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I was talking recently with a group of graphic designers. The subject was good work: not doing it, but how to get it accepted. Designers like to complain. We cast ourselves as embattled defenders of good taste and inventive ideas; arrayed against us are armies of insensitive clients, determined to thwart us, whose pigheadedness can only be defeated by dedication, cunning and guile.

We traded war stories for a while, but one seasoned designer in our midst was silent. We finally asked him what tricks he used to get good work done. “Well, I guess I’m lazy,” he said. “I just make sure all my clients are smart people with unique messages and good products. The rest is easy.”

The rest is easy. Looking back at the design work that led to Barack Obama’s historic victory in November 2008, I wonder if that was the trick. Although much has been made — rightly so — of the ingenious and adaptable “O” logo developed by Sol Sender’s team, Obama himself was his own best logo. Young, African-American, charismatic, change wasn’t just a message, it was the candidate’s very embodiment. When it was all said and done, Barack Obama was a smart guy with a unique message and a good product. And what designer wouldn’t wish for that in a client?

Selling change isn’t easy in a world that tends to prefer the comfort of the familiar. We all know what a revolution looks like: handmade signs, scrawled graffiti, the voice of the people. But Obama’s campaign was the opposite. Reportedly, the candidate resisted at first. “He did not initially like the campaign’s blue and white logo — intended to appear like a horizon, symbolizing hope and opportunity — saying he found it too polished and corporate,” reported the New York Times. But David Axelrod and his team prevailed. They must have known that the revolution, when it finally came, would have to be wrapped up in the most comprehensive corporate identity program the 21st century has yet seen. And it worked, as Designing Obama, the new book from Scott Thomas, Design Director of New Media for Obama for America, reveals.

Like every other graphic designer I know, I watched the live images of campaign rallies from Toledo to Topeka to Tallahassee with a growing feeling of awe. Obama’s oratorical skills were one thing. But the awe-inspiring part was the way all of the signs were faithfully, and beautifully, set in Hoefler and Frere-Jones’s typeface Gotham. “Trust me,” I told Newsweek back in February 2008. “I’ve done graphics for events — and I know what it takes to have rally after rally without someone saying, ‘Oh, we ran out of signs, let’s do a batch in Arial.’” But it isn’t just strict standards and constant police work that keeps an organization on brand. It’s the mutual desire for everyone to have every part of the effort look like The Real Thing. At the height of the campaign, my daughter asked me if I could design a flyer for a friend’s Obama benefit party at a little bar in Hoboken, New Jersey. We took the text and reset it in Gotham, downloaded the O logo, and put it together in minutes. “Wow,” my daughter said. “It looks like Obama’s actually going to be there!” Exactly.

The same thing was happening all over the country. In a world where access to digital media and social networks is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, Obama 08 became the first Open Source political campaign. Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” poster — an icon that’s destined, if you ask me, to occupy the 2008 slot of any historical timeline drawn up a hundred years from now — sits at the top of an astonishingly vast collection of posters, websites, buttons, You Tube videos, and even pumpkins, some generated by professionals, some by ordinary citizens, all of whom motivated by the urge to create a sense that their candidate was actually going to be there.

Political operatives will study this campaign and its design program for years, trying to unlock its secrets. Many will copy it. But few will capture its magic. It seems so simple, doesn’t it? A good logo, consistent typography, get everyone to join in. They’ll have all the ingredients in place except the hardest one: the client. You need a smart person with a unique message and a good product. Then, like the fellow said, the rest is easy.

By Rich Harshaw

Everything you’ve ever learned about marketing and advertising is WRONG. Everything you’ve ever heard everything you’ve ever tried, everything you’ve ever done, it’s all WRONG.

Hello, my name is Rich Harshaw; I’m the CEO of Y2Marketing, the nation’s leading marketing consulting and fulfillment agency. What I want to do in this series of articles is teach you a system for innovating and marketing your company to a point that it’s instantly evident that you’re the obvious choice to do business with. I want to show you how to make those advantages of doing business with your company so obvious to your prospects and customers that they quickly and easily draw this one simple conclusion: “I would have to be an absolute fool to do business with anyone else but you…regardless of price.”

Let’s say that you own a moving company… and you spend $3,000 a month in the Yellow Pages for a full-page ad, and that ad generates an average of 70 calls per month. Is that good? Is that bad? Well, it depends….but, let me ask you this: What if you could take that same full page ad that costs $3,000 a month, and by just changing what it says, and how it says it–now, instead of getting 70 calls a month, you could generate an average of 955 calls a month…and the average quality of the prospect was quantifiably BETTER? Let’s say you owned that moving company. Would you be excited about that? 955 better qualified calls a month instead of 70? If not, we need to take your pulse and see if you are ALIVE! That’s what’s called getting more results–making more money–for the same time, the same money, and the same effort spent.

Or let’s say you’re the CEO of an up and coming bank that is trying to get a stronger foothold into the small business loan market. Let’s say you’ve got 22 retail locations supported by $370,000 a month in total marketing and advertising expenses for the small business loan program, including heavy telemarketing, direct mail, newspaper, and some radio and television…. as well as various brochures and collateral at each sales office. What if you’re that CEO, and despite spending a fortune on advertising and marketing, your efforts to generate leads and subsequently close loans are losing money and is actually getting worse as time goes by?

What if you could change the message being communicated in your marketing and advertising and in all of those brochures and other collateral materials, and by doing so you could increase the number of leads generated by 465%, increase the quality of those leads, and therefore increase your closing ratio from a paltry 8% to a healthy 31%? Not by changing the amount of money being spent on the program, not by hiring some expensive celebrity to say he gets his loans from you, not by doing anything substantially different than you’re doing now…. Just by changing what you’re saying in your marketing so that it WORKS BETTER.

Whether you spend $3,000 a month, $370,000 a month, or $3,000,000 a month on marketing, I’m going to show you how to use the “Monopolize Your Marketplace” system to leverage what you’re already doing and get those kinds of results for YOUR business by changing the way you do all of your marketing and advertising, including advertisements in all media, brochures, websites, trade shows, signage and everything else. I’m not talking about radical changes that are “creative” or strange or weird or anything else.

The process for getting these kinds of results is very systematic, and anyone with a strong business background can figure it out. But simply put, my purpose is to show you how to change your marketing and advertising, and allow you to leverage your marketing momentum. Just like the moving company and the bank in the examples, and just like the dozens of examples I’m going to give you in this series of articles. The result is you make more money for the same time, money, and effort expended.

Most companies simply don’t know how to do this. Some companies know their marketing could use some help and that it’s under leveraged, and as a result, they’re looking for solutions. Maybe that’s you. But there’s a larger group, a group that doesn’t really understand the untapped potential that lies in their marketing. They spend some money on marketing or advertising, get some results, make some money, and then decide that whatever results they’re getting are probably about as good as it gets… and figure that there’s not much they can do about it.

They figure that the 70 calls a month on the $3,000 ad is about what you ought to get for a $3,000 ad; they never imagined that 955 calls were even possible. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you just understand what you’re going to learn on this program, if you understand how to run what we call the marketing equation on a consistent basis, then you’ll always get predictable, consistent, and inevitably huge results every time you do anything called “marketing.”

The system is based on unchanging principles of human nature that dictate that people always want to make the best buying decision possible and therefore marketing’s job–your job–is NOT to YAK incessantly about how great you are or how low your prices are–but rather, your job is to simply facilitate the prospect’s decision making process, and allow them to feel like they’re in CONTROL of the decision, based on having enough quantity and quality of information. The system is truly a breakthrough in marketing and advertising, yet it’s simple and easy to understand. We have thousands of client successes to prove that it works literally every time it’s implemented, regardless of what kind of business or industry you’re in.

We compete head to head with marketing consultancies and large traditional advertising agencies who grub money from their clients with no accountability for results. These agencies hate our guts because we expose their ineptitude and reveal our results-getting processes to our clients so they can evaluate for themselves… just like we’re going to do on this program… and then we show them step-by-step how to make more money every time they run an ad, produce a brochure, create a website, show up at a trade show, send a sales person out in the field, or any other sales-generating activities. The ad agencies hate us so bad because we threaten their very existence; they even call us the “anti-agency.”

So how can I say that everything you’ve ever learned is WRONG? How can I accuse you, without ever having met you, of leaving huge untapped profits on the table that are easily and readily available just by doing what I’m about to share with you? How can I say, in essence, that you don’t know what you’re talking about marketing-wise–even given the fact that there’s a good chance that you’ve been doing marketing for 10 or 20 or 40 years–and you’ve been getting what most people would consider good results that whole time?

Well, I’m not going to answer that question right now….in fact, I’m going to let you answer that question for yourself as you read this series of articles; If I do my job, then I think that answer will become self-evident. But I’ll make you a promise right now: This is not hype, it’s not the same old stuff you’ve heard a million times repackaged…even though that’s what all the so-called marketing gurus and ad agencies would like for you to think. And even if you do think it’s the same old stuff, I’m going to give you some evaluations later on to prove to you, quantifiably, that it isn’t. Anybody who’s claiming we’re using the same old formulas and processes should be producing marketing and advertising that looks like ours does, works like ours does, and most importantly, makes money like ours does. They should have a specified set of rules and formulas and strategies that can systematically be applied to any kind of business across the board. They should provide a set of evaluations that will allow anyone to instantly and objectively judge and rate their own marketing and predict the success of a marketing campaign before spending any money. And guess what? Nobody does. That’s right, nobody. This information is exactly what you’ve needed and been looking for to take your business to the next level of profitability and success.

Rich Harshaw is the founder of the Monopolize Your Marketplace system and CEO of Y2Marketing Business Marketing Strategies