Publishing with Meaning
Penguin brings an entirely new form of literature to its readers.
Over the past few weeks, my team has been speaking with publishers about our plans to develop a book around meaningful marketing. I’ve had the chance to chat with some of the top business-book publishers in the world. One of the topics we have hit on a few times is how meaningful marketing is not just for the large, traditional marketing companies such as P&G and GM. Instead, we believe that any business size or type has an opportunity to grow sales by uniquely adding value to its customers’ lives.
In speaking with publishers, we end up introducing our own meaningful marketing plan for the book, and we discuss how each publishing house can similarly add value to its bookstore customers. Ironically, I recently discovered an interesting campaign from Penguin that shows how even publishers are thinking differently and meaningfully.
I learned from one of our employees (and a good link from PSFK) that Penguin launched a digital marketing campaign in April ‘08 called We Tell Stories. Over six weeks Penguin launched participatory stories by six of its fiction authors across a range of genres to create an entirely new form of literature. One story, The (Former) General in his Labrynth, is “an unholy cross between a text adventure, choose your own adventure, and dungeon map.” Some stories unfold as the “reader” answers clues by searching the Net and using Google Maps, for example. Another story was written and posted “live” during the week. There is a hidden seventh story that brings together clues from the other six, and offers a prize of more than $25,000 in books from the Penguin Complete Classics Library.
I believe this campaign has a lot of potential to deliver for Penguin and its target readers. The free online game is a chance to connect people with the works of authors they may not have heard about before. In a way, it is a free sample that gets readers’/players’ blood pumping and makes them ready for more. While the grand prize is available for a limited time, this online game experience can stay online for years. It is impossible to judge the actual business impact, but a look at site traffic on Compete.com shows that traffic spiked to 35,000 visitors in April. I’d like to see higher, but it’s not bad based on campaigns I’ve seen of this type.
There is room for improvement, of course. I would have loved to see Penguin keep this site going for the long-haul versus just a six-week promotion. The stories could have been released once per month to spread the impact out further and allow for the gradual build from word-of-mouth.
We’ll have to wait and see if this meaningful marketing paid off for Penguin and whether it and other book publishers continue in this direction. For now, please try one of the stories for yourself - and let me know what you think in the comments section.
“Instead, we believe that any business size or type has an opportunity to grow sales by uniquely adding value to its customers’ lives.”
This strikes me as being the wrong way round. Shouldn’t companies add to their customers’ lives and the more, better, more uniquely they do it, the more it drives sales?
Well, I think the point is the same, Jens. However, you make a good point that we need to continually think and talk about adding value first, then enjoying the sales boost as a result. Thanks for the reminder!