Marketers: Beware the Ides of…August?

Not exactly a banner summer for some of the marketers around me. Have a read, then send us all some encouragement.

Have you taken your vacation yet? Maybe you’d better think twice this year.

Exhibit A: The Case of the Disappearing Marketing Budget

“Here’s how I want to do this,” said the director of marketing for a Silicon Valley company I had cold-called a couple of weeks before. “I’ll hire you to write the paper we’ve discussed. If you finish by the end of August and we work together well, I’ll have more work for you this fall. Send me your contract and let’s get started.”

Sounded good to me. My project-pipeline was nearly empty, and I’d been aching for the thrill that comes from landing a new client. This director and I had exchanged e-mail over several days in early July, and I was pleased that she phoned me spontaneously to close the deal on the Friday morning before my vacation. It was a good note on which to leave things, and something I’d be glad to pick up after a few days away. I pushed her all the requisite paperwork, then went on holiday.

Imagine my surprise when, upon my return, she wrote that the project was on indefinite hold in Finance.

Chalk it up to the risks marketers run when they take vacation in 2010…

Exhibit B: The Case of the Disappearing Marketing Department

A marketing manager in the Asian subsidiary of one of my biggest clients called me a couple of weeks later.

“Remember that paper you did last year for us, focused on wireless operators?” Naturally, I did. It was the best paper I wrote for anybody all year. “We’d like you to do a new one focused on application developers.”

More good news. He had done an excellent job of explaining where he wanted the paper to go, and of providing me reference material, so the structure was almost automatic. I looked forward to more of the same on this paper.

“You know what, though? I wrote that paper for you at way below market rate,” I told him. “I need to charge you a lot more for this one. Also, I’m away with my family next week, so we can start on this the following week.”

“OK,” he said, “send me your proposal and I’ll get the ball rolling in Purchasing. I should have the purchase order by the time you return.”

Once again, it was nice having that in my back pocket as I read books, watched movies and practiced slacklining with my kids for five days.

Imagine my surprise when, upon my return, there’s no purchase order and LinkedIn shows that the marketing manager is connecting to people left, right and center – never a good sign. Connecting the dots, I phoned his cell.

“Ah, yes, Mr. White. I’ve got some bad news for both of us, really. The company has shut down marketing across several offices here. I don’t think the future holds much for that paper we were going to work on.”

Chalk it up to the risks marketers run when they take vacation in 2010…

Exhibit C: The Case of the Disappearing Business Unit

I had a business partner a few years ago, and we did marketing consulting for a couple dozen companies over eleven years. I can’t count the number of times we’d be noodling some potential business problem or contingency and I’d say, “Wait a minute. Are you worried about this?”

“Yes,” he’d answer. “I am.”

“Good,” I’d reply, “because I’ve never seen you accurately worry about anything that came to pass. Worry all you want.”

You get that way after eleven years in business together.

One of our clients made him an offer too good to pass up in 2006, and he hired on as their VP of marketing. In 2007, the company was acquired, and he has successfully navigated the corporate rapids as a marketing director ever since, trotting the globe and making his bosses’ bosses happy. We have coffee and he tells me how treacherous things are, and how he isn’t sure about his job from quarter to quarter, and I ask whether he’s worried about it, and he says he is, and I tell him to keep on worrying so that nothing averse will happen.

Imagine my surprise when he phoned me last week to say that, while on vacation in Australia with his family, his intranet access had been disabled and he’d received a layoff notice via e-mail. The work in his business unit was moved to Pune, India.

“The exception that proves the rule,” I told him. “You finally figured out how to worry about something that actually took place.”

Chalk it up to the risks marketers run when they take vacation in 2010…

Exhibits C through ZZ

These are just the three cases that occur to me this evening as I’m posting. I’m sure I could come up with more, and I encourage you to chime in with your own in the comments below.

I do believe that there is still plenty of marketing spend out there. In fact, I know there is, because I was busier and made more money than ever in 2009. Things dried up for a quarter, then became frantically busy for a quarter, and are back to a dull hum again.

I can put up with that, figuring that the recession has caught up with even the most nimble of businesses. The thing I don’t get is the whip-saw characteristic of this economy: the periods of normal respiration to keep things going, punctuated by frenzied gasps to keep up with the workload. (I don’t really know what “whip-saw” means, but I think I heard it in a Chuck Norris movie, and sometimes it feels as though the economy is following one of his scripts.)

So, fellow marketers, I don’t want to put a damper on your summer vacation, because we certainly all deserve one. But are you seeing similar oddness as you market your way through the ides of August?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his e-book, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: karindalziel

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