Still, Marwah has pushed hard to make Tattoo the kind of place that attracts and holds talent. It's a thrill to be part of a company that's doing these amazingly cool things in some pretty wild places. But Marwah knows there had better be more. The company offers a 401(k) plan and profit sharing. Salaries move up quickly. Plus, Tattoo closes its doors for two weeks every year in addition to vacation time. "The whole point is to encourage people to stay," Marwah says. "When you're small, people think in terms of negative trade-offs, turn and burn." He has thought about this particular issue as carefully as any business owner I've met. And so when I called to ask a couple of last-minute questions and learned that two key people had split in the meantime, it was a fair reminder that, even when a company is attempting to keep you, there's always a price to be paid when you live your life on the road. Even though you're doing some pretty unusual work for blue-chip clients and learning a ton, it takes everything you've got.
Once, companies relied almost exclusively on quant jocks and lab-coated market researchers to make decisions about marketing strategy based on what focus groups had to say from the yonder side of a one-way mirror. In an average day, that approach might yield a truckload of complex computer-modelish information, but it lacks heart. That's where Tattoo comes in; it delivers the unexpected, the mysterious, and, above all, the surprising--the kind of insight that makes the hairs on the back of your neck tingle and, coincidentally, creates buzz.
If you want to understand how Tattoo works, the best place to start is the unorthodox way the firm reconnects companies to their customers. Tattoo delivers an evocative, emotional, highly impressionist take on the consumer's perspective; the firm does for marketing what Claude Monet did for art. "They're very, very good at the qualitative part of it," a mass-media client says of Tattoo. "But they're a high-maintenance group, and you have to commit your time to working with them."
When I visited Tattoo, I watched a couple of its signature client presentations--"collages," they call them. Think 5- or 10-minute slide shows with a sound track. Those presentations are explicitly designed to delve into the sensory and emotional side of a brand. So you'd think the collages would be fluffy, but they're not. They are very engaging, if nonconformist, vehicles to get Tattoo's complex gut-level findings across to the client, and they furnish the conceptual underpinnings that will eventually support brand strategy.
The first collage is for a powdered, mix-it-yourself diet soft drink that did a nice business in the 1980s but by the 1990s was feeling the burn of its competitors, famous names in cans. The product's health-and-fitness image had gone the way of leg warmers, as Tattoo would discover when it was brought in to give it a second wind.
After Tattoo sniffed around a bit, a few ideas took shape. This drink was a feminine concoction, girly and playful, unlike brewskis, which are Dad's, or Kool-Aid, the kids' favorite. A woman wouldn't break stride for the ubiquitous Diet Coke, but she'd create a special break in her day for this drink. Maybe most important, it might make drinking the prescribed daily eight glasses of water more fun.
Projected on the wall in front of me are Kodachrome boats and beaches and yummy summer colors. Some slides contain text that's been written to capture the key finding of the initial data-gathering phase. "Drink it with thine eyes," one slide says. The music for this one is provided by New Age diva Enya, who's singing, "Sail away, sail away, sail away." It fits the presentation perfectly, but I can't get the damned song out of my mind for a week. Of course, that could be the whole idea.
The next one is about tea. The music is by Vangelis, from Chariots of Fire, I think. Tattoo's been hired by a U.S. company to find out what's going on with premium tea, and the client has asked for several different impressions, a puzzle the Tattools seem jazzed about because it means they get to work on some new stuff.
Tea, I learn, is borrowed culture. Can you take classic blue-blood British style and make it as American as blue jeans? Ralph Lauren did, and the consumers Tattoo talked to were all over that idea. In another interpretation from Tattoo, the underlying theme is tea as perfume; and in the third, everything depends on setting up a chain of retail specialty shops that sell fine teas the way wine merchants peddle merlot. I also learn that any of those scenarios would be a stretch for a stateside company, because the United States buys the detritus of tea. Tea is sifted. The higher the level in the sifting tower, the greater the tea's market value. What's left at the bottom is called tea dust. That's what most Americans drink.
The collages are put together by a team of Tattools after the brand audit is done and there's all this rich, lively information to stomp around in and decode. The audit is the first of three formal phases of a typical (to the extent that typical and Tattoo can be used in the same sentence) project, studded with nontraditional proprietary techniques designed to get a bead on a brand. To tap into street buzz, for instance, Tattools hang out on sidewalks and videotape what passersby have to say about a certain brand. Each interview lasts about 10 minutes and captures the inchoate images that leap to mind when people think of Rollerblade or Armani or Time.
