misunderstanding that brand authenticity is merely a handy tool in establishing a commercial presence, not a core business strategy.

I was thinking about some brands that I use on a regular basis and which I believe will endure. It’s worth noting that many of them have been lauded for reaching category dominance only to backslide, or be caught up by competitors, with the consequence that they have had their decline / demise predicted by naysayers. Yet all succeeded in either defining their brand category and / or remaining among the top brands in that category.

Adobe. The brand that is synonymous with industry standard illustration and design software has successfully added video editing, animation and sound production to their “suite” of products. Once closely identified with the MAC platform Adobe now sells far more products in the PC environment.

Dell. The company that merged high-quality and low-cost to become the dominant personal computer vendor has lately seen both profits and market share fall to Hewlett Packard. With Michael Dell back in the saddle I expect Dell to remain a contender well into the next decade.

Starbucks. The overaggressive pursuit of corporate earnings led the company that introduced millions to the cafe latte, Vente mocha and frappuccino to stumble. However, now that Howard Schultz is back minding the store, Starbucks has trimmed the fat and refocused on its core customers.

Levi Strauss. From dungarees for cowboys in the ‘40’s to bell bottoms for hippies in the 60’s in new millennium blue denim jeans are the standard issue pants for young people worldwide. Levis has ridden the crest of the blue jean wave for over 50 years. Though jeans as such are no longer a homogenous clothing category, Levi Strauss still makes the best pair of blue jeans for my money and is arguably the only jeans brand to warrant the term “original.”

Nikon. The company that defined the professional SLR camera for several generations of professional photographers lost ground to arch rival Canon in recent years because it was slow to embrace digital technology, CMOS sensors and “live” picture in their high-end cameras. Nikon nonetheless remains one of the top 2 camera brands in the world.

Staples. Actually, until they opened a store in the town where is live, I preferred a competing purveyor of office supplies. Since then, that competitor just folded its tent and Staples has become indispensable to the operation of our small business.

I’m sure you have your favorites as well. I think though, if you examine them closely, you’ll discover that they’re captured your favor because they stand for something that you value beyond the mere delivery of a quality good or service.