A while back, I explained how to prevent marketing geeks from issuing embarrassing press releases. That post elicited some complaints, evidently from marketing geeks, who resent my attitude towards marketing. Here is a representative quote, verbatim: “This is the stupidest story I ever stumpled onto.”
Well, that remark got me thinking, because I’ve “stumpled” onto some marketing stories that are a lot more stupidest than that. Here’s my favorite.
Back when I worked at DEC in the mid 90’s, I was mandated to come up with a name and tagline for a new groupware product. Under my direction, we hired a top ad agency, which came up with the trademarkable name “Percussion” and the tagline “Heartbeat of Your Team.” Not too shabby, eh?
The ad agency was amazed that nobody had ever trademarked “Percussion,” because even back then it was unusual to find any English word (let alone one with positive overtones) that hadn’t already been trademarked. That’s why today’s software companies all have goofy made-up names like “Synergicomp” or “Collabativa.”
Incredibly, DEC’s corporate marketing group, rather than taking advantage of this opportunity to snatch up a great product name, decided to name the product “LinkWorks” because that sounded similar to some other software from DEC. In an effort to scuttle this truly bonehead decision, I asked the ad agency to run blind focus groups, which revealed, not much to my surprise, that prospective customers automatically assumed that “Percussion” was something cool, and thought “LinkWorks” was obscure.
Didn’t matter. Corporate marketing had spoken and LinkWorks it was going to be. Unfortunately, all the sales materials had already been prepared using the “Percussion” theme and there were only a couple of weeks before product launch. Corporate marketing’s “fix” was simply to change the word “Percussion” to “LinkWorks.” The effect was truly surreal, particularly in the promotional video, which now consisted of clips of executive talking heads blathering about “corporate productivity” that suddenly kept dissolving – with absolutely no word of explanation — to a clip of a jazz drummer busily thumping away.
Anyway, my boss, an engineering type named Barry Reynolds, was so pissed off that he quit in disgust (or so I thought…see his comment below), trademarked the name “Percussion,” and started his own company, Percussion Software, which today employs around 150 people. He’s still the CEO and, though it’s a private firm, I have no doubt that the name “Percussion” is a substantial portion of his company’s brand equity. Meanwhile, it turned out that another company had already trademarked “LinkWorks” and so, having already released the product under that name, DEC now had to pay big bucks to get the rights to use it legally.
The product tanked (of course) but before that happened, I got pulled into a meeting with these corporate marketing idiots to come up with a new tagline. I was not a happy camper, but I’ve been around corporate situations long enough to know how to wear a poker face. During the meeting, I proposed – completely straight-faced – that, because the tag should reflect the company that made the product, we should go with “Empower Your Bureaucrats.”
I was just doing some chain-yanking, but incredibly, they thought I was serious, and some of them actually liked the tag! I sat back in utter amazement as a ten-minute discussion ensued about the pros and cons of what had been intended as dead-pan humor. I finally put the kibosh on the whole thing by saying that “I think some other company is already using it,” which, in the wake of the “LinkWorks” trademarking debacle, effectively killed the debate.
