Why would anyone be dissatisfied with this? (photo by BrokenSphere via Wikimedia Commons)

So I’m reading IMC The Next Generation by Professor Don E. Schultz, the father of integrated marketing communications. This seminal book offers up brilliant approaches to marketing management (such as value-based customer segmentation and goals-based budgeting) with a large side-order of raw naiveté (the nonsensical customer-centric marketing mix).

But what inspired me to blog is not Schultz’s ivory tower tendencies but his Golden Arches slam on pages 167-168…

“On any given day, 11 percent of McDonald’s customers are dissatisfied. About 70 percent of dissatisfied customers are further dissatisfied with the way their complaint is handled. More than half of all dissatisfied customers visit McDonald’s less frequently as a result and tell as many as ten other people about their unsatisfactory experience… While the company is still a fast-food giant, it loses an estimated $750 million a year as a result of this marcom inconsistency. Even for McDonald’s, that’s a lot of money.”

And that statement is a lot of bull…

Now, I’m no fan of McDonald’s, but it’s not because I’m dissatisfied with their service — I’m actually impressed by McD’s clockwork operations and consistency. I just happened to see the documentary Super Size Me, and I’m not interested in putting any of McDonald’s products in my mouth.

But I will defend the chain against superficial thinking. Schultz’s “estimate” (not proof) that McD’s loses three-quarters of a billion dollars annually because it dissatisfies 11 percent of its customers is not only a hasty assumption, it could be completely wrong. Why? Because he fails to ask the key question:

Who are these customers and what the hell are they complaining about?

Customer-centrists like Schultz rarely acknowledge the existence of a creature called “the bad customer.” Anyone who has ever worked as a waiter has probably met more than a few bad customers, and has probably had the urge to throw them out (or worse). Indeed, smart businesses do throw bad customers out and, even smarter, encourage them to patronize their competitors.

Who are these 11 percent and what could they be unhappy about? Consider this possibility…

McD’s Employee: “Welcome to McDonald’s! How may I help you?”

11 Percenter: “Yes, I’d like a Big Mac, cooked medium-rare, without pickles, and double the cheese.”

McD’s Employee: “Uh, sorry sir, all of our Big Macs are prepared the same way.”

11 Percenter: “That’s bullkaka! Then give me a Quarter Pounder, but double the cheese and…”

McD’s Employee: “Uh, sir, all of our food is prepared the same way.”

11 Percenter: “What?! That’s outrageous! It’s the age of the customer, and I’ve got a B.S. degree in customer centricity! I demand to get what I want how I want when I want! Or else — or else — or else I’ll tweet about it!”

He then demands to see the manager, and won’t budge out of line until he does, and when the manager says nothing can be done, he bangs out a steaming email to corporate, which ignores him. He’s thus further dissatisfied, so he posts a music video about his complaint on YouTube in hopes of scoring some gift certificates and maybe a record deal.

Can you imagine some of the other people who might be dissatisfied with McDonald’s?

• “What do you mean I have to vacate my booth? I’m a paying customer! If I want to sit here for three hours without buying anything more, then I will sit here for three hours without buying anything more! Where’s your manager?”

• “OMG, this bun has wheat in it! I’m allergic to wheat! Why didn’t you tell me this bun has wheat in it?! I’m so gonna sue… unless you give me $100 right now for my pain and suffering. Where’s your manager?”

• “Don’t you dare tell me how to raise my kids! If they want to run around screaming and throwing french fries, that’s their First Amendment right! Where’s your manager?”

• “Why is there a line at lunch? I’m in a hurry. Why aren’t the McRibs ready already? Damn, this place is slow! Where’s your manager?”

• “Don’t tell me you’re out of apple pies. I come by here every day to get my apple pie, and I always get it! And no, don’t try to push that cherry pie on me. Where’s your manager?”

• “Damn, you’re cute in that uniform! What time do you get off? And by ‘get off,’ I mean, ‘get off’! Get it? What’s your phone number?”

Any of those could be possible. We don’t know, because the book doesn’t tell us.

The real issue here is that mass-marketing and efficiency are anathema to customer-centrists, who fail to understand that not all businesses can or even should satisfy all of their customers, since trying to please everyone can lead to failure.

McDonald’s has spent more than six decades honing a system that works worldwide, and it works by emphasizing uniformity and efficiency. Catering to individual requests would either throw that system out of synch or drive up McD’s costs (and prices). And either of those outcomes could cost the company much more than $750 million.

And what’s so bad about the number 11? Is that dissatisfaction percentage unusual for a large business? And what would happen if those 11 percent went away forever? You know the answer: McDonald’s customer service satisfaction rate would reach 100%. That’s right: the key to satisfying all of your customers is to make the unsatisfied ones go away.

There’s a reason McDonald’s is “still” a fast-food giant after 60 years, and that it still satisfies an impressive 89% of its customers. How many businesses can claim to do that?

So as you read business books and articles, beware of undercooked statistics and sloppily assembled estimates. Numbers without hard questions are just junk food for the mind.

Uncommon sense that's 2.Overdue

Seriously thinking about social media? Then think about it humorously first.

Ron Shevlin has written the definitive primer for anyone considering a social marketing campaign: “Snarketing Two Dot Oh: A Humorous Look At The World Of Marketing In The Age Of Social Media” — a must-read before diving in.

What’s so different and definitive about it?

“Amazon carries more than 150,000 books on social media, nearly 2,400 of them on social media marketing…” writes Ron. “There’s way too much bad advice about marketing and management being thrown around out there, often relying on shoddy research and analysis. I want to help you see why it’s bad advice. And — hopefully — do it in a humorous way…”

The Snark Goes Hunting

There’s no “hopefully” about it: Ron succeeds in deliciously skewering the Kool-Aid quaffers and snake oil merchants who have glommed onto social media. While reading the book, I actually LOL’d — not a term I use often. (Based on all the social media posts and comments I’ve read, everyone on the Internet is constantly laughing out loud; we must be the happiest generation in the history of the planet.) His weapon of choice: snark.

You won’t find the colloquial definition of “snark” in most dictionaries, which refer to Lewis Carroll’s imaginary creature in “The Hunting of the Snark.”  Rather, you have to turn to the Urban Dictionary, which defines it as “sarcasm” or (the favorite) “snide remark.”

Now, snark is not to everyone’s tastes. Some consider it too mean, and also a significant contributor to the decline of American civility. To which I say, get over it. Snark constitutes the perfect antidote to the nonsense being bandied about by self-proclaimed social media “gurus” and “thought leaders” — nonsense that could waste the time and money of all the innocent people that these charlatans sucker, I mean, consult, I mean, sucker.

Speaking of “thought leaders,” Shevlin quotes the Harvard Business Review‘s six steps toward becoming a thought leader, from creating a robust online presence to appearing on TV. “By that criteria,” he mordantly concludes, “Snooki is a thought leader.” In a similar vein, Shevlin states that anyone who cares about their Klout score must be named Lou. “I’m just not sure if your last name is Nee or Zer.”

Shevlin doesn’t spare himself, particularly when it comes to his relationships with the women in his life. I enjoyed his conversation with his mother about social media (Mom: “Am I on Twitter? No. What is it? Some kind of drug?”) and his proposed new social network DOODS (Dads Of Only Daughters – “Our minds are controlled by a force 1000 times greater than the forces of gravity and nature”).

Smarts Amidst The Snark

As we fans of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” know, sometimes the greatest truths are revealed in humor. Plus, it beats having to read another dreary, bloated textbook.

“Snarketing 2.0″ isn’t just ranting and ridicule; it also contains solid advice drawn from Shevlin’s 25+ years as a marketing consultant and executive (he currently serves as a Senior Analyst at financial services consultancy Aite Group). His discernments about marketing, leavened with an acerbic wit, are the reason I regularly read his blog.

Shevlin’s lists of fictitious afflictions — “Financial Diseases,” “Marketing Maladies” and “Social Media Syndromes” — actually contain more useful insights than I’ve seen in HBR’s blogs. His “Net Promoter Syndrome” mocks the overrated Net Promoter Score, accurately noting that “having customers who are somewhat or even very likely to refer a company to their friends and family is completely worthless unless those customers actually make a referral.”

Elsewhere in the book, Shevlin provides savvy tips on Twitter follower count, customer service hysteria, the three types of metrics, and management religion versus management science. Overall, the book contains 52 articles, one for each week of the year, but given the value of the insights — and how tasty they are to read — odds are you’ll finish all 52 in the space of a cross-country flight. And at $5.95, “Snarketing 2.0″ will deliver a higher ROI than most social media investments (see pages 9-22). And I’m not joking.

About as sloppy and nutritious as its title.

A friend recently gave me Seth Godin’s book Meatball Sundae, and I found that it lives up to its name: it’s a big mess. I won’t provide a full review of a four-year-old book here, but I have to refer to two paragraphs that made me want to hurl the book against the wall (or just hurl). On pages 68-69, Godin writes about the superiority of “permission marketing” versus “interruption marketing”:

“Pets.com used every tactic they could find — TV ads, sock puppets, and accelerated e-mail marketing with a veil of permission. They blew through a hundred million dollars by interrupting people who didn’t want to hear from them. They failed.

Dailycandy.com did the opposite. The daily e-mail newsletter has hundreds of thousands of subscribers to their fresh e-mail newsletters on style. They are extremely profitable and growing every day. They used no TV, no puppets, and a very calm and patient approach to permission marketing.”

Comparing Pets.com to Dailycandy.com is like comparing Home Depot to MTV, or Amazon.com to the Huffington Post. The two businesses don’t even have .com in common: the official name of the newsletter company is DailyCandy.

More credible than most business writers.

Pets.com failed NOT because people didn’t want to hear their marketing. In fact, viewers LOVED the Pets.com sock puppet so much they bought copies of it. The puppet appeared on Nightline, Good Morning America and the pages of People magazine, and the Pets.com Super Bowl ad was ranked #1 by USA Today‘s Ad Meter. Had Pets.com been a media property, it might have succeeded. The reason Pets.com failed was that it offered free shipping on 20-pound bags of cat litter that it sold below cost (Pets.com sold most of their products for 1/3 their cost). In other words, their business model was a disaster from the start. In addition, Pets.com played the stock market game, necessitating a massive awareness-building campaign, and the ensuing dotcom-bubble burst took down all its financing.

DailyCandy doesn’t buy, sell or ship anything. It started as a freakin’ newsletter — an excellent newsletter, but its logistical challenges involved how to find parking near trendy fashion boutiques. DailyCandy was also not a public company. It sold first to private investors excited about the huge mailing list of fashionistas, before being swallowed whole by a voracious Comcast. Had DailyCandy been a stand-alone stock during the dotcom boom, it would have been urged by its investors to run ads next to spots by E-Trade, Outpost.com and Pets.com. As for DailyCandy being “extremely profitable,” I’d love to see those numbers, since the company made money primarily from investors and recently had to shut down in 7 cities.

Seth Godin’s basic grasp of marketing is generally solid, and he should be congratulated on building a large, lucrative brand, but most of his arguments are flawed and based on nothing but what’s off the top of his head. He excels in creating catchy metaphors, but his lazy, unsubstantiated observations could get a business in hot water — or at least a shallow and tepid bowl of meatball sundae.

Related Article: Pullin’ a Godin: Behold the Cheeseburger POV

"WTF is up with these Facebook stats?"

So I’m reading an article in Inc., my favorite zine for advice on entrepreneurial matters, when I found this statement about one company’s social media campaign:

“So far, about 7 percent of Step2′s customers have registered on the company’s website with their Facebook IDs, and of those who have, more than half of them have shared product reviews with their Facebook friends. In the past year, traffic from Facebook has increased 135 percent and revenue from Facebook visitors has nearly tripled.”

Impressive, right? Based on these figures, Inc. readers should just rush out to integrate Facebook into their websites.

So what’s the problem here? (As my students know, one of my favorite business questions is “so what?”)

The statement provides some tasty figures — but not all the figures that a manager needs to make a judgment about the campaign. All those percentages can be misleading if we don’t know the actual numbers they’re based on. For example, a traffic increase of 135% sounds amazing… but it could mean that traffic went from 20 people to 47 over the entire year. For a lot of retailers, that increase in traffic wouldn’t mean much. (My local Starbucks probably serves that many customers in about 20 minutes.)

Given that traffic, what else would we want to know? Here’s a short list for starters:

• How many of those visitors from Facebook are NEW customers? If they’re just existing customers coming through a different entry way, the company doesn’t gain much.
• What are the customers doing on the site once they visit? Are they reading articles, rating products, or best of all, buying something? Or, worse, are they filing complaints, posting spam, trying to sell something, or spying for the company’s competitors?
• If they are buying stuff, how much are they spending? The article states that revenue has nearly tripled, but that could mean it went from, say, $2 to $5.
• What was the cost of the Facebook program? Did the company pay someone to do it? If the company’s owners did the work themselves, how much time was spent on this instead of on product development, customer service, or other activities that could also make money?

The article doesn’t say. That’s unusual for Inc., which usually provides the critical underlying details, but that only proves that even trusted sources occasionally need to be questioned. Well, at least 135% of the time.

I usually use this space to dissect other people’s projects, so for a change, I decided to eviscerate one of my own. Ladies and gentlemen: introducing the idea that went nowhere, “The Horror Ghetto”…

A few years ago I noticed that horror movies were scoring big at the box office, but unless they featured a celebrity or A-list director, many weren’t getting reviews — even if they opened at #1. In other words, when it came to horror flicks, “At the Movies” was out to lunch.

And that wasn’t fair to the millions of horror fans, or to twisted talent like my friend Jed Rowen, who has appeared in over 70 films, in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, and on panels at horror and sci-fi conventions. Time to give Jed and other horror aficionados more spotlight. Or moonlight. Or something like that.

Rather than moan and groan like some dyspeptic ghoul, I decided, “Where there’s a void, there’s an opportunity.” After all, isn’t that what every marketing book from “Blue Ocean Strategy” to “Zag” tells us?

Hence, the idea of a TV show that reviews horror movies was spawned.

I pitched the idea to one of my filmmaker buddies, Dane Boedigheimer, who also loves horror flicks and occasionally produces a monster-infested YouTube vid. Since he specializes in humor and sight gags, we decided to throw in comedic skits and raw silliness. After all, others like Fangoria magazine have produced horror review shows, but they’re lethally serious. So like Dr. Frankenstein, we combined horror and humor into one stitched-up beast and yelled, “IT’S ALIIIIIIIIIVE!!!”

We called it “The Horror Ghetto,” which refers to that part of the industry where actors and directors go and are never heard from again.

Ghoulfriends (from left): Alisha Nichols, Juliette Angeli and Meghan McCabe play the Harpettes in The Horror Ghetto.

To accompany Jed — and add a dose of hex appeal — we cast a Greek chorus of femme fatales called the Harpettes, played by Juliette Angeli, Meghan McCabe and Alisha Nichols. We then spent a few hours filming — hours that flew by because we were having too much fun — and Dane worked his editorial magic into a 2-minute trailer (also known as a “sizzle reel”).

Since we feared that others might steal our idea (we were that sold on the show’s genius), we didn’t share it on YouTube, Facebook or any other online medium. We decided to go straight for the prize.

So we set out to feed our baby to Hollywood…

…which didn’t bother tasting it much before spitting it out.

The first meeting was with a television production company famous for its live comedy series featuring video clips. Sounded perfect — yet the meeting lasted a little longer than our video

While friends who had seen our “Horror Ghetto” video had laughed or at least smiled, the production company guy did his best Bela Lugosi impersonation. He just stared, eyes showing not even a flicker of life. The ensuing conversation went something like this:

Him: “Who’s the audience for this?”
Me: “Millions of horror fans, particularly young males, ages 13-29.”
Him: “Hollywood’s not interested in young males.”

Yes, he really said that. I guess we should tell the makers of The Transformers series to stop filming. I responded that even if Hollywood isn’t interested, advertisers of everything from Axe body spray to Mountain Dew and horror films would be. His blank stare gave me the chills.

I handed him a marketing plan I had written to promote “The Horror Ghetto” using social media, a sponsor-friendly website, cross-promotions with potential commercial sponsors (Monster energy drink among them) and live events centered on fanboy conventions. The appendix included Jed’s Atlantic Monthly profile and an article from the L.A. Times about the popularity of horror films. He took a glance at the report cover and handed it back to me.

Him: “If this is such a good idea, why hasn’t anyone else done it yet?”
What I wanted to say: “Because most Hollywood television producers haven’t had an original idea since the doctor held them upside down by the ankles and spanked them to get the amniotic fluid out of their lungs.”
What I did say: “Actually, it’s similar to ‘Talk Soup’ and ‘Elvira’ and ‘SNL’ combined.”
Him: (ignoring me) “What we’re looking for is proven properties. We’re currently developing American versions of several hit Japanese gameshows. If you have anything like that, call us.”

Ah, the notorious Hollywood cryptkee— I mean, gatekeepers. Since it had been years since I worked in television, I had forgotten about them. Like other gatekeepers worldwide (HR managers, admissions officers, script readers and loan officers), their primary job is to say “no.” It’s usually foolhardy to deal with them without arming yourself first with a killer track record or a high-powered connection. Indeed, as I usually advise job applicants concerning HR managers, the best bet is to avoid them altogether, and to go directly to a higher-up.

So after that meeting from the black lagoon, I decided to contact my industry connections: agents, producers, studio executives.

They were far friendlier and encouraging than dead-stare guy, but they also didn’t think the project “had legs.” So I realized I couldn’t blame him for not falling madly in lust with “The Horror Ghetto” and throwing suitcases filled with unmarked bills at our feet.

Some of my friends provided suggestions, like using better music (a great idea) or replacing Jed with a celebrity, which I absolutely refused to do — friendship matters to me, and the whole point was to bring light to the ghetto, not to mimic it with outsiders.

Clearly, even though television regularly spews such toxic dreck as “Bridalplasty” and “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” it would take a lot more to sell a show than simply cooking up a 2-minute reel with hot girls and horror clips. And I should have known that. I’ve worked in L.A. for over 20 years, and I know that each of the hundreds of staff writers, actors and crew-members currently working on TV has three or four ideas in their back pocket — and they’re the ones already inside the gates.

So where do guys like me and Dane go with our mad creations? Where else, but that great democratizer on the Web: YouTube.

And that’s when Dane struck gold.

Dane Boedigheimer: from Horror Ghetto to bane of all unsuspecting fruit...

No, it wasn’t with “The Horror Ghetto.” As we discussed launching Ghetto into a web series, Dane’s video “The Annoying Orange” took off, scoring nearly 60 million views. Indeed, his entire “Annoying Orange” channel has attracted over half-a-billion views in just over a year.

So guess what’s happening next? That’s right: a TV deal. (Go, Daneboe!)

Now imagine if Dane had tried to pitch “The Annoying Orange” before it became a YouTube sensation: “So I got this idea for a talking orange whose friends get killed by a mysterious knife…”

Rather, he let his talent do the talking, and let the actual viewers decide.

Now, before you go rushing off with your camcorder and a piece of fruit, the odds of getting even a hit video on YouTube, not to mention a TV series based on one, are somewhere between slim and none.

And yet, in this age of hyper-competition, where we’re all competing with professionals across the ocean as well as amateurs across the street, those of us with creative ideas and ambitions need to lay the groundwork first — and I’m talking acres of nice, lush groundwork, redolent with the scent of money — before traipsing off to the gatekeepers. Whether your chosen venue is YouTube or Twitter or Japanese gameshows, gatekeepers want proven concepts first.

And that takes time.

With Dane fully caught up in the demands of producing “Annoying Orange,” and me getting more teaching and client work (i.e., stuff that actually pays), “The Horror Ghetto” was laid to rest. And there it lay interred in the dark forbidding depths of my backup drive for over a year, when it occurred to me the other day to go ahead and upload it to YouTube as an Atomic Tango production sample. You know, just for kicks… and the off chance that it could rise from the dead…

It must suck to be powerful.

I’m planning what kind of image I should have of myself here on my site. Since I picture myself as an action star (in a Woody Allen way), I researched how Hollywood was depicting its leading studs this summer. What I saw wasn’t encouraging. Indeed, I didn’t know if I was looking at action-movie posters or mugshots from the Beverly Hills P.D. Apparently, the heroic pose du jour is full emo: look moody and gaze at your navel. If these are superheroes, who needs villains? See for yourself…

Go ahead, run around a battlefield carrying a target and see how you feel.

Forget Valhalla — get me some Valium.

It just hit me that I'm going to be governor of California someday.

I said we got an illegal alien problem in these here parts, but did anyone believe me? Nooo...

Of course I look inexplicably intense and grumpy. I'm a cat.

I know, I know, it's a Disney family movie based on a theme park ride and my character is supposed to be comedic, but I'm still thinking about my reviews in "The Tourist." At least I'm looking up.

While watching “Brothers & Sisters” the other night, a very disturbing thing happened…

Product Placement Gone Wild (illustration by Mark Armstrong)

I was curled up on my couch wearing my red-and-white-striped PJ’s (what with Christmas just around the corner) and was fully immersed in the show’s storyline: Sally Field is worried about her children and doesn’t know how to live her own life separate from said grown children.

Okay, that’s basically every episode of “Brothers & Sisters,” but I’m hooked just the same.

So just as I’m reaching for my fifth handful of frozen chocolate chips that I’ve sworn will be my last for the evening, Calista Flockhart’s brother mentions that he took her son to the mall, and that Macy’s is doing a promotion where they donate money (or was it that they’d pay someone to finally clean their dressing rooms?) for every letter to Santa that they receive, and…

Pause.

I had to get my candy cane butt off the couch for a few minutes (during which time I put the bag of chocolate chips back into the freezer – it’s called “self control,” look it up), just to walk off the shame of what I had just witnessed. Really, ABC, this is what you’ve resorted to? “Dancing with the Stars” isn’t bringing in enough ad dollars for you to avoid interjecting a commercial into one of your dramas?

I don’t mean to be the Grinch of product placement, but this really killed the episode for me. I thought this show was supposed to be somewhat realistic. Are we really to believe that Calista Flockhart would let her son near a Macy’s? That place is a high school locker room where you can’t walk more than a few feet without stepping on gum. Amidst the knockoff jewelry and not-quite-right apparel is a cesspool of bargain shoppers and second-rate gifts. Macy’s used to be an institution but now just employs people who should be institutionalized. It’s cheesy and cheap and no amount of advertising on a TV program is going to change that.

Missed Opportunity

A few weeks back, “Brothers & Sisters” aired an episode where the hot foreign guy who’s engaged to the oldest sister (reality check, anyone?) gets a modeling gig for a Calvin Klein-esque brand, “Chad Ricardo Underwear.” The ads had the style and lighting of a Calvin Klein ad. The product was very Calvin Klein boxer briefs. But the show went with the fake name for the brand. THIS was your chance! One snapshot of Don Juan undressed on a billboard, now that’s what I’m buying. This was an instance where a real brand name was needed. It would have made sense and tied into the show seamlessly, and it would have added some legitimacy to the script for the viewers.

“Macy’s is doing a really great promotion”?! You’ve just stripped yourself of any credibility.

Product promotion should be natural and relaxed like a good pair of jeans. If it’s forced and in-your-face, it’s just pleather. And people aren’t buying it.

About Raegan Thurlow: By day, Raegan works in Silicon Valley as a mild-mannered interweb ad sales manager; at night, she dons a 100% cashmere cape and becomes a freelance fashion writer looking to rip into trends for a living. Like her? Then you’ll like her Facebook page, right?

About the illustrator: Mark Armstrong is a designer, cartoonist and illustrator with over 20 years of experience. His work has appeared on numerous book covers and in the pages of Congress Daily, Incentive, and Inside Counsel magazines, to name a few.

Related articles:

• Fashion Real: The Story of What Happens When Bad Clothes Meet Corporate America
• Bankruptcy is the Fashion? Mervyns Fails to Declare its Style
• Enough with the Fluff! A Recession is No Time for Management B.S.

"My dead wife is haunting me, evil thugs are chasing me, and I have a final exam tomorrow for a math class I forgot to attend..."

So “Inception” is this action-packed, visually stunning film that appears real. Too real. Indeed, although the premise is based on dreams, it isn’t very… well, dreamlike. Who has linear dreams that are essentially action films? Whose dreams appear shot from a third-person perspective with scenes that don’t involve them?

Dreams are usually visualized from a first-person P.O.V., with the person dreaming involved in all the action. But forget the technical side — I don’t have to tell you that most dreams are bizarre, as if you’ve been doing mushrooms with David Lynch and Bugs Bunny while going backwards on a Disneyland ride during an electrical storm. Plus, they often contain a few good dream clichés. For example, if “Inception” were truly dreamlike, it would contain the following…

1. Leonardo DiCaprio finds himself in public wearing only pajamas, his underwear, or nothing at all, and tries to be cool about it around other people.

2. As bad guys chase him, he finds himself suddenly trapped in slow motion. He tries to scream for help, but no words come out of his mouth.

3. Speaking of mouth, his teeth feel loose in their sockets, and some fall out.

4. He finally manages to talk to his wife, but she changes before his eyes. She becomes Ellen Page and then his mother who in turn becomes his junior high school crush and then some woman from an insurance commercial before becoming his wife again.

5. In mid-conversation, he suddenly realizes that he had signed up for a math class at school, but had failed to attend class all semester long, and the final exam is tomorrow. And where the hell is the classroom?

6. He finds the class, but it becomes a theatrical stage from when he was a younger actor. The play is about to begin, and he realizes he doesn’t know any of his lines and will have to improvise the whole thing.

7. A cat feeds him his lines and becomes a wild beast that starts to stalk him. He runs into his childhood home and slams the door. He thinks he’s safe, then turns around and realizes he left the back door wide open.

8. Freaked out, he hops in his car, but can’t control it. He crashes into things and at one point finds himself hanging out the window, barely holding onto the steering wheel.

9. The car flies off a cliff and he loses his grip on it, but he can suddenly fly over the trees — as long as he concentrates on it. His concentration slips and he starts to fall back to earth.

10. Before he can hit bottom, he wakes to find that he is actually Joseph Gordon-Levitt busting moves to “You Make My Dreams” in a dance sequence in the middle of L.A.

Now THAT is a dream movie. And it’s easy to see: two burritos, some melatonin and I’m there. Who needs Hollywood?

Note: The following is meant to be satirical. The author has no affiliation with the Harvard Business Review or any idea what its editors could possibly be thinking.

HBR: Gettin' in touch with a new generation of business readers.

For 88 years, the Harvard Business Review has been the authoritative voice of critical business thinkers, featuring such legendary thought leaders as Peter Drucker, Theordore Levitt and Michael Porter, and popularizing such paradigm-shattering concepts as the glass ceiling, marketing myopia and the balanced scorecard.

Well, enough of that…

We, the new generation of editors at Harvard Business Review, have concluded that critical, cutting-edge business thinking is, like, so 20th century. Who’s got the attention span for that anymore? Imagine today’s business titans taking time to read groundbreaking articles that require thinking… Could billionaire entrepreneur and Harvard alum Mark Zuckerberg adequately explore privacy loopholes if he were contemplating long-term sustainable competitive advantage? Would the words “long-term sustainable competitive advantage” even fit in a Facebook update?

Or consider the bankers of Goldman Sachs, many of them Harvard MBAs. What’s the purpose of having them learn about the impact of corporate social responsibility on brand equity if there’s no way to short it?

As the self-proclaimed social media gurus say — and we’re big followers of self-proclaimed social media gurus — what’s most important is doing what your customers want because, according to the gurus, customers know everything. Customers are never wrong. Customers can see the future and determine what’s best for the world at large. Our customers are primarily business leader wannabes, and from our extensive studies (using Twitter search), we learned that what our customers want most is pith. Great pith. Pith that can fit into 140 characters or less.

So, after much deliberation involving multiple case studies (cases of Sam Adams Boston Lager, to be exact), we the new generation of HBR editors have decided to punt the in-depth, statistically substantiated studies written by PhD’s and veteran business executives. Hey, don’t blame us — we tried publishing those, and a bunch of know-it-all bloggers complained that they were too hard to read. True, we could have edited those articles to make them readable, but that would have required reading them, and they’re too hard to read. Plus, what editor does editing these days?

Instead, we turned to specialists in addressing high school business 101 students and members of the Greater Wasilla Chamber of Commerce. We’re talking consultants, of course. You may have seen one of our recent posts, “Two Rules for a Successful Presentation,” which contained this earth-shattering insight: “know thy audience.” What pith! And note the cleverness of the word “thy,” which is the author’s way of acknowledging that this bit of wisdom is 2,000 years old, give or take a millennium.

In addition, we’re staying fresh with a new generation of business leaders — leaders raised on “Legally Blonde” and the lyrics of Justin Timberlake — by hiring columnists who speak their language. Consider the “Awesomeness Manifesto,” in which the author says innovation is dead, and that the only thing that matters is being “awesome.” See, no thinking required!

Along these lines, we’re publishing the following articles in coming issues:

• The Third Rule Of Public Speaking: Don’t Forget To Wear Pants
• Terrific Smelling Hair + Other Keys To Boardroom Success
• Today’s CEO: Bringing Sexy Back
• Effective Corporate Communication Is, Like, Whatever
• Money Lets You Buy Things
• and our favorite actual quote from the recent SXSW conference:
  We Spend Most Of Our Lives Living Among Other People

If you have any ideas for articles, please let us know on Twitter (@HarvardBiz), since, you know, we value customer input and don’t like to read anything longer than a tweet.

One final change: We, the new generation of HBR editors, realize that most of these articles aren’t really about business. Rather, they cover the kind of basic etiquette and concepts once taught on PBS children’s programming before all public broadcasting was sold to News Corp. Since authenticity is so du jour, we’ve decided to be totally authentic and rename our august publication the Harvard Obviousness Review, or HOR. Catchy, no? You’ll still find the name Harvard Business Review on our website and other media, since strategic rebranding is, like, the kind of smart practical advice we don’t do anymore.

Happy reading, dudes!

Related Articles:

• Enough With The Fluff! A Recession Is No Time For Management B.S.!
• Why I Won’t Get A PhD: Exhibit 1A
• The Young Professor: How To Get Published
• Marketing Mix-Up: Being Treated Like Lois Lane
• Ivory Towers Vs Empty Calories: The Best And Worst Of Business Publishing

OK, sometimes it's a bit of a stretch...

Looks like it’s over for us marketing strategists.

Now I’m not saying that there’s no more need for marketing strategy; if you look at the anemic brands of most banks, airlines and Web 2.0 startups, you’ll see that the need for marketing is growing faster than Rush Limbaugh at a cheesecake bake-off.

But the opportunity to develop a revolutionary new marketing strategy may have passed. Sure, we marketers can still develop new tactics based on new mediums and new markets, but the big picture strategies have apparently all been done. Even worse, they’re now being recycled…

This dawned on me while teaching competitive strategies in my integrated marketing course at UCLA Extension. Although I’m quoting different marketing experts and their theories, I found myself repeating the same ideas disguised as different metaphors.

For example, in the 1976 classic “Marketing Warfare,” Jack Trout & Al Ries recommended that “a good flanking move must be made into an uncontested area.” Nineteen years later, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne recommended the exact same strategy, but opted for a nature metaphor with their “Blue Ocean Strategy.” A couple of years after that, Marty Neumeier’s “Zag” tapped his design experience and recommended “look for the white space.” Three bestselling marketing books. Same basic idea. Different metaphors.

Then there’s the current reigning king of marketing metaphors, Seth Godin…

Godin is an extremely savvy marketer who’s cranked out an entire shelf of business bestsellers. His method? Devising wildly creative metaphors — sneezers, purple cows, meatball sundaes and big red fezzes — for basic marketing concepts. Three of his books extol the virtues of being “remarkable,” which is his way of saying “be good and different,” which is to marketing what “profit” is to financiers. Common sense stated in an uncommon way, resulting in millions of books sold. Godin is the Rachael Ray of business lit.

Since I found myself wading knee-deep in metaphors before a score of marketing students, I decided to show them how they, too, can contrive their own. I asked one student to pick an item, any item. He suggested a cheeseburger. (In these late night classes, food is always high on the mind.) And right there in class, the Cheeseburger POV (Proposition o’ Value) was born…

The Cheeseburger POV: The Exclusive Recipe…

Your basic American cheeseburger consists of a meat patty layered with cheese, an obligatory slice of lettuce, and a bun. And like a cheeseburger, a good value proposition is greater than the sum of its parts:

• The meat: This is the core product benefit, which is what consumers primarily want. In a car, that would be the drivetrain that takes them from point A to point B. But a drivetrain is not terribly exciting by itself, so…
• The cheese: You layer your core product with features like leather seats and a killer stereo and xenon headlights. The more cheese, the tastier the product, and the more you can skimp on the expensive meat.
• The lettuce: This is the token nod to nutrition that enables consumers to say, hey, we’re eating healthy! In marketing, this is the corporate social responsibility element that’s the trend du jour. Think of the hybrid technology used to greenwash an SUV.
• The bun: Then there’s the styling, design and other fluffy branding elements that hold it all together.

Just apply this Cheeseburger POV, and you’ll have a product that satisfies the consumer and commands a tasty margin. (Ever see what a hybrid SUV costs?) If you crave even more profit, just ask your customer if they want “fries with that” (an extended warranty). The Cheeseburger POV can help you sketch out an idea for anything from an ecommerce site to a coffee shop to an MBA program.

Now it’s your turn to pull a Godin…

Anyone can coin a marketing metaphor — go ahead, give it a shot here. To help you get started, I’ve posted a list of suggested terms below. What do you think they represent?

Bacon Bits
Dodo Birds
Shrubbery
Tabernacle Choirs
Lederhosen
Duct Tape
Baba Ghanoush
Spackle

Just take one of those, apply it to some basic concepts from a marketing textbook, and expand it to 200 pages (large type, lots of leading). Voila! — you’ve got the basis of a business bestseller. Easy, right?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to concoct my own hit book — and find a late-night burger joint.

Related Articles:

• Meatball Sundaes and Cat Litter: Seth Godin’s Unappetizing Arguments
• The Young Professor: How To Get Published
• Marketing Mix-Up: Being Treated Like Lois Lane
• Not Exactly “Metafore!”: Politicians and Poetic License