Archive for the ‘non-profit’ Category

How One Private School Welcomes Competition

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Only a handful of my friends know that I spend a decent amount of time each month as the President of the Board of Trustees at The New School Montessori in Cincinnati. It is a private Montessori program serving about 150 students from preschool through 6th grade in one of the older, close-in neighborhoods of the city. This is the school where both of my daughters go, so it was an easy decision to get involved with the program. Being on the Board not only allows me to use my knowledge and skills in leading an organization for the betterment of the school—it also provides me with another platform to learn and develop as a business leader. By day I work on billion-dollar brands for Fortune 100 companies. But in my volunteer time with the school I have a chance to work with a small, nonprofit organization. And last week I even learned how organizations such as this can benefit its customers and its business through Marketing with Meaning.

In addition to my role as Board President I head up the Marketing Committee for the school, working with some other parent volunteers and the school administration to maximize annual school enrollment and long-term equity in the community. We recently went through a marketing strategy process and chose to focus on attracting and retaining students by sharing and enrolling them in what truly makes our school special: its unique culture.

The New School Montessori has many benefits for the prospective parent: strong test scores, Montessori accreditation, a diverse student body, a challenging and personalized curriculum, and a unique setting in a historic mansion built in the 1800s. But what people end up loving most, and what other schools find difficult to compete with, is the people who are part of the school community. Parents, teachers, students, and administration are incredibly caring and giving. The leader and Director of The New School Montessori, Eric Dustman, exemplifies what makes the school great. And although he often has to make tough decisions (especially in this economy), Eric and those who work with him continually build upon the culture by doing what is right for students.

All of this is a long-winded way to describe one small example of how Eric chose to do the right thing for students in a way that puts school enrollment at risk, but ends up delivering meaningful marketing.

One of our annual events is something called “Life After The New School.” The event is held each fall, a few weeks after the start of classes. In this event, the class that just left the spring before returns to share their experiences in 7th grade with the new class of 6th graders. Because The New School ends at 6th grade, this event helps students start to learn about which schools they should consider attending the following year. The panel of “graduates” takes questions from students about everything from how much homework they have to the quality of the school lunches. And the answers vary a bit because there are students from about five different private and public schools in attendance. It’s a valuable, fun event for both parents and students of all ages.

In addition to students, Eric gives representatives of the schools themselves a chance to spend a few minutes talking about what makes their institutions unique and successful. This is where it gets interesting, because most of these other schools have programs for children in preschool through 6th grade. In other words, we are inviting our competition into our building to talk about how great their schools are.

Eric and I recently spoke about how this felt. He admitted that it can be a little unnerving to see parents of kindergartners in the audience getting pitched by the competition. But he realized that exposing these parents to other schools does two things: First, it is the right thing to do for parents and students, who eventually do have to choose another school for their child. This is a marketing service that goes back to examples such as Progressive Insurance, which tells you their price, and those of their competitors.

The second benefit is that in hearing about these other schools, parents are reminded of how great The New School Montessori really is. They see that these schools don’t offer anything more than we have, and the returning students all agreed in looking back that The New School Montessori prepared them extremely well—and that there are more than a few things they miss once they have left.

Doing the right thing for your customers, even at the risk of your business, ends up building loyalty and revenue. Interesting to see how even a small, nonprofit school can teach billion-dollar brands a little something.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in non-profit, small business, Solution | 2 Comments »

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.

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

MoMA Matches Facebook Interests

Monday, August 31st, 2009

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

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

Business Objective

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

Customer Insight

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

Strategy/Creative

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

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

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

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

Measure and Adjust

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

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

Conclusion

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

(Thanks to Adverblog for finding this example.)

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

Bleeding Billboard Slows Traffic Deaths

Monday, July 13th, 2009


It’s a few weeks after the annual Cannes Advertising Festival. I was able to post early on our agency’s Gold Lions win for Pringles, but I’m a bit slow in sharing other examples of great, meaningful advertising from the show. This week I’ll share a few examples of my favorite work.

First up is this incredibly powerful and simple idea from BBDO in New Zealand that won a Bronze Lion in the Design competition. The video above tells the story much better than I can, but in summary, its goal is to reduce car accidents on the roads of Papakura, New Zealand, which tend to spike when rains come and roads become slippery. This campaign reduced road deaths on this particular piece of roadway to zero.

It is great to see a piece of brilliant, meaningful marketing for a nonprofit issue here. One might argue that all cause-related and nonprofit marketing is meaningful, but I don’t believe that is the case. Issue-related nonprofits are in sales just like regular businesses; their goal is to “sell in” their point of view on a topic. But unless they draw true engagement and value for the targeted audience, they fail.

In this case, local government is trying to “sell” its drivers on the need to slow down during rain. To measure success, instead of tracking sales of a product, it is tracking the number of road accidents and fatalities. And clearly some marketing is more effective than others. Imagine TV commercials or print ads with a policeman or government official lecturing a viewer about the need to drive cautiously during rains. Failure is almost assured for such an approach because it does not come at a relevant time in an engaging way. Here, the bleeding billboards not only come at the right place and time (roadside during rain), but they communicate the message in a way that embodies the tragedy of drivers’ failure to adjust—the photo of a young child. This beats a flashing yellow warning sign any day. Not only is this effective in its roadside ad placement, but the ad has been viewed nearly 500,000 times on YouTube in less than a month.

My hope is that the concept and framework of Marketing with Meaning is also used by nonprofit organizations to better their strategy and results. Coming up in my book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, I share the story of how another nonprofit issue organization, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, dramatically shifted its marketing approach from interruptive ads to meaningful messages and advice. I may also try to do something in the marketing of the book to specifically reach out to nonprofits, perhaps in a nonprofit way. Stay tuned and, as always, your ideas in the comments are welcome and appreciated!

(Special thanks to Chris Zieverink from our Creative team, who not only sent me this link but just created a killer logo for Marketing with Meaning that I’ll be sharing here soon.)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Cause Related, non-profit, Outdoor | 1 Comment »

Big Brands Borrowing Interest Everywhere

Monday, May 11th, 2009

I’ve been watching more live television than normal lately, mainly because I’ve gotten the NBA Playoffs bug. Something that has amazed me as I dip back into “normal” non-ad-skipped TV viewing is that there are a LOT of television commercials for big brands that advertise completely different products. Here are some examples:

Microsoft advertises Quiksilver. In this ad, Microsoft plays a sketchy and scratchy phone interview with Quiksilver President and CEO Bob McKnight, and we learn that “without technology, we would be nowhere.” There’s nothing in the ad about Microsoft, other than an animated, wadded-up piece of paper suggesting that Microsoft technology is “people ready.”

AT&T advertises TOMS Shoes. In the ad below, we follow the day of Blake, Chief Shoe Giver of TOMS Shoes. During a 30-second span, we learn that for every pair of shoes the company sells, it actually gives away a pair to a child in need. Blake is running around the world giving away shoes, so he depends on a global communication network that works. While his company doesn’t clearly endorse or even mention AT&T, there is a simulated, branded screen on Blake’s BlackBerry.

TrueNorth Snacks advertises Inspiration Cafe. This is one of a handful of ads in which TrueNorth (a Frito-Lay brand) highlights the story of an individual who is improving the world. The ad below (which I wrote about in this blog post a few months ago), tells the story of Lisa Nigro, who created the Inspiration Cafe to serve Chicago’s homeless population with dignity and respect.

There you have it: Three really big companies are spending millions of dollars on media and commercial production to advertise other brands. In each case, the spending brand plays a very minor part in the background of the message, somehow “powering” the featured businesses, or in TrueNorth’s case, sharing a mission to change the world.

My Takeaways:

1. Many brands are struggling to find a purpose and become meaningful. The fact that these brands cannot find a way to stand out on their own suggests a breakdown in their brand equities. I cannot fault these brands for leveraging others’ stories to break through and attempt to connect with their target customers, but I believe borrowed interest is very, very difficult to win with in today’s market. First, in a 30-second sitting when people are barely paying attention, they are lucky to recall the featured brand, much less the “sponsor” of the ad. My wife, for example, recalled everything about the TOMS Shoes commercial when the topic came up over dinner the other night, but she had no clue that AT&T was involved.

Second, people love TOMS Shoes for what it does, and likely cast aside the very weak connection to whatever global communications network the company happens to use. Further, I find it weak that none of these brands is actually doing something to be part of the mission/vision of the organizations they are borrowing interest from. AT&T is not offering free mobile service to TOMS Shoes efforts around the world, and TrueNorth is not actually helping establish new Inspiration Cafes around the country.

2. Meaningful brands attract attention, and maybe even free advertising. I tell people all of the time that there has never been a better time to launch a new brand. The costs of launching a new product are declining everywhere thanks to contract manufacturing efficiency and low-cost global marketing tools on the Web. All you need is a quality product, great story, and some fans to personally spread the buzz. Now add in the fact that big companies just might swoop in and put tens of millions of dollars of marketing support into your lap for the chance to borrow your mojo. Hell, the ads above show that your new brand doesn’t even have to explicitly endorse the big spenders.

So what should Microsoft, AT&T, and TrueNorth be doing instead? Simple: not rest until they have found a way for their brands to become cherished by their customers. Commit the entire organization to a brand purpose that resonates with the target customer, and then create marketing that itself delivers meaning.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Marketing Without Meaning, non-profit | 3 Comments »

Making Nonprofit Marketing Meaningful

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

Let’s face it: A lot of nonprofit marketing campaigns are horrible, despite the fact that their messages can and should be very meaningful – and their media placement and advertising development are often provided pro bono. Too often, nonprofits cannot decide if they want to raise money or raise awareness. And they tend to start the creative process by going straight to print ads or 30-second commercials, because, well, it’s free. Pro-bono creative work often means that the agency goes into la-la land with its work.

But some nonprofits are understanding how to make a bigger impact by starting with the needs of their audiences. My current favorite is the two-minute video above from the British Heart Foundation. Here, the group recognized that they need to add value to the audience by educating them on what a heart attack feels like.

That in itself is an outstanding creative brief for an advertising agency to receive. And Grey in the UK took this assignment to an amazing place. Instead of checklists or cuteness, Grey went for the jugular with a very realistic, first-person, long-format video. The acting is great, the editing is outstanding, and there is a real, emotional pull with the first-person view. It’s not really a video; it’s an experience.

I’m a little disappointed that this has less than 100,000 total views on YouTube, which suggests this hasn’t hit the viral takeoff point yet. But I’m not privy to how this is airing and being received in the UK.

Kudos to the British Heart Foundation and Grey UK for going way beyond the typical, and giving us killer creative that makes meaning in people’s lives.

Tags: ,
Posted in non-profit | No Comments »