Cheddar Man – Local Hero

In 1903 in a place called Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England, the skeletal remains of a man dating back to approximately 7150 BC were found. Yes, Cheddar, England is where Cheddar Cheese originated and has been made for about one thousand years. The remains are Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton and have been called, what else but, Cheddar Man.

In the 1990’s, the dawn of DNA testing, Cheddar Man and at least 20 residents of Cheddar had their DNA tested. Cheddar Man’s DNA was extracted from one of his molars. Cheddar Man was proven to be related to the living residents of Cheddar village, which brings us to the point of this posting. Cheddar Man was a local guy! His descendents didn’t wander too far from their ancestral home either.

What does it matter? A locality that is sustainable is a locality that sustains. If your location provides everything you need to survive such as food, shelter and clothing, why wander? Well, okay, what about the need to be self-actualized? A location’s culture must also be sustainable and sustained. I’ve written before that in this area, the south coast of Massachusetts, that our greatest export is educated youth. Even with a school system that others would envy, if there is no industry, commerce or enterprises for our young people to join, they will move on in search of employment.

Our economic system is such that a job or some form of livelihood is needed to fulfill our daily physical needs. We’ve got to work to buy food to eat to live. This area once subsisted on toil focused on the bounty of land and sea. The Industrial Revolution brought us the textile mills. Our standard of living increased with the nation’s. The automobile gave us mobile freedom and the suburbs (where the farms used to be). Are there Cheddar men amongst us? Are you one? I am not. One side came to New Bedford via Canada and Normandy. The other side came to New Bedford via the mountainous region of the Portuguese mainland. My roots in this area are only one hundred and thirty years old.

Yet, my ancestors brought what was local to them here. So, is local a place, a state of mind or something else completely? In the real estate profession the key factor in selecting the right property is location, or, as they like to say: location, location, location. Location requires locality. Locality is both a physical and an emotional sense of place. Where are you located? Where are you situated? Where do you live, work and play? How much and in what way does your current location sustain you?

Is self-reliance a benefit, an advantage or feature of your location? Is self-reliance a form of independence? Does change force us to change? Is change the result of external uncontrollable forces? Are we left to decide whether to change or be changed. Someone once said that what we are never changes. But, who we are never stops changing. Ben Franklin said we could only depend on death and taxes. In a letter he wrote in 1789 after the turmoil and triumph of the American Revolution he stated, “Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Permanency, like that of the Cheddar Man and his modern cousins on his mother’s side is not certain. Alvin Toffler described that: The rate of turnover in our lives, for example, can be influenced by conscious decisions. We can, for example, cut down on change and stimulation by consciously maintaining longer term relationships with the various elements of our physical environment. Now, remember that Toffler wrote this in the Seventies, another period of turmoil and uncertainty in America.

He went on to say that: Thus, we can refuse to purchase throw-away products. We can hang onto the old jacket for another season; we can stoutly refuse to follow the latest fashion trend; we can resist when the salesman tells us it's time to trade in our automobile. In this way, we reduce the need to make and break ties with the physical objects around us.

We can use the same tactic with respect to people and the other dimensions of experience. There are times when even the most gregarious person feels anti-social and refuses invitations to parties or other events that call for social interaction.

He was talking about the creation of a “personal stability zone” in which: We consciously disconnect. In the same way, we can minimize travel. We can resist pointless reorganizations in our company, church, fraternal or community groups. In making important decisions, we can consciously weigh the hidden costs of change against the benefits. Perhaps stability is sanity?

Why else is it that when we find ourselves outside of our stability zone, home and hearth if I may, we either bring some of it with us or look for it, or something similar to it where we find ourselves? Why else is it that Hoo Mee Chow Mein Mix brings such joy to the expatriated south coast Massachusetts resident along with Portuguese sausage products and coffee syrup just to name a few stabilizers within our personal stability zones?

Perhaps it’s because we all need something we can identify with and with that thought in mind, I present for your sampling, the concept of food, location and sustainability. The more I post, the more (hopefully, I think) evolve. The more I evolve, the more I am convinced that in order to be truly happy, as I learned in Psyche 101, we need a sense of control, belonging and verifiable affection. So, for all of the other Cheddar “men” out there, please consider this: sustainability is anchored to locality. And, a sense of place is represented by what we share at the table. It is with this thought, or revelation, that I am contemplating shifting my thoughts on my vocation – marketing, to something that has always intrigued me – food!

To me, food defines my personal stability zone in many ways. It represents my cultural background, it is engaged in at my family’s table and it connects me to what I am and where I live. It is about sustainability, survival and culture. It allows me to describe directly what I’ve learned and supports me indirectly as a metaphor for what I’m thinking. And, it may redirect me to rename this blog to: In Search of a Personal Stability Zone to explore our collective:

• Conscious decisions
• Environmental relationship
• Ties to physical objects
• Social interactions
• Pointless reorganizations

As well as, perhaps assisting in the investigation in to the strengths and weaknesses of current or popular short-term and long-term investments that are supposed to benefit us rather than destroy us. So yes, what I am has not changed but who I am is changing – again.

They say, go with your passion and food and everything about it is a passion of mine but not, in a gourmet sense. Or, in any matter connected to traditional food writing but, more so, it is about the one personal stability zone we can control – the table. Here is where we are identified, how we identify with where we are right now and perhaps where we’re going. It is also a way for me to tie food, art and marketing into one package in one place just to sustain myself and my sanity.

The Ladder, Your Horse & Where You Stand.

Here’s the third installation (of seven) of Ries and Trout’s - The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! This time, it’s Immutable Laws 7, 8 and 9. Number Seven is - The strategy to use depends on which rung you occupy on the ladder. Before I get into it, remember, in business as in life, the higher you are on the ladder, the more the fall will hurt or worse. Do you know what rung of the competitive ladder you occupy? Look down. What do you see? Look up. What do you see? Is anybody sharing that rung?

One of the worse marketing strategies is to “be just like” whatever company you’re competing with. Why would you want to do that? Monkey see – monkey do. Tit for tat. It’s not a strategy, it’s a mistake. If you’re on top; your biggest competitor is yourself. How you strategize to continually better yourself and what you do is the way to go. Keep an eye on the other guy but mind your own business. Your best strategy is commitment, consistency and trust building. That strategy will reward you with loyalty, repeat sales and a solid reputation.

Contests always determine a winner and the losers. There are all kinds of contests. The worst of them is the spitting contest. It’s a silly exercise in one-upmanship. The winner wins because they have more time, money and resources than the winner. Pricing wars are a classic example of this. Number Eight is - In the long run, every market becomes a two horse race. In a two-horse race, it’s all about endurance, strength and speed. Even if the law says the race is inevitable, avoid it. In a weight lifting contest the strongest lifter wins even if it’s by a few ounces or pounds. With so little contrast between the contestants, how’s the customer to know who’s superior?

You want to be the best? Find out what it is that you do that no one else can or will or, how your customers perceive you. You may be trying too hard. Yes, there’s the Democrats and the Republicans. Yes, there are countless examples of a two choice, paper or plastic, either or choices. When it comes down to a - this or that - situation, it hurts the customer because they don’t have many options and as such, both contestants end up losing customers.

As for Number Nine - If you are shooting for second place, your strategy is determined by the leader. So, what determines the market leader in your business environment? Size? Scope? Services? Longevity? Number two is a great position to be in because the customers are forced to chose either or, which is totally the opposite of I said in the previous paragraph. But you see, in this case, you chose to shoot for second place. Avis used their second place ranking to their advantage in the rental car market. They knew that racing Hertz was futile so they embraced their status and declared – We try harder! Whether you’re number one or number fifty-seven is based on the annual industry ranking criteria of sales, number of employees and such data. What really counts is whether or not your customers, (in their minds) think you’re the best or among the best.

In the end, regardless of where you’re perched on the ladder or how good your horse (or, jockey) is or, where you stand at this very moment in the annual industry “standings”, it’s the customer that got you there and it’s the customer that can bump you up or bring you down. My father once said, “Never mess with somebody stupider than you.” As with most things he said, it took awhile to sink in. Winning isn’t about what you have to gain. It’s more about what you risk losing.

In most ladder, horse race and first versus second place scenarios, the key point is value. And, most business people ignore value, or what the customer values, in favor of price. No one wins a price war. If you get customers hooked on price, price is all you’ve got. But, in nearly every industry survey, price come in fourth place or lower on the ladder of what customers want and need. Customers don’t care about size. Size only matters if it represents the power to offer a wider selection and to deliver service better and faster than anyone. So, you see, where you stand is where you want to be.

Ask the Red Queen. Even though she’s a character in Lewis Carroll's - Through the Looking-Glass, what she said, "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place," does make sense. The quote is also referenced as the Red Queen Hypothesis, which refers evolutionary systems where continuing adaptation is needed in order for a species to maintain its fitness relative to the systems it is co-evolving with. Evolve, adapt and everything takes care of itself

Indeed? Actions Speak Louder Than Words…

I received one of those emails that make you wonder whether or not you really do pay as much attention to things as you’d like to think you do. Then again, perhaps there are people in this world with way too much time on their hands. This email came from someone who is always passing along emails like this. No harm. No foul. They were just sharing something that was sent to them. It tickled their fancy. It was a list of imponderables to ponder. Chin scratchers as the old timers used to say. There is some value to this exercise. Maybe too, it’s about not accepting everything at face value. Or, maybe it’s about our skewed attitudes about certain things. So, with that in mind, I’m going to attempt to answer the seemingly unanswerable questions; sometimes seriously and sometimes not. You be the judge.

Why do supermarkets make the sick walk all the way to the back of the store to get their prescriptions while healthy people can buy cigarettes at the front? ANSWER: The merchandising “authority” is not in sync with the ADA (American’s with Disabilities Act) “authority” and that may be a sign of a bigger problem – right-hand versus left-hand. Neither knows what the other is up to. The merchandiser wants to heighten your awareness of everything else in the store as you walk towards the pharmacy with the hope that they’ll get some impulse purchases out of you. Or, at the very least, they feel most of their shoppers will bundle their errands so, to accommodate them, they’ve placed the in-store pharmacy at the end of the “store flow” in the grand plan-o-gram. Okay, so what about the cigarettes? First, if you were that ill, you more than likely wouldn’t be in the store. Second, if you smoke, you’re not healthy. Third, when you need smokes, you need smokes. That’s the only priority. Get ‘em and light ‘em up. It’s like having to go to the bathroom when you gotta go.

Why do banks leave vault doors open and then chain the pens to the counters? ANSWER: You can touch the pen at will but you need to be a bank employee to get behind the teller line. That would be a somewhat logical answer. Then again, the open vault may be a psychological “thing” to indicate to customers that the bank management feels secure about their security and so should you be. Never worked for a bank so this is a shot in the dark! Or, maybe the pen thing has to do with possession being nine-tenths of the law. Another thought, that vault door is heavy. Maybe it’s plain old laziness.

Why do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in our driveways and put our useless junk in the garage? ANSWER: We consume too much. We have way too much as George Carlin said, “…This is my stuff, that's your stuff, that'll be his stuff over there. That's all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. That's all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house…” Our priorities are all screwed up and our common sense is perhaps not as common as it once was. He also asked us to ponder, “"When did we get so thirsty in America? Is everybody so dehydrated they have to have their own portable supply of fluids with them at all times?" Department stores have Organization aisles or sections or departments with stuff to put your stuff in and it still ends up in the garage.

Why don't you ever see the headline 'Psychic Wins Lottery'? ANSWER: That’s a good question. But, maybe the really good psychics have won the lottery but kept it to themselves. Sharing a gift is one thing. Cash, well, that’s another matter. Or, it could be a psychic code of ethics. Or, maybe – oh, never mind!

Why is it that a person who invests your money is called a broker? ANSWER: The answer is obvious isn’t it? I’m sure a psychic can tell you. In this case, a futurist will do. Alvin Toffler will tell you that it’s not really investing, it’s gambling.

Why is the time of day with the slowest traffic called rush hour? ANSWER: Blame it on the Law of Diminishing Returns or, the Law of Supply and Demand. If you want to avoid rush hour, you have to either leave before or after. I guess that means that if you’re in a rush when everybody else is you’ll be in a jam. Traffic jams create a phenomenon called traffic waves. You’ve seen a traffic wave at traffic lights. That’s when, although the light turned green, no one seems to be moving. In actuality the wave is the result of everyone in the line of traffic not moving at the same time. What’s the solution? Get the rail down here instead of talking about it and studying it for another fifty years!

Why do they sterilize the needle for lethal injections? ANSWER: Because the longer you have to get to know a convicted killer, the further away the horror of their deeds seems to the present time, unless, of course, you’re the victim’s family. It’s perhaps about complacency bred from familiarity. Or, maybe it’s about indifference to those whose lives he destroyed because you know the convict better than you know the victim or the victim’s family. Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.” Justice is not swift enough for the wronged and too quick for the wrongdoer. “Justice delayed is justice denied,” according to social activist Gabriel Pendas. But, who is justice for? Maybe the needle is sterilized for the same reason there’s too much junk in our garage for our cars.

ONE SIZE FITS ALL ANSWER: If I may – I believe the answer to all of these questions has to do with our culture. If society shapes our consciousness as Karl Marx said, it is because our economic system determines the ideas we have. We rush to work and rush home in a car we can’t put in the garage to make money to buy more junk and get stressed out and smoke and complain about walking too far to the in-store pharmacy to by the meds we need to relieve the pain or counteract the unhealthy lifestyle we live and buy lottery tickets in the hopes that more money will make our lives better and convince ourselves that if we won the lottery that we’d put a lot of it in the bank or, call a broker to invest it for us and then we’d have time to devote to causes like the death penalty or victims’ rights.

When in fact, we all have too much time on our hands that we waste on shopping and acquiring more stuff which means we need to work and on and on it goes. Although we believe what we think and say is the truth, the truth is just the opposite. If we had to revert to spending most of our productive hours finding and processing our food as our forefathers once did, we might not only be better off, we’d have less stuff and more common sense. And, maybe, we’d be in less of a rush during rush hour and not so worried about pilfered pens, too. Well, the silly email did more than give me a chuckle.

Before Its Time – No Whining About Wine Show

Is it possible to be ahead of the times? May Ray, the avant garde artist believed that something was either of it time or not. Perhaps a better question is what happens when you have something that no one realizes they need? I think that’s the real point. If you have a product or service that may intrigue many but doesn’t sell, then it’s because you haven’t done a good enough job of persuading those who could use it the most. That’s the biggest “trick” in marketing. The other big trick is to get paid for what you do. Payment equals a confirmation of value. When you give something, anything, away, there needs to be some form of reciprocity. Without compensation or reciprocity the value of free is, well, nothing.

And, once people have access to something for nothing, you can’t charge them for it. Well, you can, but, it takes some strategy. The strategy is similar to the anecdote about boiling a frog. If you drop the frog in hot water, it’ll jump out. Wouldn’t you? But if you put the frog in a pan of cold water and turn on the heat, the frog will slowly get used to it. Buying requires commitment. Commitment comes from an expected consistency in the relationship. Once you have a happy customer, they’ll not only come back over and over, they’ll introduce their friends to you. The more likes, friends or fans you have, the more, as Robert Cialdini states in his best seller – Influence, social proof you have.

How could we have gone wrong? It was a simple business plan. Eat good food. Drink good wine. Meet interesting people, travel and get paid for it. Well, three out of five ain’t bad! The philosophy was as simple as the business plan. We were not wine experts. We knew more about wine than the average guy and a heck of a lot less than the real wine experts; the people who made it and sold it. We started our adventure on cable access. We had a hummable theme song that was a parody of the old Rawhide television series – swirling, sniffing, sipping… We took on the sacred cows and dumbed down wine so the average Jane and Joe could not only understand it but enjoy the process of it as well. People liked the show. Then we were asked to “bring it on over” to the local ABC affiliate in Providence, RI. We did a pilot for Public Television. We were on our way!

It all came to a crashing halt. What my friend and neighbor and the other half of the original (I’m almost positive we were the first in the country) Wine Guys came to realize is that we needed sponsors to get the show produced as a public television how-to series. Okay, we knew we needed sponsors but we thought we’d get sponsors in the wine business. Why didn’t we? Marketing 101 – if you make something too simple then the price may be scrutinized. The wine – if you make wine simple and understandable and less mysterious, you cause a lot of problems for some people. Now this was before Trader Joe’s and Charles Estate got together to give the World, the one, the only – Two Buck Chuck. You see, we were ahead of the consciousness curve. We were even approached by one of the folks who saw what we saw and made his family’s New Jersey wine business a huge really big success even though we didn’t sell him the Wine Guy name. Oh, well. And now, it seems that Seven-Eleven is launching a line of good four dollar wines in their stores, too. Even though our audience liked us, trusted us and thought we offered them something useful, the people who sold wine weren’t sold on supporting us.

I’m focusing. I’m focusing! The real problem with the Wine Guy concept was that two middle-aged guys who made learning about wine simple and funny was great until it clashed with the mystique of wine and the price structure that it supported. The cost of a bottle of wine is based on several things. One of those things is cost perception. The mystique of wine adds to the dollar value. Drop the mystique and you’ll have to drop the prices, too. Part of the mystique is that the more you pay for a bottle of wine, the more it’s worth. Yes, there are other pricing factors including the quality of the vintage, which is based on the harvest, the case yield and a bunch of other practical stuff. That’s the short version of it. Most people, women in particular, make a wine selection to drink or to give based on how attractive the bottle label is. Most guys select a wine based on price because they think price in an important indicator of quality. As stupid as that is, that’s the way the wine distributors like it. Now you’d think one of us (yeah, the guy who teaches marketing) would have figured this out - wrong! We were having too much fun swirling, sniffing and sipping to pay attention to the reality of the business. The other thing is that the closer you are to something the harder is to see it as it really is. Yes, in vino veritas – in wine there is truth – no kidding.

So here I am looking back and looking forward. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. Can we, knowing now what we didn’t know then, resurrect the The Wine Guy Show for giggles or for profit? Hum, let’ see. The name – wine guys is so generic and has been glommed by so many that, well, we’ll have to rethink the name. That’ll be the first point of business. The whole wine craze isn’t as big as it was when we kicked off our first show. And, bag-in-a-box wine has become somewhat of a secretive guilty pleasure. Hey, this stuff keeps walking away with the prizes in double-blind taste tests. What now? Well, I say we take this dog and pony show back on the original trail with a couple of tweaks to the master plan – mainly – making money. The other consideration is reflecting on how many wines there are in the world and where they come from. All fifty of these United States produce wine from either grapes or fruit. There are at least fifty vineyards and wineries in New England alone.

So I think, we, the original wine guys, Mike Daigle and I (Ron Fortier), should focus on our own wine appellation (area) of these United States – The Southeastern New England Wine Growing Appellation. This is an area that stretches from Cape Cod and the Islands and on down the southern coast of Massachusetts towards coastal Rhode Island and coastal Connecticut. There is a lot to see, eat, drink and do here. We’ll become the ex officio, de facto and self-proclaimed - Vinomytes or Alvinos or, Vinificants of our own backyard. Better to be a good sized fish in a small pond versus a minnow in a big pond anyway. Ah, yes, making money is as important as having fun since, if people pay you, you must be doing something right. Maybe we offer our very own line of affordable wines, as well as, limited edition collections of the best the Southeastern New England Wine Growing Appellation has to offer. We could add to this mix, our original earthy approach to teaching anyone who’ll listen how to begin and continue to enjoy wine. We’ll go back to our plan to eat good food. Drink good wine. Meet interesting people, travel and, damn it, this time we’ll get paid for it!

Technology has come a long way since the original Wine Guy Show aired in 1992. The internet was in its infancy then. Streaming video was crude. Social media didn’t exist. And, video wasn’t as easy to produce as it is now. Please join us in raising a glass to this repurposing of the vintage Wine Guy Show concepts with a bit more focus, social media and a beautiful part of the country to play in. Based on Guy Kawasaki’s new book: Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions – if we decide to resurrect the concept, we’ll have to reaffirm our likability, as well as, the trust people had in us to tell the truth about wine and, we’ll have to work on making our product (that’s us) great! Self-aggrandizing as it may seem, our audience and followers thought we had a great product and, that we also had good chemistry. They trusted us to gently teach and guide them through the sometimes confusing and overwhelming world of wine. And to mimic what Sally Field once said at the Oscars – they like us, they really like us! Folk trusted us because we always reminded them that even if we knew more about wine than they did, we still didn’t know as much as the experts. That’s why we surrounded ourselves with people in the business. Sure, we were having fun but they had a business to run.

One question I’m pondering is whether or not we’re still viable. The other thing is that, the show was never about wines. It was about wine. The difference is that the experts deal with the minutia of the wines of the world but we dealt with wine as a metaphor for sociability. Wine was the original social medium. Wine was once safer to drink, in most cases, than water. It was central to religious rites and cultural ceremony. Wine, in our opinion, was always about the conviviality of the table. And, we think it’s needed now more than ever to get people back to the table to eat, converse and share in one of nature’s miracles. We always believed that, as someone wiser than us once said, excess is the death of pleasure. Even though the show’s been off the air since 1997, people still ask or reminisce about some of their favorite episodes and coax us to bring back the show. You can’t buy brand equity like that! With that in mind – let’s see what happens. Maybe I should call Mark Hellendrung to see how he resurrected Narragansett Beer…