December 2021: Please click here for an update on current offerings from Thomas Marketing Services.
Thomas Marketing Services Corporation is a process-driven and agile problem-solving, branding, marketing, and business acceleration resource. Strategic & tactical, I’m helping business owners prosper in the tumultuous business and world climate.
Here’s the thing. In good times and crazy, it’s all about the brand, and the story behind it. At its core brand is a story; it’s about what makes it different, why it matters, and why we should care. How it provides certainty amidst uncertainty.
The difference is you.™ Because far more than a logo, a brand reflects the vision and values of its principals and stakeholders. Those with good instincts evolve theirs in a strategic manner, adjusting aligned tactics to meet the day at hand. And in doing so, they create sustained momentum and valuable equity.
I’m Tom Lanen, and my track record as a brand marketer, writer and integrated advertising & design agency principal is wide-ranging with mainstream brands such Velcro™ fasteners (global – 17 years), Ovation Benefits Group (15 years), Boston Whaler™, Keurig™, and several Thermo (Electron) Fisher Scientific™ business groups. I’ve also worked with many technology, services, retail, and consumer product start-ups and mid-market brands.
The brand difference: its people, The Indoor Gardening Experts™. It starts at the top.
Currently, my lead client is New England Hydroponics, for whom I work in a marketing and creative role for its 4-MA retail stores; and also online.
Right now, I’m looking to help one or two business owners who could use a hand, especially in these extraordinary days. We should talk.
I work with principals and stakeholders on revenue-building branding and re-stage strategies, which may employ tactics such database-driven permission email, social media, and online advertising; broadcast, video/streaming, and print marketing; and point-of-sale merchandising and packaging design systems. I can also help manage full-blown business and /or line expansion initiatives.
A branded visual design and marketing ‘eco-system’ that expands upon the identity established by the (new) logo; with all tactics aligned with the core strategic brand communications platform (a new way of seeing™) to create a consistent and engaging brand presence. This rebranding program was created for a management buyout team with a 5-year end-game; it was sold at private sale to a major consulting business after just 2 years.
As a business owner and brand guy with 30 years to the better, I can help navigate these tricky markets of 2020, and provide you with perspective and options. While nobody has ever seen this, sound brand marketing and design principals, and genuine story-telling still get it done.
It will be surely be the foundation of a return to normalcy and prosperity. It always has. What’s more, it can be an opportune time to pick up market share while others retreat.
In short, I’m flexible and capable, and wide open to your vision and ways of doing business. I also fully believe in budgets and transparency; and a measurable return on your investment.
Marketing is about communication and trust, a strategic balance of transactional and emotional. Do it mindfully, and you engage people in meaningful ways, and create loyalty. You prosper.
Are you ready for what’s next? Please contact me in confidence and without obligation, and let’s chat a few minutes on my nickel. (508) 951-0130
Coaching youth soccer was one of the most fun and most satisfying, albeit challenging dad things I did when my sons were young. Not that I knew what I was doing; I did not. I’d never played it as a youth, and in fact my only connections to the game came from a Danish soccer team wear client I had during the 1994 World Cup in the USA; and through osmosis from my creative partner, an Irish National designer, who lived and breathed the game.
But knowing all out enthusiasm had carried me through many challenges about which I knew nothing, I accepted several coaching roles for all my sons, and my teams always seemed to enjoy the game, as did I.
My biggest challenge came when I picked up a H-14 youth soccer team the final year my oldest son played.
I’d been warned by the league coordinator when I took on the team: two of the guys on the team had given their coaches mass quantities of grief throughout their youth soccer career.
Now 14-years old, both had fallen right on the cusp of the singular toughest team to make in our schools: the 19-person Middle School 8th grade boys team. And I could see from how they both stood aside they felt they didn’t belong to my gang.
Frankly I was concerned, unconvinced they’d play well with others or even bother to play to their athletic levels. But after watching them, I could see they both had skills. And smarts.
Fact too was I liked them both. Maybe it was they reminded me of me. And knowing what I’d respond to at that age (or even now) gave me an idea.
So, at the start of our second practice I pulled each aside, and after asking them what they thought about the team, and listening to their answers, had one thought for each of them:
“Jay/Miguel, as coach I’m seeing some real possibility in you: I’d like you (and the other) to step up and take a leadership role in the team, and help me out.”
Of course, they were both suspicious. But when I announced they would be the Co-Captains for the first 3 matches, their pride was palpable. Recognition is a wonderful rehabilitator of the spirit.
You know, they stepped up and got it done, both becoming the team’s high scorers and toughest defenders.
They also became remarkably tolerant with their less skilled teammates, and put a halt to any unkind taunts or put-downs not uncommon in middle school society.
And, when others were named single-game captains, they were still the team’s leaders; the guys looked up to them and emulated their play.
What I learned that season has carried over to my professional life as a strategy and brand marketing coach to this day. Because one of the first things I look for in my clients’ staffs are those willing to rock the boat. Hidden leaders. Though they’re not all that hard to spot: they aren’t angry as much as they are impatient, and may even seem a little discontent about their limited roles. And they are always just a little smarter than the average bear.
Of course, there are always neer-do-wells, the “entitled,” and those who are patently dishonest (or worse, liars); and they need to be isolated as soon as discovered. Nasty is nasty.
But given my baseline requirements for intelligence, honesty, and a sense of decency, I’ve most always found troublemakers take risk to heart; and who, given the opportunity, will take the ball and run.
Then again, ‘trouble’ is always in the eye of the beholder, a matter of degree. And you can be sure my guys gave the competition big trouble that season. No, we didn’t win the league, but it was as good a season as I had in my 8 seasons as a youth soccer coach.
Now 10 years later, Miguel has returned to his native land, but I still run into Jay now and then at the local grocery store; and he looks happy as he takes on the world — on his terms.
And when I see him he always pays me what I consider the supreme compliment. He calls out “hey Coach!”
That he thinks of me in this manner, well, I think of it as an annuity on my investment in my teams — one that’s paid me handsomely time and again.
To say nothing of the impact these troublemakers have had on their friends, and peers.
A troublemaker from the word go, I’ve retired from youth soccer coaching and have gratefully taken to watching Premier League football, happy to let others have some good dad fun every weekend morning.
I’ve just completed my first significant assignment solely as a strategy and brand coach, versus the full-service ad agency guy I’ve been throughout my career. When I took the assignment, I expected it to be routine: the charge was to help re-establish a mid-technology B2B brand, and the beginnings of a marketing program — right in my wheelhouse. But, while one of my primary goals was to encourage the client’s staff to take over content and social media creation, I expected resistance, and thought I’d still have to be part of the tactical team.
Then I met the young stakeholders of this Austrian mid-technology business. And when they understood their new charge, they stepped-up and took full ownership of the brand. I was delighted.
You see, much like my college-age twins, they did so with a knowing light in their eyes – the “faces with a view” songwriter David Byrne once described – giving me great hope for both their professional careers, and for the people whose lives they will touch.
The emotion was more than I’d envisioned as I’ve formulated my strategy to evolve into a coach over the past few months. But they didn’t need me to tell them how to characterize their brand any more than my sons need me to tell them how to live their lives.
They just wanted a few hints about its structure; and license to go at it their way. Excellent.
All Lines In The Water
I was most struck by their instinctive understanding their brand was about truth, and not some epic myth we advertising folk used to invent. Though I think it helped their new CEO, a brilliant Austrian technologist and who’d also taken the CMO reigns, had very focused and transparent business goals he’d begun to share across the organization.
Faced with aggressive owner expectations for sales and revenue growth, he was convinced his strategic concept of “active fishing” could make the cash register ring more consistently. His approach suggested every contact every employee made – at work, and even their personal lives – was a possible customer, and they should be encouraged to benefit from all the business and brand offered.
My dad and I, circa 1981, back from a wonderful morning’s fishing outing on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, when all lines in the water, we both caught beautiful land-locked salmon.
My heart soared as I listened: it was not unlike a concept my dad, a sales engineer and manufacturer’s rep, had postulated and talked about during happy fishing outings in New Hampshire many years back. It was part of our legacy. And, with my decades of experience since, I recognized it wasn’t just a sales strategy, but an umbrella brand marketing strategy.
What he was asking was every single person on his staff become an active brand ambassador.
We can do that!
Osmosis Isn’t a Brand Development Strategy
Just one problem: the brand story was in disarray. Every person to whom I spoke had a different feeling and sense about the company, and its focus. This is quite common with going businesses; it’s easy for owners to think because they know the current and/or evolved business story everyone in the business should. It’s often not accurately reflected on websites either.
This typically happens when a brand’s strategic communications platform and position — a core foundational block — hasn’t been formally or recently articulated. As such it can’t be scaled throughout the organization, much less executed against in its inbound and outbound marketing.
After long discussion, including an introduction into current best practices including marketing automation, and content and social media marketing, I agreed with the CEO/CMO’s assessment: its marketing and sales teams needed branded “quality bait.” And only brand stakeholders could determine what that meant.
Much to his credit, the last thing he wanted was for me to ‘create’ it. He’d already given that a go with other agencies, and had neither the budget or patience for it. Nor did I.
During a week of meetings in Austria, I helped lead the company’s best and brightest construct the elements of their core brand – not just the “what,” but the “why” – using oversized post-it notes with considered contributions teams had created in a moderated workshop format.
As they did, and it all started to take shape, I enjoyed one of the biggest thrills of my multi-decade career. You see, I was experiencing the (re)birth of a pure brand, one representing the exact sensibilities of its owners. Brilliant!
Part of my interest was how the brand lexicon was evolving from what I viewed as a rather obtuse brand design system to language-based understanding; and addressed technical and non-technical audiences without loss of technical context.
Importantly too, the team also recognized and addressed how each linguistic bite translated into core understanding – mutually agreed upon translations – as it affected its markets and cultures, European, American and Asian.
In short, when the workshops concluded all participants were armed with the first vestiges of a defined and agile brand story to take back to their teammates. Everyone could talk to the same brand regardless of where they lived; a baited hook they could cast at will.
“(Beyond marketing materials) you build (brand) equity every day with every little decision you make along the way, which sounds simple and easy. But if you are growing, how do you continuously protect and preserve and strengthen the brand when more and more people get involved? That’s where brand becomes culture.”
These young leaders redefined their brand to address current day technology and marketing dynamics as they see it. It became their brand as it is, and can be. Not just some brand as it could be.
And that’s how it should be. Because today marketing is not about creating a myth and selling it; but about finding a truth and sharing it. And about creating a brand customers want to find, and make part of their own personal and professional brands.
A Living, Agile Entity
It would be simplistic to suggest the client team fully formulated its brand within a scant few meetings or they’ll even take it any further now the meetings are over.
Or, that their definitions will remain intact, which can be a good thing, given my sense today’s brands should be agile and allowed – even required – to evolve with changing attitudes and technologies.
But, while visual design systems will remain a constant to brand identity (and a love of mine), today it’s more about how a brand engages people on every possible level, inside and outside of the business.
It’s about building upon the core emotional dynamics of a brand, of being real, as tactics to add value and understanding; and to help the business qualify for brand value premiums because their goods are perceived worthy.
Importantly, it’s about having a brand baseline upon which everyone on the company team can build an ongoing sense of their own brands and purpose in their lives; something to which they can belong while building self-esteem, and their paths to success.
It’s all so exciting – even if I’m not creating it all as my agency-guy ego might once have demanded.
But then again, my brand has had yet another defining moment too.
Tom Lanen is the principal of Thomas Marketing Services Corporation, an erstwhile full-service advertising and digital marketing agency he founded in ‘89, now a strategy and brand coaching consultancy. He truly enjoyed the people, and the lusciously rich coffee and desserts for which Austria is known; though is less convinced of its many permutations of wiener schnitzel.
His marketing in-service program, Fishing Where The Fish Are Today™, is designed for business owners and brand stakeholders in small businesses who seek a better brand and marketing process as a strategy to hit their numbers. Tom can be reached at +1 508- 951-0130 or at [email protected]
