Marketing ideas that create value

The best marketing ideas have multiple dimensions of value. The best ideas create value for the company AND the customer. It’s entirely possible [to] create value beyond even these two audiences. Great marketing ideas also create value for shareholders, communities and potentially, the planet.

Adrian Ho at Zeus Jones wrote this in a thought-provoking piece at the beginning of the year.

He uses Apple’s electronic receipts as an example of a marketing idea that manages to create different value streams for the customer, the planet, and Apple.

He also questions why ideas like this aren’t being celebrated when, to paraphrase, expensive communications activities with a single value stream are showered with praise.

It’s very difficult to disagree with this challenge.

Marketing has often struggled to attain a seat at the top table. As an organisational function, it doesn’t always succeed at demonstrating its real-life contribution to the bottom line. This can mean that it is excluded from the more ‘grown-up’, strategic conversations that go on.

What Adrian’s thinking does is to remind, and no doubt for some, redefine what marketing exists to do.

Marketing is not simply the creation of clever pieces of film or funky facebook apps.

Marketing is the creation of value for organisations and its stakeholders; where value is defined by the specific context in which it is being created.

It’s a broader definition that lifts marketing above tactics into the far more interesting realm of how organisations interact with the world at every single juncture – not just the consumption one.

What sparked this particular post was a sighting of another example of this type of multiple value creation in action; and when an award is established that recognises these types of ideas (maybe the “Everybody Wins Award”?), here is my nomination for Insure & Go:

Everybody Wins:

• I win because I receive my policy number and an emergency phone number almost instantaneously and having my this information on my mobile phone is the ultimate convenience if I get into trouble when travelling – particularly if I manage to injure myself on the slopes at the end of this month…
• The environment wins because less paper and ink is used
• Insure & Go win because they have my mobile phone number, it’s cheaper for them to text me this information than posting it to me, and they’re featured on this blog

And there are potentially even more winners:

• The foreign emergency services win if anything happens whilst I’m abroad because I’ll have my insurance details immediately to hand (and not at the bottom of my suitcase back at the hotel)

Some questions for you:

Do you agree that the creation of multiple value streams should be marketing’s ultimate objective?

What do you think about the idea of nominating these types of ideas for an official award?

Who would you nominate?

What do you think of the name, the “Everybody Wins Award”?

19/1/2009 Update: to be more accurate about the nature of the documents sent to my mobile. Originally, what I’d written suggested that I’d received all of them in a text message. In fact, I received the policy number and a phone number for 24-hour medical assistance. The documents themselves were sent to me by email.