Last week I wrote about how Delta Airlines, like many other companies, will create or continue processes that end up hurting the service quality of their customers, i.e., their lifeblood. Over the weekend I took a road trip to Atlanta with my family and found another good example of a company that is similarly following a flawed approach into failure. Instead of a process, though, this example is a marketing approach that ends up placing annoying advertisements inside its stores to the point of nausea. If you’ve been into an Applebee’s lately, you likely know what I mean.

It’s not my first choice of dining establishments, but my 7-year-old daughter, Ella, loves Applebee’s. We regularly go there for her birthday because it is her favorite. And while on Interstate 75 driving through Knoxville, Tennessee, last Friday I figured we would stop there for a bite to eat. Applebee’s has a good variety of quality food at decent prices, and its servers are usually friendly and energetic. I would say the one big negative of Applebee’s is that it has always felt like you’re being bombarded with stimuli when you really want to sit down and eat. There’s the tchotchkes on the wall and menus with many colorful specials, package deals, and drinks of the month.

But this trip blew me away with the degree of advertising interruption that surrounded us. I took the photo above of the area next to our table (despite my wife’s embarrassment). You can see the table tent to the right of the ketchup advertising cocktails, and another table tent to the right advertising that if your waiter doesn’t offer you a special drink you get an appetizer for free. Then above the table are two additional ads filling the entire wall above our meal. But wait, there’s more! Up on the ceiling to my left was the hanging banner below.

I actually started laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of this in-store marketing strategy. But then it started feeling less amusing and more angering. Here we were spending a decent amount of money at a quality, sit-down restaurant, and we were subjected to a barrage of irrelevant, interruptive ads. It sends the impression that I am considered a low-IQ lab rat who will salivate at any photo of a breading-embedded food item with a $X.99 price tag. My impression is that Applebee’s doesn’t want to maximize the quality of my dining experience; rather, it wants to squeeze every last dollar out of my fajita-holding hands. I doubt we’ll be back more than once per year.

I don’t really believe that the people of Applebee’s are evil marketers; they are just following an old playbook out the window, and have forgotten to take a step back and look at their restaurants through the eyes of their patrons. Many years ago the chain saw strong results by creating inventive special offers, package deals, and creative cocktails. Over time, they have needed better results and found that people are noticing their growing list of specials less and less. So “it’s only natural” to find new places to interrupt people’s fields of vision or new opening pitch lines for their waitstaff. And the challenging economy has put further pressure on the company’s marketing team to do even more (of the same).

Because the people who dream up these marketing ideas don’t actually have to sit with them in restaurants every day, it’s easy to keep piling them on. The restaurant business is notorious for following established “rules” such as this. I remember meeting with an executive at Outback years ago who aired new commercials on Sunday and always saw restaurant traffic rise on Monday. But what happens when the 16th in-store ad fails to be noticed and not enough people saw your commercial on Sunday because they were watching 100 different channels?

The restaurant business might be one of the canaries in the coal mine of the shift in consumer media habits and failure of traditional marketing approaches. Although it’s hard to pin down table-side marketing as a cause, it is clear that same-store sales for Applebee’s are shrinking dramatically. In the first quarter of 2010, Applebee’s same-store sales were down 2.7%, an “improvement” (in other words “less worse”) from more than a 4.5% decrease in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Domino’s Pizza showed the restaurant world how a company can effectively admit its mistakes, significantly improve its core product, and win back customers and revenues, with same-store sales up 14% recently. It is a new model of Marketing with Meaning that brands such as Applebee’s would be wise to move to quickly before it’s too late.

Regular readers know that I’m a big fan of any marketing campaign that gives people the chance to squeeze their creative juices in and around a brand.  So it should be no surprise to hear that my favorite case study from the iMedia Brand Summit where I spoke this week was the “Create Dunkin’s Next Donut Contest.”  The case was presented by Cynthia Ashworth, Dunkin’ Donuts VP of Consumer Engagement (a title the audience loved).  It was obviously not the first “make your own product” contest, but the results show that people’s hunger to be creative and make a brand their own can never be satiated.

Business Challenge

In 2008, Dunkin’ Donuts saw the donut consumption rate among its core users drop.  The main cause was the concern about carbs and growth of the Atkins diet. Franchises were looking for help from the corporate brand to increase sales of this key profit and passion driver.  The company took several measures to improve, including various promotions and some new product launches, but a bigger marketing pop was required to jump-start sales.

Insight

Dunkin’ Donuts ran research with lapsed donut buyers.  They found that there were two key drivers of their love of donuts: (1) variety of choices and continuous new options, and (2) nostalgia for simpler times and basic pleasures.  The marketing team identified a “sweet spot” for its efforts to do something that rekindled these desires for variety and nostalgia.

Solution

The brand responded with “Create Dunkin’s Next Donunt,” a chance for the company’s core fans to have a hand in adding to the variety of the lineup, while triggering nostalgic memories of their first Dunkin’ Donuts experiences.  PR, TV, in-store, and out-of-home advertising drove fans to a very slick online donut creator developed by our WPP sister agency, Studiocom. Of course, the agency included a bevy of ways to share creations via social media. Many of the 12 finalists actually created and drove traffic to their own Facebook pages, which they used to solicit votes.

There were four key opportunities for press coverage and consumer engagement in the campaign: the contest announcement, the start of the contest, the vote for finalists, and the announcement of the winner. The winner turned out to be Jeff Hagar, with his creation, “Toffee for Your Coffee.”  Here’s a YouTube video from the brand that offers a great recap of the contest:

Results

The contest was an unqualified success.  In terms of engagement, there were 129,000 entries and 174,000 votes, and people spent an average of nine minutes on the site.  There were 90 million national media impressions (a $10 million marketing value). An online media plan was cut after three days because traffic was already far ahead of expectations. Franchises chose to get very engaged in the program, and supported it with more contests and offers in store.

The business results followed this strong engagement. Dunkin’ Donuts enjoyed its highest sales since December 2007. According to Cynthia Ashworth:

“The sales volume was huge, and all of our donut metrics during this period were through the roof.  America’s in love with donuts again.”

Conclusion

In my book, I spend several pages writing about how brands can forge meaningful connections with customers by allowing them to be creative, personalize their brand experience, and share with others.  I talk about how brands such as Kroger, M&M’s, Jones Soda, LEGO, The Simpsons Movie, and Pringles have all seen strong marketing results from this way of meaningful engagement with customers.  The core reason for success again and again is that people are literally putting themselves into the brand when they have a chance to co-create. Instead of just leaving a dull “impression” with traditional, interruptive advertising, customers who co-create a brand build a deep link to the core of what makes them who they are.  And they often cannot resist sharing their creations–and a little piece of themselves–with the friends and family in their digital worlds.

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?

What I love most about digital is that it opens up so many simple ways to provide meaningful marketing to a brand’s customers. As much as we all like to spend hours developing deep digital strategies and playing with the latest innovations, it’s often best to go to the absolutely simplest slam dunks that you can think of. My current favorite example of a no-brainer in meaningful digital marketing is a program called MeetAtPanera.

MeetAtPanera.com is a very simple website that allows people to set up a meeting with a friend or group of friends and send invitations to join up at Panera. It is a natural outgrowth of Panera’s historical strategy of embracing community meetings and friend join-ups. Its restaurants provide free Wi-Fi access, have open seating with moveable tables, and usually include a “community room” that can be reserved for large meetings at no charge. The business benefit of this approach is clear-cut: By embracing groups, Panera brings in a large number of regular visitors, who repay it with recurring business.

The MeetAtPanera tool is basic but complete. You can select the restaurant to meet at as well as a time, and send the invite to multiple email addresses. Each invite arrives with driving directions and an option to add the event to your calendar. No registration is required, and there is no email list that you are automatically pre-checked to join. There is even an offer for a free coffee for you and your group if you bring in the invitations.

If there is anything to complain about it’s the fact that this could be done instead with other tools that people are already comfortable with. Most people will likely either just send an email to friends, or potentially use Facebook to set up an event. But that’s OK; some people will use the tool and feel more connected and loyal to the Panera brand. And the cost to set up this small site is likely very, very small.

So kudos to Panera for making the effort to add some value via this online invite system. Although I’m unlikely to personally use it for setting up meetings, it reminds me that this brand is working to keep my business.

Last Thursday I was driving to a client meeting in the Cincinnati suburb of Mason when I drove by a Chick-fil-A restaurant. It caught my eye for some reason; maybe it was the fact that there was a grand-opening sign but more likely because the grass around the restaurant was covered in tents. Luckily someone at the meeting I attended that morning told me about the “Chick-fil-A 100,” and I learned about yet another fantastic example of Marketing with Meaning.

If you are one of the unfortunate few who has never eaten at Chick-fil-A, let me just say you’re missing one of the greatest fast-food chains in the world. Like me, the brand grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. It began in 1967 with a killer chicken sandwich and has since spread to nearly every state and more than 1,300 locations. The brand has always retained certain eccentricities. Due to religious beliefs of the founders, Chick-fil-A is always closed on Sundays. And the brand is loved for its outdoor ads featuring cows who spell out “EAT MOR CHIKIN.”

Back in 2003 at store opening in Goodyear, Arizona, the local Chick-fil-A opened with a large parking-lot carnival. One of many promotions of the event was a promise to give the first 100 customers coupons for a free combo meal every week for a year. Since then, the company has offered a similar benefit for the first 100 at every store opening, which ends up attracting people who camp out in tents for several days and drive from hundreds of miles away. The video from a local news station below is one of many great snapshots of these events:

Chick-fil-A has discovered a very smart formula for success with these meaningful store opening events. The key business objective of any local store opening is to generate awareness and traffic as early as possible. The Chick-fil-A 100 makes for a picture-perfect local PR event. Local newspapers and TV stations can’t resist stopping in to see people waiting out all night for free meals, and the national attention and attendance from people who drive for miles to join in adds to the impact.

Aside from the initial awareness boost, Chick-fil-A benefits from the thousands of fans it creates each year through these opening-day events. Like people in London who sang together thanks to T-Mobile, those who join the opening-night experience enjoy a special moment that sticks with them forever. And, let’s face it: These experiences can really stand out as special in the rural communities and exhurbs where Chick-fil-A stores are mainly going up. No wonder that a contact of mine with a connection to Chick-fil-A told me that the brand has a higher Net Promoter Score than Apple.

The next Chick-fil-A opens in Gaffney, South Carolina, on May 28, a town also known for its large, peach-shaped water tower off I-85. Road trip, anyone?

In Monday’s post I mentioned that Marketing with Meaning can apply to any business, not just the large brands with multimillion-dollar marketing budgets. I shared an example of a book publisher that is uniquely connecting with its target readers. Today I wanted to share how even local restaurants can win by directing a targeted campaign using a single insight about its target market – at a very low cost.

To simplify a core part of our Marketing with Meaning model: Companies must begin by establishing a business objective they hope to reach. Once this specific business objective is set, the company then can put more focused thinking around how they can do something meaningful for customers that helps achieve the business objective. With these focused customer insights, they are then able to start crafting strategies and creative ideas around meaningful marketing.

In the restaurant business, a common business objective is to drive loyalty and visits from existing customers. Most of us know that in nearly every business, 80% of profits come from the 20% of loyal customers. My friends in the restaurant business tell me this holds for their industry as well. Their challenge is that there are many, many dining options for people to choose from, and any number of them can provide a similarly pleasing experience. So they must work hard to achieve a high “share of mind” with their customers. People also have a natural desire to “try something new,” so retaining loyal customers is a critical need.

Historically, most local advertising spending tends to consist of a stagnant group of traditional tactics. There are the Yellow Pages, Val-Pak direct mail coupons, and ads in the local city restaurant guides. Everybody in the business does these same things – which is another negative of such marketing. Part of the reason restaurants (and many, many other small local businesses) use these tools is that they don’t know what to do instead, and they worry that traffic will dry up when dollars are shifted. These businesses can’t afford to wait for a year for a new marketing approach to pay out. But, I’ve spotted two great examples in the past few months.

First up is Palomino , a “drop-in downtown restaurant” chain with about 10 locations across the country. At the end of each meal, Palomino provides a feedback card with an offer to join an email list for special events and offers. This is not too unusual. What is special is that Palomino asks a single question on the registration form: “What’s you birthday?”

With this information, Palomino sends an email to its customers once per year, about two weeks before this big day. Palomino knows that this is when people start to make plans to get a babysitter and hit the town. It includes a $20 voucher with the email to sweeten the offer, again, knowing that a birthday will result in extra revenue splurges such as dessert and bottle(s) of wine. For the customer, this email comes at the right time with a compelling discount. We customers feel inclined to repay the business that remembered our special day. The cost of putting together this offer is negligible, and the results can be tracked through email clicks and voucher redemptions.

The second example is from a local pizza chain called Donatos. It’s one of several large citywide chains and competes with the big guys such as Papa John’s and Domino’s. As I detailed on my Challenge Dividend blog a few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised one weekend to get a call from the manager of my neighborhood Donatos store. She saw that I placed an order during the past week, and called to ask for any feedback.

I was pretty blown away that a store manager would bother to make such a phone call. This small, focused, and personal effort makes a big difference in my mind when my wife asks me where we should order from on pizza night. I now know that someone appreciates my business and sees that I am important. Further, results of this effort can be tracked by simply looking at whether I order more often in the months ahead.

I love that both of these examples use specific insights to add value to consumers’ lives, they take very little time or money investment, and they are completely measurable back to the original business objective of driving loyalty. So if these guys can do it, what’s holding you back?

Studies show that we see 3,000 ads per day – and growing. Some companies are discovering how meaningful marketing can be a break from the pressure to interrupt, and I enjoy telling their stories here. But others are determined to find new ways to break into our brains with novel interruptions. McDonald’s has followed the latter path again, this time by paying for drink placement on the morning news of a Fox affiliate in Las Vegas (KVVU).

In analyzing this move, let’s first get the meaning question out of the way. I see no way in which McDonald’s sponsorship of the show can be considered a value-add to KVVU’s viewers. The same program appears, the same number of commercials are run, but one more unavoidable ad is layered on top of the news broadcast. You could even call it an unavoidable “pop up” ad. It’s just another (very clever) interruption.

Not only is this sponsorship lacking in meaning, but I think it crosses a line. Those of us who have spent any time in the news business (The Duke Chronicle for me) know that there is a fairly clear separation between “church and state.” Now, I admit that the local morning news – especially the Fox variant – is not exactly considered the temple of journalism. But it isn’t Coke on American Idol – it’s still the news. And it’s unfair for the news anchors, who are basically giving a personal endorsement to an iced tea in order to keep their jobs – thus further weakening their self-respect as journalists.

I find it interesting that the Meredith Corporation owns this and several other local networks that allow product placement on their news programs. Interestingly, Meredith has built a network of advertising agencies and does some in-house creative work for advertisers in its magazines. Perhaps that’s part of why the line is blurrier there.

The New York Times also reports that the cups of McDonald’s will be taken down in the event that the news team has to report something negative about the McDonald’s Corporation:

If there were a story going up, let’s say, God forbid, about a McDonald’s food illness outbreak or something negative about McDonald’s, I would expect that the station would absolutely give us the opportunity to pull our product off set,” said Brent Williams, account supervisor at Karsh/Hagan, the advertising agency that arranged the deal between McDonald’s and KVVU.”

I can see how cool business logic could allow for smart people to invest in product placement on a TV morning show. It makes a ton of sense to plant the seed of McDonald’s breakfast items just as people are hitting the road and consciously or unconsciously thinking about breakfast. Heck, it might even be a huge ROI for the company. But my gut is that today’s viewers will be just as likely to start a boycott against McDonald’s as they are to start a new iced coffee habit. Is it surprising that the FCC is beginning a move to regulate product placement run amok?

McDonald’s should have learned its lesson from the negative PR and late night television jokes about its advertising on report cards in Florida elementary schools. I think there are many other ways that McDonald’s can use its marketing to add value to consumers’ lives. This would include anything from a coupon newsletter to furthering its terrific Ronald McDonald House program. Such interruption tactics weaken the brand image in our minds and do nothing for long-term equity or loyalty.  Not to mention the fact that they don’t help the cause when cities such as L.A. want to ban your restaurant completely.

While McDonald’s might enjoy a tiny boost in its multibillion-dollar bottom line as a result of this program, I think it’s another way that our industry is killing itself and, frankly, weakening society. As Auburn marketing professor, Herbert Jack Rotfeld says, “In the end, they just make the audiences even more skeptical of everything.”

(thanks to Umair Haque for the find)