Multifactorial.

It’s an ugly, six syllable word. It does not roll off the tongue. It contorts the mouth even to say it.

Its definition is intuitively obvious: of or pertaining to, or arising through the action of many factors.

In plain English: “It’s more complicated than originally thought.”

Pharmacogenetics for Cro-Magnons

I heard my younger brother Matt, a research oncologist, use the word in a sentence to explain to me why cancer research is so complex. He specializes in pharmacogenetics.

(Which, to my Cro-Magnon brain, sounds awfully close to the word Walgreens, where I pick up my family’s medications. But I digress.)

In genetics, multifactorial refers to the many factors that cause a disease, including the interaction of genes as well as environmental factors.

One of the assumptions of early cancer research was that, ultimately, a single cure (read: drug) would be found. I don’t know that any scientist believes that anymore. Instead, there eventually may be as many drug variations as there are humans. Each human is unique and seems to respond to the toxicity or efficacy of drugs uniquely. There’s no one drug for everyone. It may end up that everyone with cancer needs a Drug for One.

Silver bullet myth

The word is also relevant when thinking about growth.

Just recently, my firm completed a project for a client with the goal of creating a plan to increase attendance at one of its conferences by 20 percent. We looked at retention data for the previous 10 years, conducted an online study of constituents, and then interviewed both recent and long-term attenders. We even located some retention data from a competitor conference.

The results of the research confirmed once again the deep truth that rarely is there “one thing,”  especially for an already successful conference. There was no silver bullet.

Instead, there were several reasons why growth had plateaued. Multifactorial.

Thus, what creates new branches of growth is almost always more complicated than originally thought. It’s a snap if there is only one obvious lever to pull.

But multiple levers create complexity. And a 20 percent increase is a big number.

Generally, marketing can contribute only a little to that big of a bump in growth. Something needs to change fundamentally within the organization for a 20 percent rise in attendance.

Multifactorial.

I’m a member at a local health club that recently spiked in growth.

It’s an “eat or be eaten” world, and when another local health club closed its doors for a couple weeks, my club feasted on the carrion. Note the phrase my club.

One day while I jogged around the indoor track, I rounded a corner and almost flattened a wizened lady who was walking in a run-only lane. I mumbled to myself something slightly profane and gave her a wide berth.

Does she not know which lane is for walkers? Is she illiterate? Can she not read?

Then one morning after my workout, I wanted simply to sit in one of the chairs in the lounge, sip the free coffee, and cool down before driving home. There was no open chair. A bunch of folks who looked like they had just caught the bus over from the retirement community sipped free coffee and chatted cheerily, like late-night patrons at a neighborhood bar.

Not long after, I began noticing a not-so-subtle change in the men’s locker room. I don’t classify myself as a “younger man” (I’m 46), except that I’ve noticed that there is a great divide in age (and psychology) between men who wrap a towel around their waist while in the locker room and those who appear to feel more comfortable with themselves. I know this sounds age-ist, but the male body after about 70 is no French painting.

Here’s the marketing story: A competitor goes under, and the senior management of my club likely said, “Wow, let’s create a promotion to cherry-pick these memberships from the other club – and voila! we’ll grow while having to spend no real marketing dollars to acquire them. We grow with no added expense!”

Makes perfect sense.

So management repaved the parking lot to narrow the parking spots – and thus increased parking capacity. Then, I noticed for the first time some signs that trumpeted valet parking. Yes. Valet parking for a health club! Most recently, the furniture in the lounge area was upgraded and expanded, ostensibly for those whom “going to the health club” means in large part chatting with friends and drinking branded coffee.

So, my question to you: Has this club’s position in the market changed, given that the average age of the club spiked along with the new growth?

Growth always involves a shift in power from the old to the new. I’m out of power, and the new folks are in. So, I bite my tongue, close my eyes, and head to the locker room to change before I run.

Every fall, my wife and I trek west from Chicago to the Amana Colonies in eastern Iowa, about a three- or four-hour jaunt from our home. This year was our seventeenth year. We started in 1992.

We rendezvous in the Amana Colonies with a couple from Kansas City for a long October weekend. I went to graduate school with the husband, and my wife worked at a Dude Ranch in Colorado with the wife. The couple introduced us about 18 years ago in Denver. Through good times and bad, cancer and job loss and six kids (total), we’ve never missed a fall in eastern Iowa.

The Amana Colonies are a series of villages, originally established in the mid-1800s by German immigrants who had come to the States in the mid 1840s to avoid religious persecution. The Amana Colonies formed one of America’s longest-lived and largest religious communal societies. The community supported itself through farming and the production of wool and calico. The community also made clocks, brewed beer, and made well-crafted products. (The folks at the Amana Colonies are not like the Amish or the Hutterites, who eschew modern comforts.) You’ve probably heard of “Amana Radar Ranges” or other kitchen products; there’s a manufacturing plant in one of the Amana villages, though it is now owned by a conglomerate.

Today, the Amana Colonies is mostly for shopping and eating. My wife and the wife of my friend shop at village shops while he and I play golf, watch college football on TV at the bed-and-breakfast, or attend an Iowa Hawkeye football game in nearby Iowa City. It’s a weekend for slugs.

Over the 17 years, we’ve seen the Amana Colonies morph from a destination place with boutique shops, each with unique inventory, to what it is today: a series of generic shops all owned by the Amana Colonies corporation. That is, when we first started visiting the Colonies in the early to mid-nineties, the shops in the villages were independently owned. My wife said recently, “Each shop was unique. You never knew what you’d find; shopping was a lot of fun.”

But that all changed.

In recent years, as best I can tell, the Amana corporation may have forced out the independent shop owners by not renewing their leases. So, today you still have, for example, many of the kinds of shops that you had in the 1990s, but they all pretty much sell the same thing – what the buyer at the corporation decides is good for all the stores. The creativity is gone. The individuality is gone. The corporation came and made everything bland.

It’s hard to know if the drop in tourist visits to the Amana Colonies preceded the move to standardize the shops or is a consequence of shopping that has become generic.

But the point is still true: Corporation thinking tends to value standardization and efficiency. No doubt, there’s a place for that. But someone needs to fight for creativity, for being unique, for taking risks. That is, if your organization wants to grow.

Over the past decade, I’ve digested pretty much every book and article and blog that you can imagine on the subject of branding and marketing.

I’ve also interviewed by phone or via email many best-selling authors on aforementioned topics.

I learn something new from each one.

I tend to take away more from the conversation with the author than I do reading his or her book. When you ask the author to clarify a point in the book or give a specific example, often you strip away the flabby writing from the nugget of insight. Most books should be only an article in length. But the publisher wants at least 250 pages, so authors write to fit the book-length medium.

In some marketing writing, though, there’s a common thread that annoys me:

It’s as if the authors all went to the same convention, identified all the “successful stories” and then starting writing. Here are a few of the wake-me-when-they-are-outdated marketing stories:

• Facebook (still looking to make some real money in social media);
• Google (the big dog on the block; who can argue with its success?);
• Starbucks (closing 600 stores soon; see our interview with John Moore: http://www.czmarketing.com/brand/);
• Apple (the brand with design panache);
• SalesForce.com (the clunky convenience of online CRM); and
• Kiva (the creative online micro finance nonprofit).

Before the above, there was:

• Krispy Kreme (now a not-so-hot stock);
• Dell (trying now to reinvent itself);
• Amazon (now just another boring stock); and
•Too many others to mention.

What’s hot is touted as the pinnacle of truth for marketing your organization: “Just follow the marketing principles of this hot company or you will become irrelevant and die a thousand deaths.”

No one writes those words, but that underlying schtick is occasionally assumed in the writing.

Here’s my grumpy point: Growing an organization is hard work. It’s tedious, sometimes monotonous. Not very sexy. And it takes much longer than you think. And just when you think you’ve got it figured out, the demographics or economics of your prospects change. Then you’re forced to regroup and make adjustments in real time.

No doubt Starbucks and Google and Apple have lots to teach the rest of the world. But it’s important to strip out the bravado from the principles and ask the real question: What, if anything, is really relevant to our situation?

Maybe the most important purpose of reading about today’s hot companies is to inspire hope. Growth is possible. Our future can be brighter than our past.

Stuck at a plateau? Wish your organization could “go to the next level,” whatever that means. Simply want something more than single digit growth?

Remember this phrase: the POWER of 7.

Marketing can do only so much for professional service firms. Yes, you need to understand your clear point of difference in the marketplace.

Yes, you need to be able to communicate that with clarity to those in your database (current clients, past clients, referral sources, business to business partners, etc.); you need to be able to educate folks on how you’re different from your competitors. Yes, you need a web site and brochures and the like. You need basic marketing.

But most professional service firms grow primarily by referral. Period.

Other than a public endorsement from Oprah, you grow primarily, for example, when an executive at a current client refers you to a friend of hers at another firm. That’s the magic.

It’s a form of “word of mouth” marketing. And a cousin to viral marketing. The problem is that “word of mouth” tends to be passive, not active. You get the referral at the whim of your current client.

Back to the POWER of 7 …
If you want to grow, your consultants (lawyers, investment bankers, etc) simply need to pick up the telephone. Here’s the statistic: If you follow up a direct mail piece (letter or newsletter or other publication, for example) with a phone call, it is seven times more likely to be effective in generating a referral. (The statistic comes from the real estate services industry—Brian Buffini, www.buffiniandcompany.com).

A phone call is active. Instead of expecting the phone to ring, you make it ring. Check in with your clients and referral sources. Ask a few questions. Set up a lunch. Perhaps even create a friendship.

Radical, I know.

The problem, of course, is the notion of using the telephone for business. Who wants to do that?

Too bad we can’t outsource that to India.