That’s saying something, given that there’s a pizza joint on the four corners of every major intersection. This restaurant is not a franchise. Not a carry-out-only place. And while it serves other Italian food - I don’t know that for sure, since I’ve eaten only the pizza.

To beat the rush weekend evenings, we order in. That is, my wife or I call about 40 minutes ahead and place our order. We arrive with our three kids, two of which head to a playroom with video games and other toys.

We put our name in with the host, who most often is the grumpy, squatty gray-haired owner-grandma. She barely looks up when you walk up to the podium that she peers over to take your name. We remind her that we’ve already ordered. I don’t think she smiles. She plays no favorites.

The service is slow, the waiters and waitresses are never around when you want another drink. You wait for your check. You wait for the box to take home the leftover pizza. It’s the place to go if you want to test your patience.

In short the restaurant violates pretty much every marketing principle of the last quarter century.

Yet, I suspect that the owners fit the profile of the rich folks in the best-selling book, The Millionaire Next Door. The restaurant mints gold, the pizza is gold.

So I wonder what there is to take away from their success, and the only thing I can think of is this: Great pizza trumps great service. That is, if your product is really, really good, then your service can be average.

That doesn’t sound right to me, but I’m stumped.

Thoughts?

I’ve also interviewed by phone or via email many best-selling authors on aforementioned topics.

I learn something new from each one.

I tend to take away more from the conversation with the author than I do reading his or her book. When you ask the author to clarify a point in the book or give a specific example, often you strip away the flabby writing from the nugget of insight. Most books should be only an article in length. But the publisher wants at least 250 pages, so authors write to fit the book-length medium.

In some marketing writing, though, there’s a common thread that annoys me:

It’s as if the authors all went to the same convention, identified all the “successful stories” and then starting writing. Here are a few of the wake-me-when-they-are-outdated marketing stories:

• Facebook (still looking to make some real money in social media);
• Google (the big dog on the block; who can argue with its success?);
• Starbucks (closing 600 stores soon; see our interview with John Moore: http://www.czmarketing.com/brand/);
• Apple (the brand with design panache);
• SalesForce.com (the clunky convenience of online CRM); and
• Kiva (the creative online micro finance nonprofit).

Before the above, there was:

• Krispy Kreme (now a not-so-hot stock);
• Dell (trying now to reinvent itself);
• Amazon (now just another boring stock); and
•Too many others to mention.

What’s hot is touted as the pinnacle of truth for marketing your organization: “Just follow the marketing principles of this hot company or you will become irrelevant and die a thousand deaths.”

No one writes those words, but that underlying schtick is occasionally assumed in the writing.

Here’s my grumpy point: Growing an organization is hard work. It’s tedious, sometimes monotonous. Not very sexy. And it takes much longer than you think. And just when you think you’ve got it figured out, the demographics or economics of your prospects change. Then you’re forced to regroup and make adjustments in real time.

No doubt Starbucks and Google and Apple have lots to teach the rest of the world. But it’s important to strip out the bravado from the principles and ask the real question: What, if anything, is really relevant to our situation?

Maybe the most important purpose of reading about today’s hot companies is to inspire hope. Growth is possible. Our future can be brighter than our past.

I once used a local dry cleaners for my shirts and did so for about 5 years. One day, while the owner waited on me, a young, pretty woman walked in. I was handing him my credit card to pay for my shirts when he turned and helped her. He made me wait. After 5 years of loyalty, I walked out and never returned. The dry cleaners was about a half mile out of my way, and that day he gave me a reason to leave. I never told him about how I felt. I never said good-bye. Poof! I was gone.

A friend recently was driving back from vacation on the East Coast and decided to drop in on a college that was on their son’s “maybe” list. The school made their list only because the daughter of a family friend attended the college and raved about it. A personal referral ranks high on my list as a high value prospect.

So the family popped by the campus and got the standard tour with a current student dressed in blue jeans with her hair pulled back. The family then headed back on the road. The school never contacted them. Never followed up with a phone call to the prospective student, asking, “How was your visit? What did you like? What questions do you still have?”

You wonder if the private liberal arts school had such an overabundance of smart male applicants that their lack of follow-up was a tactic to keep enrollment low.

Consequently, the school will never know why my friend’s son will not attend in Fall 2009. I’m not saying that he would have attended had the admissions folks cared what he and his parents thought. But my guess is that at the next marketing meeting, the enrollment team evaluated their plan and creative based on what they prefer or what some of the current students and faculty declare as acceptable. Most likely it reflected the cheery perspective of folks in love with their decision to attend or work at the school.

The next time you pat yourself on the back and say, “Look, these existing clients (current students, current members, etc) really like this or that,” remember this: The most important folks may not be in the room. Who will speak for them?

At first, I thought, Wow, these folks could sure use some consulting. Their strategy is too general - they do anything. That means they really do nothing. What a poor way to market your small business!

Then I began thinking about how I might use them at home in the Chicago western suburbs:

1. We have a heavy wooden swing set (which could survive a nuclear attack) that I’d like disassembled and taken to the dump.

2. We have two golden retrievers, and when I get lazy or forget to scrape up their business in the backyard, I might just give “We Do Anything” a call.

3. We have an old shed in the backyard that also needs to be torn down. Yes, I could do that. But why ruin a perfectly good weekend?

4. In the next month, I need to put a seal coating on our paved driveway. How motivated am I to do this, really?

5. I have some large limbs from trees that were blown down from last summer’s microburst that need to be cut up and taken away.

It hit me that the messaging of “We Do Anything” is not general, but very specific. It’s so specific that your mind goes immediately to the projects that you’d like completed but have wondered whom to call. My guess is that not only does “We Do Anything” land the hard jobs - they also get some projects that typically go to painters or sealcoating companies or even carpenters.

Does your brand evoke something specific in the minds of your prospects?

As part of her late-night liturgy, Cassidy scratched the door to be let back in, and when my wife opened the door, the dog flew past her into the family room. And so did a stench that burned the hairs in your nostrils. I arrived on the scene about 10 minutes later and I swear I could almost see a faint haze in the house. Cassidy had been sprayed by a skunk. In fact, as I gave the dog a bath in tomato juice and dishwashing soap 30 minutes later, I saw the stream of skunk fluid on the coat of Cassidy - a direct, close-up hit. Golden retrievers are not known for their intelligence.

By the time Jana got the dog back outside, the house had absorbed the smell. It took 2 weeks from that night for the smell to work its way out of the house, thanks mainly to lots of fresh air.

About a week into the 2-week ordeal, I awoke and sniffed and thought, “Hey, I think the smell is finally gone.” But when I returned at 6 PM later that day, after 10 hours at work, I entered our front door, greeted by skunk-smell. I suspect that even our clothes reeked of skunk for a time.

Here’s my point: The longer you’re in the house, the less you can smell the odor.

That’s also true of marketing. The longer you work at the same thing, the less you are able to see what’s not working. That’s why continuing education is so important. That’s why you outsource. That’s why you read. That’s why you hire staff with different experiences.

The attention of our prospective clients is in scarce supply these days. Arresting their attention requires that we don’t grow accustomed to the smell.

At the local coffee shop, a “competitor” to Starbucks, the atmosphere makes up for the unbranded (but still expensive) coffee. The place has high ceilings, funky art (kind of), wood floors that need to be refinished, and a sofa that looks and feels like its previous stop was the boys dorm lounge of the local college.

Most visits, I drink plain old regular $2 coffee. In a mug. I never tip. But occasionally, I’ll splurge and request a cappuccino in a mug. I hesitate, inwardly, as I sign the debit card receipt: Should I add a tip?

My head screams no - I shouldn’t have spent this much money in the first place. My heart says, “Well, she doesn’t make much money making coffee in this ostensibly struggling small business. I bet she doesn’t get health insurance like the folks across the street at Starbucks.”

But my head always wins: The server is emotionally flat, barely grunts when I tell her my order, and never brings my foo-foo coffee to where I sit. There’s no real value to the service. The other day, about five minutes after I gave my order, the server essentially walked by the table where I was tapping away on my laptop and pointed back to the register, where my medium, frothy cappuccino sat: “Your drink is over there.” She wouldn’t bring it over, even though my table was on her way.

It ripped me that I had to get up and walk 7 paces to grab my cappuccino. Then I remembered that I didn’t tip her. I then asked myself, “Would she have brought me my cappuccino if I had tipped her?”

So, the question is, “If I’m the server, do I go the extra mile for only those people I think will tip me?” Or, do I serve everyone with the same level of service?

So much of, maybe all of, branding comes down to execution of the little things. It’s easy for pretty people in large conference rooms to wax on and off about branding. But branding comes down to the person on the front-line, who is or isn’t executing on the brand promise.

The person who answers the phone. The receptionist. The student who is leading your campus tours. The assistant who prints out your reports and sends them to the client. The person behind the counter at the cafeteria in the food court of your museum.

So does your assistant know how important his/her job is to the brand of your organization? Or, is she just doing “administration” work for $13 an hour?

Steve & Barry’s is a recent addition to the world of sports apparel. In 2006, Steve & Barry’s recruited NBA® star Stephon Marbury to develop the Starbury™ Collection of urban-inspired apparel and footwear. The killer product is the Starbury II, a “high-performance basketball sneaker that Marbury wears on NBA® courts. The Starbury II boasts a sleek design and is engineered with the same comfort, stability, and durability found in basketball sneakers that retail between $100 and $150—and it’s just $14.98.”

That’s what Steve & Barry’s web site promised.

But I got the shoes for just $8.98. Each. Steve & Barry’s had a sale!

The Steve & Barry’s I visited was trashed. The shoe section had empty boxes strewn on the floor, mismatched shoes in boxes, 7 1/2 shoes in boxes that were marked size 10. And the clerks (who can’t be more than 19) shrugged their shoulders when I ask for help. “Yeah, it’s a mess here.” No apologies. No real anxiety.

And I wasn’t bothered by it, the prices too amazing.

Across the corridor in the mall, only 10 paces or so from Steve & Barry’s is another sports apparel store: Finish Line. It is filled with $70, $80, and $100 tennis shoes in boring colors, and other expensive sports apparel. The store was almost empty of customers when I walked by.

It must suck to be Finish Line. There’s no way you can sell your products for the same as Steve & Barrry’s. An upstart comes along and changes the rule. New companies don’t play by the same rules - ergo, that a tennis shoe has to be expensive to be fashionable. I don’t know yet whether the shoes are any good. And does that really matter?

At this point, traditional marketing itself doesn’t matter. Finish Line could spend millions trying to get customers into its store, but for what purpose? To buy boring, expensive, branded apparel? Good luck with that.

I realized that as I left Steve & Barry’s, with my 12-year-old ecstatic, that I had just experienced a “Purple Cow,” a phrase that marketer Seth Godin (www.sethgodin.com) writes and talks about. A Purple Cow is only a Purple Cow if the consumer experiences your product or mailer or service as a Purple Cow. You can’t talk your constituents or clients into thinking that what you are presenting them is exceptional. It either is or isn’t.

Tim Barg, our vice president of strategy, and I sat down and rattled off a couple principles we’ve learned over the years:

1. Competitor strategy is counter-intuitive. Your intuition says, “We need to parrot what the leader in our industry is saying, because it’s working for them.” Jack Trout, co-author of Positioning, once said to me, “You always avoid the strengths of the leader.”

I would say that most leaders of organizations do the opposite: they parrot the leader.

2. Instead of messaging specifically, most organizations message generally. They say the same thing as every other organization in their industry.

There seems to be a “fear of the niche.” There seems to be a built-in resistance to focus narrowly on a message. Or becoming good at one thing. They fear being different.

All educational institutions, for example, say they specialize in high academics - which, unless you’re Harvard or Stanford, means essentially nothing. All management consulting firms say they deliver results. All business intelligence software firms say their software deliver better analytics.

All this is confusing to prospective clients or students or donors. If you’re general with your message, you have no hook.

So if you’re having a hard time growing, begin with your competitors. What are they doing? What are they leading with in terms of their messaging? And how are you different?

My next blog topic: “The Myth of the Silver Bullet.”

Those two lines are a blast from my past. I recall my parents chiding me when I got in trouble hurling snowballs at the school bus. Once the school bus driver slammed on his brakes, threw open the doors, and challenged his kids to catch me. I escaped only because a fellow snowballer stepped between me and a couple kids from the bus. His name was Dean, and he was a big friend.

In marketing, it’s pretty certain that if everyone is doing it, and you’re doing it too, then your clients are ignoring you. It’s all white noise. A good example of this is holiday greeting cards.

Just because everyone is sending you generic Christmas cards with signatures of staff members you’ve never met doesn’t mean you should do the same.

Here’s my recommendation: Ignore your clients at Christmas, if the best you can do is a generic Christmas card. If you don’t talk to them much throughout the year, then feel free to ignore them during the holidays. The card won’t bring a smile. It won’t elicit a “Wow, I should really do more business with them - that was a personal, meaningful card!”

Blogging is not only mainstream these days, it’s become almost as annoying as email (in the sense that everyone seems to have one, even if they have nothing to say). Today’s web tools enables anyone with a computer and Internet-access to blog.

A blog is, basically, an online diary or journal that allows other folks to post responses - essentially, to talk back to you. It’s two-way communication. No, it’s 100- or 1000-way communication, depending upon how many folks are talking back to you.

Blogging is only one small part of the phenomena of social media, which many traditional organizations struggle to integrate into their marketing.

In fact, social media and marketing may be an oxymoron. In social media, the moment you start selling, you lose your audience. Why? Because the audience can talk back to you. And, worse, ignore you altogether.

We recently started another business, creating a social media web site for new nurses (www.RealityRN.com). We also created a parallel RealityRN strategy for Facebook. We launched a group on Facebook using an account of one of our nurse advisors to promote the main site.

We have on staff a young woman whose expertise in Facebook - as a user - is unparalleled, and she kept us from making many of the stupid mistakes that someone like me (middle-aged white guy) would tend to make when trying to “do social media.”

The biggest lesson: you can promote to a social media group, but you can’t sell. People will only join a group if it connects emotionally with who they are. They will never join a group that is thinly designed to sell something. If you are on Facebook, type in “Hey Docs, Nurses Are Not Nurse Maids” and you’ll pull up our group. I think more than half of the group (700-plus members) is from Europe, Australia, and Canada.

Social media has largely unwritten rules of social etiquette. The most important strategy in social media is this: just do something. And begin to make mistakes so that you can learn as quickly as possible. Don’t feel as if you have to get it right the first time.

And maybe not every organization should make a foray into social media. My favorite line of all times came from an old mentor: an opportunity is not a mandate. Stated another way: just because you can doesn’t mean you should.