FMEA: Firefighters Make Excellent Accessories

Salt Lake Tribune

Frustrated: Fire crews to hand out fliers for FEMA

ATLANTA - Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.
Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.

Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA...

"There are all of these guys with all of this training and we're sending them out to hand out a phone number," an Oregon firefighter said. "They [the hurricane victims] are screaming for help and this day [of FEMA training] was a waste."

Firefighters say they want to brave the heat, the debris-littered roads, the poisonous cottonmouth snakes and fire ants and travel into pockets of Louisiana where many people have yet to receive emergency aid.

But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

Been following along? Is the picture becoming clearer? Getting madder? Good.

When you have no skills, no unique character, no center, you find people who do, and you stand next to them. In advertising, it's called "borrowed interest" and it's why John Madden flacks for Ace TruValue, Martha Stewart for K-Mart, or Dennis Miller for anybody. It is the mark of sloth and lack of imagination within an organization. Or confusion. It often substitutes for a marketing strategy, or demonstrates the absence of one, for troubled or rudderless brands and products.

Borrowed interest. Because without the celebrity props and hero rub-off, you're invisible. You are of no real consequence or weight. When you are a rice cake, you go in search of peanut butter.

Hat tip to Talking Points Memo