Every year I genuinely look forward to reading the lists of best and worst of the past year from media sources ranging from ESPN to The Wall Street Journal. Advertising Age, my favorite work-related read, takes it to the next level with its “Book of Tens.” This year I was pleasantly surprised and thrilled to have my book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, named as one of the “10 Books You Should Have Read in 2009.”
Making this list is a great wrap-up to only the third month in publication for the book, and represents a promising start to 2010. Every day someone stops me in the hallways or pings me on various social media to ask me how the book is selling. I don’t get a lot of information other than checking where it ranks on Amazon.com, so I usually answer that “it seems to be going well” based on a solid ranking and comparisons to other well-known marketing and advertising books.
When I look back on the three years it took to get this book to market and reflect on results so far, I look less at book rankings and think more about the people it has touched. Overall, I am most proud of the reaction of individual readers—the comments from old friends/clients such as Kevin Doohan who have watched this project from the beginning, to industry players/bloggers as diverse as Jim Tobin and George Parker, and especially the people around the world who have emailed or Twittered me out of the blue with glowing comments. I loved the book when I finished writing it about this time last year, but getting great feedback from others and hearing that you are influencing their thoughts and actions is priceless for anyone who creates content.
Every day I remind myself that the goal here is not to just sell books, but rather to be a catalyst for the next evolution of marketing, and to turn marketing into a noble profession. Through the work of our team and many others I genuinely feel that this is happening. We’ve got some big plans ahead in 2010 and I believe word of mouth about the book and the overall concept of Marketing with Meaning is only just getting started.
And as I look back at where we’ve come, I have to take the opportunity to thank you, dear readers, for being early adopters and incredible supporters of this movement. You are responsible for its success to date, and will lead the progress in 2010 and beyond. Let’s make it a great year, together.
I was recently asked to provide some perspective on Marketing with Meaning to Customer Management IQ, an organization that focuses on providing information and services to the call center industry. A little more than a week ago the article here was published by the site, as well as a podcast interview with host Blake Landau.
The overall point of the article is that call center managers have an enormous opportunity, nay responsibility to turn what is normally considered a “cost center” into a platform for connecting with customers. Take a read and let me know what you think!
As our customers turn away from the traditional model of interruptive, impression-based advertising, most companies have chosen to continue to spend most of their marketing dollars in this way, while they hope that some scalable, new-media alternative takes hold quickly. But a handful of organizations are not waiting for others to build the next model. Instead, they are investing their money and time into creating new media platforms in which their marketing itself adds value to consumers’ lives. In my book, I share specific examples of how brands as diverse as Nike and The Partnership for a Drug-Free America have shifted their approach this way over years of testing and learning. Today, I wanted to share another killer example: Kraft.
In both my book and this blog I have written about how Kraft is producing some of the most meaningful marketing in the CPG business. The company has created an impressive website with everything from money-saving recipes to instructional cooking videos. The company has at least 15 million people in its email database. And who could forget its recent foray into iPhone apps, where its $.99 iFood tool blew away expectations and continues to serve as one of the best examples of useful, branded mobile marketing. In fact, the company recently announced that it will launch a 2.0 version and says that 60 percent of people use the app regularly, which is impressive given that only 30 percent of apps are used after the first day they are purchased.
Increasingly, Kraft marketing efforts are looking like the central strategy of this CPG leader, rather than just a series of experiments. Last week Advertising Ageshared a video segment of the Kraft VP for Global Media Services, Mark Stewart, in which he shared a few words about how the company is becoming a media platform. The entire video is worth watching, but some of my favorite quotes include:
“We’re in the food solutions business.”
“We’re a scaled marketer and a scaled publisher.”
“In this new world… brands have to stand for more than the functionality of their product. You have to provide real solutions and real services.”
“The future is really about how do you add utility to your brands, which is way beyond what the product delivers.”
For perspective, these words are coming from a person who spends $800 million in measured media each year (i.e., putting Kraft brand ads on others’ media platforms). This means that all of these in-house efforts still only represent a fraction of consumer marketing, but it also shows how far Kraft could go if it started carving a large chunk of this spending for its owned-media business. And the company certainly appears to be headed in that direction. It’s once-free magazine for database members, Kraft Food &Family, is now becoming a subscription-based magazine. And the company is launching other branded apps, including something called “Triscuit Small Plates”—a partnership with Wine Enthusiast that gives tips on pairing wines with snacks and cheese.
This move to a meaningful media+marketing strategy fits well with the overall company strategy. With its focus on premium food brands and the wide range of categories in its stable, a scalable marketing platform makes a lot of sense. Ironically, while Kraft was expanding its media platform last week, another major multi-brand CPG marketer, Procter & Gamble, learned that its owned media platform was being canceled. Its long-running show, As the World Turns, was shuttered by CBS. Recall that the soap opera was invented by P&G as a platform for radio advertising for its brands in 1933.
Why would one owned-media effort rise while another falls? I’m sure part of the story is that tastes are changing in favor of digital tools and are moving away from daytime dramas, but I think the bigger story is that Kraft’s new efforts put the brand in the center of the meaningful content, while soap operas are merely a package for interruptive advertising. Interestingly, while its soap opera business has been failing, P&G is making new investments in sites such as Petside.com, which offers pet health information and provides a meaningful marketing platform for its Iams brand (which has health benefits and claims). This changing of the guard it but one example of how the world is moving toward Marketing with Meaning, and I expect both Kraft and P&G to continue to lead the way in the years ahead.
Here at Bridge Worldwide, all 260 (and growing) employees are preparing to go through our annual evaluation process and work-plan development for the year ahead. Our belief is that it is important to regularly review how each employee is doing and assess individuals’ strengths and opportunity areas. On the latter, we’re big believers in having open and honest conversations about what people need to improve on, and managers help direct reports create action plans to tackle them. While it can sometimes be a tough conversation to have, we strongly believe this is a reason we have such great employees and have been named one of the Best Small Businesses to Work For in America four years in a row. So I found it interesting to see that Starbucks stores seem to be taking the same approach.
Our President, Jay, sent me this photograph he took during a recent trip to a local Starbucks here in Cincinnati. As you can see, the store is proudly sharing what opportunity areas it is working on this month. It seems to be based on feedback that they have gotten from store visitors, and alternates every month.
There are several things I love about this big idea. First, it shows visitors that the store is listening and actually thankful for the feedback. Second, because it is handwritten and changes every month, visitors can tell that this is not just some big corporate B.S., but rather that the specific store cares and is listening. Third, by writing its opportunity area publicly, Starbucks effectively opens up the dialogue with its customers. I believe people will start giving more open and honest feedback to store employees, which in turn will make them even better.
Finally, this is a tremendous tool for educating and reminding store employees what is important for them to focus on. When they walk in to start working at 5:30 a.m., they are greeted with this same sign—a very vivid reminder of what each individual should focus on.
When he shared this photo, Jay suggested that this goes even further by allowing customers to feel like they are shaping the brand and experience—and that this helps reinforce Starbucks strategy as “the third place” people spend significant time in. After all, if it’s really your space, then you need to have a say in how it appears and functions, just like home and the office.
My buddy Pete Blackshaw recently pointed out that Starbucks claims it has implemented 50 customer suggestions that have come from its MyStarbucksIdea site. Pete literally wrote the book on how to turn great customer service into marketing, and Starbucks hits it out of the park here.
This is a great reminder that Marketing with Meaning works best when you make it personal, in-store, and face to face with the customers who hand you their money every day.
(Click here to buy The Next Evolution of Marketing with a portion of proceeds to go to one of our featured case studies, The Partnership for a Drug-Free America.)
Right about now, the first of several hundred people on the client and partner list of our digital advertising agency, Bridge Worldwide, are finding this man on the cover of a holiday card. Don’t be afraid, dear readers; it’s just Mike Glisson, one of our Tech stars—and for a special few weeks of shopping season, a helpful help. Welcome to the Bridge Worldwide Holiday Card, 2009 edition. I’m happy to share a pretty fun and useful example of Marketing with Meaning from the agency that spawned this concept.
Every year agencies and vendors around the world are challenged to figure out how to say “thank you” to their customers and partners for another mutually beneficial year. I remember coming to Bridge Worldwide in October 2004 and being handed this responsibility along with many others, and somehow it has stuck with me. Historically agencies loaded their clients with personal gifts and presents, but around 2004 we started getting letters from the Purchasing Departments of our clients warning us that anything more than a small, agency-branded trinket was taboo. So we had to figure out other ways to show how much we cared.
For the past five years, we have taken the opportunity to entertain our clients, share more about ourselves, and give back to good causes. We have made donations to the food bank on behalf of clients, we have shared families’ secret recipes, and we even created a video game with key employees as avatars. More or less, these were all solid examples of Marketing with Meaning, but the bar keeps going up every year.
Our teams also love to use the Holiday Card as a way to test out and impress our partners with kick-ass digital creative. Different teams take turns working on this project, and each one wants to one-up the previous effort thanks to our friendly competitive nature.
But this year’s challenge was set at a higher level for a few reasons. First, we just launched our manifesto book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, so we knew that all eyes would be on Bridge Worldwide to practice the meaningful marketing that it has been preaching. Second, we were extremely time-constrained thanks to a huge surge in new business from both historic clients and new wins throughout the year. In an economy that has hurt many other agencies, we have been lucky enough to keep growing at a torrid rate. But that didn’t leave a lot of time for company marketing efforts such as a Holiday Card.
Despite these challenges (or perhaps because of them), our team responsible for this project pulled together a killer idea in record time. I gave them a pretty simple brief, which essentially asked them to: (1) show off our unique Bridge Worldwide culture; and (2) provide Marketing with Meaning. The team actually came up with four great ideas, but I fell in love with Elf Worldwide….
Elf Worldwide is a service in which our own employees are providing gift suggestions to our clients and partners who are in need of help to come up with ideas for their loved ones. We realized that this can be a challenge for many people, especially when there are generation or interest gaps. And we saw an opportunity to tap one of our greatest strengths: a large, diverse group of employees who represent just about every age and interest group. As you can see on our website, it takes only seconds to request a gift idea from our group of volunteer elves. What you cannot see is that there is a pretty sophisticated series of steps that each request goes through (including prioritization of client requests and multiple checks for appropriateness!). The team thought of everything that could go wrong and planned accordingly.
Of course we couldn’t just offer this tool in a plain brown wrapper. Our team took over a corner of the office for a day and filmed hours of elf hijinks. The security-cam video on the home page actually has more than 30 minutes of unique footage and you just might find yourself unable to turn away. I also believe the site has some of the funniest copywriting we’ve ever produced as an agency.
As you might expect, we’re also using this tool as a way to make sure that people have put our book on the shopping list for that special marketer in their lives. The icing on the cake is that we are partnering with one of the featured meaningful marketers profiled in the book, The Partnership for a Drug-Free America. A percentage of each book sold through this special link will go toward the partnership.
I don’t say this every year, but I really do believe this is our best Holiday Card effort yet. Let me publicly thank the entire team that put this together. Great work!
Go ahead and give it a try and let us know what you think!
Most regular readers are likely aware of Dose of Digital, a meaningful marketing blog for our agency, Bridge Worldwide, that is run by Jonathan Richman, one of our top Directors of Strategic Planning. The most-visited tool on Dose of Digital is a Social Media Wiki that gives marketers the chance to add their case studies to a list of examples from the pharma category. A few weeks ago Jonathan shared a submission by Sanofi-Aventis from its diabetes group that I felt compelled to share here on Marketing with Meaning as well.
I watch the diabetes category pretty closely because we work with Abbott Nutrition and have managed the Diabetes Control for Life program for several years. Our work on this program was a featured case study in my book. And a few months ago I wrote about a Bayer tool that turns blood glucose testing into a game for kids, thanks to a partnership with Nintendo. Both companies market to people with diabetes, and both have realized that the best way to succeed is to actually help people manage their disease and forge healthy eating and testing habits.
Now Sanofi-Aventis joins these two with an iPhone app called GoMeals. The purpose of this tool is to make “it easy to access nutritional information, find restaurants and keep track of your food intake.” There are a few very useful tools here: (1) a restaurant finder that includes nutritional information for many national restaurants; (2) a daily tracker of food intake meter for information on calories, carbs, protein, etc.; and (3) a searchable database of food and ability to plan and save meal choices.
The overall marketing strategy here is for Sanofi-Aventis to forge closer bonds with prescribing physicians and patients who are working to manage their disease. The company sells Lantus, a type of insulin, which is used to help manage the disease. So by offering this free tool, the company is doing more to fulfill the purpose of its product.
This approach builds on the well-known insight that people with diabetes must continually micromanage their meals to prevent both short-term blood sugar spikes and long-term deterioration. And by putting this tool into an iPhone app, it becomes much more convenient and useful. After all, we don’t eat meals at our computers very often, and the iPhone has become an incredible tool for information on the go. The company is even doing its customer service via Twitter, which helps it make its product more viral.
It’s early for the GoMeals app, and will take some time to build a critical mass of users. I am also curious to see if the company will be running a clinical study on the impact of the tool, like Abbott Nutrition has successfully done with its Diabetes Control for Life program. This helps both patients and physicians gain confidence in the program and is “living proof” of its meaning in people’s lives. I’ll keep watching and testing the tool, maybe even using it to drop a few pounds for my New Year’s resolution!
I’ve been a Seth Godin fan long before he was kind enough to endorse my book. In fact, the first and best innovative marketing book I can remember reading was his Permission Marketing, a little more than 10 years ago. Not only is Godin an inspirational author, but his choices in marketing his books have been quite remarkable. Examples include the limited-edition copies of Purple Cow that were sold in actual milk boxes (I’ve got one), and his recent limited-membership community to support the launch of Tribes. In the three years from concept to shelf for my own book, I often went back to an old blog post he wrote about book publishing and marketing. Godin inspired me to practice innovative marketing that I was preaching in my book, and he’s got another new trick up his sleeve with the launch of his newest book, Linchpin.
Godin announced on his blog that he would provide an advance copy of Linchpin to the first 3,000 people who contributed at least $30 to the Acumen Fund, which is “a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty.” I immediately made my donation for a chance to be one of the first to purchase a book that I knew I would pay about $30 for anyway. And it didn’t surprise me at all that the 3,000 copies were snapped up in just 48 hours. That generated $108,000 for the Acumen Fund. Wow!
It might seem odd for Godin to give up the first 3,000 in book sales and cover the cost of the book printing and shipping himself on top of it. But the reality is that after many successful books, Godin fully understands that the best way to sell a lot of books is to get a lot of books in the hands of people who are likely to spread the word of mouth. Books are nothing but ideas, and ideas have to spread from person to person.
One of the things I think about when giving away copies of my book is that one reader has the potential to create five to 10 readers. This comes from people reading on planes, keeping the book out on their desks, giving a copy to friends—and I haven’t even mentioned tools such as Twitter and Facebook where people love to share what they’ve read recently. That’s why I go out of my way to personally hand copies to friends and clients, and why I offered early advance copies to members of our Marketing with Meaning community. We’re also working our way down the Ad Age Power 150 list of marketing blogs, offering a free copy to people in hopes of getting reviews.
Not only do free, advance copies help get the word of mouth going, but the people who receive them often feel like special insiders that are, in a way, part of the book itself. Godin’s tie to a worthy charity makes the marketing even more meaningful, and helps ensure that his book-marketing effort doesn’t just feel like an obvious grab for more money.
It’s a lot harder and more complicated for marketing like this. Most books might get a few copies to overwhelmed editors and maybe a print ad in BusinessWeek. But in a world where lots of authors are competing to spread their ideas, Godin shows how to win by giving.
This week I’ve had fun writing about how technology companies are marketing themselves in meaningless and meaningful ways. I want to end the week with a timely surprise from Facebook that made me smile.
I have to admit to you, dear readers, that my birthday is coming up in a few days. I’m one of those people who really dislike birthdays. I don’t think I’m that “old,” but I find that once you graduate from childhood and reach the last cool birthday of 21 (legal drinking age in the U.S., for those international followers), the birthday is just a reminder that you’re getting older. It also doesn’t help that I have a birthday that’s pretty close to Christmas. When your “special day” is completely overshadowed by Thanksgiving and Christmas, it tends to suck. Until recently, only my family and a few close friends remember when my birthday arrives. But now, thanks to Facebook, a couple of hundred additional people now get reminded to wish me a Happy Birthday.
I am sure that a lot of you know the drill by now. Your birthday hits and suddenly tons of people in meetings and online take a minute to wish you a happy one. Facebook isn’t the first social network or tool to remind users of others’ birthdays. I recall Plaxo doing this a while back. But Facebook is the first truly mass social-media tool to take off, and its ability to call out this personal event has made a small, noticeable impact on people’s lives.
For years, Facebook has been doing nothing more than highlighting the day, but this year I got a message from the service a week ago that invited me to ask my friends to make a donation to a cause of my choice. This immediately got my attention for several reasons. First, the message was sent when I was aware of the big day coming up (and starting to dread it). Second, Facebook noticed that this is a great opportunity to use the power of friends’ attention to promote special causes. And soliciting donations for a cause is much more meaningful than giving yet another gift. It’s easier than shopping and better for the world than more junk.
The simple, straightforward “Birthday Wish for Charity” can be seen here. Within a few minutes you can choose a cause, explain why you believe in it, set a fund-raising goal, and share with friends and well-wishers. It made me feel like my birthday attention could be directed to something real and positive. I will admit that there are a few flaws in this tool. For example, the number and diversity of charities represented is very small. I found about 15 total causes, and about 12 of them were related to animal issues (noble, but not my first priority).
This idea is not necessarily a mass marketing tool that is going to help Facebook generate another 25 million members, but it does hit every single member in a meaningful way and special time of year (every year). By helping people share and support their values, the tool helps people get more value out of Facebook. Simply put, it’s Marketing with Meaning, and I hope to see many more examples like this from the company in many more birthdays to come.
This week, I wrote about three once-proud technology companies that are trying to save their businesses by embracing a marketing playbook straight out of the Don Draper era. Yahoo!, eBay, and AOL have all recently chosen to go with expensive, interruptive advertising campaigns rather than try something different and meaningful. Perhaps they should have taken the path to success of their number-one competitor, Google.
Google was named the most valuable brand in the annual Millward Brown BrandZ study for the third consecutive year in 2009. Not bad for a company that does almost no marketing. Well, it does some marketing; for example, the company launched a series of outdoor billboards recently to drive awareness of its suite of business apps. But traditional, interruptive marketing by Google is very, very rare. A lot of what makes Google a valuable brand comes from its great search engine and series of useful tools. One could argue that everything Google does is “meaningful marketing.” In other words, by offering useful, free software tools such as Gmail and Google Maps, the company draws people to its search-engine business, where it makes money on every AdWords click. But let’s save this angle for a future post. Instead, I want to highlight a few of the little things Google does that make it the leader in meaningful technology marketing.
The Google Home Page
Google understands that its home page is very valuable real estate. Tens of millions of people per month visit Google.com to start their many, diverse searches. But instead of ceding its home page to advertisers who would love to capture its eyeballs, Google puts its visitors first and offers a clean, clutter-free experience. This “page of truth” sends a clear message to users and clearly differentiates versus the competition such as MSN and Yahoo! It clearly communicates that searchers come first at Google, and its traffic is not merely sold out to the highest bidder.
But Google sometimes does change this home page… when it wants to celebrate a milestone or draw attention to an issue. People are often surprised and delighted to see how Google has toyed with its logo to highlight a holiday or news item. Recently, for example, the company celebrated the 40th Anniversary of Sesame Street with several logos, including the one shown above. By highlighting the program on its home page, Google actually drew more media attention to the milestone as well. Other special logos in November 2009 included the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, NASA’s discovery of water on the moon, Father Frost’s Birthday in Russia, and National Teacher Day in Vietnam. Instead of offering us another meaningless banner ad like Yahoo.com does, with these little touches Google earns a special place in our hearts.
Free Wi-Fi for Airports
Google always seems to be adding services for Internet users while asking for nothing in return. The latest example is its offer of free Wi-Fi service in 47 airports across the U.S. through January 15, 2010. It is a great gift for weary travelers who are often stuck in airports while trying to see loved ones for the holidays. One might expect that the “price” for free access is being forced to see a Google ad when you successfully log on. Instead the company directs users to a page where they offer the chance to donate to one of three charities that Google supports. And Google will match donations of up to $250,000 per airport.
Viral Video
Last week while I was compiling examples of the meaningless ads for technology companies in my last post, someone in our office forwarded a “commercial” for Google. I discovered a few videos under the title of “Google Search Stories” that blew me away. Check it out:
What you find here is TV commercial-quality production of a lovely ad for Google. In 30 seconds, these videos bring deep emotion while showing off many of the latest and greatest Google features. It’s no wonder that the 40,000-and-growing viewers give it five stars. And in case you thought Google went off and hired a hot creative agency to put these together, think again. These videos were created in-house by staff at the Google Creative Lab. Shouldn’t every company know its consumers and products well enough to do a brilliant ad in-house versus outsourcing it to people who spend a handful of hours watching from the outside? But I digress…
Conclusion
All of these little things from Google come with little pomp and almost no advertising budgets. Instead of clever ad messages that tell you Google is a great brand, the company uses its consumer access and brilliant employees to actually do things that make us more effective and happier throughout our day.
At this point you might be wondering: Why has Google chosen a meaningful marketing path while Yahoo!, eBay, and AOL all are failing to break through? After all, each company has developed great products and services in the past and they all hire similarly smart people. They are strategic enough to do competitive analysis and understand what Google is up to. So why the difference? It’s hard to tell, but I believe that a lot of it comes down to the fact that Google has a clear Brand Purpose. Google exists to index the world’s information, it believes in a philosophy of “do no evil,” and it has founders who are still actively, passionately steering the company. These factors give the company a basis for decision making that is clear and differentiated, and it means that no pricey advertising agency or clever tagline is required to make a campaign to keep the company “cool.”
Next week, I have the opportunity to present my book to employees at Google’s San Francisco office as part of its Authors@Google program. I look forward to honoring these meaningful technology marketers and learning more about what makes them special.
Getting the sense that traditional marketing is increasingly falling on deaf ears? Join our online community for new ideas to connect in meaningful ways.
