Jim Stengel, outgoing global marketing chief at P&G is promoting purposed-based marketing. What do you do beyond making money that makes your customer’s lives better? He uses the example of the Pampers brand and helping mom’s develop healthy happy babies, beyond keeping them dry. To do that they offered parenting advice and tips and conducted research to improve the brand.

Basically, they provided additional value with relevant information. This reminds me of social responsibility and cause related marketing. Do something good for your customers relevant to your brand. The pharmaceutical manufacturers have caught on in the last decade, and are providing additional information on diseases and self help measures. Anthem health insurance is providing its insured with all types of information to help prevent illnesses. Utilities provide ways to help customers save energy costs. I like the new name, but I really don’t think there is all that much new with purposed-based marketing.

Savvy marketers have folks monitoring blogs and conversations. At a recent workshop I attended, I found out that IndyMoms has people that are hired to keep conversations going.  At this same workshop I  met someone who to promote an expo had some four people she had hired to create twelve personas. Each person had different e-mail addresses for the type of “Mom” they represented in discussions that would happen to mention the expo. IndyMoms tries to watch out for such fraudulent discussions but I am sure they cannot uncover them all.

Companies also monitor blogs to find customers complaining about service or product features as well as those on forums trying to solve problems.  This is a smart and legitimate way to keep in touch with customers and to monitor satisfaction.