My 3-day a week treadmill regimen lasted 2 years.

Yup! I was a statistic. (Lest you think I’m a total slackard, I was exercising sporadically, but not on our expensive treadmill.)

Two and a half years ago when I decided to launch our company blog I had the same noble intentions as my early exercise aspirations. I promised myself I’d write two fresh posts a week, including compelling interviews with industry leaders, and that my entries would be GOOD. By my fifteenth post I realized that all those great ideas I’d had when I decided to become Mr. Social Media had run out. Uh oh. All of a sudden it got harder to be clever and meaningful. My blogging had ceased being a lark and had become work. This was especially problematic since I was counseling several of our clients to start blogging. After encouraging them about the benefits of writing online as a way to engage with their customers I always ended by warning them, “…and you know you have to stay with it since there is nothing sadder than an unblogged blog.”

A few years ago there was the belief that blogging several times a week was optimal or you’d risk losing the interest of your followers. That often led to people posting… how should I put it?… less than thoughtful content. As I followed the blogosphere and read more articles stating that producing compelling content was much more important than churning out posts for quantity sake I was somewhat relieved. Like a good portfolio, a few good articles are better than a few good articles along with a bunch of uninteresting ones.

But the fact remains that for a while my writing regimen got pretty sparse by anybody’s standards, so I am recommitting to making the time to write regularly. It’s challenging because I am the president of my company and I manage all the duties associated with my title. We’re also in the process of developing a new company website for which I am writing the content, so my time is even more limited than usual (Could that be why I am writing this at 7:45 pm?). But you will be my judges. I don’t have any excuses left for not writing regularly after this post goes live, so hold me to it!

P.S. A year and a half ago my wife and I adopted a dog from a shelter and it’s now my job to walk our pup Ellie every night for about 45 minutes come rain, snow, sleet or tsunami. I DO get my exercise since I need to walk her briskly, because she barks and lurches energetically at anything on 2 or 4 legs, which embarrasses me in front of my neighbors. Good for me!

To make a point, I’ve turned my subject matter on its head. So instead of entitling this post “10 Tips Toward Business Success” (I know I wouldn’t read an article with that tired cliché of a title), I’ve written one with a more engaging name (and hopefully more meaty content as well).

So here are my tips in no particular order:

1. Be passionless. Look at your business as just a way to make a living and nothing more. That will assure you take the easiest path to any challenge, and will expedite your company’s demise.
2. Nurture your ego. Make sure you view yourself as the supreme expert in every situation. And while you’re at it, make sure everybody else knows it too. If you look to surround yourself with people more talented than you in their areas of expertise, and give them the freedom to exercise their gifts, you run the risk of losing power even if you end up ultimately being more successful.
3. Don’t define your brand. Every company has a brand. It’s simply a matter of whether you build your brand with intent and purpose or whether the brand is vague and accidental. So avoid defining your company’s core purpose, and its value promise to its customers, and you’ll keep your customers (and staff) guessing who you are and just why they should do business with you.
4. Make sure you’re resistant to change. Hunker down and do things the same way over and over again. And while you’re at it, notice that your industry is changing due to economical factors as well as your customers’ buying habits, but do nothing to respond to the changes. Yup, embrace solid downward spiraling.
5. Put your needs before those of your customers. Better yet, instill an adversarial approach toward your customers: “I know you are going to rake me over the coals if I let you, so I’ll rake you over the coals first.” Can’t you almost smell those Chapter 11 documents?
6. Embrace the illusion that the business world should always be fair. That’s right, when you have a difficult customer to deal with, take it personally. Nurturing those perceived slights and inequities will almost certainly lead to bridge-burning and as we all know, retaining customers is much easier than continually winning new accounts. So, tolerance and compromise should be avoided at all costs.
7. View marketing as an expense with no return. That will ensure that you never allocate enough budget, time, and resources towards promoting your company to see meaningful results. In turn, this will support your belief that marketing doesn’t pay for itself. Hey, you’ve just saved money … that you’ll need when you go out of business.
8. Make sure your management style is dour and humorless. This will ensure that top recruits won’t want to work in your corporate culture, or at least will have the energy sapped from them soon after they come on board. Research shows that employees’ work-a-day experience and peer relationships are bigger drivers than pay, so you’ll want to avoid a relaxed culture with flexible hours. Not getting the most talented people on your team will go far to assure a short lifespan for your business.
9. Positive feedback to your employees is a no-no. They will just take advantage of you. And of course you should never apologize to an employee because you aren’t ever going to be in the wrong. Enough said.
10. Don’t give back. Doing work pro bono or at reduced rates for non-profits is to be viewed as an expense you just can’t afford. All this talk about how today’s customers care about the values of the businesses they patronize is just a bunch of hogwash.

That pretty much sums up how to expertly run your business into the ground. You may decide to really focus on one point, which can be quite effective, but combining several of the points above will be your quickest path to a dysfunctional and doomed company.

Marilyn and Mike Sullivan are special people. Not only because they are decent, honest and caring by nature, but also because they have lived through what many of us who are parents can barely comprehend. The Sullivans, along with their daughter Katie, endured the pain and loss of the unexpected death of their teenage daughter and sister, Erin.

Like many brave people who have suffered, Marilyn wanted to channel her anguish into something positive and meaningful. Just released is her book, A Patch of Comfort, A Guide for Helping Someone In Grief, which takes a different approach to dealing with loss than most books. Filled with honesty and even humor, Marilyn’s book grew out of her compassion for her friends as they tried to support and comfort her and Mike while they mourned. Some of her chapters include “Let’s Talk about How Grief Heals and Where You Fit In” and “Let’s Talk about What You May Encounter Trying to Help Someone in Grief.”

I was honored when Marilyn asked me to provide illustrations for the book. I chose a very simple style and have supplied a few samples here for your viewing. The book will soon be available from major retailers like amazon.com.

• Branding is all about differentiation–standing out in the customer’s mind by offering something different than your competition. So, don’t get caught up in the “me too” mentality of listing the same services, and copying the look and feel of a competitor’s website. Actually, aim at the opposite. Different is good.

• Meet your customers where they live. Your customers are savvy and impatient, so do everything in your power to communicate with them and meet their needs on their own terms—not yours. Imagine they are sitting across the table from you. That means cutting out industry jargon and empty advertising “happy talk” from your website’s copy. Are they using social media? Then integrate it into your site. Are they accessing your website from a smart phone? Then make sure your site works flawlessly on hand-held devices.

• Capturing your culture is as important as marketing your goods and services. Your website is no longer just about pricing and offerings, because with so much competition out there, your customers can always find whatever they are looking for cheaper and faster. Today, people are looking for brands to identify with—so your corporate integrity and core values should ring out loud and clear. Blogs, which are generally more informal than the copy on the marketing section of your site, can go a long way to help round out your brand by providing your readers with a broader, more inclusive insight into who you are and what you stand for.

So as you busy yourself with figuring out your site map, search terms, navigation, categories, and all the other myriad considerations that go into building or updating your website, don’t overlook the forest for the trees. Make sure the true “you” (your brand) resonates loud and clear. Whether we acknowledge it or not, the decisions about whom we work and align ourselves with are determined by both our left and right brains—analytical and emotional.

The problem is that when marketing gurus become dogmatic, they are setting themselves up to be proven wrong, and based on our clients’ experience, as well as that of my own company, the presenter’s opinion is untrue.

Over the past few years I’ve questioned if my openness to using traditional print for marketing today is generational. Is it because I started in advertising nearly 30 years ago, before the Internet was used by anyone except a few universities and government agencies?

To clarify, I am not a tech-curmudgeon. I fully embrace all the digital and analytical tools available to connect people with brands. Currently my company has over 600 followers on Facebook, and we are active in over a dozen social media sites, some of which you’d recognize and others that are unique to the advertising industry.

My point is this: as advertising professionals, let’s keep our minds and options open to as broad a toolbox as possible because people access information in different ways. Here are a few facts that help present the case that direct mail is still alive (from a 2009 survey by the US Postal Service):

• Over 14 billion dollars were invested in direct mail in 2009, followed by an increase in 2010.

• 79% of direct mail recipients either read or scan their mail, which is higher than for electronic mail.

• Only 19% of retail catalogs are discarded without being read.

• 2.3: the number of weekly advertising mail pieces that affluent households (those earning $150,000-plus) intend to respond to.

Other factoids are also compelling; for instance, the belief that going interactive is the greener solution. In order for our digital world to exist, we consume huge amounts of electricity driven by power plants and massive data centers running 24/7, requiring the burning of enormous amounts of fossil fuels. And electronic consumption is increasing by roughly 24% per year. In contrast, paper producers are among the greenest industry in the world. Trees are renewable. Paper and forest industries plant about 1.5 million seedlings a day (much more than they harvest) and nearly all municipalities in the US have effective recycling programs.

Another myth is that young people aged 18 to 34 (an important demographic for advertisers) want all their information and transactions to occur online. Not so, says a recent Epsilon report. They found that 43% of the young people surveyed preferred receiving insurance information in the mail compared to 21% desiring digital delivery.

Still need convincing?

• A United States Postal Service press release points out that a market study by comScore shows that among visitors to retail websites, twice as many catalog recipients made a purchase as those who did not receive a print catalog—more than doubling the online conversion rate. A revenue increase of 163% resulted from a comparison of purchases and money spent by catalog recipients versus those who did not receive a catalog in the comScore study, and catalog recipients ordered 28% more items.

• Magazine ads? Who needs them? Well, that depends. One of our clients is in a specialized market with only several hundred prospective customers in the entire country. But all of the CEOs and managers of the companies they need to reach subscribe to a single trade publication. So the print ads we create appear prominently and regularly in the magazine—often with multiple ads in a single publication. This has been one of their major and most successful marketing media and we are happy to report that our client has not only weathered the recession during a time of rapid change within their industry, but has grown their market in the US as well as developed overseas sales (for which we have also created print ads).

• My own company walks the walk and talks the talk we advocate to our clients. Even though we are on the first page of Google for the keyword terms we have targeted, we continue a robust direct mail campaign. And our proof of success lies in the fact that our most predominant keywords remain our company’s name (with plenty of variations—hile, hile design, hile design ann arbor, dave hile, and even hill design), which indicates that people are responding to our direct mail appeal to visit our website. I know because I track the campaigns through Google Analytics and measure the increased traffic after each of our mailings.

Of course, websites, social media, digital marketing and search engine optimization are essential to growing your business and defining your brand, but let’s keep all our options open—which includes print promotions. Print creates an emotional connection with customers that digital doesn’t. Consumers hold it, view it and engage with it in a manner different from their online experiences.

Finally, since I receive over 100 emails a day, going to our mailbox to collect the mail has become a treat. As a matter of fact, I daily have to attempt to outsmart Lindsey, our Production Designer, since she also enjoys collecting the mail. And with the overall decrease in direct mail over the last several years, the print mail I receive actually gets my attention. Perhaps snail-mail is the NEW, “old” advertising medium!

Entering from a rear door, the estimator apologized for my wait and was friendly and attentive as I explained my situation. We walked out to my car and he inspected the damage. In under a minute, we arrived back in the shop at about the same time another employee entered the small office, ignoring me. I received a quote in about 5 minutes—I needed a new rear bumper. The cost: $650–$850, depending on the integrity of a lattice-like interior bumper grid as well as whether a support bar under the rear bumper needed to be adjusted or replaced.

I drove directly from the first repair shop to the second, which was located less than a mile from my office. Upon entering, I was warmly greeted (even called “Sir”) by the two staff at the desk. They offered me coffee or bottled water as one of the men, an estimator, walked outside with me to inspect my car (the other shop had brewed coffee and condiments sitting out, but I wasn’t sure if it was for customers, and I was never offered anything). Unlike at the first shop, this estimator took about 5 minutes to inspect my car. He even got on his back and looked up under the bumper and noted that the support bar was slightly bent but could easily be readjusted. He also pointed out that my reflector light was cracked and a corner of my hatchback door had lost a bit of paint, which they would touch up (something I hadn’t noticed).

Back in the shop, the estimator asked if I would be open to the option of purchasing an aftermarket bumper, identical to the manufacturer’s, but about $100 less. Of course I said yes. While waiting, several staff entered the shop from the rear repair area and each one greeted me enthusiastically. They all seemed genuine—not as if they were ordered by management to be friendly. After locating an aftermarket bumper online, the estimator worked up the bid, giving me a firm quote of $576.25. He then took a few minutes to walk me through the costs and procedure, telling me that in two days the parts would be in, and that the work would then take two to three days to complete. Sounded good to me, and I made my decision on the spot to work with auto repair shop #2.

After the parts came in, I dropped my car off and again was treated with what can only be described as courtesy above and beyond my expectations. I was offered a ride back to my office, which I declined since one of my staff was going to pick me up.

A day and a half later I received a call telling me my car was ready to be picked up. Back at their office more coffee was offered, along with a detailed breakdown confirming the project and costs. After receiving a lifetime warranty on parts and labor, I got in my car and noticed that it had been thoroughly washed and that the interior and been vacuumed and detailed (like when you pay $100 to have your car cleaned), all the more dramatic since the interior of my car had been trashed by my dog. The cleaning and detailing were never mentioned in my three face-to-face engagements. It was just icing on the cake.

I drove away from the auto repair shop almost in a dream, stunned by their conscientious service. Although I hope never to need bodywork again, they have gained a loyal customer.

In the branding and marketing world I’m part of, the ultimate goal for customer loyalty is “willingness to recommend.”  Regardless of what business you are in, follow the example of my new favorite repair shop: Treat your customers with respect, look for ways to differentiate yourself and, if you really want to grow your business, exceed their expectations.

For local Ann Arbor area residents, Whitney’s Collision West is my new auto repair shop, which I highly recommend.

Lead Illustrator Dave Hile has completed the cover of Mystery of the Temple Court, a new book from Christian publishing company Kregel. The book is the fourth in a series of family-oriented fictional adventure stories that feature interrelated characters and correspond to sections of the Gospel account of Christ’s life. The books include Jotham’s Journey (1997), Bartholomew’s Passage (2002) and Tabitha’s Travels (2003) and are authored by Arnold Ytreeide, but the three previous books had gone out of print and the original publisher had gone out of business. However, Ytreeide’s stories remained sought after on ebay and other used book sources and grew such a dedicated following that Kregel took notice and bought the rights in 2008 to begin reissuing the series.

Kregel, based in Grand Rapids, plans to release the new Mystery of the Temple Court in the Fall of this year.

To see the other books in the series and for more information, go to http://store.kregel.com/productdetails.cfm?PC=2100.

• They liked that we listened before we spoke. By doing so before presenting our capabilities via PowerPoint, we learned that one of their top criteria was finding an agency with people they liked and felt they could work with, since they had never hired an outside agency before. Good to know! Later, after receiving their RFP (Request for Proposal) we put a lot of emphasis on our personalized service and long-term client relationships.
• They liked our team approach. We presented our company as a team. We allowed each of the four staffers present to discuss their areas of expertise and what they would bring to address the client’s needs. It was clear after reading the client’s website that they placed a great deal of emphasis on humility among their leadership as well as an open, participatory corporate culture.
• They liked that our design portfolio showed a broad range of styles, tailored to different industries. Having an agency look and feel is neither right nor wrong. There are many extremely talented creative firms who have honed their design approach to perfection. (Check out Charles S. Anderson Design at http://www.csadesign.com. Personally, I’m a HUGE fan of their retro-inspired design work!) But that approach requires customers to conform to the agency’s aesthetic. We intentionally highlighted divergent styles across several different industries to demonstrate that we target each brand to the appropriate industry and end user.

So, hearing from our new client was a reminder that our pitches shouldn’t be solely about our company capabilities, but also about serving our customer. And the payoff for such basic customer-centric etiquette? By focusing on our customer, we took care of our own business (in this case in a big way, as our new client is a national leader in their field).

These email promotions (and tweets) center mostly on changing technologies, often with little mention of the need for creative marketing strategies. While all of this technology is extremely important, we seem to be living through a time in advertising where we are more intrigued by the medium than the message.

Recently a friend gave me Juicing the Orange, a book about how creativity is THE key to successful advertising. It chronicles eight major ad campaigns by Fallon Worldwide, an ad agency based in Minneapolis, MN. While Fallon is not among the largest agencies in the world, it has served an impressive list of major brands including Purina, Citibank, United Airlines, Holiday Inn Express, EDS, BMW and others. What the agency is best known for is their “single-minded devotion to, and the belief in, the power of Creativity.”

Of course the changing technologies necessary for reaching customers are highlighted in their case studies. Like all other major agencies, Fallon has lived through the decline of mass-market advertising. In fact, they were the first agency to forego television advertising in lieu of web advertising for an auto account. Way back in 2001 they created 3-minute, action-packed mini-movies (starring hunk Clive Owens) for their client BMW. This was truly radical as no car company had ever considered that an online campaign could be as effective (and in the case study in the book, perhaps more effective, and much less expensive) than the then-prescribed TV spot of the beautifully polished, high performance car driving through pristine mountain roads.

The emphasis of the book is definitely not on the medium of delivery, but on the research and development of the creative ideas and strategies behind the campaigns. And their creative solutions were often a hard sell to their clients. As quoted in the book, “Publicly announcing our devotion to creativity put us in risky territory. In the world of marketing communications, ‘Creative’ typically means ‘self indulgent,’ the kind of art for art’s sake ads that win awards but don’t affect the client’s bottom line. In the larger business world, creativity can be an even more pejorative word. Innovation is prized, but creativity conjures images of an improv group brought in for a team-building exercise, or empty exhortations to ‘Think outside the box.’”

But time after time Fallon proved this stereotype false. By focusing on creativity to reach their clients’ customers and taking risks, they rung up an impressive resume of often wildly successful campaigns (that at times saved their clients from financial doom).

Why is this book so timely right now? Because of the sheer amount of media we all have to deal with on a daily basis. Whether serving major clients like Lee Jeans or the Bahamas Tourism board (both case studies in the book) or, for smaller firms serving mid-sized local clients, the need to stand out creatively has never been more important. Think about it. Has there ever been a successful advertising campaign that you can recall that is boring, uninspired and derivative? So, it’s not enough to be ranked number one in your industry on Google, if you don’t retain your site visitors with a compelling and creative brand message. Without the creative, you will have lots of site visitors but you may not be gaining many customers. And it’s not enough to have an extensive marketing campaign if it’s forgettable, because it won’t define you against the thousands of other boring and forgettable campaigns we all immediately dismiss and forget.

Creative content and strategy, not technology, is king. (Actually, you need both.)

By the way, I highly recommend you set down your book about search engine supremacy (if only temporarily) and pick up Juicing the Orange by Pat Fallon and Fred Senn. They also have a wonderfully entertaining website where you can see (via videos) many of their now famous, and hugely successful campaigns that are discussed in the book. You can also purchase the book on the site if you are so inclined. Visit juicingtheorange.com. You won’t regret it, and you will see the power of intelligently applied creativity firsthand.

References. If you read enough agency websites in succession they all begin to sound the same: we’re experienced … we’ll deliver … we’re creative … we put a premium on serving our clients. Well, take them up on the client thing. Ask to speak with some of their clients directly. Talk is cheap, and companies can say anything about themselves. If they can’t produce references from satisfied clients, that’s a red flag.

Listening. Before handing out sage advertising advice an agency should listen to you and then listen some more. The fact is that no client has built a viable business (especially in today’s economy) without knowing a thing or two about meeting the needs of their customers. It’s true that effective ad agencies know how to help grow a business by motivating existing customers and reaching new ones. And good agencies will help to define a clear marketing message in order to increase sales. But not before they fully understand the goals and unique challenges of each client. They should listen more and speak less.

That said, you aren’t hiring an agency to be your lap dog or “yes men” (or women). After listening and understanding your challenges, they should bring in fresh new marketing ideas—and your job is to be open to them.

Accessibility. Some creative firms only provide an email form with which to contact them. That’s suspect. They should at the very least have a phone number, and a brick and mortar street address wouldn’t hurt either. They’re not engaged in covert ops, they are in advertising. So why the secrecy?

Samples. I have actually visited agency sites that don’t show any of the work they’ve done. What’s up with that? Advertising depends on ideas expressed through the combination of creative text and visuals. If they don’t show you their work (or enough of it for you to make a judgment about their expertise), it’s probably not worth seeing.

Creativity. Judge the firm’s portfolio by their creativity, not just by their experience in your particular industry. Creativity is what will get you noticed and what will set your company or product apart. It doesn’t necessarily matter if the agency has worked in your industry before because good advertising needn’t be industry specific. Effective advertising is made up of great ideas targeted successfully to distinct markets. Look to see how a prospective agency thinks, and again, look for satisfied clients across a spectrum of industries.

Bias. People have biases, and advertising agencies do too. Some are biased against newer marketing methods such as social media and phone apps. Or conversely, others view any offline media as old fashioned and ineffective. Truth is, people access information in many different ways depending on the industry and the customer base. I recently had a conversation with an online marketer who couldn’t believe that my firm had helped a company experience radical growth through a billboard campaign. The fact is that over 80 percent of the client’s customers’ decisions were affected by the billboards. How did we know this? Because our savvy client asked their customers (who generally had a short waiting period before being seen) to fill out cards asking how they came to the company (online search, referral from a friend, etc). Pay-per-click stats are not the only way to confirm return on investment.

I have my own personal bias. It’s a bias against advertisers and marketing firms that insist their clients conform to their particular niche marketing approach, and don’t consider all the options of what might work best for their client’s customers.

Friendliness. Friendliness? Isn’t that kind of touchy-feely? What’s that got to do with business, as long as the agency gets results? Well, from my experience, accounts go south less because of agency deliverables and more often because of miscommunication, misunderstandings and hurt feelings. Yes, hurt feelings! You and your agency are going to be spending time together in meetings and on the phone and corresponding by emails. It will go much better for both sides if you like each other.

So that’s my bare-bones list of what to look for if you’re in the market for an ad agency. Do you agree with my points? Are there other factors that need mentioning? Let me know your thoughts.