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Preparing for Our Book Launch Event

Monday, October 5th, 2009

hack night logos

In a matter of hours, at 9 a.m. ET Tuesday, about 240 Bridge Worldwide employees will launch a social-media marketing experiment to support the launch of our new book, The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with Your Customers by Marketing with Meaning. I’m excited about the launch, and can’t wait to see what comes out of the groups’ work—and I look forward to readers’ participation and feedback.

The book officially launched on Friday, October 2, and it got off to a great start. That morning Advertising Age published an outstanding book review by Pete Blackshaw. I could not have asked for a better and compelling review of the book, and sure enough the sales lift-off was immediate. On Amazon.com, the book rose to the #1,200 seller across all books, and shot up to #2 in the Advertising category, just under The Tipping Point. McGraw-Hill emailed me soon after to let me know that they are already getting ready for a second printing. Thanks to all of you for helping me along the way and for your early book orders.

Tomorrow morning our entire company is going to try to generate some more buzz around the book by engaging in an exercise modeled after P&G’s successful “Hack Night” from back in March 2009. You might recall that the company brought together a couple hundred senior-level marketers and external digital experts for an evening to compete on teams, using social-media tools to sell the most Tide T-shirts in support of its “Loads of Hope” cause marketing program. I got to attend that event and saw it not only raise a lot of money in a few hours, but also get people to learn by working together and experimenting.

A few months ago, our President, Jay Woffington, asked me if we might do our own company-wide “Hack Night” in support of the book launch. His goal was to not only juice book sales, but to give all of our people a chance to further improve their digital sensibility by rolling up our sleeves and working together. This conversation spawned a project and a team and tomorrow’s event.

Here’s how it will work: The goal of the competition is to get as many people as possible to download the free chapter of the book.  We decided to do this because the free chapter itself is Marketing with Meaning, and it is much easier to track chapter downloads than actual book sales. We have split up the company into teams, and assigned each team a specific medium to use to market the free chapter: Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, WPP resources, and this blog and community. The teams first met a little more than a week ago to start planning and preparing, and tomorrow at 9 a.m. they will begin their activities in earnest. We will have them each in separate War Rooms, with a live monitor feeding in the total downloads of each team. Everyone will stop working at 1 p.m. so we can go to have some fun at our annual company offsite, where we will announce the winner of the contest and present a few other awards.

Already people to seem to be having fun and are learning a lot. I don’t know much about what they have planned, though. A few teams have asked me mysterious questions, and one team dragged me into a room to film something before I left on a trip last week. “Winning” is one of the key words of our agency’s equity, so I’m sure the competition will be hot and heavy.

My only fear for the day is that the competition will drive people to do things that end up angering our carefully crafted audience. During the P&G Hack Night, one of my friends, Kevin Doohan, who knows several of the participants, wrote about how the contest felt like spamming. I have tried to reduce this risk by providing a coaching brief on how to approach people, as well as how to ask for forgiveness when you make a mistake. But I am sure that some of you might find tomorrow’s event annoying. I apologize in advance and hope that you see that our hearts are in the right place.

Although I am the author of this book and the most public voice of “Marketing with Meaning” I really believe that I am just one of many members of what can be an important movement. This idea has been driven by nearly everyone at Bridge Worldwide, readers of this blog have been incredibly supportive during the past 18 months, and now we have new tools such as our community to bring others into the cause. I am excited that our experiment tomorrow might give many more people exposure to what we’re trying to do together, and give more people the chance to be a part of driving a better future for marketing and society.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Sampling, book | 4 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 »

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 Concept, Sampling, book | 3 Comments »

The Next Evolution of Marketing: Book Cover

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

One of the things I love about this blog is that it offers a chance to share progress on my upcoming book, The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with Your Customers by Marketing with Meaning. My hope is that regular followers of this blog and believers in the overall concept enjoy seeing a little bit behind the curtain as we work to make this an industry-leading idea. Today I am excited to share the final book cover!

Just as I was warned by many authors before I started the writing and publication process, aligning on a final cover was not easy. The biggest challenge is that, despite the old adage, everyone DOES judge a book by its cover. The first impression at the buying moment of truth is critical. The challenge is that there are many conflicting priorities that go into the process. You want to stand out on shelf, but your customers don’t want something that scares off customers. You need something with lots of selling points, but the more words on the page, the less someone wants to read any one of them. Oh, and it needs to look good on a tiny piece of a screen on Amazon.com. There’s also the natural tug of preferences between my team at Bridge Worldwide and our publisher, McGraw-Hill.

Despite some stress, I’m very excited with how the book cover turned out. The final book is a combination of work by McGraw-Hill designers and a team at the branding and design firm of Landor Associates, and specifically Richard Westendorf and Joe Napier. They created a cover that stands out on a crowded shelf and catches the eye thanks to interesting color and the turning title words. While at first I was just happy to be finished with the cover, I’m really loving it now.

Another thing you might notice is the endorsement by Seth Godin at the top of the book. I am incredibly honored to receive his kind words; it means a lot to me to get such positive feedback from a guy who has inspired me for my entire marketing career. I was lucky enough to land several other very strong endorsements from a collection of friends, acquaintances, friends of friends, and complete strangers. As a first-time author, I believe these words of support are important positive signals for prospective buyers as they consider shelling out $27.95 for a copy. And I can’t say enough about how great it feels to have this cast of all-stars support my writing. Here’s a full list of endorsements that will appear on the back cover and inside pages:

  • “Bob is one of the marketing industry’s young bright lights. The Next Evolution of Marketing is a true beacon for all brand builders—many books claim that; Bob’s book delivers. It is part inspirational stories, part handbook for change… change we must embrace if we are to grow brands into the future.” Jim Stengel - Former Global Marketing Officer, Procter & Gamble
  • “Some timeless truths restored for modern marketing—and many new ones added. An inspiring reminder of the value of brand behaviour and how to make it happen.” Sir Martin Sorrell - CEO, WPP
  • “In the always on, text-messaged, TiVo-infested, social media driven world of today, traditional advertising has been rendered virtually meaningless. Bob Gilbreath brilliantly shows why we’re no longer living in our fathers’ marketing era. Better yet, he details how marketing works best when it adds value to people’s lives and he provides a playbook for success.” David Meerman Scott - Best-selling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave
  • “Advertising is changing rapidly and the old formulas don’t work anymore. Bob Gilbreath’s new book is loaded with ideas and concepts that will help you deal with the new realities in the marketing arena. Well-written, too.” Al Ries - author of War in the Boardroom
  • “The world has changed, consumer expectations have changed, and, as a result, traditional, interruptive marketing is significantly less effective. In his book, Bob Gilbreath not only defines and makes the case for the evolution to Marketing with Meaning, he provides a strategic framework, excellent real-life examples, and a clear road map to deliver, all in an insightful and engaging way.” Brian McNamara - President Europe, Novartis OTC Business Unit
  • “As the world becomes more immune to “advertising as usual”, the urgency for finding new and better ways to connect with consumers is rapidly increasing. Recognizing the need and responding with a solution, Bob Gilbreath introduces Marketing with Meaning, a fantastic way to earn consumer attention and make the world a better place in the process.” Kevin Doohan - Director, Digital Marketing, Red Bull North America
  • “One of the many illuminating insights in Bob Gilbreath’s important new book is that many marketers are finding success in social media because they’re rediscovering their generosity. Persuasion has given way to sharing and marketing will never be the same.” John Gerzema - Chief Insights Officer of Young & Rubicam and author of The Brand Bubble
  • “This immensely important book presents a new marketing model in sync with today’s new consumers hungry for meaning in their lives. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at how the greatest brands are leveraging their power and an essential read for anyone looking to add value to their business, career and life.” Jim Heekin - Chairman and CEO, Grey Group
  • “I thoroughly recommend this book. Bob Gilbreath demonstrates how marketing can go beyond interruption to add value for both consumers and brand owners. He illustrates his case with a rich and diverse set of case studies complemented by guidelines designed to help others create marketing with meaning.” Nigel Hollis - Chief Global Analyst, Millward Brown, and author of The Global Brand
  • “At The Coca-Cola Company we believe that nurturing brand love and advocacy is critical to building brands in this age of social media. This book provides a framework and compelling examples for creating the next generation of culture- leading brands.” Mark Greatrex - Senior Vice President, Marketing Communications and Insights, The Coca-Cola Company
  • “Today’s technologies have shifted power to consumers. The Next Evolution of Marketing shows how companies can leverage that power to benefit both their customers and themselves.” Peter Golder - Professor of Marketing, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and author of Will & Vision: How Latecomers Grow to Dominate Markets
  • “Bob Gilbreath has written an exciting and articulate guide to the future of marketing in the new media environment. Kudos!” Bruce Owen - Morris M. Doyle Professor in Public Policy at Stanford University
  • “Tell and sell was never authentic. Smart companies have watched their products soar by adopting a more meaningful approach, but no one has named the new model, codified it, or provided any guidelines for implementing it. Until now, right here in this book, where Bob Gilbreath does all three.” Pete Blackshaw – EVP, Digital Strategic Services, Nielsen Online, author of Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell Three Thousand
  • “Gilbreath is onto something important with The Next Generation of Marketing. I can’t recall a book that contains more actionable, real world examples.” Tim Kopp - CMO, ExactTarget
  • “This is a comprehensive and practical approach to marketing connectivity. With media no longer ‘dumb,’ marketers must truly connect their brands with their key customers. The plethora of new media vehicles fragments the marketplace, but also creates a tremendous opportunity. Bob skillfully uses real-time examples of how we can capitalize with richer and deeper connections.” Mark Chmiel – Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer, The Denny’s Corporation

    •  

    The official launch date for the book is October 2, but you can pre-order it now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders.

    I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, dear readers, for all of your kind words and helpful comments in the past 15 months that I have been blogging away here. As anyone who has put their heart and soul into creating content would agree, there is something incredibly special about having others enjoy and learn from your original work.

    But just writing and selling books is not why I started on this journey years ago. Instead, I hope to spark a movement in the marketing profession—one that will elevate the importance of the work we do and make the world a better place in the process. A book is only one “chapter” in the story. The next chapters will be written by you, and I’m happy to say we’ve got much more planned to help you make meaningful marketing in your companies and careers. Stay tuned…

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    Posted in Uncategorized, book | 6 Comments »

    Book Review: ‘It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For’

    Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

    Last week I trekked down to Austin, Texas, to spend some time with a fellow leader in the campaign to elevate the role of advertising, Roy Spence. I first wrote about Roy in a blog post a few months back. Our initial phone conversation then led to this trip to continue the dialogue about how we might partner up. We were able to spend some great time with Roy, his Chief Purposologist and co-author Haley Rushing, and a few other quality folks from their agency, GSD&M Idea City. We met the day after it was announced that Roy was handing his CEO role over to Duff Stewart, and he seemed extremely charged up to focus on the new Purpose Institute.

    The purpose of this post is to convince you to purchase Roy and Haley’s book, It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For. Overall, it’s a must-read if you are a fan of this Marketing with Meaning concept and wish to drive your organization and yourself to higher-level work.

    I believe the act of proclaiming a Brand Purpose is really the best way to start down the path of creating meaningful marketing. When a brand makes the decision of “Why We Exist,” it becomes much simpler to begin thinking about how you can create marketing that people choose to engage with, and marketing that itself improves people’s lives.

    What is particularly insightful about It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For is that it provides an inside view of some of the most successful businesses in terms of profit and purpose. The advertising agency Roy founded out of college, GSD&M, has been fortunate enough to attract and help shape great companies such as Walmart, Southwest, Whole Foods, and BMW, all of which have stayed close to a higher-level purpose. For example, the purpose of Southwest is to “democratize air travel,” and BWM exists to “enable people to experience the joy of driving.” I agree that being on the inside of an advertising agency offers the chance to see “lifetimes” worth of the good and bad of many organizations. It’s very easy to understand which companies “get it” and which are hopelessly lost, no matter what print ad or website we create for them.

    Roy and Haley weave decades of personal history together with these brands’ most recent activity, and provide a nice step-by-step guide for brands to uncover their own purpose. There are a few specific sections of the book that I underlined heavily:

    Life Is Too Short to Work Without Purpose

    This is something I first began thinking more about after reading The 4-Hour Workweek. In this book, author Tim Ferriss encourages cubicle dwellers to escape the office, become Internet entrepreneurs, and focus on personal hobbies for the rest of their lives. He almost looks down on for-profit, 40-hour-a-week work. I enjoyed his book in many ways, but believe that a full workweek itself can and should be rewarding and exciting. Roy and Haley remind us that:

    Bookstore shelves are now fully stocked with books about finding your personal purpose. But the reality is the vast majority of your time is consumed by your work life… Whether you’re a CEO or a secretary, the majority of your time, energy and talent will be spent in the service of your work. So why not make it worthwhile?”

    They go on to suggest that you find the work you love best by paying attention to “the meeting on the calendar that you’re actually excited about going to” and to “notice when your heart speeds up just thinking about an issue.” In other words, finding personal purpose is the first step in moving your company or your career toward brand purpose.

    Great Takeaways from Whole Foods

    While I enjoyed the deep case studies on Walmart and Southwest Airlines, I especially enjoyed two lessons from Whole Foods. First, there’s the fact that the company continues to commit to donating 5% of its sales on five days a year to nonprofits chosen by each local store. Stock analysts and some investors complain about so much of Whole Foods profits going to charities, but who can argue with a 3,000% increase in stock value over 14 years?

    A second interesting observation is that Whole Foods admits that it is never going to be perfect in delivering on its Vision Statement, as seen in its “Declaration of Independence“:

    We do not believe [the Vision Statement] always accurately portrays the way things currently are at Whole Foods Market so much as the way we would like things to be. It is our dissatisfaction with the current reality, when compared with what is possible, that spurs us toward excellence and toward creating a better person, company, and world. When Whole Foods Market fails to measure up to its stated Vision, as it inevitably will at times, we should not despair. Rather let us take up the challenge together to bring our reality closer to our vision. The future we will experience tomorrow is created one step at a time today.”

    (On a side note, after meeting with the folks at Idea City we headed across the street to the Whole Foods headquarters store. We spent about two hours exploring the amazing selection and had a wonderful lunch in the seafood cafe.)

    Conclusion

    One of my favorite passages in the book is the challenge for people to be willing and able to communicate their personal+brand purpose into the dinner-party conversation. Imagine the usual first exchange when you meet someone new and he or she asks, “What do you do?” You know you’re onto something when you can proudly proclaim the higher-level drive of your work. For me, the answer is: “I create marketing that improves people’s lives.”

    What’s yours?

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    Posted in Agency Marketing, book, purpose | 1 Comment »

    Recap of P&G Global Alumni Reunion

    Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

    One of the benefits of having worked at Procter & Gamble (I was in marketing for six years from 1997 to 2004) is access to an alumni club of thousands of the smartest business minds in the world. Every two years the P&G Alumni Network hosts a global summit that brings together top leaders from around the world, including a few of the top current leaders still at P&G. Two years ago the event in Cincinnati was outstanding, so long ago I made plans to attend this year’s event in Rome, which was held two weeks ago. I took the opportunity to take the family on a vacation through Italy, which means this post is a little delayed, but I wanted to share some highlights of the sessions from the event.

    The theme of the sessions was “improving consumers’ lives long term—a sustainability challenge,” and I found much in common with the Marketing with Meaning idea that I write about weekly in this space. Below are a few of my notes, on a speaker-by-speaker basis:

    Fernando Aguirre, CEO of Chiquita Brands International

    Chiquita seems to be making very positive moves on the sustainability front, a big plus for a company that uses natural resources heavily and works mainly in developing nations with rain forests, where problems seem to be significant and global biodiversity is in the balance. Aguirre talked about how his company is making several moves to embrace sustainability. For example, it is testing a new cleaning and packing station process that reduces water use from 80,000 to 3,000 cubic meters of water, which, if moved throughout the company’s operations, could save 3.4 billion gallons of water per year.

    He specifically shared the case study of Chiquita’s challenge in Europe a few years ago, when cheap imports from questionable companies threatened the company’s sales results. Chiquita chose to highlight its sustainable harvesting practices and secured an endorsement from The Rainbow Alliance. Marketing highlighted Chiquita’s efforts and the Rainbow Alliance’s support, and as a result sales actually increased despite the huge price pressure. In other words, Chiquita’s sustainability positioning helped it differentiate a commodity and retain premium pricing. Because of these practices, Chiquita is now attracting “green” investors. Not a bad value equation case study.

    Toni Belloni, Group Managing Director, LVMH

    LVMH is one of the world’s most impressive houses of brands. The company is a luxury machine, with more than 60 brands ranging in sales from more than $5 billion to less than $5 million. Belloni oversees the company, but it is a very independent group of brands. He talked candidly about how this makes it difficult to drive a corporate sustainability movement. Another challenge is the fact that his luxury brands often work with very small “mom and pop” craftsmen, so it is hard to force them to live up to sustainability standards.

    Nevertheless, the company is making a lot of progress. One example is a much-improved volume forecasting process and model that is helping shift shipping from airplanes to sea transport. The big downside of sea transport is that it can take many weeks longer to move goods. But better volume forecasting and planning can make a big difference. Shipping not only reduces transport costs by 90%, but it also cuts emissions by 80%.

    I was very interested to hear that LVMH as a company is focused on the cause of supporting arts and culture around the world. In what is a perfect fit for the luxury brands and their consumer targets, it sponsors more than 30 art exhibitions every year, and created a “Haute Couture Academy” to encourage interest in the field and develop future hires.

    Stef Kranendijk, CEO, Desso Group

    The Desso Group is one of the world’s largest makers of carpets. A few years ago Kranendijk read the book Cradle to Cradle, a manifesto meant to convince companies that they can improve the world and improve their business results by pursuing more sustainable manufacturing processes. Stef decided to remake his company according to the manifesto, and he spoke about how his company is recycling carpet, using fewer chemicals, and innovating in areas such as office noise reduction. I gave him an advance copy of my book and I hope that he now reinvents his marketing according to my manifesto!

    Len Sauers, VP, Global Sustainability, P&G

    Sauers was one of the notable attendees who is not yet an alum of Procter. He was a perfect fit to speak in the conference theme of sustainability. He first spoke about P&G research into what consumers are willing to pay for more sustainable products. About 9% say they will pay more, 72% will pay the same or less, and about 17% ignore the sustainability issue altogether.

    He went on to describe how the P&G corporate drive for sustainability can result in innovation down to individual products. For example, the company discovered that the Laundry Detergent category had the biggest negative energy impact among all of P&G’s businesses. That’s because a lot of energy is used in hot water washing cycles. This in turn helped drive innovation on brands such as Tide and Ariel that allow for better cleaning in cold water. And by advertising the benefits of cold water washing, P&G is helping to educate consumers on this simple yet meaningful step to reduce energy consumption. In the Netherlands alone, the company’s efforts have helped convince 52% of consumers to wash in cold water versus just 7% a few years ago.

    Panel with Sir Martin Sorrell (CEO, WPP), Kevin Roberts (CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi), and Jim Stengel (Former Global Marketing Officer, P&G)

    In one of the most disappointing parts of the event because earlier sessions ran very long, this panel of marketing giants was cut short. But there were a few good highlights from these strong voices for our industry.

    Sir Martin spent time talking about how clients talk about holistic marketing, but their biggest barrier is actually their own behavior. They cannot seem to overcome the internal politics and silos of their organizations: “The amount of time we see our clients wasting on bureaucracy and infighting is appalling.” I wholeheartedly agree.

    Kevin Roberts had some witty and accurate lines about what’s wrong with marketing today and what we need to do to fix it. Some of my favorites:

    • “The consumer is still not the boss at P&G; the brand is the boss… Consumers want to participate in building the brand.”
    • “It’s not B2B and B2C; it’s P2P—People to People.”
    • “Stop talking about touchpoints. Like the expression “counting eyeballs,” that’s not good enough. It’s about creating engagements, and we should measure return on involvement.”

    John Pepper, Former P&G CEO and Disney Nonexecutive Chairman

    Just days before the event, Procter announced that the CEO baton would be passing from A.G. Lafley to Bob McDonald, and we were lucky enough to have both A.G. and Bob join our event in Rome. What made the moment even more special was when John Pepper, another former P&G CEO, spoke for a few minutes about the success of A.G. and his confidence in Bob. I personally agree with John that Bob McDonald is a great choice for the role. I got to work for Bob when I was on the Tide brand in the late ’90s and found him to be an inspirational leader. (As an aside, on the Laundry floor I was jokingly known as “Little Bob” and McDonald was “Big Bob.”)

    After praising Bob, Pepper talked a bit about how Disney thinks about sustainability in its operations and marketing. He made a great point about how “it’s key to record the company’s efforts around sustainability and promote them internally so that employees understand and value the work.” Pepper also talked about how Disney has a powerful ability to encourage sustainability and positive causes through its media channels and parks. Currently there are park exhibits that educate visitors about the need for environmental improvement, and Hannah Montana recently kicked off a Disney Channel effort that encourages kids to play a role in improving the world (see Disney.com/friendsforchange).

    Finally, Pepper provided me with my personal highlight of the event. After his session I went up to hand him an advance copy of my book. The first thing he said was, “Well, any time someone gives me a book I have them sign it.” I was very touched to hear this request, which was actually the first time I have ever signed a copy of my book.

    This interaction with John Pepper and the P&G alumni event itself reminded me of how special my time with this company has been. P&G took a risk in hiring me out of business school, and gave me incredible opportunities to challenge myself on big brands with big budgets. It trained me well and exposed me to some of the best marketers in the world. Now that I’m on the agency side with P&G as a client, the company has been an important partner for our success and growth as an agency—challenging us to continually take our game up a notch, and treating us with respect and fairness. Procter & Gamble has certainly improved my life and I look forward to continuing to build its business as an alum and agency partner.

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    Book Introduction Video Release!

    Friday, May 8th, 2009

    As regular readers know, my team at Bridge Worldwide and I continue to gear up for the launch of my book, to be published by McGraw-Hill in October 2009. At this point I’ve almost completed the actual writing process, and I’m now shifting to focus on the marketing of the book itself.

    According to many of the successful authors I have spoken with, one of the key steps to a successful book is a strong introduction video that can be placed on the websites for Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Luckily I happen to work at an incredible digital advertising agency and was able to work with a stellar team on my video. The team decided to audit several best-in-class examples and decided to aim for the top. Of course their drive and passion put me on the spot to perform as well. The shoot went very well and I think the final product turned out great.

    In the video you can see a summary of the structure of the book, as well as the final title: The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with Your Customers by Marketing with Meaning. I hope you will provide your feedback and reactions either in the comments below or on the YouTube page of the video.

    Thanks for your support and encouragement and my special thanks for Alex Rolfes, Brad Lark, and James Marable for making it happen!

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    Update on the Upcoming Book

    Friday, April 17th, 2009

    As regular readers of this blog are likely aware, I am in the process of publishing a book around the concept of “Marketing with Meaning.” And although I usually use this space and your time to share a case study or analysis, I thought I’d have a little different approach this Friday and share an update of the work around bringing my baby to market.

    The Writing

    At this point in time, the actual writing of the book is nearly complete. I turned in the first draft to my editor at McGraw-Hill on March 1. We spent about a week working edits together, and now the book copy is in the hands of a proofing editor. McGraw-Hill was actually so pleased with how the book came together with little rework that they decided to move the publication date up a month to October 1. Upon finishing this first draft, I was happy to be done, but at the same time I was a little sad to just stop writing cold turkey. I discovered that I really loved spending time in my office turning research and notes into useful, clever writing. I actually can’t wait to write another book already. (I hope my wife doesn’t read this.)

    The book itself is coming in at just more than 300 pages. This is actually way above normal for a business book, as most authors are happy to barely squeak past the 200-page mark. But I wanted to make sure to use this book as a complete guide for marketers who want more than a keynote speech put to text. Instead, buyers will find a text that includes step-by-step instructions for how to make a shift to meaningful marketing in their own brands.

    Actually I haven’t totally completed the writing process, as I will have another chance to make final-final edits in a few weeks. And it’s a good thing, too, as since I turned in my first draft I have continued to collect scraps of information and insights around many of the case studies and examples that I have included. For example, I’ve had a chance to interview executives at Sears and Luxottica, and have gotten great new insights at conferences from companies such as Denny’s and OfficeMax. This will help make the book even more relevant and recent.

    The Marketing

    With the writing nearly complete, my mind has almost totally shifted toward marketing the book. The marketing process actually started in May 2008 when this very blog was launched. I took Seth Godin’s advice that authors need to start marketing an idea as early as possible, and the book is only one of many ways to spread the idea. More than 200 people per day visit this blog on average, a figure that continues to climb over time. A few months ago I added a Twitter account that is already up past 1,100 followers. For the book launch I’ll be tapping these new networks and hoping that there is pent-up excitement to power early sales.

    This week I started working on asking for endorsements for the final book cover and inside pages. I have put together a list of various names from brands, agencies, and universities and will be reaching out to them over the next few weeks. I’ve gotten a couple of very good “blurbs” already from top leaders, and believe a good deal more will come in based on my networking thus far. What I think helps a lot is that the Marketing with Meaning concept fits very well with and builds upon the beliefs other authors and leaders have been saying and doing.

    In the months ahead before the book launch, we’ll be doing some big upgrades to this site. We’ve got a video in the works and will have the usual book-site features such as downloadable chapters, PowerPoint presentations, and news coverage. But I am most excited about a “Tribe of Believers” that we will be creating totally separate from this space. I believe that the concept of meaningful marketing has a chance to be a real movement, one that becomes bigger than me and Bridge Worldwide. My vision is that marketers around the world declare themselves as “meaningful marketers.” So I want to create a virtual place for fellow believers to meet, share, learn, and work together to make our work more meaningful. I’m encouraged that a LinkedIn group we created and have done little to promote already has more than 300 members. There will be much more exciting news to share on this soon, and I will be much more public about soliciting your feedback.

    Overall Impressions of the Process

    One thing I’m actually a bit disappointed in is that I am unable or uncomfortable with sharing some major decisions and soliciting feedback along the way. For example, the final title and book cover are two things that I wanted to share more broadly earlier, but the publishing world is really not ready to totally open up in this way. One of the challenges is that I am a first-time author, so there tends to be less risk-taking along the way.

    Working with a book publisher has been enlightening and a great learning opportunity. Sometimes it feels like they are my clients and I’m doing everything possible to please them, while at other times I’m in the client position and they are bending over backward for me. Either way, we’ve built up a good relationship in a short period of time and the closer we get to publication, the better we’re working together. At the end of the day we come from different perspectives but all share the common drive to make this book a best seller.

    If there is one thing I most appreciate about the process is how kind fellow authors have been to me along the way. I’m a firm believer in seeking first to understand by sucking knowledge out of those who have come before, and I’ve been the annoying younger-brother figure to authors such as John Gerzema and Pete Blackshaw. Both of them remember what it was like to be in my shoes and have been incredibly helpful in showing me how to mimic their successes and avoid their mistakes. Lee Aldridge at Y&R brands has also been an incredible mentor. I’d like him to start his own book label some day!

    Thank you all, dear readers, for keeping this blog on your reading lists, sending me comments, and re-tweeting it to your friends. If you have any suggestions, feedback, or words of inspiration, I’d love to read them in the comments below!

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