You know the book Catch-22, don’t you?

It’s still selling after all these years. It was published in 1961.

Before it was Catch-22 it was Catch-18.

That was the title. Clunky, isn’t it? Awkward.

But with reconsideration and more time, Joseph Heller went for the alliterative title we all know today.

Catch-22 sounds better. Good thing Heller wasn’t rushed and had time to make an improvement.

The same is true of another book you know. It also happens to work with alliteration.

The Great Gatsby.

F. Scott Fitzgerald originally titled it Trimalchio at West Egg.

You have to go back to Rome in the First Century AD to understand the Trimalchio reference.

He was an ostentatious fictional character. One who achieved power and wealth in a work  by Petronius called Satyricon.

With a bit of reconsideration and time, the Gatsby title won out.

Thank goodness Fitzgerald didn’t rush Trimalchio into print, never mind the West Egg location as part of the title.

Reconsideration and time can help ad agencies turn out better work as well.

The Volkswagen ‘Lemon’ ad doesn’t look like it was a rush job.

Read it and we think you’ll agree it doesn’t feel like it was done in a burning hurry. http://bit.ly/1Ozn68v

Each thought and sentence feels considered, skillfully so.

It’s the opposite of ads stalled by an indifferent strategy or an unimaginative execution.

The first line of copy, ‘This Volkswagen missed the boat’, was the original headline.

So said the great copywriter, David Abbot. He worked for Doyle Dane Bernbach at one time.

To get to the ‘Lemon’ headline you have to take a bit of extra time. Time thinking, fiddling, tweaking, and worrying.

Worry is a good thing when you’re creating something special. It gets you to look further for solutions.

Here, a measure of  credit should go to the VW brand manager.

Because we’re pretty sure of one thing.

That individual didn’t say, ‘get it to me by first thing tomorrow’.

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 Who in your ad agency is doing a good job for you?

Who’s muffing it?

For marketers, the answers may come with the following three questions

You don’t want agency creatives to completely agree with you, do you?

You don’t need planners to match your thought process exactly, right?

You don’t require account directors to come up with precisely the same strategies that drive your actions, correct?

If agency people think differently than you do that can be good. Thank them.

Because they can help you guard against decline.

They can help you see your brand as all it can be.

They can help you cope with the disruption that regularly accompanies change.

They’re a weather eye against new developments in the marketplace.

They’re a safeguard against sticking with of old assumptions.

As contrarians they could be trying to save you from hitting the rocks.

To move your brand ahead and be better able to compete, informed pushback can help by challenging all you know. Or think you know.

After all, always seeing eye-to-eye with your agency people can lead to complacency.

The best agencies can help you avoid that by always aiming higher.

They can make you more self-critical and effective.

They can help you question old certainties and  strategies that have reached their use by date.

The best agencies can erase drabness in your communications. They can help you sidestep inert ideas and dullness in your messaging.

After all, they’re in the boredom alleviation business.

With a bit of well-judged audacity, like the Crazy Ones for Apple and Dove’s campaign for Real Beauty, they can help you stand out.

Agency people who are milquetoast and merely order-takers may not be the best choice for you.

Flip them the bird.

Because if you rely on yes men and women your competitors could get ahead and flip you the bird.

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Your Websites, emails, blogs, videos …

Are they packed with appeal and value?

Are they attracting customers from your competitors?

Are they resulting in more conversions?

Because without the kind of content that stops people, lengthens attention spans and creates the moment someone buys, your messaging is like a shirt with no buttons.

Nothing much comes together for you.

Actually Bill Bernbach said it best.

‘If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.’

So for attention-getting content, take a lesson from an unusual messaging source.

The touchscreen monitor of a new car … the Tesla Model S Dual Motor.

The Tesla may be electric but few other cars have the knack of alleviating boredom so thoroughly.

The ‘drive selector’, alone, is the opposite of monotony.

On the touchscreen you’ll see the normal ‘drive mode’ which makes for a quick car. Fast only begins to describe an all-wheel drive experience with two motors, one over each axle.

But instead of the usual ‘sport mode’ of other marques, you can shift to ‘Insane Mode’.

That’s how Tesla brands it.

Click this link for a demo: http://bit.ly/1gXUxpR

You’ll want to note, ‘Insane Mode’ isn’t an exaggeration; Tesla isn’t riding on the street of dreams.

The Model S Dual Motor is faster than a Ferrari.

It beats many super cars in a telling way … the way Four of a Kind shades a Full House in poker.

But that’s not the whole story.

Because if you can resist wolf whistling the car for a moment, things get even faster.

Tesla is ahead of events. They’re planning to add even more oomph with a software upgrade.

It will accelerate you from ‘Insane Mode’ to what they call ‘Ludicrous Mode’.

The language here may be a bit over the top but it’s accurate.

We’re talking about the kind of speeds that might be more appropriately measured with a G-Force indicator than a speedometer.

It’s not enough to say Tesla has engineered a novel car.

They seem to have unlearned most of what everyone has said a car should be to create an electric car beyond expectation.

You get the feeling Tesla doesn’t look to anyone for how to think and proceed.

They follow their own approach to see cars as all they can be.

Even the language of the drive selector, with Inane Mode, is in line with that.

It’s messaging that intrigues first timers who slide behind the wheel.

How about your messaging, your content … is it working in the same way for your brand?

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In 1950 a publisher called Eugene Reynal assumed nobody would read The Catcher in the Rye.

He wasn’t exactly good-humored in his criticism.

Reynal hated the book and refused it for publication as it was unlike anything else in print at the time.

He said it had to be rewritten with major changes to be more like the kind of books that were selling.

The character of Holden Caulfield needed to be completely re-done, it was a non-starter.

There’s an assumption for you.

Chances are you’ve read The Catcher in the Rye and loved it.

If so, you’re among the 65 million people who bought the book.

65 Million books … how’s that for a money-spinner?

The fact is The Catcher in the Rye is still selling 250,000 copies a year.

So much for Eugene Reynal.

But you may come across people like him in marketing and advertising.

We heard about one from an intern spending a summer in a product company.

Their ad agency came in after two unsuccessful attempts to sell a new campaign.

Unhappily, it wasn’t a case of third time lucky.

The marketing director rejected the campaign as it was like nothing he had ever seen before.

There was no precedent for it.

More to that, the marketer director said the solution should have been more along the lines of his ideas … ideas, incidentally, which were not shared in the brief.

One wonders then … why bring in an agency in the first place. Why buy a dog and then bark yourself.

As you might have guessed, the intern thought differently about the creative work that was presented that day.

His take was more along the lines of not-so-fast-on-the-rejection-thing’.

He realized the ads made the brand a stopper. In short, the campaign was different and for that, great stuff.

Precedent didn’t come into it.

But nobody asked the intern for an opinion.

Too bad.

Assumed knowledge killed off a strong idea.

Let’s hope it didn’t also kill off an intern’s desire to go into advertising.

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We’re memorizing a list of unusual words to use when we’re stuck as Scrabble players.

Yeuk, yirth, ensky and huhly are among them.

They’re bound to rack up the score and upset competitors.

We’re heartless that way. Our cruelty knows no limits.

Ensky means ‘to exalt’, the rest are anybody’s guess.

To us Scrabble and high school vocabulary tests are the only places for unnecessarily complicated words.

Certainly they don’t belong in business if you want people to understand you.

These days you get a stunning amount of rubbish with expressions like matrix enterprise schemas, incubate granular methodologies and mesh frictionless technologies.

Who knows what they mean. It’s all Greek to us.

Who cares, other than those wannabes who use over-complicated words to feel superior to everyone else.

Why don’t they get a life.

After all, isn’t the importance of a marketer based on differentiating the brand?

Isn’t it reliant on imaginative planning?

Isn’t it about selling more product and gaining a bigger market share?

Most smart business people know one thing.

When it comes to success Δεν έχει τίποτε να κάνει με ρίχνοντας ορολογία.

Which is Greek for ‘it has nothing to do with spouting jargon’.

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This is a war story. A prisoner of war story.

Its focus is a German Afrika Korps lieutenant who fought under Rommel in WWII.

Eighteen-year-old Reinhard Mohn.

He was captured in the North African desert and shipped to Camp Concordia in Kansas as a POW.

It was the start of an extraordinary business life, the creation of a media empire.

At Concordia you had time on your hands. Days dragged by inside a barbed wire enclosure.

Still, Reinhard Mohn used the interminable hours well, mastering English and making one thing work to his advantage.

The prison library.

He read exhaustively – books on business management, marketing, direct response and advertising.

He absorbed all that American business leaders were doing in the publishing and media industries as he came from a publishing family in Germany.

It was a business started in 1835 but it had amounted to little.

That was about to change with Mohn’s reading and study.

He picked up on a new American idea of the times for sales and the retention customers – book clubs.

At the end of the war Mohn returned to Germany to head up the family business.

Today it’s the mass media corporation you know as Bertelsmann, a giant organization.

In 2014 it had a revenue of €16,675 billion, a workforce of 112,000 and a presence in 50 countries.

As Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz might say, ‘we’re not in Kansas any more’.

Besides publishing, Bertelsmann is an international force in radio and television.

If you had a book called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective POWs, Reinhard Mohn would feature prominently on page one.

After all, he’s an example of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Speaking of which, how about those bootstraps of your own?

Even if you’re already a success you can always do better in dealing with competitive forces, can’t you?

You can go from excellence to the high side of excellence, correct?

You can do it by becoming more curious and reading more.

Too many marketing books are unread by those who have the most to learn.

More’s the pity.

But with no barbed wire enclosure to hold you in, it’s easy to get out and do one thing.

Explore the Barnes & Noble Business Book section.

It can be a treasure trove for new ideas. A starting point for fresh thinking.

Were he with us today Reinhard Mohn would endorse that.

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The Tour de France is on again. Maybe you’ve tuned in.

21 Stages and 3360 kilometers of racing equates to compulsive viewing.

You don’t have to be a bike race aficionado to be drawn in and captivated by the spectacle and the scenery along the route.

The last spurs tourism in a big way.

It worked for Britain with race stages in Yorkshire and London and it’s bound to work for the USA with a much-talked-about Tour start here in future.

Where will it be – Washington, DC and Northern Virginia?

Watch the Tour and you’ll see all eyes are on the favorites and race leaders; the cameras rarely point in the direction of those who are less then heroic.

Which is why the back of the race if often overlooked.

That’s where you’ll see the Broom Wagon, or as they say in French, the Voiture Balai.

It’s there to pick up the slowcoaches who can’t make it to the finish in the allotted time.

It sweeps up the stragglers, hence the name.

In the past the vehicle carried a broom over the driver’s cab.

The Broom Wagon helps to set standards; it concentrates the action, it keeps the race fast while supporting a higher level of competition by removing riders who can’t make it.

If only we had a Broom Wagon of sorts for marketing and advertising.

It could sweep away complacent content … the kind of work that’s inert on a Web page.

It could do away with emails that are boring from the subject line right to the end.

But why not go for the best work in the first place.

By challenging conventional wisdom and old standards you set yourself up for success.

When you find new truths about your brand, your products, your service and your customers you gain an edge.

When you replace drab creative solutions with something bright and extraordinary you can change attitudes.

When you present your brand as the opposite of a commodity you set yourself apart from the rest.

As we’ve all heard, it’s all about ‘adapting’ to take advantage of opportunities and avoid problems.

Failure to change is the big problem.

Because it opens the door for competitors who are intent on one thing.

Sweeping you up.

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Do you recognize these story titles:

‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band.’

‘The Red-Headed League.’

‘The Adventure of the Dancing Men.’

How about this address … 221B Baker Street, London. Seem familiar?

You guessed right if you said they’re Sherlock Holmes stories and Baker Street is his address.

The famous detective and Dr. Watson first appeared in print in 1887.

Their adventures extend to 56 stories and four novels.

But the author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was irked by Holmes’ popularity.

In his mind, another of his works, The White Company, was more deserving.

He viewed his novel about knights in the 14^th century as the pinnacle of his success.

It details chivalric deeds, political turmoil and heroic battles in England, France and Spain, as well as the Crusades in the Holy Land.

It’s packed with historical appeal and adventure.

Conan Doyle wanted to be known for The White Company, not Holmes.

But as you well know, the public had other ideas.

You might say this is a reminder for business.

A reminder that customers stake out the boundaries of your brand.

Their opinion of your company is what counts.

So why do marketers often miss the mark on this?

Are they’re so wrapped up in their product or service they overlook customers’ views?

That question pops up in conferences these days.

It’s said many marketers aren’t awake to customers’ needs and desires.

They’re not always attuned to customer pain points. And with that, they don’t recognize golden opportunities when they come along.

But a customer-service strategy that’s inventive and differentiating can change all that.

It makes you better able to compete.

It gives you an advantage with established markets as well as emerging ones.

It helps you counter tired, old companies that have suddenly regenerated themselves by cutting costs, shedding unprofitable divisions and emerging with the technology and leadership to win.

It helps you deal with start-ups and others that have re-written the book on agility and added value for customers.

It supports you against overseas companies that have come to America with fresh ideas on how to capture market share or create new markets.

It reinforces your position in industry shakeouts.

Marketers who value their judgment more than their customers’ judgment risk difficulties for their brand.

Especially when it comes to being seen as open, approachable and responsive.

There’s a predicament for you.

Incidentally … if a company can’t respond to their own customers what hope do they have of attracting customers of the competition?

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to understand the impact of that.

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Have you noticed?

Too much content these days seems to come from a corporate point of view.

Often there’s little focus on customers’ problems, worries and desires.

So it’s hardly surprising people meet this with  indifference.

Those who approve iffy work like this say they are response-oriented, but are they really?

Because when you address your customers’ needs and pain points … when you demonstrate interest in their lives, attitudes and predicaments … things look better.

That in itself should get you up to the mediocre level.

But the idea is to go further, isn’t it?

A marketer we know said that when you’re doing okay, some people think that’s the way life in the office will always be.

Of course, that was her way of damning people for complacency.

To avoid getting stuck that way, turn to the smartest ad agency people.

Those who have the talent to add surprise value to your communications with messaging that rewards customers and prospects for looking.

We’re talking about strategists, writers and art directors who can take what’s familiar about your product or service and present it anew.

Adopt that approach and you can sidestep dry, corporate communication and the boredom that accompanies it.

So to go from mediocre to something more engaging … something that punches convention below the belt … give your agency a seat at the table.

Elevate them from subservient order takers to planning allies.

Give them the freedom to go beyond tactics and a reactive role to the kind of proactivity that questions all you do.

That way they’re in a position to uncover new directions and opportunities for you.

After all, the best agencies support you with professionals who excel at branding, innovative digital thinking and creative execution across all channels.

They’re adept at digging deeper into research, developing new possibilities and ensuring briefs are highly creative.

Think of it this way, how can you expect brilliant creative work if you don’t first have a brilliant creative brief?

Don’t just think out of the box. As they say in the UK, let your agency think out of the bollocks for you.

That way you can improve your concepting, content and power for lead generation.

Best of all, you can leave mediocre work where it belongs.

With your competitors.

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Deep dives into analytics.

Performance inquests.

Leveraging automation systems.

Put them on hold for a minute. Cool your jets.

In their place, take another approach to marketing and advertising.

One that can add a level of superiority and difference to even ordinary, mass-produced products.

Start by speaking to people’s feelings.

Address their problems, needs and desires.

Surprisingly enough, this kind of emotional persuasion isn’t taught at business schools.

Emotion isn’t on the curriculum.

More’s the pity because so many purchases are emotionally driven. Even when it comes to B2B.

After all, we’re still human. That hasn’t changed in spite of all the gee-whiz technology at hand.

Adding emotional appeal to your communications can lead to new growth and a more stable future.

It can give you an advantage over your competitors.

Especially those that sell the features of their products instead of the end-benefits.

So to do more for your brand, start with the study of the advertising award books.

You can do it over a weekend.

Think of it as a seminar on how to stop prospects, lengthen attention spans and create the moment someone buys.

Page through The One Show, Communication Arts or D&AD.

You’ll see how brands are humanized and how messaging is made memorable when you add emotion.

You’ll learn how to erase drabness and sidestep wearily familiar ideas that put no premium on interest or engagement.

You’ll understand how to gain attention with well-judged audacity.

You’ll realize that stories must be simple and emotionally resonant.

You’ll appreciate that better work can change the perception of your brand.

Especially when it rewards customers with wit, charm and intelligently presented facts.

By looking though the award books you can model your output on what’s extraordinary rather than what’s expedient.

Put another way, you can leave it to your competition to continue to get it wrong.

After a weekend of seeing new possibilities for your messaging, Monday morning could be different for you.

You could start back to work with your MBA and something more.

A greater degree of knowledge on how to appeal to customers.

Share with us. Leave your comment below. Thanks for reading Whybetonto.com. Regards, Steve Ulin LinkedIn: http://linkd.in/1Bey3Jl