Diane Mastrull: Philadelphia-area venture offers marketing ideas for small businesses

As strip shopping centers go, Gateway Plaza in West Chester is as uninspiring as most. But when you're killing time on a Sunday morning waiting for the pizza you ordered, there's no telling what passes for entertainment.

Greg Brandner had just placed his order at Domino's on East Gay Street about a year ago when a storefront in Gateway caught his eye.

Rather than manicures or almost anything for $1, the store - its logo a yellow lightbulb - was selling "bright ideas."

The Marketing Department is a unique franchise selling (with no appointment necessary) just what the name suggests. Its target clients are start-ups and companies with $500,000 to $6 million in annual sales. They are small businesses that often forgo marketing - or try to do it themselves - because resources are so tight.

That's a mistake, says John Cooley, founder of the Marketing Department and a veteran advertising executive who also runs M, M Health, and M2 agencies in Philadelphia.

"Every business has the same problem, and the problem is we need clients," Cooley said. "I don't care if you're Comcast or Budweiser."

Though he has spent years helping companies of that size - including Comcast, Kellogg's, and Pfizer - his Marketing Department chain is all about the little guy, about bringing "Madison Avenue to Main Street." The cost varies, from $500 to $5,000 a month, depending on services provided and the size of the business.

Marketing Department sites pop in navy blue and yellow, each featuring a "wall of knowledge" showcasing colorful examples of branding intended to "educate, motivate, and inspire" anyone who walks through the door, said Cooley's partner, Rich Caserta, the company's creative director.

Five years after its first store opened in Villanova (later relocating to Malvern), the Marketing Department is showing enough promise that Cooley and Caserta believe establishing 500 outposts by 2018 is doable. So far, there are nine. Besides Malvern and West Chester, they also are in Doylestown and Reading, with the rest in Texas, Colorado (three stores), and Connecticut.

Despite interest from Dubai, Japan, China, Russia, Panama, South America, and Uganda, Cooley said, "Right now, we put our international expansion on hold."

Their goal is to have a presence in Center City and Cherry Hill first.

The name may not be sexy, but Marketing Department certainly leaves no doubt what is for sale. Then again, Cooley, 50, and Caserta, 48, have built careers helping companies craft the right message.

For Caserta, who grew up in Yardley and graduated from Tyler School of Art, his past work has included developing Super Bowl ads for Pepsi with the BBDO agency in New York.

He agreed to join Cooley in launching the Marketing Department because "I always had that passion for something different, something new."

Cooley, a Philadelphia native who majored in economics and marketing at the University of Delaware, had one big problem with his initial idea for a retail marketing operation to help small business: "I just couldn't see how economically it could work." Then he read an article about a retail venture offering routine legal work such as wills and leases. The work was centralized in the Midwest to achieve economic efficiencies.

Cooley would mimic that model at the Marketing Department. Most of the graphic- and website-design work is done by 20 employees in the Philippines in consultation with Caserta and staff at each franchise.

"That's our secret sauce, how we can create world-class creative execution at affordable prices," Cooley said.

The franchise fee is $19,900, with build-out an additional $35,000 to $75,000, depending on size. In urban markets such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, Cooley said, the Marketing Department is partnering with office-rental titan Regus to enable franchisees to use shared space for $300 a month.

Typically, the revenue split between franchisee and parent company is 66.5 percent/33.5 percent. With average yearly sales of $750,000 per franchise site, Cooley projects the parent company's gross annual income will be $125 million (plus $9.8 million in franchise fees) when all 500 sites are open.

Franchisees - typically, advertising executives with at least 15 years' experience - should expect to do $350,000 to $1 million in business each year through walk-in and outreach efforts, Cooley said.

It might have been a storefront in West Chester that hooked Brandner on the Marketing Department when he was in town for a son's hockey tournament. But the real work happened a 90-minute drive away at his rink, Skylands Ice World in Stockholm, N.J., when Cooley and Caserta visited to get a sense of the business.

Along with a new motto, "Come to Play," Skylands now has a new logo, a revamped website, and marketing materials replacing in-house creations that looked like they were "drawn with crayon by small children," Brandner said.

Told by Cooley to expect a 3-to-1 return on his investment, Brandner reports: "We are well on our way."

John Cooley tells how his brainchild, the Marketing Department, can help small- to medium-size businesses with advertising, design services, and Web development at

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