And no, that’s not a typo—we’re talking about more for less. It’s not just the goal of marcom executives everywhere; for some of them, it’s a practical reality.

For example, HP, Google, and Symantec all have very big marcom budgets—maybe much bigger than yours. But they might be spending less per execution than you are—while still getting enviable creative and production quality. And there’s no magic, funny accounting, or alternative reality involved.

It doesn’t seem fair, does it?

At Harding Marketing we work with all three of those companies—and many others equally adept at controlling costs. So we know what it takes to achieve more for less. It takes a rigorous, systematic approach to marcom creative and production, that’s what. But that sounds awfully stuffy, so let’s call it:

Mystical Secret 1—Planning: Everybody plans their marcom, so that’s no big secret. The secret is to plan with cost controls built into the strategy, into the creative execution, and into the production.

But be careful. It’s not enough to say, “Hey, we can’t afford a four-color job,” especially if you really need a four-color job. That’s not planning; that’s surrender.

At Harding, we expect everyone in the place to do their job with cost implications in mind. That means the writers and designers as well as the project managers, web designers, and production experts. For example, it’s amazing how much a writer can cut costs on a Flash assignment simply by using one voice-over announcer instead of two.

Mystical Secret 2—Knowledge: Every medium is different, with different factors affecting costs. The same writer who saves money by using only one announcer for a Flash production might waste it on a website homepage. Unless, that is, the writer understands the medium.

Considering the variety of media we all use these days—print, Flash, InDesign, desktop, HTML, interactive Web design, and everything else—it’s a daunting task. And almost nobody knows everything.

At Harding, we have a handy way to undaunt ourselves: we talk to each other. With more than a hundred marcom professionals in San Jose, California; Grenoble, France; and various points in between, it’s almost inevitable that more than one of us knows the turf.

For example, Harding technical wizards know the Web so well that they built a kind of search engine Google uses for its own marcom efforts. Yes, that Google—home of the world’s premier search engine. It’s called NetMarcom, by the way. And if you’re an international marketer, it could very well save you a ton of money. In fact, it saved $1.3 million in just a year for one user.

Mystical Secret 3—Great sources: At Harding, we’re an international agency working for multi-national corporations. That means the world is not only our oyster; it’s our supplier shortlist, too.

Want an example? We have an award-winning source for Flash production in the Philippines. True, they work when most of us in the States are asleep. But no matter: Harding creative people are willing to check their emails—in the middle of the night, if necessary.

More important, our Philippine colleagues are very good. They’re also very responsive. And they are very–okay, not exactly cheap; let’s say reasonable. In short, a low-cost option with high-quality results.

All of which leads us back to the same question we asked at the beginning: How much less are you willing to pay for higher-quality marcom?

One way to find out is to talk with us about an upcoming marcom project. Even better, ask us to bid on it. Either way, there’s no cost at all to click michelle_contreras@hardingmarketing.com in San Jose, CA. Or to reach our office in Grenoble, click stephane_labartino@hardingmarcom.fr.

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Here’s the problem (or because we all believe that problems are really opportunities in disguise, let’s say opportunity): blending the marketing of two (or more) companies is full of vexing and seemingly endless… uh… opportunities.

Want proof? One source says half of all brand consolidations—i.e., attempts to combine two or more brands without losing market share-end up in the tank.*

However, the same source says there’s a way out. “Skills and experience together with a well-structured approach appear to increase the rate of success.”

At Harding Marketing, we worked with HP when it merged with Compaq, with Google after it acquired YouTube, and with HP when it purchased 3Com. So you might say we have the “skills and experience.”

We also have a “well-structured approach,” which is our way of saying we’ve developed more than a few best practices to help fellow marcom people integrate all the communications assets of one company into the formats, styles, and voices of another. These can help not only with brand consolidation, but with ballooning product portfolios and re-branding jobs as well.

You probably have some of the same skills and experience yourself. But because you might be facing more… uh… opportunities than you need at the moment, we’d like to share some of our well-structured approach.

First, hang onto the base. Even your best customers might be confused—to say nothing of the customers of the company you’ve just acquired. Both might wonder if you’re still the same great folks they’ve known and loved. Do your products and services still have the right stuff—at the right price? Who do customers deal with for service and support? Who backs the warranties and SLAs?

Change is frightening. And if you don’t help your customers understand how change benefits them, they might be frightened straight into your competitor’s arms.

So at Harding, we believe one of our most important jobs is to find ways the changes actually benefit customers. Next, we come up with ideas to let them know what it all means—the new logos, the new product names, the new model numbers, pricing, warranties, and support. Not to mention how to get hold of someone who can answer their questions.

We use media ranging from ads and commercials to brochures and e-blasts, from websites to Flash. But the focus is on savvy strategies and tactics—and on following through with on-target executions.

Comfort your prospects. Change worries prospects even more than it worries customers. Worse, it’s even easier for prospects to take a wait-and-see attitude—meaning they can take their business elsewhere—than it is for customers. So whatever you do to hang onto your customer base, you have to do even more of it to hold onto your prospect base.

Don’t forget the family. Following a merger or acquisition or even an internal reorganization, we’ve noticed channel partners often feel abandoned. How can they suddenly switch from the brands that built their business? How do they convert to a whole new line of products and brand names? How will the changes affect well-established customer relationships?

Too often, merging companies assume their partners will fall into line, like the Rockettes (but without the kicking). Too often, they’re wrong. Too often, partners, retailers, and even your own sales force are slow to get with the program. And too often, that can send the program reeling.

At Harding, we’ve found that to make a merger work, we have to figure out ways to woo every middleman and middle-woman connecting you to your customers. That means we have to show them how change will make their lives easier, better, and more prosperous.

Take advantage of the opportunities. People always say that mergers and acquisitions deliver economies of scale. Well, guess what: they’re right. Brand consolidation offers tremendous opportunities to streamline marketing, cut costs, and deliver a handsome ROI. And at Harding, we have 10 very specific ways—let’s call it our well-structured approach—to help make all that happen. In short:

1. We audit and review all the collateral marketing from both companies—then develop joint content guidelines.
2. We identify places where content needs to be revised and updated—in print, online, and everywhere else.
3. We also review product literature to make sure it accurately describes all the products and lines.
4. We use NetMarcom, Harding’s automated online tool, to support integrated collateral development.
5. We review all the design templates from both companies, combine them where possible, and design entirely new formats when necessary.
6. We update the photography and graphic libraries of both companies, catalog everything currently available, provide a unified look, and maintain use rights.
7. We come up with joint messaging guidelines covering strategies, key selling points, and style.
8. We integrate Web materials from both companies. That includes migrating websites, unifying graphics, and updating links.
9. We develop internal communications to keep employees and management informed.
10. We develop external communications for customers, prospects, stockholders, stakeholders, analysts, channel partners, and everyone who needs to know.

Of course, turning those points into reality isn’t easy. That’s where our skills and experience come in.

If you’d like to talk it over, merge your ideas with ours, and perhaps acquire a few insights from our well-structured approach, please click michelle_contreras@hardingmarketing.com for Harding Marketing in San Jose. Or for our office in Grenoble, France, click stephane_labartino@hardingmarcom.fr.

* Our source was Lars Finskud in his article, “Brand Consolidation—the Right Choice for Capturing Value in the Face of Ballooning Portfolios and Brand Dilution.“

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Ok, so you probably won’t find the above in any legitimate historical tome. But case studies, at least in their more familiar guise as “success stories,” are as old as human history itself.

The term “case study” means something different to the scientific and business communities. In broad language—and as it applies to both fields—the case study is an in-depth investigation of or research report on one individual, group, event, or community, real or imagined.

The business case study apparently originated at Harvard Business School nearly 85 years ago. Necessity being the mother (or at least the midwife) of invention, its birth resulted from a dearth: more specifically, from a lack of appropriate textbooks for the school’s graduate program.

The Harvard Business School is now noted for its case studies-based interactive learning program, which helps students understand real-world lessons in management. The faculty works with business leaders at companies worldwide, interviewing them and then writing in-depth accounts of exactly what they did to achieve their success.

As you already know, case studies can be found everywhere (beyond the Fertile Crescent even), crossing business, industry, and educational thresholds. Though companies may have their own unique criteria for what constitutes a “success,” case studies generally include the following information about the customer or client:

• Appropriate background information/overview
• Discussion of its business and/or technology challenge
• Why it chose a particular solution
• A description of said solution
• Benefits of the solution, both quantitative and qualitative

One area where case studies often differ from one company to the next is how much detail, if any, the organization provides about the roadblocks it faced along the way. Some feel more comfortable telling the story in the broadest strokes possible, while others don’t hesitate to point out actual setbacks or issues faced. The latter usually place a high value on transparency and/or imparting the lessons learned from the experience.

That’s not to say that this last bunch is necessarily more “benevolent” than the former; it’s just more likely that they understand the advantages, financial and otherwise, of a good story, even one that may show the obvious flaws of a particular strategy.

Most people can relate to mistakes (we’re only human, after all). The important differentiator between success and failure may be in how those mistakes are handled. The advent of social media and instantaneous communications are proving this over and over on nearly a daily basis.

Even if a case study is transparent and forthcoming about failures as well as successes, it still doesn’t tell the entire story. With the notable exception of Harvard Business School, mentioned earlier, most case study templates simply don’t allow for the space necessary to do so.

In his article entitled “The Downside of Business Success Stories,” marketer Daniel Faintuch points out the limitations of success stories in business magazines, for instance:

While there are obvious differences between a success story in a periodical and a corporate-sponsored case study, they have at least one thing in common: if they are written well and engagingly presented, they’ll probably get read more. If this sounds pretty obvious—well, to some extent, it is.

But the simple idea that good writing can stand on its own, no matter what form it takes, may not always be a guiding principle. It can get overlooked, for instance, during the internal process of picking and choosing which case studies to include in a company’s portfolio.

While the ultimate goal may be to pique your readers’ interest enough that they want to buy your product, service, or solution, the way down that eventual path starts with a good story—be it entertaining, educational, thought-provoking, or spine-tingling.

Our ancestors would agree.

By Jolene Dobbin

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And you’re right: “Got Milk?” is as deft as any of those. But it’s hard to think of many more.

Normal people might shout Hallelujah! at the decline of sloganeering. But at Harding Marketing, we are not normal people; we are marketing communications people. And that caused us to do what marcom people do best: We worried. We worried because building a slogan is a lot like building a brand, a product, or a corporate identity. And judging by the slogan drought, it looks as if building them all is getting tougher.

To put it another way, it’s getting tougher to get full value for your marketing budget—especially if you depend on traditional advertising media like broadcast and magazines. With money tighter than Scrooge and old man Potter put together, that really is something to worry about.

Since it’s our job to help you maximize your marketing budget, we’d like to offer some suggestions, starting with an overview of the problems. We think there are three that stand out.

1. Media segmentation
2. Product lifecycles
3. Customer attention span

It’s clearly wonderful to have about a trillion channels our parents never watched. And who doesn’t rejoice at having one magazine for trout fishermen and another for bass fans? For that matter, who isn’t thrilled that blogs, YouTube, Google, Twitter, and Facebook give us all something to do at 3:00 AM?

But building awareness takes constant repetition among a large group of people.

And that’s no snap these days. Media segmentation gives your target audience an almost infinite number of choices. So whichever you pick, your target is probably looking at something else. The result: It takes a budget the size of all outdoors, including nearby parsecs, to get the reach and frequency you need. And never mind that you’re also paying for a whole bunch of viewers, readers, and listeners you don’t really want. They tag along because… well, because.

As to shorter product lifecycles, consider this: Ivory Soap was invented way back in 1879. That means P&G had 130 years to gently slide its slogan into our brains. As a comparison, the technology industry is built on having something new every few minutes. How much time did 8-track players have to create a brand? Or floppy disks? The answer: Slightly less than it takes to lose at Pac-Man.

Even worse, your prospects now have less time to spend on ads. If they’re not Tweeting their innermost thoughts or making videos for YouTube, they’re off to cooking class, book group, soccer practice, and Mensa meetings. Or spending crazy-long hours commuting.

Want proof? At its peak in the 1980s, The Bill Cosby Show drew 50 million viewers a show. American Idol averages 40% less. Newspapers and magazines are dying all over the place. And instead of listening to the radio, your target market is updating its playlist.

At Harding, we think the answer to these three problems lies in the ultimate marketing machine: collateral. By shifting more of your budget to marcom collateral, you give yourself the flexibility to turn the problems into positives.

First, collateral can pinpoint your market—with almost no waste circulation. You can target email and DM to actual prospects, by name if you like. People pick up your brochures because they’re interested in what you have to say. Same goes for people who hit your website, download your white paper, read your blog, or watch your Flash presentation.

Second, collateral lets you change your message as your message changes. Online copy can be revised in a virtual instant. And today’s printing technology is so sophisticated, you can update your marcom materials faster than you can update your product.

Third, when people examine your collateral, they’re focused on you. They’re not idly thumbing through a magazine or passively watching TV, they’re involved in a personal search for hard information about your company and your products.

But most important is that tight money thing. Collateral production costs tend to be far less than making commercials or print ads. And the media costs—for time or space—are roughly zero. So net-net, bottom line, at the end of the day, collateral turns out to be an enormously cost-effective way to put your marketing budget to work.

Which leads us to a key part of any marcom piece—the call to action. If you’d like to talk about ways to give your marketing budget a little more snap, crackle, and pop, so would we. Just let your fingers do the walking and email michelle_contreras@hardingmarketing.com. Or to reach our office in Grenoble, France, try stephane_labartino@hardingmarketing.com.

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It’s tricky, but it’s important. That’s because you and we are often trying to communicate about highly technical products to not-so technical people. They might be very smart people with advanced degrees and whizzes at whatever it is they do. But that doesn’t mean they know bupkis about storage interfaces, including multifunction, Fibre Channel, RAID, iSCSI, and SCSI adapters.

Yet these people are often the decision makers when it comes to buying what you and we are selling. If we’re not careful, prospective customers will find themselves browsing through our brochures, white papers, and websites—and never know what we’re talking about.

This can lead to lost sales. Not to mention lost jobs.

At Harding Marketing, these difficulties led us to think about practical ways to help our writers write technical copy for non-technical readers.

First, know your audience. If your audience is all engineers, no problem. Usually.

But what if they’re ophthalmologists and you’re trying to describe some new device for laser eye surgery? Or what if they’re Chief Financial Officers who need to approve funding for a new data center? In that case, if the writers start listing the benefits of virtual storage before the readers have even heard of virtualization, we’re headed for the abyss.

This same principle explains why school teachers usually cover addition and subtraction before they get into fractions.

So before writing something like a networking brochure, we try to find out if the audience knows the difference between networking with old college chums and networking with blade switches (not to be confused with switch blades).

Next, define your terms. This can get touchy because none of us wants to offend readers by explaining stuff they already know. Stuff like a PC. Or a USB.

But what about SOA? Wikipedia says, “In computing, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has different… and openly-debated definitions.” This means our readers might have a different definition than we do. Or no definition at all. The trick is to make sure every reader knows what we mean.

For acronyms and other clumps of initials, the standard practice is to spell them out the first time, then follow up with initials in parentheses. For example: “service-oriented architecture (SOA)…” But sometimes that’s not enough. For a Hewlett-Packard white paper, one Harding writer explained SOA in a way that even a CEO could understand:

BTW, if we fear that sophisticated readers will think a definition is offensively tautological, we sometimes begin by saying, “As you know, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been called… “

And as you know, a glossary is often a good place to define new terms. No one takes umbrage when we include one. And when they come across something unfamiliar, everyone is grateful for it.

One caution: We try to make sure our definition is either the standard one or else clearly explained. There are, for instance, about as many definitions of “cloud computing” as there are clouds. An explanatory phrase or two can put a silver lining around your copy.

Finally, ask a non-techie to read it. It’s SOP to run technical copy past the engineers for accuracy. But we can often learn more if we run it past an MBA—or even (gasp) a history major. If they stumble over a word or phrase, the target CEO might also stumble. And that might mean it’s time for a rewrite.

At our Harding Marketing offices in San Jose, California; Grenoble, France; and points in between, we write marketing copy for clients as technical as Hewlett-Packard, Google, Symantec, and many others. Some of it’s intended for engineers and other techies. Some of it’s intended for the rest of us. We work hard to make all of it clear, direct, and understandable.

If that’s the kind of copy you need for an upcoming marcom project, we’d be delighted to talk with you about it. Technically speaking, that’s our job.

To reach us in San Jose, click michelle_contreras@hardingmarketing.com. Or for our Grenoble office, try stephane_labartino@hardingmarketing.com.

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Most of us, though, need guidelines to help us build, climb, or cook. It’s the same with blogging. Technically, you can create, write, and edit a blog without guidelines, but it’s probably not prudent.

Having guidelines is especially helpful if you’re creating a B2B blog like this one. We’re learning this here at Harding Marketing, as we go through the process of creating the very blog that you’re reading right now. We’ve written some guidelines, but we’ll need to expand them as we learn new things along the way.

Here are some of the things we’ve discovered. Guidelines for blogging can help you:

1. Decide who will be writing the content. Blogs are written by a variety of different people within an organization. Some companies only allow C-level executives to write blog posts, and others encourage everyone to pitch in. Still others only use professional writers. Deciding early on who will or will not contribute can save a lot of time and energy up front.

2. Think about the content of your content. In real estate, the three things that matter most are “location, location, location.” In marketing, the adage is “audience, audience, audience.” Dance legend Twyla Tharp once said, “It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience.” She was definitely onto something; this is a good maxim to follow no matter what business or industry you’re in.

   Ultimately you’re creating blog articles that you hope will benefit your audience. So think about the language you use when speaking to and about that audience. Then, add those considerations to your guidelines.

3. Set appropriate reader expectations. Whether you’re writing niche-specific content or a broad-spectrum blog about your overall business, setting reader expectations is important. Transparency is essential, especially if you’re writing for a well-known company. In its externally available blogging code of conduct, HP notes that “blogs are written by a variety of employees at different levels and positions in the company, so you can expect many viewpoints.” It then goes on to tell readers what else to expect.

4. Get in front of your content; don’t react to it after the fact. It’s better to act than to react, at least in the case of blog content. Reacting can not only waste enormous amounts of time, but potentially damage your company too.

   It should be clear, for instance, which subjects are absolutely off limits. It’s much easier to address this before it happens than to delete an already published post. The Internet is an accomplished trailblazer, leaving virtual breadcrumbs of content everywhere it goes.

5. Establish a system for monitoring/approving comments. Having such a system in place helps you avoid spinning your wheels as you try to determine who’s responsible for these tasks. In our world of instantaneous communications, this is especially important: delaying approval of or a response to a comment could result in a disenchanted reader at best, and a lost sale at worst. Well, obviously there are even worse things, but you get the picture.

6. Determine how to respond to comments. Speed is not the only factor when it comes to comments. What you’re actually going to say is pretty important as well. Here are just a few questions to consider:
   
   • What type of response will you provide?
   • From whom in your company will it come: can anyone respond to comments, or only a select few?
   • What is the level of detail your response to comments should have? What about the tone of that discourse?
   • Will you wait to respond until you have several comments on the same subject, or will you always strive to address each one individually?

The above six items are just a few things to think about as you draft your guidelines. Some organizations may want to include legal policies or detailed writing tips in their guidelines as well; others may be fine with short, yet handy bulleted lists of dos and don’ts.

What about your own corporate blog guidelines? Is there anything that works for you that you’d like to share?

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So it’s not surprising that graphic designers—those free-spirited folks who make your brochures and websites look so spiffy—are offended by typographical rules. Therefore let’s not call these rules. Instead, let’s call them guidelines. Or helpful advice. Or typographical tips to enhance legibility and make your marketing communications more effective. In short, let’s call them the type of thing that can be helpful.

Get it? Type of thing?

Okay. Let’s skip the weak jokes and concentrate on a few practical realities about typography in marketing communications.

1. Keep it short. Reverse is generally not a good idea for body copy, but it can work just fine for headlines or short captions.
2. Use strong, bold faces. There is a place for delicate, arty type, but that place is not in reverse.
3. Make it big. Small type sometimes works okay in reverse. But most times, big type works even better.
4. Finally, if we’re using reverse type over a four-color photo, we make sure to do (a) and (b) and (c). And even then, it’s risky. That’s because the slightest problem with color registration can make reverse type as blurry as memories of your fourth birthday.

Practical reality #2: Big type is easier to read than small type. We realize that’s not a totally helpful tip. Like, how big is big enough if your copy will sometimes pop up on a 10″ mini notebook screen and sometimes on a monster 27″ monitor? But we still think it’s important to consider whether or not your words might be more effective in larger type.

BTW, trying to follow this advice often encourages us to cut copy, which is nearly always a good thing.

Practical reality #3: Too many characters per line is a bummer. How many characters are too many? Various authorities offer various opinions, with no firm answer. At Harding, our own guideline for readability says there should be no more than 90 characters per line, including spaces.

Practical reality #4: When you print type over a black and white photograph (or almost any pattern), whole words can disappear in a haze of nearly identical values. One protection is to use outline letters. That way, even if black type winds up over a very dark background, the white outline will make the words legible. If you’re printing in reverse, the opposite is true; giving your white letters a black outline will help the words show up.

PRACTICAL REALITY #5: ALL CAPS MIGHT BE EVEN HARDER TO READ THAN REVERSE. AT HARDING, WHEN WE WANT TO SET COPY IN ALL CAPS (LIKE WHEN WE’RE TRYING FOR THE WESTERN-UNION LOOK), WE FOLLOW THE SAME GUIDELINE WE FOLLOW FOR REVERSE TYPE: KEEP IT SHORT.

Practical reality # 6: When your words are going global, there are special issues to think about. For one, copy translated from English can run up to 40% longer in other languages. I took a walk, for example, becomes, Ich habe einen Spaziergang machen when it ambles into Germany. Maybe even worse, a beautiful design using Latin letters (like these) might not work as well in the Cyrillic, Greek, Sanskrit, Kanji, Arabic, or other alphabets.

Unfortunately, there are also practical realities numbers 7 through maybe 1,027. But this blog is too short to include them all, and you’re too busy to read them anyhow. So let’s just end by saying that we’d be delighted to discuss typography with you at any time. And if that leads to the opportunity to set some legible, attractive, and persuasive type for your next marcom project, even better.

To set up a conversation, just open your email and type in michelle_contreras@hardingmarketing.com. Or to reach our office in Grenoble, France, try stephane_labartino@hardingmarketing.com. They’re the type who’ll respond almost instantly.

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Okay, maybe not.

Maybe those of us in marcom should just forget about using humor because our responsibilities are, like, way serious.

But at Harding Marketing, we think that begs the question: serious to whom? Marcom copy is pretty darn serious to those of us who manufacture it, but who are we kidding? You and we can come up with brilliant strategies. We can focus on benefits. We can include bullets and callouts and subheads and a powerful call to action. But if we don’t write copy that readers enjoy reading (or listening to), our chance of success is reduced by a whole lot. Maybe even more.

Funny thing is, people seem to enjoy a bit of humor. That’s true even if the people are engineers. Or stuffed suits. Or C-class big shots. Or even if they happen to be our best prospects and customers.

The leading sales reps understand this. That doesn’t mean they try to be standup comics or circus clowns. It simply means that leading sales reps are adept at the sort of amusing patter that puts a smile on a customer’s face. Of course, lowering the price will also work.

So if a little humor performs well in face-to-face marketing, why do some of us dread using it in marcom copy—which is sometimes as dull as cleaning the garage?

At Harding, we laugh at such dread. Not that we think humor is right for every assignment. But we’ve found it’s exactly right for some. Take Cheapo Chuck. When Hewlett-Packard asked us to help fight the menace of low-cost, off-brand replacement inks and toners, we came up with a Flash presentation starring a funny little doofus who insists on wasting money at every opportunity.

Since Cheapo Chuck’s first Flash was launched earlier this year, HP has been so happy with the results that they’ve asked us to create another half-dozen or so. We think his success demonstrates at least a few of the solid business reasons for using humor in marketing communications.

Humor cuts through the clutter. There’s so much dreary, boring Marcom copy clogging brochures and the Internet that even a small, unassuming chuckle stands out like a Ferrari in a parking lot full of Yugos. Not that there’s anything wrong with Yugos.

Humor enhances recall. If you doubt that, think about the TV commercials you remember. Got Milk? The E-Trade Baby? Mac guy vs. PC guy? Now think about the ones you forgot. Oh, right. You forgot them.

Humor is disarming. People are skeptical when it comes to marketing, but humor helps us all get past their defenses. And that helps us all seem a little less like someone trying to trick them into handing over their bank PIN, credit card, and PayPal password.

Humor rewards the audience. In a funny way, a funny line can be a “thank you” to anyone who sticks with your copy all the way to the end. Which we have now reached.

There are several scholarly sources to support what we’ve said here. One is a book appropriately called Humor in Advertising.

It costs about 80 bucks, which is not what you’d call a laughing matter.

On the other hand, we invite you to meet with us to talk about good, and possibly humorous, ways to create effective marketing communications. The conversation’s free, but we do ask that you bring your own Whoopee cushion.

To set things up, just send us an email.
For Harding’s office in Grenoble, France.

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You’re not alone. A large contingent of the population, especially outside the corporate world, doesn’t really know what a mission statement is. And probably a good portion of that group actually includes marketing professionals.

But writing a mission statement isn’t as Marketing 101-ey as you’d think.

So this might be a good place to attempt to define a mission statement: A mission statement, sometimes referred to as a corporate statement, is a short, written statement that identifies a company’s official goals and principles.

Ideally, it should guide a company’s every action and decision by defining its overreaching objective. It should also be the most accurate, yet succinct answer to the questions:

• What are we trying to accomplish?
• For what reasons are we selling our product/solution/service?
• Why do we even exist? (existential musings aside, try to think beyond the clichéd here; it’s not just about making a profit)

Here are some tips, and it’s not an all-inclusive list by any means, to help guide you along in writing a mission statement:

• Think big, but focus narrowly. Try to whittle down your grandiose, sweeping vision to its most essential elements: you may indeed want to be the world’s largest and most successful consumer electronics superstore, but what is it about your unique qualifications that will help you get there? What will you specifically be giving your customers that your competitors can’t or won’t? What can you offer or do that’s better, cheaper, or faster?
• Be short, sweet, and direct. Okay, maybe not “sweet,” unless you’re a confectioner or chocolatier. Lengths of mission statements range anywhere from a few words to several paragraphs. Although your organization’s goals should dictate the length, you should strive to be as brief as possible without sacrificing inspiration.
  • The Humane Society’s mission statement gets directly to the heart of the matter, and reads a lot like a well-focused tagline: “Celebrating Animals, Confronting Cruelty.”
  • So does Google’s: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

• Write for the long haul. Your mission statement should be just as applicable three years or a decade from now as it is today. This doesn’t mean it should remain timeless simply for the sake of being timeless; during certain periods of upheaval (including events like mergers, acquisitions, or restructuring) you may in fact need to review it for relevance.
• Display it publicly. You don’t need to take out an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle or secure a billboard on the Times Square Jumbotron. But your mission statement should easily be available for your customers, partners, and even competitors to view. Many organizations post theirs on the website’s “About us” page.
• Include others. You may be the only one responsible for assigning it or writing your company’s mission statement, but that doesn’t mean you should go it alone. Plan on involving internal employees as well as externally based partners and associates, if applicable, in the brainstorming and/or researching phase. Differing perspectives may bring a fresh focus and help you gain valuable insight into your company’s goals.
• Take the necessary time to complete. Don’t speed through the process. You should plan on spending time doing research, reading company literature, conducting interviews with the right people, and then drafting several versions if necessary.

There are, of course, other things to consider. What works for one company or industry, for instance, may not work for another. Every organization’s culture is unique. And that’s fine. In fact, a mission statement should encapsulate, and celebrate, that uniqueness.

This is why you probably shouldn’t write your statement using something like The Flag Patented Mission Statement Generator. Although you might want to check out that link for its humorous take on the gobbledygook of corporate-speak.

Speaking of corporate-speak, stay tuned for next week’s edition of MarComments, where we’ll show you how to translate corporate-speak into American English. Well, we’ll provide a few entertaining examples at least.

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