Marketing with Moxie

mox·ie (mŏk'sē) noun Slang

1. The ability to face difficulty with spirit and courage.
2. Aggressive energy; initiative.
3. Skill; know-how.

Moxie. 

My dad, a World War II hero and lifelong entrepreneur, sometimes used this word to describe a really great idea, or someone who had a lot of smarts that he respected.  "That fella's got a lot of moxie," he'd say in his Minnesota accent, referring to one of his favorite business gurus or a war hero. The term conjured up an image in my mind of a smartly dressed, handsome man winking at me, or a platoon lieutenant leading his men over a hill.   American soldiers at Normandy had moxie, I thought.

Little did I know that the word "moxie" derived from a bottle of soda.  Moxie was one of the first mass marketed soft drinks and outsold Coke and Pepsi in the 1920s.  The Moxie Man on the bottle implores you to drink Moxie because it is "distinctively different. " Too different, it seems.  It gave way to Coke, mostly because of a bitter aftertaste that one beverage industry writer said tastes like licorice mixed with pomade.  It took a lot of moxie to drink Moxie.

Moxie Soda is still around.  It's a boutique soda bottled in Maine and is the state's official soft drink.  Moxie lovers say that you have to take three long hauls, poured into your mouth like beer, before you like it.

The word popped into my vocabularly when I was writing an email recently and just seemed to stick.  Marketers like sticky words.  And with the state of the economy, we could sure use a big swig of American Moxie right now. 

So that's what this blog will be about.  Moxie.  Marketing wth Moxie.  In honor of my Dad and that generation of post World War II small business owners that made America great.  They overcame obstacles, opened hardware stores, built factories, raised families and  made America the greatest country on the planet.   I have a passion for small business.  Now, more than ever as we watch the titans of industry topple one after the other.

We do have the moxie to make the American economy churn again, and small businesses will have to do it without the benefit of stimulus packages, bailouts or "Recovery and Reinvestment." 

I'm going to order a case of Moxie right now and have it shipped to Austin.  Want to join me for a cold one?