I am a Major League Baseball fan. I love the long history of the game and the many legendary players and managers of the sport. The most recent Hall of Fame class was announced a couple weeks ago and included Ken Griffey, Jr. and Mike Piazza. It is the goal of every baseball player to be enshrined in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. The Hall attracts 350,000 visitors annually to this small town in northeastern New York. Here is a question: why is the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown when all of its teams play in major metropolitan areas? There are less than 2,000 residents of Cooperstown. You can find more people than that in a city block of New York, Chicago or Los Angeles – all of which support two baseball teams. Why is the Hall in Cooperstown? The answer is marketing.

Cooperstown was selected to be the site for the Hall of Fame because it was said that Abner Doubleday, a Civil War general and local hero, had invented the game in 1839 in a cow pasture in Cooperstown. During his time in the U.S. Army, it was said that Doubleday had provided bats and balls for federal troops to give them a little recreation. The game took off as the national pastime after the war. In 1935, the idea of building a Hall of Fame to honor the greatest players started to take shape. People thought the idea to be a good one. In January 1936, the first five members of the Hall were elected (Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Honus Wagner and Walter Johnson.) Every January since then, votes are cast by the Baseball Writers of America to determine which former players, managers and executives are voted into the Hall in Cooperstown: the birthplace of baseball – except it wasn’t the birthplace of baseball.

The idea for the Baseball Hall of Fame being located in the tiny village of Cooperstown was birthed by a need to bolster the local economy that was feeling the grip of the Great Depression. Small hamlets were becoming ghost towns, with businesses boarded up and abandoned. In the early 1930s, a philanthropic group financed by the heirs of the Singer Sewing Company, known as the Clark Foundation, was formed. They began to float the idea that a museum to the game’s greatest players could bring a lot of business to the area. The game had become the national pastime, filling stadiums across the country. But why would anyone travel to this small town to walk through a museum converted from an old gymnasium? The Clark Foundation began to market the area as the birthplace of the game. They selected Abner Doubleday as the inventor, although there was not any proof that Doubleday had anything to do with the game’s genesis. He wasn’t even living in Cooperstown in 1839 when he was supposed to have played that first game. It did not seem to matter. People believed the hype including the game’s biggest stars. The marketing worked. Players come to Cooperstown in anticipation of being recognized for their achievement and along with them, people have been flocking by the hundreds of thousands to small town Cooperstown for the past 80 years.

I am not suggesting you go out and make up a whopper of a tale to sell your products and services. We live in a very different time and people can fact check your marketing claims with a simple search. What I do want you to realize is how important it is to promote a very compelling marketing message. Everything you do in business rises or falls on marketing. Promoting your business means more than just hanging a sign in your storefront and coming up with a web site. You have to have something that is unique about you that makes you stand apart from your competition. If you don’t have anything unique, you need to work on it. When you find your uniqueness, push it hard in your marketing efforts.