Marketing Lessons From the Lincoln Highway

The original social networking success story
by Randy Shattuck, The Shattuck Group

Ever heard of the Lincoln Highway? I’ll bet you haven’t. Because the Lincoln Highway isn’t really a highway at all — it’s a brilliant marketing idea, a strategy really. I want to tell you this story because I think it contains powerful lessons for those of us managing, and creating demand for, professional service businesses today.

The Lincoln Highway story

The Lincoln Highway was America’s first coast-to-coast highway. But it wasn’t the sort of road we think of today as a highway. It did not have one continuous slab of pavement that stretched for miles on end with few curves, multiple lanes, bypasses around urban areas and signs warning pedestrians to keep off. No, this highway was very different from today’s high-speed, impersonal affairs.

Conceived in the early 1900s by automobile headlight manufacturer Carl Fisher, it connected New York City’s Times Square with San Francisco’s Lincoln Park — at least in theory. While the highway supposedly stretched for 3,300 miles, it is indeed a stretch to call this route a highway.

You see, many different types of roadways were “connected” to create the highway. Some were paved, some were gravel and some were simply dirt paths that you couldn’t traverse in inclement weather. But all of them connected a growing population of automobile owners with sights they wanted to see, diners they wanted to sample and motel beds on which to rest their travel-weary heads.

Soon after the highway officially opened, the Lincoln Highway Association (LHA) was launched to improve and look after the roadways. Many states along the route had their own LHA chapters and had discretion over the routes. This meant local chapter heads could dramatically increase tourism revenue simply by placing the L sign, the official sign of the Lincoln Highway, on a different road that took travelers in a new direction. If a small town wasn’t getting enough traffic to Main Street, simply reroute the L signs toward downtown and, voila, instant customers. In fact, the Lincoln Highway became known as the main street across America.

But I don’t want to speak pejoratively of the Lincoln Highway, because it was a huge success. It did, in fact, play an important role in creating demand for the massive travel infrastructure that accounts for a large part of our prosperity today. It created demand for a lot of things like better roads, faster automobiles and increased tourism. Yet — at the end of the day — it really didn’t build anything but an idea. This is the power of marketing.

What can we learn from this?

I believe the Lincoln Highway project was so successful because it tapped into three primary drivers: culture, collectives and community. There are great lessons here for those who build strong professional service businesses.

Culture

The Lincoln Highway came about at a time when our nation was undergoing massive cultural change. We had a nearly insatiable appetite for goods and services. We were becoming mobile. We had discretionary income to spend, and we wanted to spend it on, of all things, experiences. The Lincoln Highway tapped into this cultural phenomenon and created its own culture — the sightseeing American.

How does this apply to your business? Let me ask you a few questions. How have our national experiences of a deep and long recession, an escalating debt ceiling, and a plateaued economy shaped the culture of your market? What do people in your industry right now really care about? What makes them passionate and willing to get on board with an idea? Now here’s the real question.

How can you create a Lincoln Highway of your own that shows them how to get to where they want to be? Remember, it’s not a physical thing, it’s an idea. All of the paths that constituted the Lincoln Highway predated the highway itself. But the LHA connected them under an idea that inspired people. What is your big idea?

Collectives

The LHA chapters were the ultimate collective, a group of people bound together by an idea with the goal of turning it into an economic reality. While the chapters were local and autonomous, they were part of something bigger — a rising nation. So let me ask you a few questions about how to design a collective that benefits you.

Most professional service firms are made up of a handful of very smart, capable and highly trained individuals. This doth not a collective make. The goal here is to get other people to be passionate about projects that your firm can service. Sounds manipulative, I know, but then again that’s marketing.

When you look at your market and who stands to benefit from the services you offer — who are those people and what are those benefits? Is there a way to get people to band together to demand of budget decision-makers the benefits that you can deliver? What idea would unite those people and cause them to autonomously lobby decision-makers? If you think hard enough on this, I’m sure you’ll come up with something.

Community

One of the reasons the Lincoln Highway was so successful is because it tapped into community — or I should say communities. It connected villages, towns and cities in both physical and psychological manners. This is an early example of the power of social networking at work.

So let’s think about how you can use this strategy. How can you band a group of people together around an idea that will cause sponsorship of projects that require your services? How would those people like to connect, communicate and share with each other? What can you do to facilitate those conversations and bring those people together? More important, what can you do to shape their dialogue so it moves in a fruitful direction for you?

Think of all of the social media sites and groups that exist today. What if you could insert a brilliant idea that they sponsor into those groups? Are your wheels turning? They should be!

About the author:

Randy Shattuck is a senior marketing executive and founder of The Shattuck Group, a full-service marketing firm that specializes in assisting professional services firms. You can reach him at randy@theshattuckgroup.com.