Lonny Kocina on building Kocina Marketing Cos.
for two decades, on his originally
controversial pay-per-interview idea.
Lonny Kocina and his wife, Robin, started Kocina Marketing Cos. and Media Relations Inc. in Burnsville 20 years ago on an idea that fellow public relations people disdained at the time: They would bill clients only when articles were written by the media, not on the common monthly retainer. He says his trademarked pay-per-interview publicity model has created a scrappy company culture, a characteristic he displays in this interview as well.
It’s a challenge staying viable for 20 years. We started as a pay-per-interview public relations firm, 20 years ago. You start a business, you try to get something going. I worked for Jim Cook at Investment Rarities; they sell gold through direct marketing. I got my start as a commercial artist.
The owner, I went to him and said I need money. He loaned me 10,000 bucks for 50 percent of the company, then I bought him out several years ago.
At that company, I was buying publicity. PR at the time was sold by the hour. I really took a lot of heat for what I was doing and I didn’t know why. I had no formal training.
I’m spending Jim Cook’s money, millions on direct-mail advertising. I’d get bags of mail cards as replies. We were pioneering infomercials.
But the thing I never bought was PR because these PR folks would come in, it was this ivory tower thing. When I tried to pin them down on what would I get, they couldn’t say.
One time a little company came by and said they bill by the story, so I bought a little bit and I saw it really worked. As far as a marketing tool it was clear to me that channel was underdeveloped. I thought if anybody flattened the rates, you could make a business of it.
Public relations was born in a consultative role. I was from the other side. I was from sales. We needed to sell something.
When I started Media Relations, I remember one guy looking down his nose and saying, “Oh yes, you’re the fellows selling publicity by the pound,” and I said, “No, we sell it by the ton,” to give him a jab back.
Businesses like it. PR firms didn’t like it. For the first three years I didn’t take a salary. It was slow, but it caught on. One of the reasons it caught on was when companies used us they had great results. They were like me. I never bought PR because I thought I was getting a cat in a sack.
Here’s what it is: What if you ordered pizza and they said, well, I don’t know if we’ll get you the pizza but here’s a bill anyway. All I said, if you order a pizza we’ll get you a pizza.
Now it’s more and more common. A lot of companies do this. Pay-per-performance, it sounds good, but it?s difficult to pull off. Our culture here is scrappy. I have publicists who make six-figure incomes but they have to perform.
So this is good advice for any company that wants to stay in business for 20 years. You need a concept that transcends your products. Our concept is helping companies teach their customers about their products.
In ’93 we started an Internet division that in 2000 became a separate entity called Checkerboard. Mid-America Events & Expos started in ’97.
Business cycles are going to get shorter, because everything is getting more fragmented. You’re going to have to change your business more frequently.
The other thing, we’re repositioning from a company that executes well to a company that’s more strategic.
Businesses need to understand the basics of marketing and they just don’t. If you ask the four P’s of marketing, they might know one or two. That’s like going to your accounting department and asking if they know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide, and they say they know two of those.
Marketing is an art and it can be done more intuitively than accounting. Because there’s so many moving things right now, marketing’s hard. We do training. I just drill it into people here, the basics of marketing.
The old marketing model was pretty cut and dried. But it’s complex now. So we find a lot of our clients are confused now about marketing. It appears like a tangle. If you go back to the basics, those things haven’t changed.
As things change you think you need something fancy. I think it’s just the opposite. You need to go to the basics.
What’s the worst day at the company? Too many to count. No, that’s not true.
I wrote about this one: Many years ago I was just sure the Internet was going to be a big thing. No one had a Web site. I had a friend take me out to Cray and show me their supercomputers. I said, look, we’re going to get into the Internet a little bit. I had 10 people on the sales staff. I was getting pumped up to walk in and tell them about the Internet.
I said, Nobody has a site. Nobody has a name. It?s going to be wide open. I said, Get out there. They looked at me bored. I got so mad I threw my notebook at the wall and said, You can all kiss my ass. We’re never selling Internet in this company again, and I walked out.
I at that moment vowed I would never be in the Internet business. Now Robin talked me down from that. I think it was a huge blessing. I would have jumped in with both feet and a lot of people did that and lost everything.
Entrepreneurs tend to be stubborn. So that’s a dark day and a bright day.
The best day, It was the day I convinced Robin to come to the company full-time, about ’94 or ’95. Companies need to transition from entrepreneurs to professional management and she was our professional management.
-as told to Beth Ewen
[contact]
Lonny Kocina,
Kocina Marketing Cos.:
612.798.7200;
lonny@mediarelations.com;
www.mediarelations.com
