Marketing with Meaning seems to be catching on in the early days of 2009. A little more than a week ago, the strategy team at Razorfish promoted the use of the word “meaning” to describe the act of brands acting to do something valuable with their marketing. This week I discovered Tim Leberecht’s blog iPlot, where he, too, is on the Marketing with Meaning bandwagon.

Tim is VP of Marketing and Communications at frog design in San Francisco. In what seems like a relatively new positioning, the firm states its purpose is to “help create and bring to market meaningful products, services, and experiences.” It’s a positioning that makes sense, as great design depends on digging deep into people’s needs, and then creating products that surprise and delight them. The firm works with clients ranging from HP to Victoria’s Secret.

Although frog shares only a handful of marketing-related examples, on January 1, Tim began posting about examples of companies that are pursuing Marketing with Meaning. He begins with a post about how business leaders should become Chief Meaning Officers. Later posts feature an anti-God campaign by pro-atheists in the UK (very gutsy post!), and a new cause marketing effort by Starbucks. Tim even works to lay out some structure for one way of organizing types of meaningful marketing.

I’m very glad to see another organization and individual promoting the idea of meaningful marketing, which adds another voice to the choir and increases the odds of the concept taking hold. However, I wish that Tim had at least acknowledged the work that we’ve been doing here for nearly a year. Even a cursory Google search of “marketing with meaning” would show that we’ve made nearly a hundred posts and have spawned a Twitter stream, plus LinkedIn and Facebook groups. Perhaps a trackback here will convince Tim to join the conversation we’ve started.

Either way, it’s good to have multiple viewpoints supporting a similar overall approach. I’ll keep watching his blog to see how another group makes the concept its own.