Archive for August, 2009

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MoMA Matches Facebook Interests

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Many, many brands and their agencies are asking themselves the same question: “What is my social-media strategy?” This is absolutely the wrong question to ask. The problem is that social media is not a strategy; rather it represents a group of tactics that can be creatively used to solve business problems and deliver on a marketing strategy. To further explain this point, let me use the example of a summer trip planner from the New York City Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Not only is this a great case study in the right process of utilizing social media, it helps prove my point that social fits under Marketing with Meaning.

In my upcoming book I spend the entire second half of its 300-plus pages walking through a simple framework that brands both small and large can use to deliver meaningful marketing. Sometimes that process yields a compelling opportunity to use one or more social-media tactics. Let me offer a crash course in the process here by providing my assumptions on what drove MoMA’s killer idea:

Business Objective

Summer is an important time for any kind of tourism-based business, including museums. Each year MoMA must put together permanent and temporary exhibits and events to draw its fair share of visitors to New York City. I believe “share of visitors” is actually a key business objective for the organization. It is unlikely to convince people to come to NYC just for a visit to MoMA, but it can set a goal of getting X% of people who are already planning to spend vacation time in the city. This becomes that business objective that kicks off the strategy process.

Customer Insight

With this clear focus on vacation visitors, MoMA marketers can begin to learn about how this target audience makes its decisions about where to visit, and any issues or barriers that are keeping them from putting MoMA on the list. I believe a little thinking and likely not a lot of new research could uncover the following: First, people are spending a lot of time online in the weeks and months ahead of a trip, looking at the websites of places they might visit. Second, I believe a key barrier for MoMA is that the average visitor might be intimidated by modern art, which means this option might drop down on the priority list. Third, when looking at direct competitors, MoMA lacks some of the history and must-see art that other museums benefit from.

Strategy/Creative

Put this objective and these customer insights together and you can start to see a strategic opportunity: MoMA can gain incremental visitor share by providing online tools that help people learn more about why a visit to this museum is right for them. With a strong online research experience that helps people discover what fits their specific interests (down to the best day to go), MoMA can rise higher on the list of to-do’s for tourists. I believe this represents a simple, direct strategy that could then be the focus of a briefing for the creative team.

In turn, the creative team in this case likely thought about how people use the Web and social media. The brainstorming process might have gone something like this: People are doing research at MoMA.com, and there is an opportunity to learn about their interests and when they are visiting so that we can offer up some valuable personal recommendations. But instead of hoping they fill out a preference form, what if we just read their Facebook profiles to automatically generate recommendations? This would make it easier for visitors, and add a bit of fun and buzz to the tool. Plus, it would encourage people to share this with their friends. As you can see, this doesn’t come from “What do we do on Facebook?” but rather Facebook becomes a tool that makes the personalization strategy best come to life.

And so a great idea is born: Summer at MoMA. It’s a mini-site that simply asks you for the dates that you are in the city and permission to connect to your Facebook profile. A slick Flash interface returns with what I found to be very accurate recommendations that you can browse by day. The tool allows you to build a plan, and explore other options that were not specifically recommended. To drive word of mouth and encourage families and friends to get in on the planning together, the tool allows users to post to Facebook and Twitter.

This idea not only helps deliver on the immediate desire to secure visits, but because it increases the chance for a great experience when people visit, it can drive repeat visits when people return to NYC in the months or years ahead.

Measure and Adjust

We’re big believers in watching new launches closely and using early data to gauge success and make adjustments. A tool such as this offers many ways to track engagement with users. Overall site traffic can be compared to the previous year, and the specific tool can spin out numbers such as total users, time on site, and amount of sharing via Facebook. Users of the tool can be pinged later to ask if they actually visited the museum. And because MoMA gets direct customer interaction through visits, it can also survey entering or exiting visitors about whether they used the tool, whether it drove their decision to stop by, and if it made their experience better.

While these activity measures can be important, if you don’t measure success against your original Business Objective there is no way of understanding if your effort paid off. If we go back to a Business Objective of “share of NYC visitors,” I am sure that there are survey services that MoMA and other area tourist destinations can use to nail down this number, hopefully over many years.

Conclusion

If you and your team are sitting in endless meetings wondering about your social-media strategy (or mobile strategy or in-game advertising strategy, etc.) you should now have the knowledge to be able to raise your hand and suggest that the group is considering the wrong question. Turn it around and come back to the key businesses objectives and challenges that you have been struggling with for years. Then take the time to consider where new developments in social media (or mobile, or gaming, etc.) might be able to help address the objective or challenge. That clarity will drive your success in old and new media alike.

(Thanks to Adverblog for finding this example.)

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Posted in Entertainment, non-profit, Social Networking | 5 Comments »

Local Sandwich Shop Scores on Facebook

Friday, August 28th, 2009

There have been many of the same, tired stories circulating in marketing-guru circles about small businesses that are using social media. There’s the bakery in London that installed a special device that tweets when fresh bread is baked, and there’s the Kogi Korean BBQ truck in L.A. that people chase around at 2 a.m. through Twitter and Facebook for killer tacos. These cases are great, and show the power of social media to impact small businesses, but do you really need special devices and a whole new business model to win in this new medium? Nope. Any small business can get on the bandwagon, including a local sandwich shop near our office. All it takes is some courage and a little personality.

I have spent many, many meals at La Tea Room Cafe over the past five years that I have been working at Bridge Worldwide; it’s a solid but not special lunch spot a few blocks away from our office in downtown Cincinnati. It offers a good range of salads and sandwiches and plenty of room to sit down and chat. The staff is friendly and conversational. A few weeks ago I was wasting a couple of minutes on Facebook in the morning and saw a recommendation that I become friends with La Tea Room, based on the fact that others in my network were connected to it. I checked it out and decided to give it a try. Right away I got a message that the daily lunch special would be the Buffalo Chicken Wrap. I’m a sucker for just about anything that’s been “Buffaloed” and I had no specific lunch plans, so I grabbed a friend and headed over for lunch and an experiment in social-media marketing.

I walked in the door, and immediately said I was there for the special that I had read about on Facebook. The usual counter guy informed me that actually this was going to be tomorrow’s special, and they had made a mistake. He apologized, but I was disappointed that my social-media experience had ended poorly. I got another sandwich and placed a comment on La Tea Room’s daily special announcement to the effect that I was let down.

When I returned to my desk I saw a direct message reply from La Tea Room on Facebook. It read, “WE’RE SORRY!” and went on to offer me a free sandwich and drink the following day. I had already forgiven them at the store, but this was a very nice touch.

This little story, my friends, can teach just about all you need to know about how to succeed with social media for your brand, whether you’re a small business or a giant national airline. First, provide useful information that your audience appreciates. Seeing the daily special is a good piece of info, and it tends to come in the late morning when you start to think about lunch plans. Other offers and promotions also make sense, but note in my screen grab above that La Tea Room doesn’t abuse the friendship; it only sends an update about once per day.

Second, be human. That means you have to write with some personality and show who you are. It’s even OK to screw up once in a while; just apologize, offer something to make up for the error, and move on. In this case the only flaw I see with La Tea Room is that the account does not identify an actual named person.

The benefits here are very obvious: In just a few short weeks this sandwich place has gotten more than 50 nearby diners to accept daily marketing messages. These people are leaving positive comments on the food and showing their friends that they are following. Each one is a key influencer surrounded by other working stiffs who make daily lunch decisions. And the cost? Well, it takes one person probably 10 minutes a day to craft a single post and monitor responses. If one more sandwich a day is sold this effort pays out.

But this is more powerful than just selling an extra sandwich. Social media such as this helps establish a true, human relationship between the company and its customers. This generates loyalty beyond reason and begins to court “regulars” who like to give their business to people who work hard and seem to care. And once again I ask: If the local sandwich shop can succeed with social media, why isn’t your giant brand making an effort?

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Posted in Restaurants, small business, Social Networking, Solution, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Sam Adams Supporting Craft Brewing

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

I believe Sam Adams has been the most consistently meaningful beer marketer that I have come across. Last year I wrote about its launch of specially designed beer glasses that—at least in this beer drinker’s opinion—really do make the amber ale taste even better. Today I want to share some things I’ve learned about the company’s dedication to encouraging home- and craft-brew competitors.

As a subscriber to the Sam Adams email newsletter, I’ve had a chance to learn about its annual LongShot challenge among home brewers. It is an annual competition with judging events around the country that gives people the chance to have their beer mass produced in a special promotional six-pack. What I love about this contest is that it is much more than simply a “name our next flavor” or “make your own commercial” marketing promotion, which many brands have done with little personal engagement or connection to the product itself. Instead, this challenges the most dedicated brewers against each other and offers up the special reward of possibly seeing their years of investment pay off in peer admiration and distribution across the country.

My only disappointment is that Sam Adams doesn’t make the LongShot contest a bigger deal. After looking for the SKU in stores for years, I only just found it last weekend in a dusty corner of a local liquor store. There are actually three different winners in each six-pack: Cranberry Wit, Traditional Bock, and Double IPA (my favorite of the three with tons of citrus from the seven different types of hops). The Cranberry Wit was actually created by a Sam Adams employee, Carissa Sweigart. Giving employees the chance to participate is a pretty neat cultural build for the company. In total there were a little more than 1,300 entries from about 1,000 home brewers.

Last week I found another great story of Sam Adams support for small brewers. In a video at Fast Company I found an interview of Sam Adams founder Jim Koch. He tells the story of a recent national hops shortage, and how he ended up selling excess hops to competitive craft brewers who did not have access to this key ingredient. Koch put the reason simply: “They are my colleagues.”

The question is: Why would a mass marketer such as Sam Adams do small things like this that only touch a handful of their consumers? Where’s the scale, right? Well some might argue that these brilliant marketers realize that their positioning in the market as a legitimate microbrewer means that they must stay close to their roots and do things that the big players find too small. True, but I think Koch and his team are making these “small” efforts first and foremost because they want to. After all, Koch first brewed Sam Adams in his kitchen sink, and today they continue to behave like a bunch of passionate believers who want to make great-tasting beer. That’s just the easiest way to do the right thing for the business.

By sticking to their brand purpose and retaining a personal, hands-on engagement in the product, the marketing stuff comes naturally, and Sam Adams continues to be one of the best big brands in beer. Actually, with Anheuser-Busch’s takeover by foreign-based InBev, Sam Adams is now the largest American-owned brewery. I can think of no better beer representative for our country, and no better representative of where I hope our country’s brand marketing is heading next.

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Posted in Contests, purpose | 1 Comment »

End the GRP; Embrace Engagement

Monday, August 24th, 2009

I was extremely disheartened last week to read an article by Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer, who announced that he was finally coming around to the belief that digital marketing must submit to be measured and compared according to Gross Ratings Points (GRPs), which is a way of counting the number of people who are exposed to an advertisement. Although he stopped short of calling GRPs the only way to measure, his comment signals a step back in both digital in particular and marketing overall. It’s a sign that more and more new media leaders are giving up on the medium’s potential to change the marketing rules, and have succumbed to the traditional, interruptive model in hopes of speeding the move of dollars to digital. But I’m not about to cave in, and instead would like to promote the cause of a new marketing measure: engagement.

In his article, Ramsey claims that his mind was changed after interviews with numerous smart people in the media buying and measurement field. Examples include:

  • “At the end of the day, we ultimately need a standard…. We need a metric that will allow marketers to mix and match and to allocate dollars across whatever the platform is….” —Pam Horan, CEO of the Online Publishers Association
  • “…If you don’t have [GRPs], I don’t see how you can really understand the intricacies of your media plan or compare it across media.” —Gian Fulgoni, Chairman of comScore

Ramsey claims that marketers want two questions answered: First, “How successfully and efficiently did I reach my target audience?” He calls the GRP, a measure of reach and frequency, something that can answer this. The second question is tougher: Did my advertising influence the intended target’s attitudes, perceptions, or behaviors associated with the brand?” The GRP doesn’t address this.

I agree with the overall points of these experts: Marketers do need a standard measurement across media, and we do need to know how successfully and efficiently they reached their target audience. But measuring eyeball impressions is no longer good enough for any form of marketing. In a world of 3,000 ad messages a day and technology that allows unprecedented ad skipping, the “impression” is less and less able to sway purchase habits. It is failing to answer Question #1, above, and has decreasing impact on Question #2.

Ironically, while the digerati are giving in to the call for GRP measures, at least one big traditional media buyer is heading in the opposite direction. In a recent Ad Age article that suggests the recession is leading marketers to “hit the reset button” on where they put their dollars, Phil Cowdell, head of WPP media agency Mindshare, says:

I feel we could be facing an inflection point in our industry. The often contradictory forces of procurement-driven cost reductions and the marketing departments’ calls for more, smarter and better [approaches] will create an increasingly uncomfortable and potentially less effective operating zone for agencies. The only viable way forward is to shift from the procurement-oriented benchmarks of input measures such as CPMs [or cost per 1,000 viewers] to more output-oriented measures such as cost per hand-raiser and cost per lead. We need to move away from pure cost to a more-considered value equation.”

Meanwhile, data continues to show that the only way to successfully sell product is to get people to willingly engage with marketing. Instead of capitulating to the old-world measure of impressions, we must measure digital—and all marketing choices—according to the higher standard of engagement. Reach and impressions represent the wallpaper of a consumer’s day. But engagement is your welcome foot in the door of the consumer’s mind.

While there is no firm consensus among new media gurus on the definition of “engagement,” most sources point to a common theme: When people willingly direct their attention to your marketing, you have achieved engagement. There are many types of engagement and some can be more meaningful than others, for example:

  • Reading text (consciously)
  • Watching video (consciously)
  • Playing games
  • Forwarding/sharing
  • Voting
  • Commenting
  • Creating text/graphics/audio/video

Every item on this list requires the consumer to choose to pay attention to your marketing.

While admittedly imperfect, engagement is the closest thing we have to the next holy grail of marketing measurement. It fits with a common-sense belief that when people get more personally involved in your marketing, they are likely to develop a more favorable impression of your brand and learn something important about your product or service. Engagement is extremely measurable thanks to digital tools that can gauge everything from time on site to number of video views. And engagement is versatile enough to work across all forms of media. For example, Facebook apps can read how many people are using the code, and TiVo and Nielsen are now reporting which TV commercials are skipped and which are replayed.

Finally, changes in consumer media habits suggest that engagement will become even more important going forward. We are spending more of our media time in “lean-forward” mode. According to a Forrester report that called engagement “marketing’s new key metric”:

…Passive consumption of media is waning. Individuals dismiss or ignore marketing messages in lieu of information available from an ever-increasing number of resources, such as product review sites, message boards, and online video.”

The biggest downside to engagement is that it requires thought and processing, rather than just counting eyeballs. Engagement is multidimensional, and marketers and their media agencies must work together to define the right measures for each program up-front. And while it is important, engagement is merely the beginning of a robust measurement program. From this starting point, brands must build metrics to ensure that this foot-in-the-door leads to closing a sale.

It’s not easy for Ramsey and other digital-marketing leaders to change the media measuring and buying habits of thousands of marketers, but it is the right thing to do for our clients, our businesses, and the people who buy our products and services. Who’s with me?

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Posted in Engagement, Marketing Without Meaning, Media, Organizational Behavior | 5 Comments »

Plaid Nation Tour 2009 Wraps Up

Friday, August 21st, 2009

My post is a little belated, but I wanted to give a shout-out to the team from one of the coolest advertising agencies I’ve seen or heard about, Plaid, which recently wrapped up its annual Plaid Nation tour. As I wrote about last year, the agency has been spending a few weeks each summer driving across some part of the country in a “rolling demonstration of creativity and innovation.” Its goal is to check in on cool companies and share its unique take on the marketing world.

Once again the traveling team at Plaid shared their experience with the world using live camera feeds, a blog, and a Twitter account. This year’s tour took them mostly through the heart of the Midwest, including Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and New Orleans. Sadly the team did not make its way over to our home base in Cincinnati, but maybe next year.

I believe this is a great example of meaningful marketing in the ad-agency world. Companies often choose long-term agency partners based on culture fit. By taking this tour, the people of Plaid are able to show their personalities, both in real-world meetings at the offices of companies and through online tracking. Prospective clients see an agency with high energy, big ideas, and a desire to get in the trenches. It’s no wonder the agency has clients such as Segway and Virgin.

But aside from the business-building benefits, this annual trek is meaningful for Plaid’s company culture. In the agency world, you have to keep your talent inspired if you want them to continue to stay and do great work for clients. By bonding together over a few weeks and meeting new people at top companies, the agency brings needed stimulation. The Plaid Nation tour shows recruits that the agency is special, and I know that Plaid employees love to be part of this, even if they are not one of the few who hits the road.

I look forward to next year’s tour (and next year’s free blogger T-shirt), and hope Plaid rakes in a bunch of new business.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, B2B, Experience, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Baxter Delivers Free Health Testing

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Just when I thought I have heard every example of meaningful marketing in the healthcare industry, my friend and coworker over at the Dose of Digital blog, Jonathan Richman, shared a very intriguing new example with me this week. It could be the start of a meaningful marketing trend that helps save our healthcare system.

This example comes from healthcare giant Baxter, the producer of a drug called Aralast. Aralast is a drug that was developed to treat alpha-1 antitrypsin (AAT) deficiency. This little-known disease is an inherited condition in which there are low levels or no levels of AAT in the blood. AAT is an enzyme that protects the lungs from neutrophil elastase (NE), another enzyme that is produced by white blood cells. Without AAT, the NE can attack healthy lung tissue. The result can be early emphysema and liver damage.

The “good news” is that only about 100,000 people in the U.S. suffer from this disease, and treatments from companies such as Baxter can help prevent the negative effects of the condition. The bad news is that there are only about 100,000 people in the U.S. who suffer from this disease, which means that many doctors and patients know little about diagnosing and treating it. What’s worse, it is estimated that 95% of those with AAR deficiency are currently undiagnosed. With increasing pressure on healthcare costs and insurance companies’ aversion to “needless tests,” many healthcare providers don’t stock and won’t provide the tests to patients who come in. Many patients experience failing health for years before they are eventually diagnosed correctly.

This is obviously a significant barrier for suffering people, and for Baxter in its attempt to make a return on its millions of dollars of drug-development expenses. What to do? Some might assume the leap to an expensive television awareness campaign, or even government lobbying to force doctors and insurance companies to stock the tests.

But Baxter’s solution is brilliant: The company provides free test kits for healthcare providers, and even allows people to order the kits themselves online to take to their doctors to administer the tests. Baxter pays for shipment to the lab and for the tests themselves, and sends the results back to the physician. It’s a significant added value for both physicians and the people they serve.

According to a recent news release, Baxter has tested more than 50,000 people since 2004. Of those tests, more than 385 people were positively identified with the disease. This goes to show how rare it is, and how usual healthcare economics just won’t work. In addition, about 10% of those tested discovered that they are carriers of the gene that can cause AAT deficiency, and by learning this information they can be better educated about their higher risks of smoking and the risk of passing the gene along to their children.

As people and politicians debate healthcare legislation around the country, I wish more positive light was shining on this example. I wonder what would happen if more healthcare companies were turning their massive marketing budgets away from interruptive awareness building and toward meaningful marketing programs like this. I think we can all agree that this would be a big step forward.

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Posted in healthcare, Solution, Uncategorized | No Comments »

AccuQuote Makes a Good Call

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Last Friday, I wrote a post about a banner ad from AccuQuote, a service that can be used to compare insurance offerings. I complained that the banner was offensive because it showed a dead body, covered with a sheet and with a toe tag attached, under the headline “Everybody Dies.” The purpose of this post is to highlight the response I got from Sean Cheyney, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for AccuQuote, which shows that this company is listening to the feedback and getting on a more meaningful track.

On Tuesday, Sean made the following comment on my post, which bears highlighting here:

Bob,

Thanks for sharing your views about this ad. You are correct in your assessment that we feel our service, and more importantly life insurance in general, is extremely important. It’s our passion as an organization.

The fact that we’re dealing with a product that involves death makes marketing a sticky situation. You can’t really sidestep the nature of the product without producing lousy non-impactful ads. That said, sometimes the always moving line is crossed. Sometimes we have to go out on a limb and test when we’re in this gray area. It turns out that the positive response rate on this ad was very high. Regardless, we’ve taken your criticism as well as a few others constructively and pulled the ad.”

I really respect Sean’s comment and his company’s decision. The reality is that in these tough economic times, it is even harder to make a call like this with a banner ad that is working well. What if a job is lost or a bonus is cut because of this decision to take a higher road? Anyone who has worked at a small business knows that little things like this can count for a lot.

But great business leadership and long-term success depends on doing the right thing. So kudos to Sean and his team. I’m excited that I will have the chance to spend more time with him personally at the iMedia Brand Summit in September, and hope to offer him some meaningful marketing ideas for his next campaign.

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Posted in Banners | 1 Comment »

Blyk Free Mobile Service Finds Few Takers

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

One of the last great hopes of believers in the interruptive marketing model is that consumers will willingly opt into advertising if there is enough of an incentive to do so. This idea is inspiring a few new business models; perhaps the most-watched has been Blyk, a mobile service in the UK that since 2007 has been offering free calls and texts to 16- to 24-year-olds in return for mandatory advertising. Alas, Blyk failed to hit its growth numbers and was recently absorbed into telecom giant Orange with little fanfare or investor payday. I believe it proves my point that when the price of interruption is too high, the only way forward is Marketing with Meaning.

The business model of Blyk was fairly simple: Offer free mobile service to teens and young adults who are heavy users but have small bank accounts, and use mandatory advertising to lure big marketers eager to engage with an audience that is notoriously difficult to reach. According to Advertising Age, the company expected to reach 4.5 million members and roll out across Europe in its first year. There was even talk of an eventual U.S. entry. Alas, the service hit only 200,000 members in its first year and was unable to attract more users.

There were some good signs from the Blyk experiment. The company launched more than 2,000 campaigns, which included top brands such as Coca-Cola, Colgate, L’Oreal, and the BBC. Clearly the company was reaching an audience that these marketers desire. And the response rates to the forced ads were actually very good. The average response was “at least 25%” and one quiz for L’Oreal got a 70% response rate.

So, WTF? Simple: Most people, even teenagers with more time than money, find the true cost of advertising interruption so high that they will not accept it. In 2005 there were 6.9 million people aged 16 to 24 in the UK, so 200,000 Blyk users represent only 2.9% penetration (assuming 100% of Blyk subscribers fell into this narrow range and the company didn’t kick out users at age 25). Consider the fact that this is a very social crowd, and likely each of the 200,000 users told dozens of friends about the service. The lack of growth shows that the proposition of free mobile service could not overcome the advertising overload.

I think this experiment also shows how personally important the mobile device is in our lives. While we might be OK with zoning out in front of ad-supported passive media such as television (even on Hulu.com), our mobile devices are our active, lean-forward links to the world. As we’ve seen with the tens of millions of people who have signed up for the Federal Do-Not-Call List, we want our phones to be immune to marketing interruption.

Some might wonder why the response rates to ads were so high. I believe it is just a logical function of the type of people who were attracted to Blyk in the first place; in other words, the (small) audience that bought into Blyk doesn’t find advertising to be that much of a negative. Some of them even enjoyed the advertising. It reminds me of a study AOL did a few years ago on the .2% of people who click on banner ads more than once per month. These rare few are “the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.”

So another ad-supported business model bites the dust. My hope is that marketers and the investment community see this specifically as an example of how interruption and annoyance will fail in new media. As I wrote about earlier this week in my review of Chris Anderson’s book, Free, the price of consumer attention continues to increase. Forcing people to accept a drain on their time and attention (forced ads) in exchange for something of value (free cell service) is likely the wrong way to go. But if the marketing itself can be enjoyable and add immediate value in return for people’s attention, we might just be able to win them over.

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Posted in Marketing Without Meaning, mobile | 5 Comments »

Book Review: ‘Free’ by Chris Anderson

Monday, August 10th, 2009

I was expecting—maybe even hoping—to hate Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. As a digital marketer I have seen far too many poor business models pop up, become addicted to annoying advertising, and slowly fade away (e.g., the Bloglines RSS reader is killing me). I felt that Anderson was launching his book at the worst time, just as the economy hit new lows and businesses were burned by failing to act responsibly. I even started putting together notes for a thought-piece on why “free” is wrong and why the “99-cent economy” with iTunes songs and iPhone apps is the real answer. But after reading Free, I have to admit that Anderson is right, and I must thank him for providing yet another pillar of proof that the world must shift to Marketing with Meaning.

Anderson wrote the book with his biggest detractors and doubters well in mind. The result is a book that is well-researched with bulletproof logic and hundreds of examples. As an economics major myself, I appreciated that he went down into the details of this dismal science in order to make his case. He also blends in psychological studies to teach us how we think and react to free versus paid offers. For example, one study suggests that, “Most transactions have an upside and a downside, but when something is FREE! we forget the downside.”

Free aspires to be a general business book and approaches the simple, compelling work of Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers). However, I believe we marketers will get the most out of the Free manifesto. Anderson describes how one of our traditional tools, free samples, is powering new business models in industries as diverse as music, retail, and bike rental. But his thinking for us is much deeper…

One of Anderson’s fundamental points is that while the cost of information (and many real-world products) nears zero, the amount of attention people can give to something has remained unchanged. Unless we figure out how to avoid sleep or sprout additional heads, we’re pretty much limited here. This means that consumer engagement—the doorway to selling them stuff—is becoming harder and harder to open. As a result, if you’re a musician hoping to break through, or a game developer hoping to attract players, you are better off giving something away in order to earn this engagement. Once we have their attention, there is a chance to sell them something.

This is actually very much the thinking behind Marketing with Meaning. Because consumers are less willing or able to give their increasingly valuable attention to interruptive advertising, we must try new methods to get their attention. Through free samples or free services—meaningful marketing—we can break through the clutter and begin a dialogue that can effectively lead to sales.

For example, by creating a tool that lets people create their own Simpsons characters, the franchise wins viewers for its programs and movies. By providing live lunchtime entertainment, Healthy Choice has a chance to share information about its new line of Fresh Mixers. And by providing free education for you, dear readers, through this educational blog for more than a year, I have earned the chance to tell you about my upcoming book.

Imagine if the $500 billion in annual global advertising spending was completely diverted away from unwanted, interruptive advertising and toward marketing that adds value to people’s lives. It’s not a utopian dream; rather, it’s the simple economics of a world where the most scarce resource for business is consumer attention. If you’re not giving them something valuable through your marketing itself, then you have little chance to win them over. But win their attention through meaningful marketing, and you have the chance to achieve short-term sales and loyalty for life.

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Posted in book, Concept, Sampling | 3 Comments »

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