What a Major League Baseball Team can teach us about Legal Marketing

Joe Posnanski is a very good sportswriter. When it comes to baseball, he may be the best in the business right now. He recently wrote an article on “The Oakland Way,” examining the Oakland A’s continued success more than a decade after Moneyball was written by Michael Lewis. It is a very good article and I recommend you read the entire thing, but, for my purposes, here’s your summary:

The Oakland A’s do not have a lot of money to spend on baseball players, the way teams like the Red Sox and Yankees do. Michael Lewis wrote Moneyball, which then became a successful movie, profiling their General Manager, Billy Beane, and the approach the Oakland A’s took in identifying talent and finding success with less resources than other teams. The book has been a lightning rod since its publication for a myriad of reasons that are mostly too boring to get into. Basically, many took it as some sort of hagiography of Billy Beane and misinterpreted the message. The book is about exploiting inefficiencies. Michael Lewis made his bones writing about markets, and still does, and in this baseball story he found some interesting marketing inefficiencies that the Oakland A’s were exploiting. Now, it’s over a decade later and those inefficiencies are no longer inefficient. They are known by all teams, fans, writers and even the players themselves. And the Oakland A’s keep winning with resources that suggest they shouldn’t. That is because, in a nutshell, there is a new inefficiency, and that inefficiency is execution.

One of the key quotes that immediately clues us in that this is “not just a baseball story,” comes from the Oakland A’s current Director of Baseball Operations, Farhan Zaidi, “We’re not trying to be smarter than anybody else. We’re just trying to stay true to our philosophy of building a baseball team.”

The lesson within the article is actually relevant to any organization or business, but since my particular interest is legal marketing, I’ll focus on that. I receive, like many marketers, a barrage of daily industry information in the form of articles, books, white papers, webinars, podcasts and every other medium designed to deliver a message. The duplicative content of much of this onslaught is exhausting. Content marketing is king. There is a new normal. Add video. Stay engaged. Automate. Pine for and mine big data.

As a sample, here are three headlines for content sent to me before Noon on Wednesday June 5^th, 2014:

o   How Does Business Intelligence Improve Your Bottom Line?

o   How CMOs and CIOs are working to improve business with technology

o   Marketer's Guide to Mobile Engagement 2014

I don’t have an opinion either way on the content of these articles (or presentations or 3-D virtual reality seminars, whatever they may be). I don’t have a problem with any of the headlines. I can’t write headlines, mine are no better. What strikes me as I look at the plethora of knowledge in my industry is how transparent and ubiquitous the playbook is.

Folks who do not work at law firms and have very little experience with firms as a business typically start a conversation with, “How do you market a law firm?” But within the industry, the answer to that question is known across the board.  Being a bit of a contrarian by nature, I’m always looking for some new angle or some popular technique to dislike or rail against. But, the Oakland A’s story gets straight to the point – there is no new angle.

Let’s get back to the story. The meat of it, the point of this post in one quote from the story, comes from Posnanski summing up the secret to the Oakland A’s success:

No, it's not about KNOWING things others don't. It's about ACTING differently from other teams.

Acting differently comes down to execution. For the Oakland A’s they cannot afford to get seduced by a hard-throwing left-handed pitcher who, if they could just teach him to throw strikes would be a superstar. It doesn’t matter that other teams do this. In legal marketing, we cannot afford to have some portion of the team operating outside the organizational philosophy. It does not matter if there are office politics at stake. The Oakland A’s cannot afford to ignore a 27 year old minor league hitter that is tearing the cover off the ball just because he is too old. If he can hit, he can hit. Why he didn’t hit in the past is not of any concern to them because they are playing baseball in the present. Legal marketers cannot afford to take half measures and shortcuts or use short-term minor successes as evidence that the long term vision is flexible. I mean, yes, be adaptable. But don’t abandon principle.

Strategy is fun and intellectually stimulating to discuss and craft. I love strategy. Spending an inordinate amount of time strategizing is a great way to sound fantastic at meetings and not further the firm’s goals. The real work, the work that pays off and shows up, is painstaking. It is filled with details that cannot be overlooked or tossed aside. Strategy is big and broad. Execution is a daily process. It is tiny. It is necessarily stubborn and slow. It is extremely tempting to look at the competition, see something new and exciting, and take off in an entirely new direction. The Oakland A’s choose not to do that. They know the playbook, it’s the same playbook every other General Manager in baseball has, and they focus on execution and ignoring the temptations to stray. And there are many temptations.

The marketer down the street is just as smart as you. The attorneys down the street are just as smart as your attorneys. The market inefficiency is not intelligence or skill. It’s execution.