blog

Hi. And welcome to the Barefoot blog. I get the honor, and the implicit pressure, of writing the first blog entry for our new website. First, I should probably tell you what to expect from the entries that I write. It’s very simple. I want to share information that I think readers will find to be worth their time. And when I say that, I imagine our readers to be those considering Barefoot as an agency partner, those considering us a potential employer, and in all likelihood, every now and then my mom — who will be checking to see whether or not I should be considered a failure. Kidding. Second, I want to make it a bit entertaining, which I really just define as being funny. And since the only thing I can safely make fun of is myself or the agency, you’ll see most of the humor will be self-deprecating.

One quick aside on what you won’t find. You won’t find me venting about current projects, challenges or clients. That would violate the trust our partners put in our relationship, and frankly, intuition tells me that might be bad business.

Today I primarily want to focus on Barefoot and how we’re bringing some focus to our own agency positioning (thus the new website). We’ve found, like many agencies, that while we do an amazing job getting our clients to hone in on a positioning and singular point of difference, we haven’t done a real good job defining our own positioning. And while we have historically denied that, we’ve faced up to the truth, and decided to put a stake in the ground and focus our new business efforts on those clients that would benefit from the behavioral learning and expertise we’re developing as we focus on “Marketing the Pursuit of Happiness®”.

What is “Marketing the Pursuit of Happiness?”

It’s marketing products and services that consumers are willing to rocket for. Those of you who are familiar with Michael Silverstein’s book—“Trading Up” will know what this means, but for the rest of us, rocketing is a consumer purchase behavior defined by spending a disproportionate amount of your effort or income on something that is important to you, or as we define it here at Barefoot, things you do, buy or purchase in “the pursuit of happiness.”

If you look at our new identity system, you’ll see a series of what appears to be unrelated objects. They each represent an item that reflects a product or service that one of us here at Barefoot rockets for. For example, if you look at my business card, on the back you’ll see a whiskey barrel. Not because I spend a disproportionate amount of my income on whiskey. I don’t. It’s because a whiskey barrel literally marks the entrance to a large group of islands on the eastern shore of the Georgian Bay. Pointe au Baril (French for Barrel) is where our family has a summer cottage, and the whiskey barrel mounted at the point is a symbol that has denoted safe passage to sailors since the 1800’s. It is quite possibly one of the most beautiful places in the world, and I happily spend a disproportionate amount of my money getting from here in Cincinnati to there. And I spend as much time there as I can every summer.

Let me try to explain a bit more on why we’ve adopted “Marketing the Pursuit of Happiness” as our positioning.

• First, the agency environment is incredibly competitive and a differentiated agency position is critical to our long-term success. We wanted to develop a POV for Barefoot that’s not only different, but of substance and value to prospective clients. A clear reason to pick up the phone and call an agency in Cincinnati.
• Second, while this does more narrowly defines our prospecting efforts (otherwise it wouldn’t be an effective position), we believe this to be a significant market since virtually every category includes an option for which you can trade up or rocket. So while we are not narrowly focused in on a category (i.e. agriculture or B2B), the consumer behaviors we’re learning and the marketing tools we’re developing are narrowly focused.
• Third, when the purchase of goods and services are driven by a desire, hunger or passion for them, they lend themselves to emotional advertising that is passionate, smart, fresh and memorable. The very kind of work we excel at.
• Fourth, these are purchases that people tend to research and become experts on. And they like to share what they’ve learned. This opportunity for buzz and brand advocacy plays to our strength in non-traditional media and interactive.
• Finally, we’ve chosen this positioning because we’ll be pursuing our own happiness. Pitching accounts people here are passionate about, meaning those accounts for which people here already trade-up. I’ve talked a little bit about my passion in this blog with more to follow. Stop back soon and see what some of my partners rocket for.

Remember, you’re happier when you go Barefoot.*

* Our lawyer just pointed out that this is a claim. The preceding statement reflects the opinion of Doug Worple only. It is based on qualitative research and has not been extensively tested with a large enough sample of clients. If you’d like to volunteer to find out if it’s true, please contact me immediately.