Once in a while I bring up a topic that is such a no-brainer that it almost writes itself. This is one of those occasions. From the headline you likely got it right away: People absolutely love to personalize the products and services they buy. The overall concept hits on both sides of the brain. The rational, left side believes that there is a perfect package of features that will maximize the utility of a given purchase. Meanwhile, the right side loves to create something and show it off to others. More and more marketers have discovered the power of product personalization across one or both of these lines, and they are discovering that such meaningful marketing leads to great sales results.

Let’s start with M&Ms, a brand that has been in the personalization game for some time now, and was recently featured in a 3-minute Ad Age video. It’s a pretty simple concept: Let people go onto a website and create a personalized message to print onto their M&Ms candy. After starting in 2005 with simple messages of a few words, the company’s manufacturing process now allows faces, sports logos, and pretty much anything a customer can imagine. In other words, M&Ms helps people make more out of special occasions and personal passions. The result is a value-added experience that connects people deeply to the M&Ms brand. When people create a bowl of M&Ms with their wedding date on it, or buy a package of M&Ms with the Phillies 2008 World Series logo, they are creating a permanent bond with the brand that drives loyalty beyond reason.

People want to express themselves more and identify themselves more… and a brand like M&Ms can really enable that and evolve that.” (Ryan Bowling, PR Manager, Mars North America)

But the business benefits of personalization are just as powerful as the customer payoff. The candy itself returns a huge margin. One 7 oz. pack of Kyle Busch-themed candy sells for $12.99, which runs to $38.97 (plus shipping) in the three-bag minimum. Compare that to less than a dollar for regular M&Ms at the checkout lane. Personalized products also enjoy a strong word-of-mouth factor, as people often give these as gifts or can’t wait to show off their creations to friends and family. In the Ad Age video, Ryan Bowling, PR Manager for Mars North America, describes some of the other key marketing benefits of the program:

• “Opened up new partnerships and allowed the company to reinvest in its manufacturing systems”
• Led to a similar initiative with Dove bars called “My Dove“—which specializes in chocolate for weddings
• Finally, he credits the program with: “Nothing less than revitalizing the brand.”

More and more companies are getting the message that personalized products represent a model of meaningful marketing and strong business results. Per my left brain/right brain comment above, product personalization seems to work best in categories where people have specific tastes (food and otherwise) that they want to get just right and/or where they can show off their creativity to others. Here are some of my favorites:

NIKEiD—This maximizes both logic and emotion by offering up the chance to pick the perfect shoe fit and a range of colors and styles. Nike continues to evolve this business and marketing machine with experiments in mobile and even a Times Square billboard.

Jones Soda—Add your photo and choose your flavor, and for only $29.99 per 12-pack (plus shipping), you can have your personalized Jones concoction.

Pringles Pop Art—I’m proud to say that we just launched this tool a few weeks ago at Bridge Worldwide. The Pringles can is iconic and with this simple tool you can create a new label, print it, and tape it on. With barely any media support so far, we’ve had thousands of people create and share personal labels. I’m amazed that: (1) people are already creating holiday versions; and (2) one of the senior Pringles leaders has already created eight cans! You can check out and vote for mine here (a remembrance of Pringles inventor Fred Baur, who was buried in a Pringles can this year):

LEGO Factory—Use special software to design whatever you come up with, then upload the design, and order the LEGO kit needed to make it a reality. Happy kids and high profits.

Heinz—The new labels are funny, but you can come up with a better one on your own, right? My only ding on this program is that there is some pretty heavy editing for trademarks.

Scion—The Gen-Y brand from Toyota came to market built around the idea of personalization. Car lovers continually tune their cars after purchase, so why not allow personalization off the assembly line? They have built on this theme of personalization with Scion Speak, a tool that lets you create your own coat of arms.

Of course, personalization hasn’t worked for every brand. I recall Millstone coffee offering a personalized-blend product several years ago through Yahoo! stores. It did a great job of asking questions about your taste preferences, and then made a personalized blend of beans under the name of your choosing. The plug was pulled on Millstone, however, as owner P&G discovered that the high-maintenance packing process was not paying out. I do wonder if the company could have figured out a success model by staying in the game over time. This also might have given Millstone a stronger competitive position in the marketplace.

Despite a few challenge and brands that have no right to play here, product personalization offers huge prospects for meaningful marketing and business success. If you are not at least experimenting here, your brand—and its most loyal customers—are missing out.

There’s not a marketing guru on the planet who hasn’t pointed to the Nike+ system as an example of where all brands should be going.

I’ve been as guilty as all the other gurus, as I believed the system was a perfect fit with meaningful marketing. Back in my entries about our trip to the Cannes Advertising Festival, I fawned over the program. I’ve brought the Nike+ case study in front of a few clients and it will appear in our upcoming book. But whenever I have spoken or written about Nike+ I have felt a little embarrassed that I have never personally used it. Our President, Jay Woffington, is all over it and supplies me with insights, but that wasn’t enough. Recently, however, I’ve gotten myself back into the running habit big time, and I felt it was a perfect reason to get some first-hand experience with the “God Shoe.”

Getting Started

It turns out that some running shoes I bought three years ago were Nike+ capable, so all I had to do was order the iPod+sensor kit. It came in the typical, beautiful Apple style of packaging. I had to commandeer my wife’s iPod Nano even though pink is not my color. Within minutes I was up and literally running on my basement treadmill.

Overall, the concept works as advertised. A woman’s voice calls out your mile or time splits and adds gentle encouragement. The sensor is very accurate (correct on average, but has random, incorrect splits once in a while), and the iTunes software has no problem receiving the data and uploading it to the Nike+ website. The overall experience met my pretty lofty expectations. Now for the analysis…

What I Love

True runners know that there is something special about tracking your runs and looking back on your progress. My Dad, for example, has a running journal that he has kept for decades. In each of my first three runs, I was still sweaty and out of breath as I synced my Nike+ and “got credit” for my workout. The site has nice touches, such as a graph of your speed and distance. I liked that a special message said, “Congrats on your first 11 miles; now make it 100.”

I haven’t played with all of the features, but a few things stand out for me. I absolutely love the “Human Race 10k” that is happening around the world this Sunday. I signed up right away, giving me a new challenge and the feeling of participating and uploading. A key focus of the program is the Challenges tool, where people have posted a variety of small and large contests. A few buddies have a one-on-one running competition that I might join soon. I also like what Nike is doing with its “Nike+ Mini” application. It’s an avatar that you design, and its running pace is a live reflection of how much you’ve been running lately (mine is above). I do think Nike is thinking small, though, with only a rudimentary Facebook application (where’s the widget for my desktop and this blog?). Finally, I really like features such as special music motivation soundtracks that you can buy on iTunes.

Improvements Needed

There are a few important areas that I think the Nike+ system, site, and community are missing. First, the site itself is extremely slow. You would think a giant video is loading every time you move from one feature to the next. I’ve actually lost patience a few times and decided not to explore something new because of the delay. My guess is that the Nike team and agency chose cool design over simplicity and speed, which speaks to my issue around prioritizing user experience in these programs.

Second, the data presentation is very, very basic. There is no way to truly analyze your performance over time, and there are no insights or suggestions from Nike based on your runs. It would be very easy for Nike+ to, say, calculate helpful information such as the number of calories burned (I later discovered this but had to go through the FAQ section). I would also like to see Nike’s sensor be able to judge elevation, which would add another dimension of measurement and challenges to the daily run log.

Third, the program is missing out on a lot of basics that other smaller brands with tiny budgets have embedded. An obvious miss is the lack of the ability to post blog or journal entries about your runs; another is the inability to create a network of friends within the site. I’m also really surprised that Nike+ hasn’t learned from video game marketers and included rankings of where you stand versus everyone else in the system. I can tell you how my high score ranks against all Guitar Hero players, for example; why not be able to see where I rank on speed and distance among everyone else who ran this week?  Finally, there’s no search bar for help or other info, which is very odd.

Conclusion: Nike+ almost completely lives up to the mega-hype, but it needs to constantly improve to attract and retain runners. I have definitely formed a digitally enabled relationship with Nike through this program, and the brand is providing a free service that is adding a lot of value to my life. I will be recommending this product to others, and as long as Nike+ keeps doing the job for me, I’ll buy Nike shoes and other products for life. I really can’t wait to go home and run with my Nike+ system after work today.

That said, I hope that Nike has enough focus on supporting this platform. Creating a value-added digital service is still a very new marketing and business model for Nike. The brand makes money off of shoes, not websites, which will continually put pressure on the program. I have seen this pressure often in relationship marketing programs that we have created for our clients. And I have no idea how many people are in Nike+, so it’s hard to calculate what an ROI might be for the program.

During my most recent Nike+ data upload I was asked to complete a survey about my experience with the program. This in itself suggests that the brand gets the need to keep improving on what seems to be working very well so far. I’ll keep running and sharing my personal experiences with this meaningful marketing program.

UPDATES from my experience:

• (9/7/08) I’ve never seen Nike actually report how many people are using the system.  I think I’m pretty close to a good estimate, though: There is a page that lists the number of members that have recorded 100 miles, which I think is a pretty fair judge of ongoing use.  As of 9/7/08 there are 17,086 pages of members with 14 members per page.  That makes 239,204 people.  Overall, this is a smaller number than most would assume, given the hype around the product.  I’m not at all surprised, though, it takes time to build up a community like this (think Awareness, Trial…) and anything around technology like this takes time for people to be comfortable.  I’m looking forward to joining the 100 mile club - 52 down, 48 to go!
• I made 100 miles - very cool to experience the achievement and get the following code to brag about it:
• 

I’ve been here at the Cannes advertising festival less than 10 hours and what I have seen and heard so far has blown away my expectations in terms of meaningful marketing. Of course my going-in impression was that Cannes is a tribute to navel-gazing creative work that desperately wants to be considered artwork. I pictured a lot of people in too-school-for-cool outfits smoking cigarettes and exchanging cynicisms. Instead, I find Cannes to be a more egalitarian environment of people anxious to break our careers into something more meaningful. Net, the epicenter of advertising is ready for meaningful marketing.

There were two sessions that really got me charged up and had me wearing through a notebook. First was a session featuring Nike’s Stefan Olander, Global Director for Brand Connections. As you might have guessed, Nike is a leading brand in the move to create more meaningful marketing, and Stefan presented several killer insights. For example:

• Nike added a design studio with consultants to its Nike Stores to help people better design their Nike ID shoes.
• They created “The Ballers Network” after noticing that a big issue with playing basketball is organizing the dates and times among friends. It’s an application in Facebook that makes it easy for friends to coordinate. On top of this useful tool it adds locations and info from 1,700 courts around the world, player reviews and scouting reports, score recordings, and a mobile version for courtside.
• Nike is promoting its Nike+ service with “The Human Race 10k,” which will have races in 25 cities and including people running and uploading from their homes. The hope is to have 1 million participants on one day around the world.
• Finally, Nike announced the launch of a new avatar tool called the “Nike+ Mini” (example above). It’s like a Nintendo Mii that you design as you like and post to your blog or Facebook page. Further, it actually reacts according to how much you’re running in the real world, i.e., run a lot, and it goes faster, slack off and it, too, loses pace. It’s a great way to create fun, deepen the community, and add a little more motivation (”I don’t want to make my Mini look like he’s slacking!”).

Nike continues to blow me away with its wholehearted dive into meaningful marketing. Stefan also shared data, such as the fact that “30% of Nike+ users come to the site three or more times per week.” He said that people who don’t have their Nike+ sensors with them will simply skip running “because they want credit for their achievements.” Overall, Stefan summed up Nike’s approach as follows:

“If we can do something good for somebody, they will repay us with sales.”

My second interesting session came from Contagious Magazine and Leo Burnett Worldwide. Leo is driving a meaningful-marketing-type quote around “moving from ads to acts,” and Contagious has “been tracking the branded utility space for three years.” (In fact, a reporter from the magazine interviewed me two weeks ago for a big upcoming piece.) The two shared several examples of meaningful marketing, some new, some old. I was struck, though, by how the examples they shared touched so few people - especially compared to traditional advertising’s reach into the tens of millions. For example:

• 7,900 people downloaded a widget for Nike+.
• Guinness created a mobile tour guide in Catonese for the 20,000 people who visited Hong Kong for a rugby tournament.
• 5,000 people in Australia uploaded photos for a Canon promotion.
• Big brands are running product placement on a webiseries called “Kate Modern” that 1.5 million people view each week around the world.

These are small numbers. So small that I’d have a hard time telling a client these looked good, much less bragging in front of thousands of people at Cannes. I’m personally a big fan of much deeper engagement with fewer people, rather than a massive reach play with millions of interruptions. But we also need to take a hard look at the numbers behind these amazingly creative (and meaningful) programs, and ensure that they are achieving enough scale to actually move the needle on revenues.

OK, time to cat nap before my first night on the town at Cannes. We’ll see if the cocktail conversation is as meaningful as the work we saw today.