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April 1, 2008 In Transcripts By Advent

xmt-005: Service-based Marketing

[This is a tran­script of the free audio pro­gram, Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today. The audio ver­sion of this con­tent is avail­able at: Episode 005: Service-based Mar­ket­ing]

Announcer: Wel­come to Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today.

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Luke Flener: Wel­come to this episode of Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today. This show is about the the­ory and prac­tice of using expe­ri­ences to engage audi­ences with the authen­tic nature of a brand or com­pany. We believe that it may be the most pow­er­ful tool mar­keters have, but it’s also some­thing of a mys­tery. My name is Luke Flener. I’ll be your host for this episode.

[music]

Luke: Episode Five: Service-Based Marketing.

Daniel Pink, in his best-selling book “A Whole New Mind, ” iden­ti­fies six senses that are emerg­ing as the new frame­work for decid­ing what has value. One of these senses, the sense of mean­ing, leads us to look for causes big­ger than our­selves, and to align our­selves with brands that demon­strate authen­tic­ity, respon­si­bil­ity, and involvement.

This trend is exert­ing its influ­ence on busi­nesses, which are led by peo­ple who share the same need for mean­ing. This influ­ence is seen in the grow­ing use of state­ments on sus­tain­abil­ity, com­mu­nity ser­vice, car­ing, and other socially respon­si­ble lan­guage, in places that would have sur­prised us only a few years ago.

Yet, when it comes to putting those words into action, many com­pa­nies fall short. The rea­son? When it comes down to the hard sci­ence of bud­get­ing, it’s dif­fi­cult to allo­cate resources for some­thing that gen­er­ates no mea­sur­able return. To be fair, if I’m jus­ti­fy­ing my stew­ard­ship of com­pany assets to stock­hold­ers, it brings remark­able clar­ity to the deci­sion of whether to spend five per­cent of scarce resources on mar­ket­ing or on help­ing build playgrounds.

How­ever, using the tenet that expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing is more pow­er­ful when focused, a few com­pa­nies have found a way to get expo­nen­tially more pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing return through mak­ing a dif­fer­ence in a cause. They’ve taken the either/or bud­get­ing dilemma and made it into both. Today, we’ll talk about service-based marketing.

Todd Austin: Wel­come back. This is Todd Austin. John Rober­son is away this week. John and I have been tak­ing turns trav­el­ing, being away from the office. It’s been dif­fi­cult for us to sit down together and record this episode, so the pro­duc­tion team decided we should go ahead and record this one, and John will rejoin us for the next episode.

On this episode, we’re going to talk about service-based mar­ket­ing. Now, service-based mar­ket­ing is not the mar­ket­ing of a ser­vice, so let’s just get that behind us here at the start. Service-based mar­ket­ing is where you choose to take on some act of ser­vice, and the ser­vice is for some­one in your audi­ence, in the audi­ence for your brand, and the ser­vice that you choose to do for them has some nat­ural tie to the authen­tic nature of your brand. So you’re doing some­thing that rein­forces who you are and makes an emo­tional con­nec­tion with your audience.

So, just to be clear, we’re not talk­ing about dona­tions to a good cause. This is much more than that. In service-based mar­ket­ing, you’re not writ­ing a check; you’re get­ting your hands dirty. You’re going and per­form­ing the ser­vice. You’re mobi­liz­ing the resources to make it hap­pen. You’re get­ting the word out. You’re find­ing the peo­ple to serve. It’s much more than writ­ing that check.

But it’s also more than just per­form­ing the ser­vice, because, don’t for­get, this is a mar­ket­ing tool that we’re talk­ing about here, so you’re per­form­ing a ser­vice that helps you grow your busi­ness, that helps you cre­ate fans of your brand. So let’s go through a few exam­ples, just so we make sure that this point is really clear.

The first exam­ple we want to talk about is the com­pany Nes­tle Waters. Now, Nes­tle Waters is a global brand. They have sev­eral brands of bot­tled water in the United States. Some of those are Ozarka, Deer Park, Arrow­head, and I believe there are a cou­ple of oth­ers. And those are all dis­trib­uted regionally.

Now, Nes­tle Waters had a cou­ple of ini­tia­tives going that they really wanted to empha­size. The first was that their prod­uct was nat­ural, and they’d been men­tion­ing this in their mar­ket­ing for years. The sec­ond was they were proud of their envi­ron­men­tal cre­den­tials, and of course, they’d mar­keted this in the tra­di­tional ways as well. But they were look­ing for an expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing tool that would allow peo­ple to con­nect with these two aspects of their brand, would let them under­stand that they were real, they were more than words.

So Nes­tle Waters decided to do a service-based mar­ket­ing project with the Arrow­head brand on the West Coast. And they decided that for the service-based mar­ket­ing project, they would do a beach cleanup. Now think about it. It’s a nat­ural water that they’re sell­ing, and here is a beach cleanup project. The two seem to go together. It makes sense.

So Nes­tle Waters teamed up with an orga­ni­za­tion called Heal the Bay. Now, Heal the Bay has strong cre­den­tials in the South­ern Cal­i­for­nia area for clean­ing up beaches, for actu­ally get­ting it done. Now the fact that they teamed up with a not-for-profit in this area is impor­tant for sev­eral rea­sons, and we’ll talk about those in a few min­utes. But for now, just think about the nat­ural strengths that come from this kind of partnership.

First of all, Nes­tle Waters now doesn’t have to think about orga­niz­ing, how to make it hap­pen, how to actu­ally get the beach cleaned up, because they’ve got Heal the Bay, who knows all that. Heal the Bay has a part­ner in Nes­tle Waters that will help them get the word out, that will help get another beach cleaned up. So it works well for both.

The way Nes­tle Waters played this, with this Arrow­head pro­mo­tion, was a “give back, kick back” event. They were invit­ing the pub­lic to come help clean up this beach, and in return for vol­un­teer­ing to help clean up the beach, Nes­tle Waters was going to put on a free con­cert that evening after the day of beach cleanup, and they were going to have a cou­ple of bands that were get­ting a lot of air­play come and per­form for free.

Now, orga­niz­ing a beach cleanup is valu­able by itself. But lis­ten to how Nes­tle Waters turned this into a mar­ket­ing event, an expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing tool. They took the mar­ket­ing dol­lars that they were going to be spend­ing in that area any­way and focused them all on this event. So they had a lot of cross-channel pro­mo­tion going on.

They had mem­bers of the bands that were going to per­form at the free con­cert record pub­lic ser­vice announce­ments that were played on local media, encour­ag­ing peo­ple to come out to the beach. And of course, every time one of those media announce­ments was made, it said “Nes­tle Waters” and “Arrow­head Water” and rein­forced that nat­ural, environmentally-friendly aspect of the brand.

Heal the Bay, the not-for-profit orga­ni­za­tion that Nes­tle Waters teamed up with to do this event, agreed to send out to its data­base of donors and vol­un­teers a mes­sage about this event. Now think about that. Nes­tle Waters could not have pur­chased that data­base. But now, because they had teamed up with Heal the Bay to do this event, their name — as the spon­sor of this event — was sent out to all these influ­encers in the area who cared about clean water and clean beaches.

The label for the two bands that were going to play agreed to get involved as well, and they sent out to their data­base of fans for the two bands pro­mo­tional mes­sage about the “clean up the beach” event. Again, that’s pub­lic­ity that would have been dif­fi­cult for Nes­tle Waters to have gotten.

Nes­tle Waters also did 37, 38 retail mobile mar­ket­ing sta­tions through­out the city — again, pro­mot­ing this event, and also offer­ing free sam­ples of their water. So these mobile sta­tions were out­side of office build­ings. They were out­side of gro­cery stores. They were scat­tered all across town. And they drove home the mes­sage of, “Hey, come help us clean up this beach, and kick back with us at the end of the day.”

Of course, at the event itself, Nes­tle had a ton of brand ambas­sadors on-hand, rep­re­sent­ing Nes­tle Waters, rep­re­sent­ing Arrow­head, pass­ing out free sam­ples of the water to those that were clean­ing up the beach, offer­ing mas­sages, there were some games that could be played.

All these things were branded pieces remind­ing peo­ple that Nes­tle Waters cared about this beach, cared about clean water, cared about the fact that its water was nat­ural. This was a very suc­cess­ful event for Heal the Bay and for Nes­tle Waters. They walked away with met­rics that they were very happy with. That’s another piece to this that we need to focus some atten­tion on, mak­ing sure that we can mea­sure the results.

It’s great just to do the great work, and we can feel good about it at the end of the day. But if we can walk away with proof that it was a good invest­ment of our money, then so much the bet­ter. So let’s move on to a sec­ond exam­ple. Now Google is another global brand that everyone’s famil­iar with. They have a divi­sion called Google Maps and I use Google Maps a lot. You may as well. It’s a cus­tom map­ping tool that lets you find dri­ving direc­tions, and lots of other things as well.

Google encour­ages its peo­ple to be involved in good works. One of the ten­ants of Google is “Don’t be evil.” One of the local Google offices — it may have been the main head­quar­ters, I’m not sure — was doing a local cleanup effort. It was just an envi­ron­men­tal cleanup of an aban­doned lot or some­thing like that. Well, they decided to turn this into a mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­nity for Google Maps, and also to encour­age some good work worldwide.

So their service-based mar­ket­ing project was to use the Google Maps tool to do an inter­na­tional cleanup day. They used the day that they were plan­ning on doing their local cleanup in the area, and they encour­aged peo­ple world­wide to come to the Google Maps tool, to a spe­cial page they set aside, and say “Hey, in our area, we’re going to do this cleanup, and any­one that’s around is wel­come to come help us do it.”

Well, at the end of the day they had 287 cleanups around the world in over 35 coun­tries, and got lots of press and pub­lic­ity about it. All they did was use the exist­ing tools they had and take some­thing they were going to do any­way locally and encour­age oth­ers to get involved world­wide. They turned some­thing that was a ser­vice project, locally, into a world­wide mar­ket­ing event.

All right, let’s quickly go through a cou­ple more exam­ples. For the third exam­ple, Pam­pers Dia­pers, again a brand that you’ve prob­a­bly heard of. They were com­ing out with a new fea­ture in one of their dia­pers and they wanted to stim­u­late trial. They were look­ing for a way to do this expe­ri­en­tially, so their service-based mar­ket­ing project was much sim­pler and smaller in scope than the other two we’ve talked about so far, which demon­strates that a ser­vice based mar­ket­ing project can be big, or it can be small, and it can be done by anyone.

The project that Pam­pers chose was that they had brand ambas­sadors sta­tioned out­side of retail areas where par­ents of small chil­dren might shop, par­ents who might be cus­tomers for Pam­pers dia­pers. These brand ambas­sadors went up to the cus­tomers as they were get­ting out of their cars and said “Hey, we would like to do a free child seat safety inspec­tion for you.”

Now of course the brand ambas­sadors have been trained by, I guess it would be the National High­way Trans­porta­tion Safety Com­mis­sion, one of the orga­ni­za­tions that over­sees that. But they were trained in how to do a safety seat inspec­tion. So they walk up to these par­ents, they offer to do this inspec­tion, and of course what parent’s going to say no to that? They do the inspec­tion, they come back, they report their find­ings, make their rec­om­men­da­tions, and then when they’re done they say, “And we would like to give you this coupon that’s good for a free box of our new dia­pers, that you can get right there in the store. There’s no obligation.”

So Pam­pers is just per­form­ing an act of ser­vice that their name is tied to that’s for the audi­ence that they’re try­ing to attract, and that cre­ates good­will between Pam­pers and their audience.

For our final exam­ple, which I think is my favorite exam­ple of the four that we’ve talked about, Tide laun­dry deter­gent. Now Tide is one of those brands that’s been around for­ever, and every­one knows what Tide is about.

Well, they were look­ing for a way to cre­ate an expe­ri­en­tial link with their cus­tomers, or with poten­tial cus­tomers. At the same time, they felt the need to pro­vide some response to the dev­as­ta­tion after Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina, for the folks in Mis­sis­sippi and Louisiana. So they decided to com­bine the two. Now, they could have writ­ten a big check for the relief effort. They could have sent lots of free Tide to the relief effort. Both of those would have been appreciated.

But they went a big step fur­ther. Tide cre­ated trac­tor trailer rigs that were out­fit­ted with 30-something sets of wash­ers and dry­ers, with all the hookups to make it work. They sent teams of peo­ple into the areas with the great­est dev­as­ta­tion, and they went there in part­ner­ship with Sec­ond Har­vest. So again, sim­i­lar to Nes­tle Waters, they had a part­ner in place that knew what the need was, knew how to direct Tide to meet the need, and took the bur­den off Tide’s shoul­ders to try to fig­ure that out, just let them serve where they needed to be.

So Tide would go into an area, their brand ambas­sadors would set up, and they would ask peo­ple to just bring them laun­dry. Now think about what a great ser­vice that is. These peo­ple are rebuild­ing their homes, they don’t have util­i­ties, their clothes have to be filthy. They’re hav­ing to wash them man­u­ally. Here’s Tide, com­ing to town, say­ing “Here’s a free laun­dry ser­vice. Just bring them to us.”

Peo­ple would bring their laun­dry to Tide. They would mark it all so they could iden­tify it. Tide ambas­sadors would wash and dry it, they would wrap it, they would treat it as if they were a pro­fes­sional laun­dry ser­vice that was for-pay in a large city. So again, just to be clear, this wasn’t offer­ing to let peo­ple use these wash­ers and dry­ers. Tide brand ambas­sadors actu­ally washed and dried and folded and wrapped the clothes for the peo­ple who were work­ing in this area.

So Tide com­bined mobile mar­ket­ing — they had these huge trucks that were branded Tide — with part­ner­ship with a not-for-profit, Sec­ond Har­vest in this case, with lots of great pub­lic­ity. And it worked so well for Tide that they expanded the pro­gram and used the same pro­gram fol­low­ing the wild­fires in Cal­i­for­nia. Now Tide has pro­duced a video about this expe­ri­ence, and the video is very mov­ing. It has inter­views with sev­eral of the peo­ple in Louisiana and Mis­sis­sippi that were recip­i­ents of this act of service.

I highly rec­om­mend that you go and look at it, because you’ll see how pow­er­ful this kind of mar­ket­ing can be. We have a link to that video and the show notes on the web­site, and again the web­site is www.experientialmarketingtoday.com. OK, so we’ve given you four exam­ples here of service-based mar­ket­ing. One of the ques­tions we like to ask here, that may not be per­fectly appro­pri­ate for this episode, but still fits, is: “Why should I care? What’s the big deal here?”

Well, if you’re build­ing your expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing pro­gram, one of the things you have to remem­ber is that your audi­ence cares about authen­tic­ity. Now, authen­tic­ity means walk­ing your talk. If you say you care about some­thing, they want to know that you do care about that. Send­ing a check is one way to do that, but actu­ally get­ting boots on the ground, get­ting your hands dirty, says a lot more. It says “Hey, I really do care about this. I care enough to walk away from my busi­ness long enough to do this good work.”

Also, if you choose the ser­vice cor­rectly and care­fully, then you have the oppor­tu­nity to influ­ence the influ­encers in your mar­ket. Now think about that Nes­tle Waters exam­ple that we gave ear­lier. By part­ner­ing with Heal the Bay, they got access to — mar­ket to — the Heal the Bay data­base. There’s no other way they could have got­ten access to that data­base. Here was an oppor­tu­nity for them to influ­ence peo­ple who they know care about clean water and clean beaches. And if those peo­ple think Nes­tle is for real in this area, they’re going to tell peo­ple about it. They’re going to drink Nes­tle Water.

Choos­ing a service-based mar­ket­ing project in some ser­vice area that has a nat­ural tie to your brand strength­ens your cre­den­tials with those peo­ple that you’re try­ing to influ­ence. Another rea­son you should care is that for today’s employ­ees, for peo­ple that are younger espe­cially, this kind of thing pro­vides a lot of moti­va­tion. A lot of rea­son for them to work hard and stay there. We set some aggres­sive goals for our team this year, and we tied some rewards to those goals.

One of which was of course a finan­cial reward for each per­son in our orga­ni­za­tion. But the sec­ond reward that we set was we said “Hey, if we reach our goal, we’re going to come together, we’re going to build a Habi­tat for Human­ity house together.” Well don’t get me wrong, a finan­cial incen­tive is impor­tant, but our employ­ees were talk­ing much more about want­ing to build that house. That project is much more moti­va­tional for them. It gets them involved in some­thing worth­while that’s big­ger than themselves.

They feel like what they’re doing all of a sud­den has a lot more impor­tance than just mak­ing a dol­lar. So don’t for­get the influ­ence this can have on your inter­nal people.

As we’ve already said, you’re going to gen­er­ate a lot of pub­lic­ity with this thing, a lot of great word of mouth. On that pub­lic­ity angle, we have another exam­ple from our own com­pany. 18 months ago or so we launched a new cat­e­gory of ser­vice, and of course try­ing to be good mar­keters, we worked on get­ting pub­lic­ity for that cat­e­gory of service.

But we ran into the obsta­cle of media folks not under­stand­ing this ser­vice. There was a lot of edu­ca­tion that we had to do about it. Maybe it was des­per­a­tion, but it was just one more thing to try. We decided to do a release about some of the ser­vice projects that our own peo­ple had been involved in over the last few months. Well, we got instant trac­tion on that. Reporters were very inter­ested in a busi­ness that encour­aged its employ­ees to do good works from which there could be no easy return for the business.

So we had national pub­lic­ity all of the sud­den because of service-based projects that we had encour­aged our peo­ple to be involved in. So again, this will get you an angle some­times that you can’t get any other way.

Let’s move on to how we actu­ally make it hap­pen. How do you do a service-based mar­ket­ing project? What are the things you need to plan for? As we’ve alluded to sev­eral times in this episode, one of the key things you need to look for is a ser­vice project that has nat­ural ties to your com­pany or brand.

Nes­tle Waters found a service-based project that had ties to clean water, a clean beach. Pam­pers found a project that allowed them to make a con­nec­tion with the audi­ence for their brand; they did those child seat safety inspec­tions. Google and Tide found service-based projects that put their own prod­ucts to good use in a good cause. So you’re look­ing for some­thing with nat­ural ties, some­thing that uses your project or ser­vice, some­thing that uses exper­tise that you’ve devel­oped because of who you are, some­thing that relates to your prod­uct or ser­vice like clean water.

Or even some­thing that’s related to you by loca­tion. The closer your ties are between the ser­vice that you do and your brand, the more poten­tial power you have for gen­er­at­ing an emo­tional response, a rav­ing fan for your brand from the ser­vice that you do. One of the things that we saw from sev­eral of those exam­ples is you need to look for a way to estab­lish ties with an exist­ing not-for-profit that’s doing this ser­vice already.

For our com­pany, we’re work­ing with Habi­tat for Human­ity. They know how to build houses, they know how to find the peo­ple that need them. For Nes­tle Waters, it was Heal the Beach, a not-for-profit that knew how to clean up beaches. For Tide it was Sec­ond Har­vest, who was already on the ground, doing a lot of cleanup in the post-Hurricane Kat­rina areas. Find some­one who knows how to do the ser­vice already and work with them.

Another thing that you need to plan for in your service-based mar­ket­ing project is think long and hard about those brand ambas­sadors who will be rep­re­sent­ing you at this project or event. We’ve done an episode on brand ambas­sadors, and it’s prob­a­bly worth your while to go back and lis­ten to that again. Remem­ber, you can’t leave this train­ing to chance because every­thing that you’ve worked so care­fully to cre­ate through this can be undone by a neg­a­tive reac­tion with one of the peo­ple or one of your representatives.

Now, think about those folks on the Tide pro­gram. If they had acted dis­gusted about the clothes, if they had been surly, any of that could have quickly undone all the work that Tide did to pull that event off.

If the Nes­tle Waters rep­re­sen­ta­tive at the beach hand­ing out Arrow­head bot­tled water had been think­ing about the per­son they had just bro­ken off with, and had been a lit­tle grouchy, hadn’t been trained well in what they were doing and why it was impor­tant that they treat peo­ple a cer­tain way, then all that work could have been undone. So think hard about how you train peo­ple who rep­re­sent you on these ser­vice based mar­ket­ing projects.

We touched on this a lit­tle ear­lier, again we’ve done an episode on mea­sure­ment, but you need to think about: “How do I mea­sure the mar­ket­ing return I can get out of this event?” It’s great if you do it just for the ser­vice angle of it, you can get a lot of ben­e­fit from that both inter­nally and exter­nally. But if you go in to it look­ing for things you can mea­sure, then you’ll come out with met­rics that tell you how effec­tive this event was for you.

Finally, take a cue from Nes­tle Waters and how well they did with cross-channel pro­mo­tion. They didn’t just say “Hey, we’re going to do a give-back, kick­back, clean up the beaches event.” They took all the mar­ket­ing dol­lars they were already plan­ning to invest in that area, and focused them all on this event. So the radio ad before the event was focused on “Arrow­head Water, you should drink it.” It’s now say­ing “Hey, Arrow­head Water cares about clean water. Come help us clean up the beach.”

They’re going to get the same effec­tive­ness out of dri­ving water sales through both ads, but in the sec­ond one they get the added ben­e­fit of demon­strat­ing about how much they care about clean­ing up that beach. Even if the lis­tener doesn’t go help clean up the beach, they know that Arrow­head Water is doing it. The impact is greater because of that.

So, as we wrap up this episode, we would encour­age you to find a way to get a service-based project on your agenda for the com­ing year. It is a very pow­er­ful expe­ri­en­tial tool. It can build strong ties between your brand and your audi­ence, and it can do a lot of good for you as well.

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Luke: That con­cludes this episode. We hope today’s dis­cus­sion pro­vided some infor­ma­tion that you can imple­ment in your own expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing pro­gram. You can find links to any of the resources men­tioned in this episode in the show notes on our web­site. Specif­i­cally, you’ll want to take a look at the video about the Tide project. You’ll also find the link to the full tran­script of this pro­gram. These can be found at www.experientialmarketingtoday.com.

If you have ques­tions of com­ments regard­ing some­thing we dis­cussed, you can send those to us using the email address feedback@experientialmarketingtoday.com or you can post com­ments on the web­site. We hope you’ll join us for the next episode. See you soon.

Announcer: Thanks for lis­ten­ing to Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today.

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