Bruise Relief in Communication Arts
Posted on 23. Mar, 2010 by Becky in Press, Uncategorized
MacGyver Marketing
by Robbie Vitrano
It’s a wonderful world, but it has some problems. If you could solve a few, would you?
It’s easy to daydream in the valleys, between the better paying gigs, about changing the world. But that changed for me after Hurricane Katrina. Defining the purpose and impact of my work could no longer be a hobby.
Turns out our experience in New Orleans provided us a three-year head start on the global recession. I find it ironic to hear references to an economy “underwater.”
The recession was created by the behavior of business. By omission or commission, we’ve got blood on our hands.
Through my work in New Orleans, it’s become clear that we can play a larger role. Upstream. One that’s good for society, good for capitalism and arguably necessary for our business.
Confidence, optimism and all of the other ingredients of innovation and economic recovery, rise and fall on some belief in a way forward. But to drive it, we need more skin in the game, more feel for the shape of the cause and effect of our work.
Being awake is a bitch, best appreciated in the moment of truth that drops in when you least expect it. Mine arrived August 29, 2005, when 80 percent of my city was destroyed.
Almost three years later to the day, the first tremors of the global recession were felt. Billions of people were about to realize, as we had in New Orleans, that everyday, everything is in play.
Our response in 2005 was to take an active role in launching companies with a tilt toward social entrepreneurship. Our strategy hinged on the untested and unapologetic belief that what we did for “traditional” clients could be evolved to include product development and the securing of investment.
Catalyzing entrepreneurship was crucial in a post-Katrina New Orleans forced to confront its decades-long decline and in desperate need of a reinvention that transcended the economic, social, cultural, environmental and political ecosystem. Our opportunity for impact was not simply startups, but a newly emerging kind of business, combining social purpose with financial promise.
The city had become a social innovation laboratory, swollen with a crush of newcomers, brainy idealists bouncing into reawakened natives, creating an entrepreneurial alchemy. Our company Trumpet was its startup Ellis Island, with tarted-up business plans and cocktail napkin sketches piling up in our lobby.
In evaluating startups, venture capitalists talk about the cure for cancer (differentiated positioning), white space (the size of the untapped market) and the go-to-market strategy. Sound familiar? But the difference between an established client and a startup is significant: In a startup the game begins in sudden death with a very small window to prove concept. The goal is not perfection or market share, but validation of the business idea through customer development. Less crafting, more failing fast.
We formed a ventures unit—venture marketing—laughably unready for the full complexity, but leading with our chin. Working in New Orleans, with its absence of major brands, had prepared us well. Budgets are small, resourcefulness at a premium. We’d found the role we were born to play.
We started with nine companies, hosting two under the roof of the icehouse we’d renovated in a flooded, historic neighborhood. We raised several million dollars from investors, created patents and dove into other waters previously out of our depth.
The New Orleans-based startups we partnered with began to break out nationally this year. Bruise Relief landed distribution in CVS and Walgreens, thriv rolled out in Sports Authority’s top 150 stores and Feelgoodz was picked up by Whole Foods. Naked Pizza, a company hacking the $30 billion pizza industry with the world’s first functional food pizza, gained international recognition alongside Burger King, Dell and Zappos for its pioneering use of social media, attracting the investment of billionaires Mark Cuban and Robert Kraft.
It’s a bumpy, necessary path I call MacGyver Marketing in homage to that patron saint of practical invention. It’s also a deeper more authentic application of branding, aligned and awake. It makes complete sense and remains wildly unpredictable.
I now have metrics to support my unlimited faith in the capability of the people in our profession to help lead the way forward, restoring trust in a capitalism that liberates talent and innovation while serving the social good. We are uniquely qualified to make a business case for replacing cynicism with optimism. It gains energy when we move upstream-a natural evolution-turning ideas into product, business ideas into fully realized organizations, conscious of all stakeholders.
We can. We should.
