Basics

A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.

― Michael LeBoeuf

McDonald's CEO told investors last week his company will go back to basics.

The flip comes after research revealed customers had fled the chain not to fancy, fast-casual restaurants like Panera and Chipotle, but to other fast-food joints like Burger King and Five Guys.

To escape the pickle, McDonald's plans to beef up its burger recipes; roll out mobile ordering and home delivery; and fork over $1.1 billion for store renovations.

The company will no longer dish out wraps, salads, oatmeal, and other high-end food.

The move comes two years after McDonald's canned the CEO's predecessor and Consumer Reports ranked the chain's burgers as the nation's worst.

The lessons here are basic:

• No business can survive if its offerings are flawed

• Sound strategy often lies in what a business chooses not to do

In his autobiography Grinding It Out, McDonald's founder, Ray Kroc, got to the meat of it:

"Perfection is very difficult to achieve, and perfection was what I wanted in McDonald's. Everything else was secondary for me."

How You Can Matter

Susan Rosenstock is a friend and colleague whose teenage son Evan took his own life four years ago.

Where other parents in pain withdraw, Susan advanced.

Her cause is now teenage suicide prevention; her student-led organization, umttr ("you matter"); and her outreach, nationwide.

The nation needs Susan's efforts. The rate of suicide deaths among teens has doubled in the past decade, according to the CDC.

ummtr has just teamed up with The Capital Classic, the nation’s longest-running high school basketball All-American game, to launch “44, 44, 44,” a grassroots campaign to raise funds through ticket sales.

The idea behind the campaign: Evan Rosenstock’s basketball jersey number was 44. The 2017 Capital Classic is number 44. And everyone who joins agrees to sell 44 tickets to the game, which takes place April 8.

Funds raised through ticket sales will directly benefit the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Washington. And your involvement in the campaign will help increase awareness that teen suicide is preventable.

If you can sell 44 tickets, please contact Susan.

If not, please donate to the campaign now.

Thanks!

Fake Authenticity

Fake it 'til you make it.

— Alcoholics Anonymous

My stint as a promoter of antiques shows taught me why authenticity is paramount.

Customers pay a premium for it.

Fake authenticity—what trendspotter Heather Corker calls fauxthenticity—isn't good for business, unless your goal is to dupe bargain-hunters.

Fake authenticity, as Corker says, results from brands trying to curate an "unfiltered" image.

The whole effort is ironic from the get-go.

To paper over the irony, marketers will label fake authenticity "aspirational."

It's a sleight-of-hand that lets them live with embracing phony claims like:

• We're industry-leading. (Not really, but we could be.)
• We're customer-centric. (Not really, but we could be.)
• We're global. (Not really, but we could be.)
• We're socially responsible. (Not really, but we could be.)

Marketers, I've got news for you: Your fake authenticity resides in the world of "alternative facts," alongside the king of France, colorless green dreams, and trickle-down economics. It's what antiques dealers call a repro, a counterfeit meant only to deceive.

The best customers are too smart for that.

We Will Survive

It's even worse than it appears, but it's all right.

― Jerry Garcia

Every day brings more dismal news.

Tornadoes and floods ravage small towns...

Uber's CEO is actually Beelzebub... 

A hostile foreign government has handed our presidency to a Dalek... 

My Facebook account has been hacked.

Thank goodness, philosophy provides the way to deal with problems.

The Ancient Greek and Roman stoics taught that human shipwreck is inevitable, and must be borne with dignity. Anger and grief over your fate is unbecoming when you accept that disaster targets everything alive.

The American pragmatists, 2,500 years later, taught that the goal of steady growth and improvement colors all human actions, and that ingenuity and hard work will yield eventual victory.

A sensible middle way lies between the stoics' pessimism of the pragmatists' optimism, says contemporary philosopher John Lachs.

"The problem of pragmatists is that they never give up striving," he writes in Stoic Pragmatism. "The problem of stoics is that they give it up too soon.

"If we could combine the two views―vigorously seeking improvement so long as our energies have a chance to prevail and graciously surrendering when the world strikes us down―we would have the makings of a sound philosophy."

Sounds right to me. How about you?

Brand Name Poetry

In 1955, a consultant to Ford Motor Company asked poet Marianne Moore to come up with a name for the company's new car.

He told the poet his list of 300 names was an "embarrassing pedestrianism," and that Ford needed a name to convey "some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design."

Moore supplied these names:

Accipiter, Aero Faire, Aerofee, Aeroterre, Andante con Moto, Anticipator, Arcenciel, Bullet Cloisoné, Bullet Lavolta, Comme Il Faire, Fée Aiglette, Fée Rapide, Ford Faberge, Hurricane, Impeccable, Intelligent Bullet, Intelligent Whale, Mongoose Civique, Pastelogram, Regna Racer, Resilient Bullet, Symmechromatic, Thunderblender, Thunder Crester, Utopian Turtletop, and Varsity Stroke.

In the end, Ford didn't choose any of Moore's names; nor any of the 18,000 supplied by its ad agency. The company launched instead with its original in-house name: Edsel.

With my partner David James, I recently went through a similar exercise to name our new agency. 

With help from a third writer, our list of names included:

Benchmark Marketing, Cranium Marketing, Criteria Marketing, Dive Team Marketing, Fearless Marketing, Fresh Face Marketing, Gutsy Marketing, Jungle Cat Marketing, Lean Mean Marketing, Lucky Dog Marketing, Marketing Engine, Marketing Maniacs, Noir Marketing, Outcome Marketing, Playbook Marketing, Rampant Marketing, Road Runner Marketing, Rugged Marketing, Runaway Marketing, Solutions Marketing, Stalwart Marketing, Touchstone Marketing, Trained Minds Marketing, Untamed Marketing, Venturesome Marketing, and Wildcat Marketing.

Like Ford, in the end we launched with the a "pedestrianism," Bob & David James.

Let's hope we have better success than Ford did with Edsel.