Suits

From 2002-2003, I was the marketing director for S&S Fire Apparatus Co., a small business in northern Indiana that built—surprisingly enough—fire apparatus (i.e. fire trucks and similar anti-incendiary devices). It was my first job out of college and the pay was less than I would have liked (like whose isn’t?), but I loved the company and I loved the work I did for them.

Near the end of my first year there, the decision was made to cut costs by merging our three successful tanker lines into one. We began the project as these things usually begin: with a meeting. After a couple of hours, there were still very few good ideas on what to call the new product family, which encompassed the old Infinity II®, Infinity+3, and FC Series. Finally, I piped up and asked, “How about Infinity III?” Amazingly, everyone liked that suggestion and the Infinity III line was born.

That’s where things started getting interesting. My next task was to create a marketing campaign for the Infinity III™ product line. Of course, nothing is ever that simple, and this task was even less so than most. It was the end of November, but my boss wanted the first Infinity III ad to run in the January issue of Fire Engineering magazine. This obviously requires time—a luxury we didn’t have—and to make matters worse, the prototype wasn’t even built yet! Even if I’d had all the time in the world, I couldn’t reasonably show people a product that didn’t exist. There had to be some other way.

After  I decided to focus not on the apparatus itself, but on its qualities: specifically, that it had a lifetime warranty and was therefore designed to last. I began by considering other things that were designed to last

The ad would take a few weeks to appear in trade magazines, by which point we would have a prototype finished and photos on the web site. The ad was solid enough to pique people’s curiosity, which would drive them to the site and help them understand, in ways the limited space of a magazine ad never could, why our new apparatus was the best for their needs. As I polished the concept, I showed my drafts to several friends outside the company, who all agreed it was awesome.

Finally, the day came to present the campaign to the sales department. Rather than call a meeting, I decided to show each person in the department—there were only seven of them—the new ad, one on one, so we could discuss. I kid you not: every single one of them asked the exact same question: “Where’s the truck?” They couldn’t even fathom a fire truck ad without a fire truck in it, even though the fire truck in question didn’t actually exist yet. They also couldn’t deal with just having the web site on it; it needed to have the company logo and phone number, period, end of story.

Suffice to say I wound up Photoshopping a “photo” of the truck, cobbled together from parts of other trucks that actually did exist. I then placed the piecemeal truck off in the distance of the ad, so no one would know the difference. Then I reformatted the contact section to include the company logo and phone number. I again showed it to the sales department, and every one of them loved it. Eleven months later, 10% of the company was laid off (myself included); and five years after that, they were out of business.

Moral of the story: leave the marketing to the Marketing department.