I only really know two people in politics. They’re both people I love and respect. They disagree with each other. I disagree with both of them. Guess that means we’re true friends.

Right now, they’re both running for the same office (opposite parties). I wish they wouldn’t do that. You can’t convince either of them that you really don’t want to take sides. But I want to go on record right now…

I’m not voting for EITHER of them. Love ’em. Not votin’ for ’em. That’s that.

It’s funny about old friends. I got an email from my college roommate, Tom, a while back. Hadn’t seen him since 1983. But he’s the kind of guy who ought to be in PR (turns out he is). We caught up about folks we know. He gave me some news about his family. Talked about the rivalry between his Cleveland Browns and my Pittsburgh Steelers. Found out that he’s a big expert on national parks. Some people are just easy to catch up with.

Today I had lunch with our old pal JR. Used to do business with her every single day. Haven’t seen her in months (maybe a year). Same thing as Tom. We just picked up conversations and kept going.

Other people, you only have in common the thing you’re doing together at the moment. When you run into one of those people later, even days later, it’s hard to have anything to say. I’ve worked with some folks like that. They say that’s a common thing with political campaigns. The only thing you have in common is the candidate. Win or lose, after the election, the bond is gone.

There must be a branding application here somewhere. Oh, yeah…it’s Malcom Gladwell’s connector thing. Look it up. Knock yourself out. I gotta go.

Wonder if old Tom can get me a deal at El Tovar.

Isn’t that the Patsy Cline song? I think Michael Nesmith also covered it back in the 70s—I loved his album, From a Radio Engine to A Photon Wing; contained one of the funniest songs in the history of music video, Rio. Anyhow, about that falling to pieces thing, did you ever notice how you hear an old song and immediately start feeling the way you used to feel when you first heard it? I have that with a lot of late Steely Dan songs. And early Wynton Marsalis makes me feel lonely. But that’s just me.

Well, turns out that this is an important principle of sensory branding. Just as smell is closely linked to emotional memory, music is closely linked to mood. How can you not feel silly when you hear a song with a bicycle horn in it? The folks who did the soundtrack for Harry Potter knew that celesta (a romantic era French keyboard instrument that sounds like little bells) would make people feel magical. Mini Ripperton makes you feel romantic.

So, when we do a total branding initiative, we always talk about music. It’s a shortcut to making people feel the way you want them to feel about your brand. For a retail establishment that sells cosmetics to brassy, sassy, Southern ladies, we selected some bold Austin blues women. For a bank in the wide open range of Texas, we selected a lonesome style we called, lone virtuoso. This was defined as music that could be played by a single person on the back of a horse. It included solo guitar, solo violin (including Bach Partitas and Concertos—this is not yee-ha music).

A lot of people don’t like to admit that they can be manipulated by sensory stimuli. But can you really, truthfully say that you’re mood at this moment is based on objective facts about your day? If you don’t believe me, next time you have people over for dinner, throw on Claude Debussy’s La Mer. See how happy the conversation is. Bums me out just to think about it.

It’s been a few days since I last blogged. It was our anniversary—we had the foresight to get married around the Memorial Day holiday—so we took a long weekend in one of our favorite top-secret, undisclosed locations. While sitting next to the bocci court, overlooking the Tennessee River, we met a dad and teenage daughter in town from Memphis for a soccer tournament (he pays, she plays).

He mentioned two interesting, seemingly unrelated things about Memphis. First, they have a great deal of race-related conflict. Second, they have idiosyncratic (love that word) street naming habits: you’re driving down the street and suddenly it changes names. Same street. Different name. The conversation reminded me of something I once heard (or read) about Louisville, KY.

According to the story (and I can’t remember where I heard or read this, so if I’m wrong, somebody from Louisville can correct me and I’ll fix it), Louisville has one big, major street running through the middle of town. On one side of the street are all the “white” neighborhoods. On the other side are all the “non-white” neighborhoods. Funny thing is, though, that all the cross streets change names as they cross the big main street.

Turns out names really matter to people. They don’t mind living on the same street with folks from a minority they don’t like…as long as it’s not the same street name. As a fairly balanced guy (and I’m not using that as a clinical term), I just wanna say, “Get a life!” But as a student of marketing, I find this whole name thing fascinating. I guess there will always be work for lexicographers (isn’t that the art and science of naming things?).

I don’t know about the client perspective on this. Maybe somebody should tell me. But from the agency side, there are few things more frustrating than having to estimate, line by line, a laundry list of items—some of which turn out to bear little connection to actual objectives—in order to back into a budget, so we can start to provide advice to our client. I see the problem as two-fold.

1. Few people have a handle on how much their advertising should cost. So they look to the marketplace to set their prices. This is counterproductive, of course, because the marketplace then has to set prices that pay for all of the free price consulting that goes into the proposal process, and that cover the 80± percent of the time you don’t get the business. So the old get-some-proposals-and-take-the-second-lowest-bid approach, or worse yet, the get-some-proposals-and-use-the-lowest-bid-as- a-club-to-beat-down-the-agency-you-actually-wanna-work-with approach doesn’t get you to a fair price. It gets you to an inflated price.

2. Many companies have an us-against-them culture. This creates the self-fulfilling assumption that only those within our walls can be trusted to a)know what we need, or b)not rip us off. As a result, companies begin what should be a high-trust, consultative relationship with an adversarial (sometimes insultingly so) price negotiation. By the way, a variation on this syndrome is one in which companies believe that EVERYONE within our company is smarter, more knowledgeable, more capable than ANYONE outside of our company. If you’re company has this problem, lots-o-luck getting any decent professional advice. Smart people will only be treated like numbskulls so many times before they give up and start telling you what you want to hear. And dumb people…well…they’re not smart.

But getting back to the old budget thing…

Here’s what I think companies should do.

1. Put together an agency job description—what roles, responsibilities, and capabilities are we expecting from our agency. You might need to hire a consultant for this. Or maybe you can just get some folks from various company functions to sit on a committee. Everyone should be represented—agencies work or the whole company, not just the marketing department.

2. Blast out a questionnaire of 20 questions or less, as a qualifier. Send it to as many agencies as you can. Use an email blast. Give a deadline. Make it cheap and fast.

3. Get a list of 3-9 agencies (I like odd numbers—guess I’m just odd). Visit all nine. Ask to see their best and worst work. Talk to them—brainstorming style—about your business and the kind of problems you face. Get a sense of how fast they learn, how well they understand, how inclined they are to listen, how well they develop good ideas on the fly. Also, get a sense of who you like and connect with. A very smart, qualified agency you don’t want to spend time with will not serve you well. A slightly less qualified agency that you LOVE to be around will stretch to serve you if necessary.

4. If one agency stands out as Mr. Right, hire them. If not, narrow it to a list of two or three. Give them an assignment and a budget. Give them plenty of face time as they work on their assignment. Select your agency on the basis of who seems to work best with you, as well as who delivers the best final product.

5. Once you’ve chosen your agency—folks you trust and respect—give them the first real assignment: working with you to devise the annual marketing communication plan and the budget, based on actual C-level objectives. By this time, you and your company have a high level of trust. The agency has actually worked with key people in your company. And they are familiar with your priorities and quirks.

Or, you could just send out an RFP and see what happens.

It was 1963—maybe ’62—and I was sitting in the second row of the First Baptist Church of Martins Ferry, Ohio, along with my cousin Dan, my second cousin Mark Wilson, and some other little guys (all of us five our younger). We were kicking the pew in front of us, playing with our Matchbox cars, dropping things, giggling, fidgeting…generally acting like five-year-olds in Church, when suddenly, Dan and I were levitated out of the pew from behind, by the left and right hands of our steel-worker, ordained-deacon grandfather.

Dan and I never touched the ground until we were on the sidewalk in front of the church. Now, I knew we were going to get spankings, and I was ready to accept it. But Dan, who has always been bolder than me, decided to argue his case. The argument was brief and ended in a summary judgment.

Dan said, “We weren’t doing anything worse than the other boys.”

Granpap responsed, fast on the heels of Dan’s defense, “The other boys aren’t Gibbonses.”

And that was that.

Do you remember that episode of WKRP in Cincinatti where Venus Flytrap has to get a kid to understand atoms in order to get him to stay in school and stay out of gangs? So he makes up a story about a neighborhood and three gangs called the “pros,” the “nuboys,” and the “elected ones.”

Well, I did a lot of presentations last week. One was an advertising presentation to a room full of master tool makers. The other was a presentation about the economic theories of pricing to a room full of advertising people. It’s started to dawn on me that all this advertising stuff is really about teaching. And teaching is really about writing stories on the fly and telling them well.

So, do you remember how that episode ended? Johnny Fever is crashed behind the sofa, unbeknownst to Venus, and pops up just as Venus is finishing the story and the kid is deciding to stay in school. Johnny is so jazzed by Venus’s teaching style that he says, “Cool, man. Can you teach me how magnets work?” It was really funny when Fever said it. Not so much with me.

Anyone remember the episode of Taxi where Jim cuts his van apart and reconstructs it as a sheet-metal castle in Elaine’s apartment, to prove there is still romance in the world. I love that episode, especially one line: “I write better than I look; I write better than I am.”

Hey, while we’re on sitcoms in the golden age, remember the Barney Miller, where Chano accidentally kills the kid. And Barney comes to Chano’s house to reassure him. And he tells the story about how the largest animal on earth, the great white whale (I think) has a tiny esophagus, and lives on a diet of nothing but microscopic plankton.

“Now why do you suppose that is?” says Barney.

“I don’t know, why is that?” says Chano.

“Cause that’s the way it is.”

I love those old shows. Those cats could write. Oh well, running long.

Good night “Shoebooty.”

I was just reading a quote from Peter Drucker. The gist of it is that a business exists for one reason—to create wealth for its customer.

Of course, this is right. And not just ethically, but economically. But it is contrary to the practices and even stated policies of a lot of businesses these days. I was at an event (not surprisingly at the Chamber of Commerce), when a business owner introduced himself as doing “a little of this, a little of that, whatever we can make some money on…cause we’re in business to get rich.”

Shockinglly, that business is still in business. Don’t think they make that much money. Doubt their clients get much value from them. But that’s how it goes.

It’s become common wisdom that the price of a thing should be the cost of producing it plus an X factor for desired profit. This is more common than wisdom. A thing should cost the value that a willing, able buyer places on it.

The problem with all the MBA/CPA/Cost-Plus guys, is that they assume everything effecting the product happens within the four walls of the firm. Fact is, most of what effects the product and the firm is outside of the firm, in the marketplace.

No matter what your cost accountant says, the customer determines the price—unless you’re leaving money on the table.

Al Davis, renegade owner of the Oakland…LA…Oakland Raiders is quoted as saying, “Just win, baby.” Of course, Al Davis is a notorious jerk. And, by the way, his Raiders haven’t done that much winning lately.

Personally, I think cultures win because of their beliefs. Companies that succeed over a long period of time tend to be companies that stand for something more than just making money. GE, for example, has been about systematic invention ever since Thomas Edison started the company. Apple is about being user friendly. Wal-Mart is about continuous improvement in the efficiency of the supply channel. I like Jim Collins’s book, Built to Last, and Guy Kawasaki’s Selling the Dream, because of their positions on beliefs.

I would go so far as to say what you believe defines what winning means to your company. If beliefs don’t matter to you, then neither does winning. If you don’t know what you believe, you can’t know whether you’re succeeding or not.