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Kroger Shows Loyalty to Customers (from #DHI09)

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Kroger mymagazine

One of most exciting things about the DHI Non-conference last week here in Cincinnati was a session by The Kroger Company, one of our clients at Bridge Worldwide. Through its various banner stores, Kroger is a major player in the retail food business, capturing 10 cents of every dollar spent on food in the United States. The company is not secretive, but it doesn’t go around regularly beating its chest about how it is winning in a very competitive market. In a session titled “Innovation and How to Meet New Expectations for Media Delivery,” RW (Kirk) Douthit and Angie Rose from Kroger shared several nuggets about how they are working to evolve to digital marketing by putting their customers in the center.

The main focus of the discussion revolved around Kroger’s work with its database marketing partner, dunnhumby, to provide personalized messages and offers to its loyalty cardholders. The company has the second-largest database in the U.S., after the Census Bureau. Kirk kicked off the discussion by reframing how Kroger thinks about the loyalty program:

“It’s not about customers’ loyalty to us; it’s about Kroger’s loyalty to its customers.”

This message permeated everything in the company’s session. Kirk and Angie spoke about the company’s use of quarterly coupon magazines (such as the one pictured above) that are personalized for its top shoppers based on their purchase habits. This helps the company drive sales of new products and larger baskets sizes from the 20% of customers who drive up to 60% of total sales.

The Kroger team spoke about how it is gradually embracing digital tools where it makes sense for its customers. They admitted that progress is slower than some customers want, but that it takes time to get things right. And while some shoppers are ready for innovations such as mobile coupons and online circulars, the company still has to provide mailed offers for the many who are not living in the digital future yet.

One of the really interesting digital services that Kroger is planning to release soon is the chance to pull up your Kroger shopping history. It’s a way of giving people a digital receipt and something unheard of in the industry to date. This could help people, say, track their spending on pharmaceuticals over the course of the year so that they can be properly charged back against flexible healthcare spending accounts. It’s a great example of how customers can see additional benefit from using their Kroger loyalty cards.

Finally, I also appreciated the Kroger team’s willingness to share how the decline of traditional media is happening faster than digital is ramping up. For example, a staple marketing tool for decades has been the daily newspaper. When sales needed a boost, Kroger has frequently used newspaper ads to drive traffic to stores on specials. But the decline of newspaper subscriptions is seriously weakening the impact of these ads, and there is no digital solution with the same scale impact. It’s another example Bob Garfield’s The Chaos Scenario come to life.

The entire audience really enjoyed Kirk and Angie’s open and honest communication about the opportunities and challenges in digital marketing. By better understanding their world, those of us who serve them can do much more to help Kroger crack the code.

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Posted in Loyalty Program, Personalization, Presentations, Retailers | 3 Comments »

Cincinnati #DHI09 Non-conference Presentation

Monday, September 28th, 2009
Saving Digital from Failure by Marketing with Meaning
View more presentations from Bob Gilbreath.

On Thursday and Friday last week my hometown of Cincinnati hosted its second annual Digital Hub Initiative Non-conference. I was able to deliver a keynote speech Friday, following in the footsteps of A-list speakers such as John Battelle, Peter Kim, Brad Berens, Allan Adamson, Pete Blackshaw, and Winston Binch. I was very proud to see our event attract a large, engaged crowd and I can’t wait to see how we take it to an even higher level next year.

Obviously I was speaking to share the concept of my new book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, and the topic of this blog, Marketing with Meaning. Every time I speak I like to try something new and personalize my presentation based on the specific audience at hand. For my speech on Friday I decided to come down hard on my fellow digital leaders for choosing to adapt to the existing, traditional, interruptive model of marketing, and I challenged the room to lead the move to meaningful marketing, which happens to provide a powerful path for digital to win.

I thought this built very well on earlier presentations in the day from Peter Kim and Brad Berens, who both showed how digital technology is a groundbreaking societal change. My link was to show that such a dramatic shift in society means that there must be a similar dramatic shift in marketing strategy. I also used my presentation to share how a simple model of focusing on business objectives and higher-level insights can lead to meaningful marketing ideas in no time. You can see my slides above.

Overall I think it went pretty well.  The Twitter feedback was strong and several people came up to me to praise it. Hopefully a couple hundred digital marketers take my challenge and go back to their offices Monday ready to lead!

What I really love about this conference is that it is a way for the digital leaders of Cincinnati to practice Marketing with Meaning. Led by Jack Streitmarter and a diverse group of volunteers, the Digital Hub Initiative is about attracting, developing, and retaining digital talent in the Cincinnati area by investing in great events such as this. I was proud to see many groups come together and pool their efforts around this effort, including local chapters of the AdClub and American Marketing Association, big companies such as P&G and Kroger, and diverse digital services companies such as Nielsen and Empower.

Thanks again to the DHI leaders volunteers for inviting me to speak, and to all of the volunteers who pulled off a great show.

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Posted in Conferences, Presentations | 1 Comment »

Best Buy Plays a Meaningful Note with Instruments

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

best buy pandora

In my final post of takeaways from last week’s iMedia Brand Summit I wanted to give props to a competitor who I admire, Clark Kokich, Chairman of Razorfish. Clark got the second day of the conference started by asking the room to think less about digital tactics and more about marketing strategy. He shared a handful of examples of work that brands are doing that start with big, strategic ideas that happen to lead to some killer digital work. For example, the Nike Human Race 10k, and Fiat’s new tool that allows people to upload information about how their driving is impacting CO2 emissions. But my favorite example, and something I just had to share here, is that of Razorfish’s work with Best Buy in selling musical instruments. This story shows how getting into a new product category is a great way to launch with meaningful marketing at the center.

Business Challenge

Just a little more than a year ago Best Buy first announced it was getting into the musical instrument business after a successful pilot in a handful of stores. This seems like a no-brainer. After all, Best Buy has one of the largest selections of music and music equipment, and its vast stores certainly have enough room for some instruments. According to Kokich, “They could have just run ads telling people that Best Buy now sells instruments.” But the reality is that this is not a big market, and it is currently dominated by specialty retailers such as Guitar Center. So the challenge for Best Buy was: How can we stand out in an existing market that needs a lot more buyers?

Insight

Best Buy saw huge untapped potential among adults who always wanted to learn how to play an instrument. The rise of games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band showed the potential.  But the biggest barrier is that many people are afraid and intimidated. People who work at guitar stores are mostly “stoners… who resent you for being able to buy the instruments that they cannot afford.”  So many potential buyers hate even going into the leading instrument stores.

Solution

Best Buy’s strategy was to “become a partner in helping you rediscover your love for music.” And by starting with this overall, customer-focused strategy, it was clear that just running a 30-second ad wouldn’t work.  The company started with the purchase point, and created a “store within a store” with trained musical instrument specialists. Each store also offers group and individual lessons. In terms of marketing support, digital has a leading position. Barry Judge, Best Buy’s CMO said this about the company’s approach:

“Our musical instruments department (in about 100 stores nationwide) is all about experience. Everything is plugged in and ready to play. The staff is friendly, knowledgeable, and approachable. We carry professional-grade gear from brands like Fender, Marshall, Roland, Yamaha, and Drum Workshop. We are working on building awareness of our musical instruments department, but more importantly, building credibility and authenticity. We hope to inspire people.

Digital allows us to connect with our customers in new and exciting ways, and our digital experience is meant to tap into that potential. Later this summer, we want our customers to create “dream rigs” from our inventory and share them with their friends on the social platforms they use.  We will be using the power of digital to let our employees, musicians from communities around the country, and our customers share their passion for music and their insights. Instead of just telling people that we have these great instruments, we want to show them, and help them experience them in the digital space in unique ways that go beyond catalogs of products.”

Kokich described how his team is inspired by the call to “become a partner in helping people rediscover their love for music.”  One example is a unique advertising effort with Pandora. Again, instead of just skinning Pandora with big ads for Best Buy, the company created a unique ad (above) that actually shows what instruments are being played in each song. (On a side note, I can’t find that tool anywhere at Pandora–what a lost opportunity!) He shared some glimpses of work in progress including Facebook tools to help people form a band and ways for people to build an interactive wish list. This should be an exciting space to watch in the months ahead.

Results/Conclusion

It is too early to call this a success, as Best Buy has only just begun supporting this effort in earnest. Of course, I welcome any comments from Barry Judge (@bestbuycmo). But the real lesson here is that a new marketing strategy is a great opportunity to rethink your approach to marketing–and make it meaningful from day 1.

BONUS: Kokich on Client Organizations

One of the biggest challenge of shifting to a meaningful marketing model is the existing organizational behavior of clients. As our boss, Sir Martin Sorrell said at the P&G Global Alumni Reunion back in June, “The amount of time we see our clients wasting on bureaucracy and infighting is appalling.” Kokich also drew attention to this key issue in his presentation. He made the point that “digital” can be sales, CRM, advertising, research, and customer service.  But clients have kept each of these functions in separate silos (“and they all hate each other”) for so long that it is difficult to take advantage of the opportunities.

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Posted in Conferences, Retailers | 1 Comment »

A Meaningful 90-Second Sales Pitch

Monday, September 21st, 2009

imedia card 1

Last week I had the chance to present our Marketing with Meaning concept and hand out copies of my new book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, at the iMedia Brand Summit in San Diego. There were some excellent case studies, including a Dunkin’ Donuts case that I wrote about here on Friday. But today I wanted to share an interesting experiment of my own that shows how meaningful marketing can even be the basis of a 90-second new business pitch.

One of the recurring iMedia events is something that its organizers call “One Minute Matchups.”  It’s essentially a speed-dating concept in which “buyers” sit at tables around a room and “sellers” rotate every minute or two and pitch their product or service. As odd as it may seem, it can actually be very useful. For both buyers and sellers it is a low-investment way to quickly size up whether there is enough interest to merit a follow-up discussion, and both sides get to weed out those that are not a great fit.

In March of this year I first experienced the “One Minute Matchups” concept at iMedia’s Breakthrough conference. In this case, I was a “buyer” and many specialty media vendors and digital services companies rotated to speak with me. I was disappointed, though, that nearly all of the 40 sellers I met with had done zero research on my agency. So most of the first 90 seconds was me answering their question, “What does Bridge Worldwide do?”  Needless to say, I didn’t find any great matches.

But this time was a little bit different. On Thursday evening, just 36 hours before my flight out, I got an email from the folks at iMedia with a list of companies that I would be matched up with. I actually had no idea that my keynote address would afford me this opportunity. As an agency guy at this conference I was to be in the “seller” position, so now it would be my turn to see if I could do a better job of pitching. I huddled with Jonathan Richman, my Director of Business Development (and top blogger over at Dose of Digital). We quickly decided that I had to do something meaningful in my matchups, and likely something related to my keynote topic. We decided that the best thing to do would be to bring each company one or two ideas for how they might practice meaningful marketing. I stayed up until 1 a.m. that night coming up with ideas by using their websites and my gut as a guide.  Then on Friday Jonathan and Carole Amend from our team worked on turning these ideas into blown-up cards with the idea on one side and my contact information on the other.  I picked them up Saturday morning on the way to the airport and they looked great.  The image at the top of the screen is one example (the person from Atkins didn’t show up), and at the bottom you can see the contact info side.

Now, let me pause to say that it’s very, very difficult to sell a full-service digital agency like Bridge Worldwide in only 90 seconds. While brand managers may feel free to “date” specialty service providers, working with a full-service agency is like getting married–as you typically stay with the agency for a long time and make them strategic partners on the core business. Maybe one or two of the marketers in attendance expected to hire an agency sometime soon. My real goal was to leave each person with a positive brand experience with Bridge Worldwide, so that when they are looking for a new i-agency at some future time they remember to give us a call.

It was an interesting experience sharing my ideas at the event.  My time with the first group of about 25 marketers came before I had given my keynote speech, so they had no clue who I was or what I was speaking about. My approach was certainly unlike others that the marketers had experienced. About one-third of them reacted very positively and were appreciative to get something personalized and clever.  The other two-thirds had a hard time figuring out how to respond, mainly because they thought I was selling them a specific idea. So there was some defensiveness (“we already have an agency”) and dismissal (“we tried that once and it didn’t work).  I felt pretty good, though, because I knew my keynote the next day would help connect the dots in their minds.

Sure enough, when I went to the next batch of matchups just minutes after leaving the stage of my keynote address, every marketer I spoke to understood what I was doing. I also changed my talking points a bit to adjust, for example, by starting off with “I’m not selling you an idea; I’m selling you on how we work as an agency partner.” People were overwhelmingly positive and excited to hear the ideas I shared, and a handful promised to reach out on some specific work.

But one of the best things about this approach was that I really enjoyed these one-minute matchups.  The decision to bring a unique idea for everyone forced me to do my homework on the companies, and better prepared me for longer discussions with prospects over meals and cocktails.  The ideas gave me more confidence in sitting down with a stranger for 90 seconds, and I felt great knowing that I would be giving them something worth remembering when they got back to the office later that week.  This approach was more meaningful to me, too.

Part of me thought that I shouldn’t write this blog post and share this idea with the world. I wondered if now everybody else would take the idea and outdo us at the next iMedia show.  But the reality is that most people just don’t bother to make the effort. It’s too easy to stick with the traditional path and “rules” of the game, whether you’re a salesperson or a big brand. But it goes to show that our success is less about what our competitors do, and more about how we take advantage of new opportunities. And as my friend Brian McNamara always said, “If it was easy, anyone could do it.”

imedia card 2

Posted in Agency Marketing, B2B, Conferences, Organizational Behavior | 1 Comment »

Dunkin’ with Meaning

Friday, September 18th, 2009

dunkin with meaning

Regular readers know that I’m a big fan of any marketing campaign that gives people the chance to squeeze their creative juices in and around a brand.  So it should be no surprise to hear that my favorite case study from the iMedia Brand Summit where I spoke this week was the “Create Dunkin’s Next Donut Contest.”  The case was presented by Cynthia Ashworth, Dunkin’ Donuts VP of Consumer Engagement (a title the audience loved).  It was obviously not the first “make your own product” contest, but the results show that people’s hunger to be creative and make a brand their own can never be satiated.

Business Challenge

In 2008, Dunkin’ Donuts saw the donut consumption rate among its core users drop.  The main cause was the concern about carbs and growth of the Atkins diet. Franchises were looking for help from the corporate brand to increase sales of this key profit and passion driver.  The company took several measures to improve, including various promotions and some new product launches, but a bigger marketing pop was required to jump-start sales.

Insight

Dunkin’ Donuts ran research with lapsed donut buyers.  They found that there were two key drivers of their love of donuts: (1) variety of choices and continuous new options, and (2) nostalgia for simpler times and basic pleasures.  The marketing team identified a “sweet spot” for its efforts to do something that rekindled these desires for variety and nostalgia.

Solution

The brand responded with “Create Dunkin’s Next Donunt,” a chance for the company’s core fans to have a hand in adding to the variety of the lineup, while triggering nostalgic memories of their first Dunkin’ Donuts experiences.  PR, TV, in-store, and out-of-home advertising drove fans to a very slick online donut creator developed by our WPP sister agency, Studiocom. Of course, the agency included a bevy of ways to share creations via social media. Many of the 12 finalists actually created and drove traffic to their own Facebook pages, which they used to solicit votes.

There were four key opportunities for press coverage and consumer engagement in the campaign: the contest announcement, the start of the contest, the vote for finalists, and the announcement of the winner. The winner turned out to be Jeff Hagar, with his creation, “Toffee for Your Coffee.”  Here’s a YouTube video from the brand that offers a great recap of the contest:

Results

The contest was an unqualified success.  In terms of engagement, there were 129,000 entries and 174,000 votes, and people spent an average of nine minutes on the site.  There were 90 million national media impressions (a $10 million marketing value). An online media plan was cut after three days because traffic was already far ahead of expectations. Franchises chose to get very engaged in the program, and supported it with more contests and offers in store.

The business results followed this strong engagement. Dunkin’ Donuts enjoyed its highest sales since December 2007. According to Cynthia Ashworth:

“The sales volume was huge, and all of our donut metrics during this period were through the roof.  America’s in love with donuts again.”

Conclusion

In my book, I spend several pages writing about how brands can forge meaningful connections with customers by allowing them to be creative, personalize their brand experience, and share with others.  I talk about how brands such as Kroger, M&M’s, Jones Soda, LEGO, The Simpsons Movie, and Pringles have all seen strong marketing results from this way of meaningful engagement with customers.  The core reason for success again and again is that people are literally putting themselves into the brand when they have a chance to co-create. Instead of just leaving a dull “impression” with traditional, interruptive advertising, customers who co-create a brand build a deep link to the core of what makes them who they are.  And they often cannot resist sharing their creations–and a little piece of themselves–with the friends and family in their digital worlds.

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Posted in Connection, Experience, Personalization, Restaurants | 5 Comments »

Adweek: Building Brands, One Act at a Time

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

adweek story

I’m writing from the Delta Sky Club in San Diego today as I wait for my return flight to Cincinnati after a whirlwind iMedia Brand Summit. My keynote speech yesterday went very well and I got to hand out 400 copies of my new book to an audience of brilliant digital marketers. I got to meet many of them, and, thankfully, my Twitter feedback on the presentation was strong! I’ll share more of my experience and lessons from iMedia in the next few days, but for now I wanted to share an article that I wrote for Adweek, which just hit today.

In this piece I put traditional equity building ad campaigns in the crosshairs and call out several examples of big brands that have failed to turn themselves around despite big spending and slick, celebrity-laden ad campaigns. Meanwhile, a handful of companies are making tremendous revenue and equity gains by creating marketing that actually adds value to people’s lives.

Take a read and let me know what you think!

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Posted in Equity, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Can Big Brands Adapt to Marketing with Meaning?

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

lululemon central park

Thanks to Seth Godin and New York Magazine, over the weekend I discovered the Lululemon brand of yoga clothing and accessories. It’s a remarkable business that seems to be sweeping the nation and broadening interest in a 2,000-year exercise ritual. One of Lululemon’s main marketing strategies is to host free, public yoga sessions weekly, such as the photo above in New York City’s Bryant Park. It’s a terrific example of Marketing with Meaning, but this case study and Seth’s post suggest to me that the evolution to this new marketing model might favor new brands over the old.

Let me first establish that Lululemon has a killer idea with its free yoga classes. Strategically, there are a few business challenges that make this idea smart. First, the classes help people who are intrigued by the idea of yoga get a feel for the concept in a low-risk way. The classes are free, and because there are many people around you there is less pressure to look good and perform well. Lululemon understands that it needs to get more people engaged in yoga to grow its sales. Give away the class, and people will keep buying the refill clothing.

Second, because the classes are large and in a very public place, they become one giant advertisement for yoga and the Lululemon brand. Actually, it’s almost insulting to call this an “advertisement”—rather, it’s a living, breathing example of how yoga makes a lot of people feel really good and stay in shape. Passersby see that this is a very socially acceptable exercise, which helps break down some people’s concern that yoga is for hippies and gurus.

So it’s confirmed: This is very meaningful marketing. But Godin uses this case study to suggest something more. He says, “I think it’s dangerous and often fatal to put free on top of an existing business model. Things fall apart.” Seth believes that businesses that have been charging for services won’t be able to adapt to the world of giving away value and hoping to be repaid in sales, loyalty, and word of mouth.

I think Seth is getting close to a very big issue but misses the mark a bit. He says that big companies are not used to giving away valuable “stuff” for free. But this is not accurate. After all, one of the most common marketing tactics in the history of commerce is the free sample. By people taking a taste of food or trying a new razor at no cost, many end up buying the product or service either because they like it or they have generated feelings of reciprocity and are compelled to repay the marketer with sales.

But the much bigger picture that Seth is raising is this: Can big companies shift from interruptive advertising to marketing that actually adds value to people’s lives—what we call Marketing with Meaning? Right now, I believe the future might belong to new brands, which rise to strength with a meaning-based approach from the beginning, while large brands might be unable to make the shift in time.

Looking at the hottest new brands in the world, many have risen to power with a more meaning-based approach. Red Bull came out of nowhere with a marketing strategy focused on events. Zappos rose thanks to social-media-powered customer service. Google became the most valuable, most loved brand in the world by continuing to roll out great, free services—and hasn’t run a single TV commercial. These brands show us that a completely new marketing approach, centered on adding value, can win.

Meanwhile, the odds seem staked against big brands despite their big budgets and historic leadership. The best model to pose their challenge is The Innovator’s Dilemma. Put simply, big, leading companies rise to success by getting better and better at one way of doing business. But when the world changes, they just don’t understand how to understand how to shift, and all of their existing processes, people, and incentives support the old way.

Traditional, interruptive, impression-based marketing is one of those existing models that a lot of big brands have gotten very good at mastering. They can tweak that commercial to perfection, squeeze out more efficiency in a media buy, and even find new ways to gauge consumer reaction to an ad (such as brain scanning) and new places to put an ad (airplane trays, anyone?). But those skills are all spent in polishing a model that has decreasing marginal returns—and with the revolution in consumer power and media options, these actions might be leading to decreasing returns, or at least widening opportunity costs from not embracing meaningful marketing.

Lululemon went from zero to a $1 billion market cap thanks to marketing with meaning. But it did so because it had zero to start with. This challenge forced Lululemon to think differently from the start. But big brands have the disadvantage of lots of money and existing equity. This mirrors the evolution of life on earth—the specialties that made plants and animals successful in one era can become weaknesses when the climate shifts.

But hope is not lost! In my new book, The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with Your Customers by Marketing with Meaning, I share the case studies of four very big brands that have made the shift: Dove, Burger King, Nike, and The Partnership for a Drug-Free America. And, in order to practice some free-sample meaningful marketing myself, you can download the chapter that includes these case studies here.

Time will tell which brands are able to make the leap. I believe thousands of small brands will rise from the chaos, and a good number of big brands that quickly admit the challenges and commit to a new path will make the journey as well.

Posted in Challenger Brand, Organizational Behavior, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Milk-Carton Ads Don’t Build Strong Brands

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

oreo milk 1oreo milk 2

Last week was back to school for my two daughters, which means I was right back into the habit of making them breakfast in the morning. When I pulled the jug of milk out for their cereal on Tuesday, I noticed something new and unexpected: an ad for Oreo cookies where I would usually expect to see the usual milk-brand package logo. I grabbed my iPhone and snapped the photos above. It seems many other people were waking up to this new media channel, as The New York Times featured it in an article on August 27. It is an interesting test case in “new media” and makes for a blog post that I hope you dear readers will weigh in on.

The rationale for milk-jug advertising makes a lot of sense from a traditional marketing perspective, of course. There are millions of gallons of milk that appear in grocery-store aisles and home refrigerators each day. That’s many billions of impressions that have gone uncapitalized on, until now! With people increasingly ignoring or avoiding traditional advertising media such as newspapers and TV, this is a viable alternative for eyeball harvesting. Because people drink an average of 20 gallons of milk each year and often leave it out on the counter or at the table during breakfast, this makes for a very long-term exposure.

It can also be very relevant to advertise on milk cartons. One of my coworkers pointed out that his grocery store has placed a display of Oreos right across from these milk ads. The New York Times reports that milk ads can be customized by type of milk—say, higher-end product ads for low-fat milk, which people with higher incomes tend to choose. And because kids drink a lot of milk it’s an easier way to connect with a generation that grew up with one finger on the DVR skip button. Ads are starting to show up on single-serve milk cartons at schools, and Disney and Build-A-Bear have already gotten on the bandwagon. No wonder there’s already at least one advertising company with a specific focus on selling milk-carton media. The firm, BoxTop Media, ran a study that showed a large brand got a 4% to 6% increase in sales.

Despite the new hype around this old/new media idea, I don’t think it has much of a future. New places to put your interruptive ad represent a fight against the grain and offer only temporary sales gains at best. Last year I wrote about how Zappos was advertising on airport security bins, for example. These ads are temporarily cute and stand out the first few times you see it, but over time people just learn to tune out the new ad space. And the ad networks that quickly form around them do not limit their space to clever and relevant marketers; rather they will “monetize” these impressions to whomever is willing to pay, which further deteriorates any hope for the new medium.

I also wonder about potentially negative consequences. A key problem with mass interruptive advertising is that people increasingly feel offended when it comes at them unwanted. In this case, imagine the parent who puts milk into the grocery basket and hears a child say, “Oh, Mom, can we get some Oreos?” That moves from mere interruption to a negative externality, and it could lead to a very poor brand impression for life, if not an all-out boycott campaign. Today’s social-media tools make this much, much easier for consumers to take actions like this.

Switching around among new interruptive media might be a viable strategy for some brands, but I doubt it would work for many. Instead, why not choose to create marketing that is more meaningful to customers’ lives? Imagine what a great brand such as Oreo could to do make its product more fun, engaging, and buzz-worthy. Perhaps taking a chapter from My M&Ms and allowing customers to buy personalized cookies. Let us choose the colors of cookies and cream, inject different flavors or designs, and miniaturize, double-, or triple-stuff ‘em. That’s just one minute of thinking and one possible avenue. But I’m sure that the Oreo team could come up with a lot more meaningful ideas based on their years of experience and customer understanding. And if they are looking for more ideas we’re always here to help.

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Posted in Marketing Without Meaning, Personalization | No Comments »

Crispin’s New Site Shows Smart Branding

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

crispin beta site

My buddy and our agency’s President, Jay Woffington, is a master of comparing diverse data and figuring out how they add up to a common issue or opportunity. One of his favorite sayings is, “Two points make a line,” meaning that there can be a direct link between seemingly unrelated data or events. Well, it seems that we have another genuine trend on our hands, as now there are three prominent examples of companies that have turned over their websites to open social-media input by featuring unedited Twitter comments, Wikipedia entries, Facebook friends, and blog posts. First was Modernista!, an advertising agency, and next came the Skittles brand. Both experienced a mainly positive burst of buzz. The third example comes from another ad agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, which has a live beta site that is attracting attention. Although the trend seems real, the questions linger: Is it meaningful… and it is worth the risk?

On the first question, I increasingly believe that adopting social media into your home page can be a powerful positive for customers. I say “increasingly” because the social-media space is evolving with the new digital social norms that are still self-organizing before our eyes. It is clear that already people are using social networks to judge any brand that they come across, whether it is posting a question to friends on Facebook, reading a review on an e-commerce site, or using Google, which often draws from personal reviews on blogs and discussion boards. So at the same time that people are visiting your brand’s website, they have a few other open browser tabs with this information. For forward thinkers such as Modernista!, Skittles, and Crispin, the logic is that they might as well go ahead and showcase this social media on the home page. So in this basis alone the approach is meaningful marketing.

The biggest marketing benefit can come when the brand website visitor first arrives and sees several positive stories, tweets, and blog posts. People judge a website and brand within microseconds, and some trusted, impartial comments on the home page can make a big impact. Instead of cluttering this moment of truth with ad copy, why not defer to the more-trusted comments of other customers? That’s what a billion-dollar brand that I used to work on, Tide, figured when it recently launched a home page redesign featuring actual user reviews front and center. And Juicy Juice is testing a banner ad that presents live tweets from moms.

But what about the risk and bad stories and comments that might appear at this moment of truth? Well, Crispin saw just what that looks like last week. First, it lost the Volkswagen account, which led to a rash of negative tweets and stories. It’s never fun to lose a big client, and worse to see the news everywhere. Second, the company took a lot of heat for running a contest in which it invited designers to create a new logo for the electric motorcycle start-up Brammo for a $1,000 top prize. Many in the design industry felt that this was undermining and cheapening their craft. Again, another round of negatives has filled its beta home page. In fact, the very public space and open ability to add a negative comment likely invites a much more negative response than one would otherwise see. It’s the chance to hold a virtual picket sign on the company’s front lawn.

So Crispin would call this a failure, right? I don’t think so. They are smart enough to have anticipated the negatives that can happen and I believe they fully embrace the haters. Even negatives can end up being positive in this case. First, it shows that the company is in the center of the action and they matter. This falls under the age-old line that even bad publicity is better than no publicity. The second benefit is that this open acceptance of hate media actually helps them attract the right clients, those who want to take risks and want to build a brand with a little controversy. Jason Bender, one of our top Creative Directors and leader of the team that recently won a Gold Cyber Lion at Cannes for a Pringles banner ad (that was somewhat controversial), said it best in our conversation about the issue:

“This shows people that Crispin is not for everyone, and that they don’t mind alienating the tight-asses they don’t want as clients. This helps them weed out the bad prospects.”

With this open site, negatives and all, Crispin as a brand is living and breathing the kind of marketing that it does for its clients. Brands such as Burger King, MINI, and Microsoft hired the agency in order to stir up attention, and they’ve all gotten what they wanted. In fact, Volkswagen chose to look for a new agency because it felt it needed to broaden its marketing to a wider audience. This will likely mean more watered down creative and Crispin wouldn’t want to do it anyway.

Interestingly, this Crispin story comes just as we at Bridge Worldwide have started to dabble social media on our Web presence. You might have noticed that we just launched our new Marketing with Meaning site, and on the home page we decided to feature a live feed of Twitter posts that include anyone who uses my handle, @mktgwithmeaning. We actually got to this idea in a roundabout way. We asked Ryan, our Web developer, to try to increase interest in our Twitter account on the home page, and he wrote an Ajax widget that brought in live tweets. We loved the idea, but I hated seeing my picture 15 times running down the screen. Someone mentioned that we could bring in retweets and other @replies. I immediately loved the idea because it would show the new visitor at this moment of truth that this is a popular topic that others are talking about. Second, I knew that the people who followed the Marketing with Meaning cause would appreciate that we were giving them at least a few minutes of public attention on our home page. And this in turn would lead to more tweets.

But what about the negatives of our modest effort? Jay and I actually had a long conversation about what could go wrong. Our agency recently got dinged a bit on something we shared publicly, so we felt the need to be cautious. We thought about the worst that could happen: Someone could, say, protest our work for a client and flood the site with negative tweets. If a client CEO with no social-media understanding (rare, I know) visited the site and saw this on our own home page it could be a huge negative. However unlikely, it is possible, so we made some plans to deal with it, but launched the tool regardless.

Bridge Worldwide is no Crispin Porter + Bogusky. We don’t believe that we need to embrace controversy to build brands. However we do have a very defined point of view on the kind of work we want to do for clients: Marketing with Meaning. This blog, the Twitter feed, the upcoming book, and more all are tools that we use to put ourselves out there for client consideration. When I speak with clients and prospects about this concept I say that sometimes our work will be interruptive and less meaningful if that is what is called for; after all, we exist first and foremost to serve our clients’ needs. But I quickly follow that this is our starting point for all recommendations, and that we’re going to challenge them continuously to move in this direction.

Just as Crispin has successfully attracted clients that follow its brand belief, I hope that our focus on Marketing with Meaning will attract more of the clients we want: brands that buy into our concept and are ready to buy meaningful ideas. The more public we are with this statement, the more likely we are to succeed.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Social Networking, Twitter, book | 1 Comment »

Free Chapter Download from ‘The Next Evolution of Marketing’

Friday, September 4th, 2009

chapter 2 image

It’s just a little less than one month to go before the official release of my book, The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with Your Customers by Marketing with Meaning. You might have noticed the new website, here, which matches the design of the book and brings in a lot of new content and tools that I’ll be introducing in future posts. Today I want to share the release of a free chapter of the book, in hopes that you will enjoy the sample, place a pre-order, and share it with friends and colleagues. You can find it on our Media Kit page or simply click here to open a PDF.

It was actually an easy decision to pick this chapter as the free download. Aside from its very compelling first paragraph, above (c’mon, who can resist that!), I selected Chapter 2 because it is where I first fully introduce the concept of Marketing with Meaning. It begins by suggesting we are at the verge of a next evolution of marketing, following in the footsteps of Direct Marketing and Permission Marketing. I then take the reader through four stories of brands that have made a fundamental shift away from interruption and toward meaning, each in a way that fits perfectly with its brand equity and target customers’ needs. Those four brands are Dove, Nike, Burger King, and The Partnership for a Drug-Free America. The chapter ends with an introduction of the Hierarchy of Meaningful Marketing, a tool that I further explore in the following three chapters.

Of course, I can’t finish this blog post without calling out the fact that this free chapter is an example of practicing the Marketing with Meaning that I preach. Free samples of any kind give the prospective buyer a chance to check out the product or service with no risk. And I actually spend a couple of pages describing diverse examples and benefits of free samples in my book. My hope is that people come away from this chapter with an overview of the concept and a hunger to see what else I have to say. On the other hand, I also hope that people who read and dislike this chapter are able to save their money (and not spread negative word of mouth!). I would like to thank my team at McGraw-Hill for understanding the importance of a free chapter and for making it happen quickly.

I will be introducing other examples of meaningful marketing around this book as the next few weeks roll by. Thanks so much for your support, feedback, and sharing.

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Posted in Concept, book, non-profit | 2 Comments »

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