Over the holiday break I got a very interesting email question from Al Samuelian, VP Group Media Director at media agency MPG. He was in the middle of reading my book and paused to ask, in summary: “Can you implement a Marketing with Meaning strategy if your product or service stinks?” I thought it was a great question—and one of the reasons that I love opening up this entire concept to public discussion—so I choose to share our back-and-forth thinking here.

When Your Product Is Poor

My first response was fairly short and simple: No, you cannot win if your base product or service is sub-par. Brilliant marketing can never overcome a product that fails to live up to customers’ expectations. You can look to the movie industry for many examples of big ad budget films that petered out once the pixels hit the screen. And with digital and social media, negative word of mouth travels so many times faster and farther.

Al Samuelian replied with a great story about when a car marketer visited Google recently and asked, “What should I do when I get negative online reviews or social-media chatter about service at my dealerships?” The simple reply by the panel of Google experts: “You should improve service at the dealerships.”

This point is also a good reminder for all marketers that our jobs are not just to make advertising (meaningful or otherwise), but to start with guiding the features and functions of the ultimate product that you have to sell. Marketers should have a say—preferably the final say—when it comes to product benefits, features, retail placement, pricing, customer service, and any other decision that is relevant to how it is presented to the end customer. Al suggested that it might be time for us to redefine the classic “4Ps” for the new world of digital, social, and extreme word of mouth. Not a bad idea!

But I know from my own experience that organizational structures are the biggest barrier to marketing making a difference. I remember my own meeting with a major car company when I was marketing Mr. Clean Car Care at P&G. We wanted to do a joint promotion at the car manufacturer’s national chain of dealerships and repair centers, but the marketer from Big Car, Inc. admitted that she couldn’t even get them to run a national “Buy 3 Tires, Get 1 Free” promotion. The decentralized structure of the network prevented her from managing her business. Now this error, and many others, is part of the reason that the company is tanking.

When You Don’t Have Much Innovation

The other half of our discussion revolved around brands that do not have much innovation to stand on. Sure, it’s easy to do meaningful marketing when you have a breakthrough product such as Mr. Clean Magic Eraser or Nike+, but what about the 95% of brands we work on that do not have much word-of-mouth merit?

In thinking about this question I brought up the model presented by Laura and Al Ries in their book, The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR. The central hypothesis of the book is that brands are first built on innovation—they bring some new news to the marketplace of existing players—and the best way to win is by making the news as big as possible. Hence, the book’s belief on making PR the lead focus of early marketing efforts. Then, after years in market, the strategy becomes simply reminding people that you exist and what you stand for. This is where the authors find that advertising is more effective. For example, Coke and Pepsi haven’t changed their formulas in years, so the cola war is a battle to remind people through advertising.

My belief is that Marketing with Meaning can work well for non-innovative products and brands in two ways. First, the marketing can itself bring innovation and PR news to the brand in ways that the product itself cannot. Charmin creating a mobile app that helps you find public restrooms is an incredible new way to innovate, and has earned the brand more than 500 million free news media impressions. This idea of using marketing as a way to apply innovation could open up entirely new ways of thinking for brand managers who have struggled for years with doing something new with product development. Making changes to a product formula and assembly line can take millions of dollars and thousands of hours. But cranking out an iPhone app can be done by a small team in a matter of weeks.

The second way that Marketing with Meaning can help non-innovative brands is by serving as the “memory jogger” as described by Laura and Al Ries, but in a format that has a much higher chance of earning customer attention and loyalty. My favorite example is the story of Unilever’s Dove brand. You know by now that the brand was struggling to find a new positioning in the marketplace until it seized the high, unoccupied ground of standing for “Real Beauty.” What you might not have thought about was how this happened with virtually no product news or innovation. By using its marketing to create a cause, Dove reminded people that it existed in a meaningful way.

This second point is where I believe many, many companies should be moving their marketing dollars quickly. As I wrote in this Adweek article a few months ago, the old model of ordering up a new ad campaign is not enough, and as I wrote in this post a year ago, the brands that are able to be remembered and relevant are those that actually do something rather than just saying that they stand for something.

I recently read that Pepsi has chosen not to advertise in this year’s Super Bowl for the first time in 23 years. Instead, the brand is planning a $20 million marketing effort to “refresh” society in real ways. Not much is known yet, but this could be a big step in moving the marketing world away from interruptive reminders and further toward meaningful connections. Stay tuned for more…