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My friend had a fender-bender right before we met for brunch. Thoroughly rattled, she asked me – a non-driver – what to do. Report the accident to the police? Notify her insurance company, or the other insurer? Would her premiums go up? Truthfully, neither of us knew. Fortunately, there’s an app for that. That is, there would be if you lived in the U.S. and had Nationwide Mobile for iPhone, which walks you through the steps, identifies local resources and reporting channels, helps gather correct documentation and even submits claim information on the spot after an accident—all from your phone.
A few years ago, the strategic term for Nationwide’s offering might have been “brand utility” or “meaningful marketing.” Today, it has evolved into brands distinguishing themselves from the cacophony of advertising by simply being helpful, that most old-fashioned of brand values.
By providing information and services that are truly relevant, useful, reliable and not necessarily tied to sales, brands are building the kind of engagement that yields long-term returns. Several forces—from bandwidth and the ubiquity of smartphones to our delicate economy’s need for corporate transparency and competitiveness—have created ideal conditions for helpful marketing to flourish, not just in mobile app form but in online, interactive and even “traditional” media.
I wondered: Does being helpful add up to Nationwide selling more policies? Mitch Joel might reply: “Does a bear shit in the woods?” The president of Montreal’s Twist Image is especially fond of the Sit or Squat app, sponsored by Charmin since 2009, which guides travellers to clean, safe restrooms around the world. “Now, when I’m walking down that aisle in the store, I’m buying Charmin,” says Joel, who classifies himself as mostly “immune” to marketing and advertising, an “occupational hazard,” he says. “I’m more aligned to Charmin now because I love that app.” So much so that he’d pay for it, even though it’s free. “We could very quickly be evolving to a world where certain marketing platforms are revenue-generating business models that the companies didn’t have before.” Useful, indeed.
Good, Old-fashioned Help
Jay Baer called a cab in Banff and got Taxi Mike. In the cab were single-sheet, tri-fold brochures on bright yellow paper, naming the best joints to eat, drink, take kids or find a sunny café patio—and Taxi Mike’s dispatch number. Mike’s Dining Guide is as low-tech as helpful marketing gets, but “helpfulness has always been a differentiator,” says Baer, the president of online marketing consultancy Convince & Convert. On the phone from Bloomington, Indiana, Baer elaborates on his concept of customer-focused “You-tility” with the clever aphorism “helping and selling are only two letters apart.”
Thanksgiving and Christmas might go up in smoke without the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line (and now email address). Toronto beer drinkers weathered the dark days of 2010 with the award-winning James Ready Beer “coupon” billboards (snap the ad, use your photo-coupon for a discount), a delightfully simple approach in the QR-code era. Domino’s online pizza tracker tells the hungry exactly when their pie goes in the oven and out to a delivery vehicle. Geek Squad instructional YouTube videos help solve your own simple IT problems, but ensures the Geeks are top-of-mind when you get in over your head. Helping and selling are nearly synonymous in these examples.
On the surface, it might seem like brands are giving too much away by revealing trade secrets, what Joe Pulizzi of the Cleveland-based Content Marketing Institute calls a brand’s secret sauce. “You can give out the secret sauce and still position yourself as a leader,” he assures.
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Useful, Reliable and Fresh
Passing through the Warsaw airport this past summer, I was happy to stop for a few minutes and check my email at an ING Internet Gate, a welcome service from the online bank in a wi-fi-sparse place. I’ve been similarly grateful for a silent phone-call moment at a Nokia booth at a noisy music festival and for a replacement shoelace from the Nike Runner’s Lounge along Vancouver’s seawall (not to mention online training programs like Nike+ and Adidas miCoach).
“Experiential marketing is something ad agencies have always done really well,” Twist Image’s Joel says. But what makes brands truly cutting-edge today, he says, is helpful content. “That’s still something that’s very counter to the business model agencies have,” Joel says—providing “real useful content… that doesn’t have a monthly or quarterly life. It has a daily voice that’s constantly struggling to scrape its way to the top.”
Consider the magazine-style websites Procter & Gamble creates to cover its consumer bases, with lifestyle advice, tips—and, yes, brand information and offers—for women (HomemadeSimple.com, now also a TV series on OWN), men (ManOfTheHouse.com) and teens (BeingGirl.com), or American Express’s comprehensive OpenForum.com for small business. This kind of “brand journalism,” with useful, reliable and fresh content creates a long-term relationship and engagement with consumers and potential customers that few flashy 30-second spots can duplicate. “These platforms act as an amazing way to get people more vested into the brand,” Joel adds. “That might be one of the more interesting metrics to look at, rather than impressions and repetition.”
How can a consumer not take the bait of the utility dangled by the website of Procter & Gamble’s Pampers diapers? The content is designed to establish a bond with mothers-to-be early in pregnancy, with a section walking them through the entire nine-month development of their fetus. The website continues the relationship with parents by offering additional advice and tools, such as PDF files of certificates that can be printed off for children who are successfully potty trained. (There are, of course, enough links to P&G products, such as training pants and wipes, to make it worth the company’s time and effort.)
Social Studies
Remember when you had to bring a tiny sample into a paint store and ask them to match the colour and estimate how much paint you needed? The once-complex task was replaced at the dawn of the app revolution—in 2009!—by a Benjamin Moore app so whiz-bang cool (and quick-to-market) that I’ve shared it with several professional designer and amateur renovator friends. If you loved a colour, you could just take a photo of it and the app would instantly match it to one of the 3,300-plus hues that comprise Benjamin Moore’s stash. The GPS patch then directed you to the closest store.
“I wish I had that 20 years ago,” laughs Convince & Convert’s Baer, who once worked in a paint store. “Companies are asking you to friend us! Like us! Follow us! What that results in is a lack of differentiation between brands. What I tell my customers is that in social media you earn the right to promote, and you do so by being helpful first.”
As Joel puts it: “Brands shouldn’t be getting people to like them; they should be liking people.”
People have always trusted other people more than they trust companies, and now that personal recommendations are done with a click, “everybody likes to be an expert,” says Baer. “Sharing is the new entertainment. It’s the new way we see the world, through our own sharing behaviours and the sharing behaviours of friends and contacts.” Google rewards that behaviour, with algorithms that increasingly put weight on content that is shared. “And the stuff that gets shared is helpful content,” Pulizzi adds.
The New Old Thing
In a world where anybody with an online connection can publish their thoughts and every brand can be a media platform, who’s winning in market share and mindshare? Like the neighbourhood butcher of a century ago, giving out recipes and advice, it’s helpful brands like Kraft or Whole Foods, putting hundreds of online recipes at your fingertips, dispensing helpful content.
“It’s not new to marketers; it’s just very new to advertisers and advertising agencies that are forced to change their game a little bit, to understand content and editorial calendars and things you never had to when it was church and state,” says Pulizzi. Free and valuable content from brands “makes me value them more, not trust them less.”
Which companies are doing it right? Who’s helping consumers best? Post your thoughts in our comment section.
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