I hope everyone is having a great start to 2009. I spent much of the past two weeks finishing the first draft of our Marketing with Meaning book. It took a ton of time and we still have some work to do in editing, of course, but it’s a huge step and I’m extremely excited about how it reads so far!

Aside from working on the book over the holidays, I got a chance to play around with a few grown-up toys.  I spent a little time with the new Xbox 360 interface and specifically with the new Netflix viewing service that it added. I have been interested in testing the Netflix service since I heard it was coming several months ago. I have been an active Netflix user, and it seemed smart to allow members to download movies direct rather than waiting a few days for a DVD to arrive in the mail.

I tried out the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, At World’s End, which I have been waiting to see for some time. Unfortunately, the experience was way below par. The movie started easily enough, and it was nice to play it immediately like a pay-per-view movie. But as the movie began to play, the quality was horrible. On my 50″ HDTV it looked like a low-quality YouTube video. I turned it off after a few minutes, highly disappointed.

The next day, however, I got an email from Netflix that specifically asked my opinion of the quality of the picture (see screen grab above). I was very pleasantly surprised to see the company notice that I had tried the service for the first time, and that it followed up proactively on an issue that obviously was experienced by other customers. As a Netflix member, I’m disappointed with the service and likely won’t try it again for some time, but I actually feel more positive about the brand itself.

On another level, it is remarkable to me that this kind of service quality is so remarkable. It is routine for restaurant servers to come back and ask how your meal tastes, so why doesn’t every other service brand do the same? It is even easier in digital businesses, where a quick email like this can be programmed to go to millions automatically.

It reminds me of my friend Pete Blackshaw’s quote that “customer service is the new marketing department.”  If that is the case, proactively asking for feedback is another great example of Marketing with Meaning.

(P.S. Check out this investor presentation by Netflix a few months ago. It is one of the best company strategy decks I have seen in years-and also adds to my confidence in the company.)

(This is the second guest post by Ryan Kolbe, who is covering for me over the holidays. Thanks again, Ryan!)

The holidays are a time for family get-togethers and overindulging on great food. They’re a time of reflection on the previous year, and anticipation of the future. Sometimes, if you’ve been good all year, the holidays are about giving and receiving gifts! Even in these tough economic times, it’s a tradition that many people take part in, and I, for one, am thankful for that.

Something that is different this year is that fewer people will travel to be with loved ones due to the economic crunch and less money floating around for excess travel. MSN.com reported on December 10 that “Airlines will operate about 2,500 to 3,000 fewer domestic flights daily during these holiday periods compared with the corresponding days last year.”

Because of all of this, Uncle Gary will be sending that fully wrapped train set to little Scotty via the United States Postal Service instead of hopping into the RV with the kids and driving East. Aunt Peggy will have to wrap up her famous fruitcake and have FedEx get it to the relatives with two-day shipping rather than flying to Phoenix for some fun in the holiday sun. It costs a lot less; it’s just not as personal.

Because of this, UPS has come up with a new microsite to highlight those “not so great” gifts from the relatives who weren’t able to make the trek home, or even some who were! “To give someone a gift that was previously received from someone else” is how Merriam-Webster defines “regifting.”

UPSregifter.com is a site that allows you to virtually regift a subpar gift to friends or family. As a child, I was always taught to appreciate the gift that I received, even if I didn’t really like it, and that “it’s the thought that counts.”  Thankfully, UPS has come up with this idea to quietly make fun of those horrible, “what were they thinking” gifts.

So why is this meaningful? UPS is acknowledging something in a “tongue in cheek” manner that everyone has come across at one time or another. Inevitably, at some point in your life, you’ll receive a gift that’s totally out of left field, and a huge flop. In acknowledging that in a fun, interactive way, UPS is getting themselves into the mind of the site users. The thought is that if someone does receive a horrible gift this holiday season, he or she can upload a picture of it, write a small description, and regift it to someone. Then, taking it one step further, if the “regifter” actually finds some desperate soul who wants the gift, they can then take it to the UPS store and physically send it to that person. The site never explicitly says that, which allows the users to put two and two together, and turn to UPS for future package-sending needs.

UPS has successfully marketed their services in a nontraditional way to people who may have initially thought of going to FedEx or the United States Postal Services for their holiday gift-sending needs.  Although it’s a simple site with viral aspects for sharing, the interactivity makes the marketing meaningful to those site users-and should successfully build on the awareness of UPS and their services this holiday season.

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and as I put my daughters to bed, the oldest, Grace, asked, “Can we track Santa on your computer, Dad?” It was way past bedtime, but I couldn’t resist. Grace is 8-going-on-18 and the chance to let her fully believe in Santa for maybe the last Christmas tugged at my heart.

So… away to the laptop I flew like a flash

Booted it up, hoping for not a crash

Jammed in the Sprint card and pulled up the Net

Figured a search on Google would be the best bet

Soon a smile on our faces started to grow

For Santa was just crossing o’er the Gulf of Mexico

Thanks to NORAD and Google we found Kringle in flight

And I tucked Grace in for a long winter’s night.

All bad poems aside, it was really a special father-daughter moment to pull up the NORAD Santa tracker and see where he was along his journey. And I kept thinking about this tool days after Christmas. I wondered why NORAD, a government agency that tracks incoming nuclear missiles, would be the organization that tracked Santa on behalf of the world’s citizens. I was surprised not to see a for-profit company such as Sears, USA Today, or Coca-Cola take the reigns of this annual tradition.

So I consulted Wikipedia, of course, and discovered a very interesting story of how NORAD got into the Santa-tracking business all the way back in 1955. It seems that marketing did have something to do with it, in a roundabout way. That year, Sears advertised a telephone hotline that children could call to speak with Santa. But the ad printed the wrong number, sending children to NORAD instead. Rather than turning eager children down, the surprised NORAD officers accepted the calls and began giving Santa’s position on the radar.

From there follows a history of continuous upgrades, improvements, and generations of magical moments for children around the world. Now, of course, Santa can be tracked live online, and even through Twitter.

There are a few really good lessons here. First, it shows how a long-term meaningful marketing investment can pay off. In this case, NORAD has “owned” this valuable service for more than 50 years.  Another good example is Butterball’s turkey help hotline, which has become more interesting and relevant (and itself newsworthy) than any print ad or TV commercial the brand could conceive of.

But the real morale of this story is that organizations can win just by paying attention and doing the right thing. And it often comes down to your company culture and individuals’ care for their customers to unlock magical experiences like this.

Happy holidays to all of you. I cannot wait to continue the Marketing with Meaning revolution with you in 2009!

Bob

(Today is the first of two guest posts by Ryan Kolbe, one of our star Client Service Managers who is helping cover for me over the holidays. In this first post, Ryan actually disagrees with something I wrote about Zappos airport security-bin ads a few months ago. But that’s OK; meaning can lie in the eye of the beholder, and I think we need some good, healthy debate about the Marketing with Meaning concept in order for it to succeed.)

I am one of the countless numbers of people who are annoyed with the current use of “traditional” marketing tactics. Traditional advertising is becoming less meaningful to consumers, and it’s more mental clutter than anything else. Marketing with Meaning is something that will be able to help reverse these tactics with time, but unfortunately, we’re not at rock bottom yet. All companies haven’t latched onto the idea of making advertising more meaningful so that people want to see and interact with it. Where else could it go?

Someday, toothpastes may have microchips in them so that after you brush, the advertising changes on digital posters you walk by throughout the day, congratulating you on brushing, and giving you a secret code to get buy one floss and get one free. How about paper towels that reveal hidden coupons for more paper towels after cleaning up the mess on the dinner table? What about lightbulbs that send off a “bat signal” message before they burn out, prompting you to buy more? Where will it end? Companies need to be trendsetters and reverse the downward spiral of traditional “push” marketing—enter Marketing with Meaning.

A great example of Marketing with Meaning presented itself to me on the way home from a quick trip to Denver. In the age of “current threat levels” and miniature toothpastes, the reality of traveling these days is much different than in the past. Gone are the days of getting to the airport an hour in advance, gallivanting around the terminal for coffee, and finally ending up going through the sleepy line of security to make it to your plane as they are beginning to call for boarding passes. People have come to understand that they will be waiting in lines and are planning accordingly more and more.

As is customary nowadays, the lines were horrendous. There were eight open lanes, each having about 20 people in them, and a thousand of my closest friends behind me. Without hesitation, based on prior airport visits, I started to de-security-risk myself. I took off my coat, hat, scarf, belt, watch, sunglasses, iPod, phone, and boots. By the time I was done with all of that, balancing everything precariously in between someone resembling my grandmother and a teenager with a skateboard, I was at the point where I could put my belongings into the plastic security bins to send them all through the X-ray machine, only to put them back on after passing through successfully.

I took out two bins: one for my shoes and the “extras,” and one for my coat, and I came to find some Marketing with Meaning waiting for me in the base of the bins. Two different ads from Zappos.com were lining the bins, directing me to “place shoes here” and “buy shoes here” with the website address, and in the other bin telling me that they “sell almost everything [I'll] put in this tray” with the Zappos.com link again.

At first I was annoyed, as my Pavlovian reaction to marketing where I’m not expecting it immediately took hold. But then I sat there for a minute and took in what they were accomplishing with these bin liners. As a traveler, I could have been in any kind of mood at that moment: I could have been happy because I was going home, annoyed that I was delayed again, tired because of lack of sleep, or whatever. Zappos.com realized that in their marketing, and played to the fact that the people who are waiting in line will not have their shoes on, and they will see the website.

At that point, people could see their shoes and think, “Wow, I could use a new pair; those have really seen better days,” or “Man, my feet are tired from all of this standing around,” or any number of other things, and then Zappos.com was on the mind. At the other side of security, that person could whip out a Web-enabled phone or laptop, browse Zappos.com’s selection, and maybe even purchase right there when waiting for a flight. Ahh, the relief of a new pair of shoes waiting at home after a trip—could it get any easier?

So what? The fact that I wasn’t expecting to see the ad in the base of the bin ended up grabbing my attention rather than deterring it. Coupling that with the fact that it didn’t interrupt my day made the marketing meaningful: I was in line already, I needed to put my shoes in the bin, and it added some color and thought into a monotonous, sometimes annoying task. If I didn’t already use Zappos.com, I would have remembered that ad and looked on the site the next time I needed new shoes or even to pass the time when I was waiting for my flight. Meaningful marketing doesn’t have to be interruptive, and it adds that much more when it flows with my day-to-day. Understanding that mindset will help companies learn to work with consumers, rather than pushing marketing onto those who aren’t as receptive.

I’m sure a lot of you have been in this situation before: You’re running late for a holiday get-together with friends. The kids are finally wrapped in coats and hats, the car is warming up, and you remember (yikes!) that you promised to bring an appetizer to the party. Grab something at the store on the way? Sure, but then you look like—well—the person who didn’t care enough to make an effort. Now there’s a solution—Chex to the rescue!

Although I could have used this advice years earlier, Jessi Link from our team recently let me know about some Marketing with Meaning that Chex is doing for its annual holiday sales drive. The brand has created five snack recipes that can be made in 15 minutes or less with the killer tagline: “Chex lets you party at the party.” Over at its special holiday-recipe website, you can learn how to make these and several other tasty treats. I like that there are some preparation videos for inept chefs such as myself, ratings for each recipe, and a way to browse recipes by “microwavable,” “salty,” and “sweet.”

I believe that Chex shows us an excellent way for a brand to win with a holiday sales opportunity. In the old days, the brand would just blast hundreds of ads to remind us of the brand—becoming just another voice shouting for our attention when it is in most demand. But by offering a solution to our holiday struggles, Chex has a chance to earn our attention and our loyalty.

You’ve probably heard of the old 80-for-20 Rule—which is alternatively referred to as either “spend your time on the 20 percent of work that will drive 80 percent of the results” or, for marketers, “spend your money against the 20 percent of customers who drive 80 percent of sales.” At Bridge Worldwide, we’ve made this our mantra and part of the story behind our focus on Digital+Relationship Marketing. But we were somewhat shocked last week to find, buried in Advertising Age, that this 80-for-20 rule is more like 80-for-2.5.

A study by Catalina (the people behind those shopping-receipt coupons) and the CMO Council tracked 54 million people and the 1,300 brands that they purchased over a year. The study found that, on average, only 2.5 percent of consumers account for 80 percent of sales of consumer packaged goods brands. And only 25 of 1,364 brands in the database had anything more than 10 percent of people buying 80 percent of its volume. Those few folks rack up a lot of cases over a year. Budweiser’s 80-for-1.2 racks up $170 in sales per year, and Iams’s 80-for-1 spend $93 per year on the brand.

I guess we shouldn’t have been too surprised. With an ever-growing number of brands and line extensions available, combined with people’s increasingly divergent tastes, we are seeing a general deterioration of the “mass” market. Other industries are not immune to these forces either; in banking, 150 percent of profits are derived from just 20 percent of customers (per Banking Strategies, Dec. ‘99).

What is really, really shocking is that so few brands have recognized concentration of their most important customers and shifted strategies accordingly. Mass advertising such as TV, print, and even digital banners can perform a touch of targeting, but by definition they waste tremendous money on people who mean nothing to the bottom line.

My hope is that each marketer who sees this fact reaches a personal tipping point into a new way of approaching her job: Instead of spamming zillions with unwanted messages, turn your attention to the people who love your brand and give them marketing that actually improves their lives.

There are many ways to start speaking directly with this core customer base. The Coke Rewards loyalty program was specifically started to reward and communicate directly with those who drink the most product. We helped Abbott Nutrition provide added-value resources for people with diabetes at Diabetes Control for Life, and for new moms at StrongMoms.com. We’ve even had great success with a modest email list for Folgers. People who join these programs by far tend to be in the 80-for-2.5, and they are first to try your new products and tell their friends about your brand.

The starting point for all marketers is to stop burning cash at the top of the purchase funnel—Awareness—and begin investing at the bottom with your most profitable and most loyal who believe your Marketing with Meaning is most important.

As you might have heard by now, the plunging economy is starting to trickle down even to the sports teams that we love so much. For example, the Arena Football League is considering shutting down for the 2009 season; NASCAR’s CEO was begging fans to use sponsors’ products during the sport’s annual awards night; and the Detroit Pistons have sold out their seats, but many ticket holders are staying home. A recent study showed that 58 percent of people said they are cutting back on entertainment spending, and 78 percent of those people said that means fewer sporting events. What’s a team to do when times get tough like these? More and more franchises are discovering creative, meaningful marketing alternatives.

The bottom line for sports franchises is that they need to put as many people in seats as possible for any given event. Like the airlines, it’s better to sell a seat at a discount than to tip off with it empty, and the bonus is that people who attend events often rack up significant bills for soda, hot dogs, and souvenirs. So smart teams are figuring out ways to ease fans’ pocketbook pain and still give them the chance to escape the daily grind at an event. A few examples that I’ve found recently include:

• The Birmingham Barons Minor League Baseball team held “Petrol-Palooza Nights” over the summer, in which you could buy a ticket for whatever a gallon of gas was going for.
• The St. Louis Blues of the NHL are holding 11 “Fannie & Freddie Mortgage Saturdays” with a drawing in which one lucky fan will get his or her mortgage paid for four months. This helped the team sell an extra 500 tickets.
• The NBA’s New Jersey Nets are giving free tickets to out-of-work fans who post their resumes on the team’s website—and they are sharing these resumes with their sponsors (such as Chase, Coca-Cola, and Amtrak).
• The Arizona Diamondbacks encourage people to nominate needy families for free season tickets.

I really like that these teams are in touch with their fans and realize that they need to adjust their marketing approach to be more meaningful. Not only does this have a chance of helping them maintain revenues during tough times, but fans remember that their favorite team paid attention to their needs during tough times. This, in turn, creates true, long-term fans of any brand.

We’re still only about six months into sharing our Marketing with Meaning, but I’m very encouraged by the progress so far. One measure of our progress in spreading the Marketing with Meaning idea is our recognition and inclusion on lists of some of the best and most relevant marketing blogs. For example, we recently moved up to #6 on the Junta list of the top content marketing blogs, and we’re moving up the Ad Age Power 150 list of media and marketing blogs.

I’m proud to report that we were recently selected by a new tool and list called Alltop. Alltop is “an online magazine rack” that collects feeds from sources that it reviews, categorizes, and updates. Jonathan Richman (from our team) submitted this blog and we are now listed in the Marketing section.

Alltop represents an example of the trend of “human aggregation” of Internet content, which is an interesting evolution in how information is organized and accessed. While Google has done a great job of building an algorithm to make the Internet much more search friendly than before, there is still a lot of difficulty in searching for what you want or simply discovering great content.

Now, humans are getting into the act of helping to further identify the good stuff. Wikipedia is one of the first, largest examples of humans adding value to the search process. Digg then came along to help flag the most interesting stories. And now “closed” sites such as Alltop have potential to succeed by providing trusted recommendations of the best content feeds on a wide variety of topics.

And some marketers are starting to use aggregation to better organize meaningful content for their customers. Purina is sorting through tons of cat and dog photos to create a “best of” site called Pet Charts. According to a recent Ad Age article, “it takes a trained person 30 minutes per day to go through and update the site’s content.” This provides Purina with a low-cost, owned media outlet, and also drives huge natural search traffic to the brand.

I also recently discovered “Tabbloid,” a service by HP that helps people make the content they aggregate more useful. The company is offering a software that turns RSS feeds into a daily newspaper. By offering this service, HP forges trust, opens a direct communication avenue, and gets people to use its HP printers and ink more often (thanks Ad Lab).

So discover Alltop and the power of human aggregation for yourself, and please use this link—as the more traffic we drive to the site, the higher we’ll rise in its listing!

As the word gets out about Marketing with Meaning, we are starting to attract some interesting outreach from unexpected places. A few months ago, a company engaged us in a project to do some consulting, which I hope to talk more about later. More recently, for the first time, I was asked to provide a review of a new marketing campaign from an agency on behalf of its client. In other words, I was suddenly elevated to the lofty list of targets for “blogger outreach.” I feel so special. But seriously, it is cool and I am happy to provide my honest assessment—according to Marketing with Meaning principles—in this post…

The Morgans Hotel Group has launched a new advertising campaign under the mantra RecessIsOn, a clever play on the word “recession,” which is dominating too much of the news lately. Morgans is playing on this depression around the now-official recession by calling for fun. The boutique hotel chain is using targeted print ads (see above), wild postings, and PR to drive traffic to Recessison.com. Once there, visitors can discover the path to parties and other enjoyment at Morgans’ hotels in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and London. Each hotel is hosting events (most seem to require a charge) as well as several added-value offers such as free massages, room upgrades, and complimentary dirty martinis (full disclosure: my favorite kind).

Survey Says: It’s just so-so.

First, let me say that I love Morgans’ decision to focus on the economy and to embrace the idea of having more fun with more freebies. Many marketers (including our clients) are working on ways to adapt messaging to appeal more to people who are struggling to make ends meet. It is very clever to see a company stare the recession in the face with defiance.

Second, I think that Morgans has some smart promotional offers for its customers. Each hotel has a wide variety of packages with complimentary services at a lower-than-usual cost. I really felt like Morgans was doing something special in this down economy.

My main issue is that this campaign is not offering significant value aside from these specials. If you’re not staying there or buying a party ticket, there’s really no meaning for you. The posters and ads might make you smile for a minute, but they don’t merit more than a half-second pause. This is not Marketing with Meaning.

My big suggestion is for Morgans to turn its party atmosphere into an open event. Once its clever campaign got the attention, it needed a meaningful hook to pull people into something valuable. What if Morgans held weekly parties with free admission, cool music, and low or no-cost drinks? They could use word-of-mouth and these wild postings to, say, publicize a code word to get in these parties. And the company could focus on its historic guest list as the best source of traffic. The attendance could even be limited to out-of-towners to encourage a hotel stay on an upcoming trip. The idea of a free party with a guerrilla-marketing guest list worked well for the Stoli Hotel, which got a ton of buzz for its effort. And if this can work for a $20 vodka brand, it’s got to work for a $300-per-night hotel.

Finally, Morgans and its agency should make sure to do more in terms of blogger outreach. I received an email and a request to cover the campaign. Thanks very little, guys! How about an invite to one of these parties with celebs such as those below, or even a free night’s stay? In case you’re listening, I’ll be in L.A. on December 16 and will be happy to update this blog with more of the Morgans experience.

Only a little more than 30 days ago my team at Bridge Worldwide and I entered the “Twittersphere” by creating an account in this fast-growing social networking tool. As I wrote previously, the main rationale for Twittering was to provide additional, meaningful content related to our Marketing with Meaning concept.  Instead of just two to three blog posts a week, I figured that believers in our mission would appreciate more, shorter examples. Little did I know that it would provide us with a great deal of benefits as well.

Frankly, I have to admit that I had purposely avoided Twitter for a while. In this business there are so many new technologies out there that you could waste a lot of time following failed ideas. In my brief look-sees at the technology, I also saw too many examples of posts like “just ate pancakes.” But the chance to provide meaningful marketing for our readers was too tempting to ignore.

Overall, I can definitely say that I’m loving Twitter and I think some version of it is here to stay. Over the past week especially, I feel like I felt back in the days when I first started reading blogs, or when I first found RSS feeds, or even when I first got on email. In the early days of such technologies, there is a common feeling that you have discovered something amazingly useful and interesting - something that will improve the quality of your life.

In terms of an assessment of Twitter, I really like Forrester’s take in the book Groundswell, where the company uses a tool to evaluate new digital marketing tools, and gives this service a thumbs-up.  Here’s my take:

What Works

• Accelerates the spread of knowledge (both ways) - There is a very rich stream of news and links that members share with each other. I’ve discovered some great data and case studies that I would not have found otherwise. It is also a powerful way for me to share Marketing with Meaning examples, which is helping to drive record traffic to this blog.
• Reaches the most advanced digital thinkers - In marketing this concept and the book, our general target is anyone who is responsible for marketing or agencies who work for marketers. But there is a more core group of digital influencers who will do the most to spread the word. They are the ones who the mass of marketers (and media) look to for suggestions on what’s new and important.  And they are all over Twitter. I really like the Twitter social etiquette that people should always give credit, and almost always follow whomever follows you.
• Creates new opportunities for partnership - I have just dipped my toe into the water of actually using Twitter to ask for specific help, but the community is often sending notes asking for examples, facts, or people connections. Just the other day someone in my network saw an exchange between a friend of mine and me about a specific marketing program, and out of the blue a person related to the company offered to arrange an interview for our book!
• Add-ons keep the service improving - There are countless tools that you can use to make Twitter more effective, which will keep advancing the usefulness of the service. I really like TweetDeck (better interface), SocialOne (allows auto-messaging for new followers), Twitter Search (find people easily), and Mr. Tweet (helps you find people with similar interests).  Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for great guidance on these.

Improvement Needed

• It’s marketing to the choir - The biggest downside for me is that everyone I tend to see is a fellow social/digital maven of some kind. So this is not where I’m going to be able to reach the general  marketer we need to connect with. I know of only two of my agency clients on Twitter, Kevin and Dave.
• Still lots of junk out there - Some Twits are interesting, and a lot are not. I think the community is still feeling out what is appropriate to share and what isn’t. But I’d like the signal-to-noise factor to be a lot better. And with all the noise coming through I know that I’m missing lots of really good links and comments.
• Huge time suck if you let it be - In the week since getting TweetDeck, a tool that makes your feeds much easier to follow, I have felt myself spending far too much time on this thing. It is addictive to “surf the community” with Twitter, similar to how some people find Facebook.

I am very, very excited about how Twitter will help us bring our Marketing with Meaning concept and upcoming book into the market successfully. We have more than 200 followers now and people keep finding us every hour or two. I can tell that this audience believes in the concept, and that they will use their network to share it with others. I am even more excited by the chance to recruit true believers who will take on the challenge of making the marketing they work on more meaningful.

Whether you’re new to Twitter or a seasoned veteran, check us out at: https://twitter.com/mktgwithmeaning.