BEYOND BUBKA

 

By Jim Carey, Core Strategies

I come from a family of bad pole valuators. (Insert obvious joke here.) The 12-foot barrier was always elusive to us. Not to mention the other eight feet it takes to be world class.

But I did start to pay attention to the sport. And it got me watching Sergey Bubka, the worlds greatest pole vaulted. Over a lot of years, Bubka has broken indoor and outdoor records almost 40 times. In his world's, he's Michael Jordan, plus Wayne Gretzky.

He's a champion, and he deserves to be. The way he keeps his edge holds a lesson for us in direct marketing.

And actually, it's a lesson about what we shouldn't do, as much as what we should do. It's a positive lesson because it shows the ongoing rewards of focus, discipline and hard work.

But it's also a negative lesson. You see, Bubka set so many records because his goal was not to do his very best, not to have a transcendent achievement but merely to set a record. Why? Because every time he set a new record, track meet promoters and Nike would pay him tens of thousands of dollars. So what's the rational choice? Break the record É a very little at a time.

While Bubka was jumping 20 feet in practice, in competition, he was setting records at 19'2", and then 19'2 1/8", and so on. Setting world records É a bologna slice at a time.

We marketers don't live in as benevolent a world as Sergey Bubka does. He can see all of his competitors. And they all play by the same rules, on the same field, at the same time, with the same sets of tools.

Our world is even more competitive, and our competition comes from increasingly unlikely places. It's not just the people we know, it's the unknowns. In high tech, they refer to "two kids in a garage putting us out of business."

Time and again, we're seeing established companies brought to their knees by upstarts. These unknowns don't try to win by the same rules. They play an entirely different way.

In seminars, I sometimes challenge audiences to switch uniforms to become the "away team" for their businesses. And I ask, "If you were to beat your own business, what would you do?"

Many times, the people on the inside know exactly how to do it. And it's rarely by doing more of the same, by upping the bar "by a bologna slice."

Instead, it's by doing something fundamentally different to accomplish the same goals. They put away yesterday's strategies and tools, and use today's and tomorrow's. And not just marketing communications, but whole value propositions and business processes.

I then ask, "Why aren't you doing this now?" And it gets uncomfortable. The answer is ... "because."

We direct marketers are the masters of the roll out. Of winning by a bologna slice. It's not enough in today's world. Being 2% bigger isn't enough when our competitors are trying to be 10 times better.

If we are to be up to the challenges of the 21st century, we need to go to a place where we haven't been. We need to go beyond our comfort zone. But as we go there, we should have the confidence that comes from knowing the challenges that we have mastered before.

We should think back to our roots -- when the Bob Stone's of the world were inventing our business -- and how they weren't afraid to be radically different in order to win.

We're certainly capable of it. When we go beyond Bubka-ism, we'll all be able to look back with pride. And then it will be time to look forward again.

It's a challenge worthy of our talents. Let's go for it.