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.

My favorite new brand story from the SXSW Interactive conference last week actually came from a brand that I thought I knew fairly well. At a small workshop called “Booze Blogging,” we tasted various cocktails and got to hear from Beth Bellanti-Walker, who worked on the start-up Tito’s Vodka brand, which is based in Austin, Texas. She filled in some blanks on the brand and shared some insights into the challenge of taking a small, meaningful brand to the big time.

Several years ago I first heard the fascinating story of Tito’s Vodka: A man named Tito Beveridge was a geophysicist with a side hobby of making flavored vodka for his friends. After years of friends’ encouragement and talking with bartenders who said they would love a smooth vodka that people could drink straight, he decided to learn how to distill his own liquor. Thanks to his scientific skills, passion for perfection, and 19 maxed-out credit cards, Tito got the first distillery license in Texas created a brilliant vodka that is distilled six times for a pure taste. One day a fan of his new vodka suggested that he enter it into the World Spirits Competition. Beveridge couldn’t attend himself, so he sent up a few bottles. It was named a Double Gold Medal winner.

Over time word of mouth fueled the expansion of Tito’s Vodka. Sales went from 1,000 cases in 1997 to currently more than 200,000 cases each year. During our session at SXSW, I learned a few other stories of the world of Tito and its bootstrap marketing. Beth essentially worked for free and spent most of her time stoking fans’ passion by responding to emails, managing a blog, and sending vodka to parties. According to Beth, “Everything about Tito’s marketing success has come from people’s love for the brand.”

She told us how Tito designed the label and logo for the brand by himself on his basement computer. Tito seems unconcerned with selling out or taking the world by storm. He is a complex guy who has several other hobbies and has some clever ideas about clean energy and improving the world.

I personally tried Tito’s roughly five years ago after reading about it on a marketing blog (that I can’t remember now), and I became one of these rabid fans. I enjoyed ritually mixing my martinis at home with Tito’s and loved taking friends down to my basement bar to give them a taste of this mysterious Texas concoction. I even enjoyed the process of finding a place to order it online, and waiting for a package to arrive weeks later. My friends would see or hear about Tito’s Vodka and say, “Hey, that’s the brand Bob loves.” And I enjoyed being the first guy to turn my friends onto the brand. The closest thing I can compare this to is when you become a fan of an upstart band and enjoy introducing the music to friends.

But my Tito’s fandom hit a bump a few years ago. A buddy of mine shot me an email and told me to look in The New York Times; he had just seen a full-page ad for Tito’s Vodka. Unfortunately, I wish he hadn’t told me about the ad, because it broke my heart. Here was my great little vodka brand advertising in one of the largest newspapers in the world. Tito’s Vodka had sold out.

In the two years or so since I saw this ad, I have reached for Tito’s Vodka less often in my liquor cabinet after a long day. I no longer raved about it to friends, and when I need to resupply I was more likely to grab Absolut at the nearby package store rather than order a Tito’s shipment. So I was eager to ask Beth why she and Tito embraced mass advertising on a brand that had such a special place in my heart. Her response, in a nutshell:

“That was a difficult decision for us and a large expense—our first advertisement in 12 years of making vodka. But our main challenge is that while people are discovering Tito’s through friends and blogs, the liquor market is dominated by wholesalers and distributors in individual states across the country. We had to get their attention by using the traditional advertising that they still believe is the key to success.”

Upon hearing this my love for Tito’s was rekindled. The print ad campaign made perfect business sense to me and I no longer felt that the brand was selling out. I happily ordered a Tito’s martini at my hotel bar that night. By hearing this inside story of how the brand was forced to embrace some amount of traditional advertising to keep its momentum going, I personally reconnected with Tito’s.

While this level of openness at the SXSW conference with 50 people was great, it shows that Tito’s Vodka and other small brands trying to make it big should be more careful when they risk losing the core fans that drive their early success. I wonder if Tito’s could have dumped the newspaper ads and worked harder to get its fans to call distributors and liquor stores to ask for the brand. Or Tito’s might have done more to let its fans know that the newspaper ad was coming and why.

I know it might sound strange to ask a brand to apologize for putting full-page ads in a newspaper, but in this new world of meaningful marketing it becomes critically important to think of your core fans first.

I’m a little bit ashamed to not have written about Village Quik Lube in this blog until now. After all, I’ve been writing here for nearly two years, and I pass this little dose of Marketing with Meaning every day when I come and go from work. I guess it was this small business’s new Facebook effort that gave me the final push to feature it here—as another example of how social media best works as a way to bring an entire marketing strategy to life.

Village Quik Lube is a small oil-change business located in Newtown, Ohio, a small suburban Cincinnati village just about 2 miles from my home. The shop is known by everyone around as “the place with the funny sayings”—as the owner of the business updates the sign above a couple of times a week with a new joke. Some are funnier/cornier than others, but every time the sign changes we are compelled to look and laugh. Aside from this sign, the shop has several other remarkable features: There’s a fish pond outside, chairs made up of old-car seats and barber chairs inside, and the parking lot is often the host of grill parties and fund-raisers.

What I love about the Village Quik Lube is that it brings some personality to a business that most people grudgingly tolerate every three months or 3,000 miles. Most of us are used to going into the cookie-cutter Jiffy Lube and car-dealership services, which feel more like a trip to the dentist. Just like these competitors, Village Quik Lube has a convenient location and all of the periodic maintenance services we expect at a fair price. But this business spends the time between our visits making us smile on an otherwise boring commute. We appreciate the owner’s attempt to lighten our day, which leaves us almost looking forward to making the stop in for an oil change and tire rotation. All it takes is some time to think up the signs and change them a few times a week.

So it’s no wonder that Village Quik Lube has gone into social media with a fan page on Facebook. Interestingly, Facebook offers a direct transfer of the company’s “offline” marketing strategy for the online world. Facebook has become the virtual vehicle of our daily commute, so of course people who enjoy driving by and stopping at the shop would want to continue the relationship online.

But Facebook offers benefits that the signs and store itself cannot do alone. For example, the owner recently asked his 200-plus members if they would like to see some of the ideas for signs that were a little too racy for the road. I learned that he actually gets complaints on certain topics and has toned down the humor over the years. Of course the members said “yes”—and we were treated to jewels like:

“Did… you hear about the new vitamin just for men sold only at golf pro shops? It’s called Tiger Wood.”

Of course this one is a little too daring for the G-rated public thoroughfare, but I laughed out loud at this and some of the others I found on Facebook.

Reading further, I got to see photos from this intersection in 1970 “when there were cows grazing in the field nearby.” I saw that the shop staff is thinking about raffling off the chance to drive a demolition-derby car. And I learned how the owner was told by a Quaker State executive that his store would be out of business within six months; that was 12 years ago.

If you really think about it, Village Quik Lube is not new to social media because of its Facebook presence. Rather, this is a business that has always been about social media. Its goal is to make people smile and give back to the community. In return, it earns loyalty and positive word of mouth. Digital social media is just an evolution of what it has been doing successfully for 12 years.

When I read about the brands that are doing the most in social media, it seems to mainly be small businesses such as Zappos and the Kogi Korean BBQ truck. They have succeeded by starting out in social media and created businesses around this core approach, rather than just bolting on a Twitter feed or having an agency monitor buzz.

I believe there has never been a better time to start a business than the present. Large companies’ advantages in mass scale are falling away as people become more interested in niche products and meaningful brands—and marketing is as simple as telling your story on a blog, tweet, or Facebook page. The future of business might look like millions of passionate owners connecting with a handful of customers by adding value through products, services, and marketing.

One of my favorite things to do in presentations about mobile and the future of marketing is to replay the scene above from the movie Minority Report (play above), in which Tom Cruise walks through a subway station and is bombarded with personalized 3-D ad units that scan his pupils and attempt to entice him to buy one of many products. Director Steven Spielberg actually got help from the MIT Media Lab to come up with the advertising concepts used in the movie. The movie was set in 2054, but here, today, aggressive companies want to make it a reality now. They dream of a world where our mobile devices are alerted to coupons, deals, and promotions as we walk by store fronts. Last week AT&T showed off such a mobile couponing concept at its Tech Showcase. But here’s the reality for today and tomorrow: These ideas will fail completely.

At the link below you can see a very short video of the AT&T concept, which is consistent with an idea that dozens of futurists, entrepreneurs, and big marketers hope will come true one day:

Next time you hear someone claim that this is the future of advertising, kindly beg to differ. The big problem with this concept is that people don’t like to be interrupted by advertising! I know, I know; it’s hard for us lifelong marketers to deal with, but it is absolutely true. To put this in perspective, let’s imagine that you could give out your home phone number to any number of marketers, and when these marketers have a “great deal” for you, they could call your home phone and speak to you when you answer, or leave you a voice mail message. Sounds great, right? Not really. In fact, more than 76% of Americans have registered their home phone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry, which shows two problems with this future scenario.

First, the telephone is a very personal tool that people are extremely protective of. We look at the phone as our window to the world, our way of communicating with the people who we want to talk to. We own our phones and our numbers; we even pay to keep these numbers by moving them from phone to phone and address to address. It is literally a lifeline in some cases. When Congress overwhelmingly passed the Do Not Call Registry legislation, they established the fact that a telephone line is something that the homeowner “owns,” rather than a public space such as the street in front of your house. And this and other laws have ingrained the “right to phone control” in people’s lives.

The second major issue is the fact that when we let marketers start sending “valuable” messages, it’s highly likely to be completely irrelevant and annoying. Let’s use email as the analogy in this case. Soon after marketers gained the ability to send email to customers and prospects, they discovered that they could reach many, many people at the push of a button and at near zero cost. When you have freedom to advertise at no cost, the result is unbridled junk. And despite great data about the value of personalization, most marketers are lazy and would rather just spam millions and hope that some small percentage opens the email and buys a product. And I’m talking about big, reputable marketers here, not just the common spammers.

Doubt me? Well, take a read of my post on how Banana Republic is sending me emails about women’s boots. In this Minority Report world, why would Banana Republic do anything differently? In this AT&T future, when I walk by its store in the mall they will send me the same irrelevant offers that they’re sending me now. And it will take only a handful of these lazy, valueless messages before I unsubscribe to this entire mobile marketing app or end my contract with whatever mobile service is pushing it on me. And even if they do something personalized (say for men’s shirts), the chances that I will be in the mood to stop in the store when I am going about my life and trying to get things done is extremely small. Sure, one walk by out of 100 might find me in the buying mood, but that means 99 messages will simply annoy me.

This brings me to some of the special reasons that mobile is the last place such a service could succeed. The mobile phone is even more personal and private, and people are scared to death that it will be taken over by marketers. A few data points from recent studies by ACNielsen:

• Mobile marketing was judged to be the “least trusted” form of advertising by consumers in 47 countries.
• Only 10% of people responded to ads in a test.
• 67% of people found it unacceptable to have ads on their mobile device.

We consumers really shouldn’t worry about the interruptive mobile future, because it faces two giant barriers. First, the mobile-service providers know that it would be suicide to force such an advertising medium on their customers. Thankfully, we have several choices in which company we go with for service. If any one of them starts spamming, then the move to alternatives would be swift. And there’s just not a ton of money for the AT&Ts of the world to reap from advertising, either. They make $50 to $100 per month on service. But at even a CPM rate of $100 for this “high quality impression,” you would have to hit people with many, many ads for this to earn a few bucks per month.

The second barrier to this future is the highly likely legislation that governments would pass to prevent this from happening. The Do Not Call Registry was the biggest slam-dunk bill passed during George Bush’s eight years. Congress loves to pick on advertisers because their constituents are sick of 3,000 ad interruptions per day, and very few people are going to defend the rights of a group that is respected at about the level of used-car salesmen.

Finally, let’s remember the barrier to all of the greatest ideas in the present and future of marketing: It takes forever for businesses to try something new. People envision a service like this to be a boon to small businesses, but here’s the reality: Small businesses don’t have a lot of marketing dollars, and they are the last to try new marketing. I love how one sandwich place near our office started using Facebook to spread the news of its daily specials. But these are few and far between. Not to mention the fact that they have been using a very, very low-tech way to share offers and promotions with people as they walk by: the sign!

So as much as we marketing geeks think it would be cool to intercept potential customers as they stroll by our stores, this idea is DOA. I think the only possibility for it to work is for services that are completely opt-in. Foursquare is one company that hopes people who have time to kill and want to see some offers will open its app. This is going in the much more meaningful direction, as it means the consumer is choosing to engage. That said, this is an idea on the small side. A store might get one person a week who has the app, logs into the app, sees a special he likes, walks in, and decides to buy.

I’m an enormous believer in the potential for mobile to connect customers and marketers in meaningful ways. But let’s file the Minority Report future somewhere along flying cars and remember to put ourselves in the customers’ mindset first.

Today I want to share the second of two articles that I was asked to write for Entrepreneur magazine. In the first article from a few weeks ago, I explained the Marketing with Meaning concept to the small-business audience.

In this piece, I write about how two brands or businesses can partner up to do more meaningful marketing for their combined audiences. Joint marketing between brands can also reduce costs for both sides, allow for brands to gain the direct attention of new customers, and increase the chance to stand out in a very crowded marketplace.

Although I am writing for the small-business audience in this article, it’s a concept that any business can benefit from today. This is a topic that I also blow out more in my book, and you can check out the article here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week I drove the 90 miles from Cincinnati to Lexington, Kentucky, to present Marketing with Meaning to the local Ad Club. The lunch-and-learn session drew about 60 people in all.

During the Q&A session after my speech, one of the people in the audience asked me how her company, a local BMW dealer, might better use social media. I answered her on the fly but wanted to explore the question here as a way to show how to start strategically, rather than jumping on the bandwagon of what’s hot today.

For the exercise I’ll use a simplified version of the step-by-step model that comprises Part Two of my upcoming book. Let’s assume that the BMW dealer has a gut instinct and interest in social media but is looking to test the rationale and do it the right way. Also let me make it clear that I have never had a car dealership as a client and did not conduct extensive research solely for this blog post. So please take this as a guts-and-opinions strategy.

Step 1: Setting Business Objectives

A local BMW dealership could choose from many key business drivers across the purchase funnel, from Awareness to Consideration to Purchase to Repeat business. Let’s leave Awareness and Consideration out of the picture, as I believe most people who arrive at the dealership already have narrowed down their choices based on national marketing from BMW and word of mouth from friends. I also believe it’s difficult to focus on the point of purchase at the dealer level, as people increasingly come armed with facts and look at the dealer conversation as if they are entering a battle. I believe improving Repeat is probably the single biggest business opportunity for a BMW car dealership. People are increasingly drawn to lease deals, which means they are shopping for a new car in less than three years after purchase. For buyers, there is also a large opportunity to benefit from revenue through maintenance and aftermarket add-ons. Let’s classify all of this as Repeat revenue and focus our efforts here.

Step 2: Uncovering the Insight

Here we work to understand the question of why people do or do not return to their previous dealership when it is time to buy a new car. In theory, people should almost always go back to their last salesperson; after all, each car brand increasingly has a wide variety of models and prices, and many dealerships sell multiple car brands. I believe one of the reasons this is more rare than expected is that car buyers often suffer from buyer’s remorse. In such a large purchase, which is intense and stressful, they tend to feel like they didn’t get the best deal after the sale was done. High-pressure tactics by sales and finance people don’t help, of course.

Based on my personal experience, this could be solved if salespeople could develop personal relationships with their customers. Salespeople of big-ticket items such as luxury cars should treat each completed sale like the start of the next sale, and work to cultivate a personal connection that will last for years. There is nothing as powerful as relationships in life. They create trust, loyalty, and mutual benefit. In the agency business, we have a saying: “Clients don’t fire their friends.” What that means is that if you have a good relationship with your client, they will feel more comfortable giving you the feedback you need to improve when they are unhappy, rather than picking up the phone and ending the relationship. The same goes for cars, thus our key insight: Personal relationships with the salesperson are the key to Repeat.

Step 3: Developing Meaningful Ideas

It is certainly not a new approach for salespeople to try to build personal relationships with their customers. I remember a salesperson at Macy’s who used to call me when there was a sale on suits at her store, for example. But developing relationships can be difficult. They are long-term investments at a time when short-term sales pressure is always high. Writing letters and making phone calls to each individual contact also can be extremely time-consuming, and when done tend to be focused on making the next sale. Personal relationships need some space to talk weather, sports, and family.

But new technology is allowing people to build stronger relationships with more people. This is where Facebook can play a huge role. The tool helps people create, maintain, and strengthen personal relationships. We can log in at any time and see what our broad network of connections is doing, and with a few clicks and words we can “touch” them and strengthen the bonds. And in the business world, Facebook is helping people share a little bit about who they are and how they tick. By understanding who we are as people, versus just clients or sales guys, we become closer.

So my suggestion is for car dealerships to encourage their salespeople to become active on Facebook and use it to build personal relationships with their customers. At the close of each sale, the salesperson should ask the customer to connect on Facebook. The pitch should be that it is a great way to keep in contact and allow for follow-up service questions. Once connected, the salesperson should use the service to “touch” the customer every few weeks. This doesn’t mean continually pitching the weekly oil-change special, but rather even adding things such as a quick comment on an uploaded photo, or a line that reads, “Did you get to drive your 5 Series in the great weather this weekend?” Not every customer will be on the service yet, which is actually a good thing to allow for some time to become comfortable and efficient.

Step 4: Measuring Meaning and Business Results

I believe that marketing should be measured both for its impact on customers’ lives as well as the bottom line. In terms of measuring meaning, this idea would be successful if customers are accepting salespeople as Facebook friends and responding positively to the “touches” that are made. Any outreach from customer to salesperson is a big win, as are referrals from customers’ friends. These are all numbers that can be clearly observed, tracked, and compared across individuals.

Business impact is simple to measure because we focused on a single core score, Repeat revenue, and because individual customer names are known and tracked. The dealership owner can track the specific number of maintenance appointments, follow-up sale rates, number of cars per household, and the overall price of each car.

Conclusion

I believe social media is an incredible tool that marketers are just now barely understanding and applying. One of the biggest barriers is the pressure to “go do something on Facebook or Twitter.” My hope for this post and the upcoming book is that you see how a strong business objective and insight can help your brand understand the opportunities for social media, and the right way to execute ideas and measure results.

One of the things I love to do is prove to people that Marketing with Meaning is not limited solely to big brands with million-dollar budgets. It can be something that helps small businesses and even not-for-profits succeed in driving customer engagement and loyalty. Recently I witnessed an example of a small not-for-profit that is doing something unique and meaningful, and if this organization can do it, surely the big brands can get onboard.

The letter above from the nearby Cincinnati Nature Center arrived in our mail. On one side was a note addressed to my 8-year-old daughter, Grace, inviting her to attend a meeting to give her ideas for a natural playscape that will be created in the year ahead. On the back was a letter to parents that describes the natural playscape initiative and the purpose of the children’s involvement. This is the kind of direct mail that stands out in a sea of junk.

Of course Grace was thrilled, and at the dinner table that night she started coming up with ideas. She’s quite the “nature child”—reading books about plants and animals continuously and never being afraid to pick up bugs. Last year when a bee stung her, Grace ignored the pain and carefully helped the bee remove the stinger from her hand, knowing that if the stinger comes off, a bee will soon die.

Overall, this is a brilliant example of meaningful marketing: By enrolling the target audience (here, both parents and kids) into the process of building the “product,” people feel a deep, personal connection to the Cincinnati Nature Center. Whatever comes out of this session, everyone who is involved will feel a sense of ownership that lasts a very long time. The result is more visits, more word of mouth, and more donations of money and time when the requests come.

So why isn’t your brand building customer feedback into the product development process? No, I don’t mean traditional closed-door research in focus groups and surveys. I mean enrolling brand fans and openly asking them for advice and ideas. To paraphrase a few people, “Research is the new marketing”—as a call for input in a direct, public way can help brands gain valuable input while winning customers for life. Examples in the “big brand” world include the My Starbucks Idea program and the beta test of the video game Call of Duty 4.

I actually do know why your brand isn’t openly asking for input in the development stage; you’re worried about whether or not you can change to what they ask, your R&D team thinks it knows better, you fear that the competition will see what you’re doing and adjust accordingly, and you don’t know how to set up such a system. All are rational arguments, but the time has come to start breaking some of these rules. Today’s consumer knows better than you, and she expects to be involved in the brands that she loves best.

I don’t know about you, but I receive somewhere around six to 12 “cold” solicitation contacts by email or phone every day. As an executive at our agency, I suppose that I appear on a lot of lists that salespeople purchase to try to get their foot in the door for a meeting. Unfortunately for the folks trying, I respond to very, very few such messages. First, a lot of them are for services that my business just doesn’t need; and second, my time is extremely limited. Plus, there’s the fact that I have a huge personal network with WPP and there is a sister agency I can trust for virtually any service we require. I feel like a jerk sometimes for spurning cold-call advances, but I lived that life when I was selling lawn care out of a phone book in college. And in my job today I have to try a few cold calls every once in a while, too.

I’ve seen every strategy in the book, ranging from sending stuffed animals, to people saying they were “referred” to me by some unknown mutual contact. One guy even tried calling me twice a day for more than a month straight. But a few weeks ago I was pleasantly surprised when I received an email from Chris Abraham, a fellow blogger and President and COO of buzz agency Abraham & Harrison. Here was the introduction of his email to me:

Hi there Bob

I wanted to reach out to you since you’re a current fellow member of the AdAge Power 150 with Marketing With Meaning.  Please excuse the form email but there are over 780 current Power 150 members.  I am popping you this note for two reasons: first, I would like your help to do something with this list; second, I just want to update you as to what I am up to.”

Chris goes on to write about a file he was willing to send with the names and email addresses of all of the other members of the AdAge Power 150. This shiny needle in the haystack of business spam caught my eye for a few reasons: First, Chris is a fellow blogger rather than just another sales guy. We have something in common and it means he probably knows his stuff. This established immediate respect. Second, he offered something of value to me and my business in the form of the Power 150 contact list. He was essentially giving away a valuable piece of data that he worked hard to create, and one that his competitors could use to contact the same people he is going after.

By offering up “marketing” that itself was valuable, Chris was practicing Marketing with Meaning. And guess what? I immediately replied to Chris and set up 30 minutes to give him an opportunity to sell me on his services. I found Chris to be very smart and personable, I listened closely to his pitch, and I asked him to follow up with the person on my team who works closest on blogger outreach programs. I didn’t buy anything on the spot, and I’m not sure if we’ll need his company’s services, but Chris achieved a critical sales goal of getting a foot in the door with a key decision maker, all because he added value.

There are more than 780 other people on the Power 150 list, and I’d guess that Chris is getting a lot of other meetings because of this approach. He even got a feature post on this blog! His example shows that Marketing with Meaning can be applied by both small businesses and business-to-business marketers.

All it takes is to think about how you can do something with that phone call or email that actually adds value to your prospect’s life. And if you can’t figure that out yet, don’t bother picking up the phone.