Recently, a good friend of mine called to inquire about hiring the agency for which I work. The fellow's a sharp entrepreneur, and one of his start-ups had taken off. He was ready to invest in a solid marketing program to keep the momentum going.

After discussing strategy for both an online and print campaign, we landed on the topic of his company logo. "Oh no, our logo is fine, there's no way we're changing it," he said, adding, "My partner and I created it on a napkin at Starbucks." I was silent for a moment, processing those words. Had my friend really just trotted out that old cliché—with a hint of pride in his voice, no less?

This dear fellow suffers from an unfortunate ailment I've been aware of for some time, though it took this incident for me to attach a diagnostic name to it. Here, then, I was observing a classic case of the Starbucks Napkin Syndrome.

Other warning signs of SNS include a belief that conceiving and executing marketing and pr strategies is something that's easy—an afterthought, really—and that all such work is pretty much common sense. SNS sufferers also maintain that we marketers are only being hired because the brass doesn't have enough time to deal with a marketing task that, of course, he or anyone can do. Even worse, the executive with SNS will simply act on his convictions: "We need a press release," he'll say. "So have Jim in Finance throw something together. No, better yet, have the intern do it. He doesn't look too busy."

As bewildering as that scenario may seem to a marketing professional, I've seen it acted out before my eyes. Few other business decisions are made on the fly, or with so little input and expertise, as are ones involving pr. I've yet to see a company treat other key business issues—like, say, paying taxes—with such ambivalence. Can you imagine hearing a CFO say: "My Aunt Betsy was pretty good at math in high school; let's have her do our quarterly." And yet the marketing equivalent of this reasoning takes place every day.

Why is it, I wondered, that the marketing profession is the one business discipline assumed to be devoid of complexity?

My ruminations were painful; I was still stinging from the actions of another client the same morning I got the line about the napkin. Plummeting stock prices and the resignation of a CEO plagued the company in question, which had issued a press release that I found in my in-box after returning from Starbucks. The release broke every rule in the book, from AP style violations to corporate-speak quotes that only made the management look weak and clueless. Nobody had contacted my firm for guidance. A Google News search confirmed that the release had already hit the wires. Damage done. (And, needless to say, here was a textbook case of SNS.)

Later, as I was getting ready to leave for Thanksgiving, the phone rang. It was a potential new client who was launching a business in Cleveland. He told me that advertising was too expensive, so he wanted "free ink." Sure, guy, I'll just order you some! Was that the Wall Street Journal or Newsweek that you wanted?

He was—you guessed it—yet another SNS sufferer. And, as I have with the rest of them, I will have to educate him. Yes, I'll say, we can probably get your start-up some initial press—but there's a lot more to good pr and identity building than just that.

Which brings me to the good news: SNS can be effectively treated, even cured. Unfortunately, it's most always up to we in the marketing and pr profession to administer the treatment. That goes by another term: education. There remain throngs of co-workers, clients and management still desperately needing to understand what pr is and what it can do for them.

To all of you non-marketing people in management roles who might be reading this: Please scoot over a bit because my colleagues need a seat at your strategy meetings. Companies refusing us a chair do so at their own peril; firms operating in a communications vacuum will eventually lose complete control over their messages and their brands. Especially in this era, in which consumers are storming the corporate gates and knocking down the once-sturdy walls constructed from antiquated methods of top-down message control, with the Internet and other new technologies being the consumers' battering ram of choice.

But that's enough SNS curing from me for today. My coffee's about gone—and it seems I've run out of room to write on this napkin.