The Bloom is on the Rose of Marketing as Service

Jonah Bloom (editor-in-chief of AdAge) scribes a savvy look at Marketing as Service in his editorial called “Make Your Marketing Useful, Like Samsung and Charmin” in this week’s AdAge. Not one to mince words, Jonah goes so far as to suggest that large advertisers “take a small chunk out of those billion-dollar budgets and help provide a free, helpful service.”

In addition to detailing Samsung’s Airport Charging Stations, Jonah offers up this example from the UK:

One of my favorite examples came from Metro newspapers in the U.K., which spent some of its launch marketing budget repairing and improving inner-city sports facilities. It was a good way to get the Metro name emblazoned into the very fabric of the cities in question and a clever way to give the brand a bit of “history” within the city.

After mentioning yours truly, this blog and the HSBC BankCab, Jonah goes on challenge Citi and AT&T directly with these suggestions:

AT&T, for example, how about you spare a few million from the billion you spend shoving your bars in my face, and help the MTA fix its Subway intercoms? Or Citi, how about you take some of the hundred million a year you spend telling us how friendly you are to construct a wireless network for New York?

Go Jonah. Delighted to have you on board the good ship Marketing as Service. And while I agree that it would be great to have subway intercoms that work and a wireless network for Gotham, I’m not certain I would have recommended to either of these clients that they take on these particular challenges. I won’t go into my reservations here but rather offer up a challenge to you all to come up some other ideas for these two clients. Winner gets a free ride in the BankCab and of course, adulation in this here blog. As my son would say, “bring it.”

In Search of Service

In a world polluted by banal messages it is annoyingly hard to find great cases of “marketing as service.” So today, I’m pleased to offer two reasonable good examples, fresh off the pages of this week’s AdAge.

The first comes from an interview with the new CMO of Wachovia, Ranjana B. Clark, who naturally initiated an agency review shortly after her arrival. [Start of rant–why is it that new CMO’s insist on conducting agency reviews? In this case, Mullen did a particularly brilliant job over the last 7 years helping to grow that brand. I suppose it is simply a question of “what have you done for me lately?” but what about all the cumulative knowledge and expertise they potentially offered?–end of rant] As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, this otherwise smart-sounding CMO of Wachovia, has determined that “American’s don’t save [and] have too much debt” and that a bank like hers needs to address these problems substantively:

The way we gain consumer trust is by truly listening and responding to our customers. … Our latest product introduction, “Way to Save,” is a way to help customers get into the savings habit. … We make it easy and we make it fun, and we make it possible for people who are either not in the habit of saving, or have very little to save, to begin.

This is the essence of marketing as service. It’s not enough to talk the talk (that’s marketing as message). You also have to walk the walk (that’s marketing as service). If this isn’t clear enough, consider Purina’s new website called PetCharts:

The site capitalizes on one of the universal truths of the web: People love pet content, especially funny cat photos or user-generated videos of pets at play. But the site also capitalizes on another one of the web’s universal truths: that when it comes to that pet content, 90% of it is bad. The goal for PetCharts is to help people find the good stuff.

Purina is performing a genuine service for its customers and in process should help them stand out of the pack of pet food marketers. Lest you think I’m alone in the praise of this approach, consider this quote from AdAge:

“This is really smart because the marketer is actually trying to give something valuable to the consumer in the context of how you create value on the web,” said Scott Karp, CEO of Publish2, an aggregation service aimed at journalists. “The web is a fantastic information medium and what the marketer is doing is giving the consumer relevant information.”

Wachovia’s new “Way to Save” product could help its customers save money, an offering that could be particularly helpful to the newly indebted. Purina’s new site could help its customers save time finding the best pet photos, a pursuit that only true dog lovers can understand and appreciate. In both cases, customers and marketers are well-served.

Packaged Good?

You know Marketing for Good has gone mainstream when the two largest consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies are battling it out to prove their goods are the most good. Here’s an excerpt from AdAge called “P&G Or Unilever: Which Is Best At Saving The World?”

Nothing indicates the growing importance of “ethical marketing” more than the concept’s growing embrace by Procter & Gamble and Unilever, the world’s two biggest spenders. While both have been engaged in such efforts for years, they’re talking about them–and particularly advertising them– like never before.

Bill Gates recently mentioned Unilever as a top-of-mind example of a company involved in sustainability efforts. The same day as Gates’ statement, P&G indicated it would make communication about its own sustainability efforts–defined to encompass a broad range of community-betterment programs–a much bigger priority in 2008.

Though both P&G and Unilever see prospects for substantial gains from such efforts on their bottom lines and for the communities in which they operate, both acknowledge that much of the effort is for internal consumption. Simply put, it’s getting impossible to attract or retain marketers without a solid reputation for ethical marketing. Cause-marketing efforts have “a big motivational impact,” says P&G global marketing officer Jim Stengel. “It fires the agencies up, too.”

CPG companies have traditionally been among the most sophisticated of marketers, refining their product, pricing, promotion and packaging with ever increasing efficiency. Typically, doing good fell into the “promotion” world and often meant cross-promotions that apportioned some percentage of profit to a particular charity. Now these efforts are turning inward as they try to well by doing good in every corner of their business. Whether they are doing this simply to boost morale and retention OR because the leaders of these companies simply believe it is the right thing to do, I’m delighted to witness this shift. It is a profound shift and will inevitably trickle down to other marketers who often following the lead of CPG companies. Or at least I hope so…