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[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.

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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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