Cause marketing can take a few different forms. Think of pink Yoplait’s “Save Lids and Save Lives” program that benefits the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Another popular campaign is Project Red at the Gap where proceeds from sales benefit The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis & Malaria. While these are all highly successful and integrated campaigns, others are not quite so innovative.

When checking out at the grocery store, I’ve been offered tickets to donate $1, $3, or $5 to help feed a child. Maybe I’m just an evil person because I know this is a great cause, but nothing about the offer compels me make this donation. It’s just another way in which people are constantly asked for money. Another example are the tear-off pieces of paper that you can write your name on and post on a wall in return for a $1 donation to some specific cause. While I like the idea of showing solidarity in support through the arrangement of papers on the wall – this is still not something that really inspires me or moves me to act. Yes, it’s easy (and that’s part of the success with point-of-purchase cause marketing), but it’s not compelling.

This is where I can envision an opportunity for print excellence to excite the world of cause marketing. Marketing service providers and print shops are so skilled at creating promotional items that you want to pick up and immerse yourself in. Why not tap into this excellence to promote the non-profit world?

Here’s what I’m thinking… Imagine waiting in line at the grocery store and instead of leafing through a tabloid magazine, you pick up a perfectly bound book complete with full color photos on fresh, glossy paper illustrating the plight of Tigers in Eastern Asia or a struggling village in Libya. Would you be motivated to add $1 to your grocery bill to help this cause? I imagine this book would move you to act much more than a paper-wrapped can or a simple graphic tear-off paper begging your donation. (Of course, the grocery store would want to secure the photo book to the check out area, but I’m sure that is possible).

Or what if when you donated to a cause, instead of receiving a tear-off paper, you received a glossy postcard with an image of those tigers or village residents? The donor could then mail this postcard to a friend or relative and essentially say, “I just donated to XYZ cause at XYZ store. Stop by XYZ so you can support this cause, too! Or visit www.XYZ.com for more information and to activate your support.” Now, not only has this postcard effectively solicited a donation, it has also communicated the cause to another individual, hopefully prompting their visit to the store and ultimate donation.

Personally, I love the idea of cause marketing. Maybe this post is optimistic, but I’d love to see more creative tactics and I know print can help create more impactful communications. In the end, it’s all about reaching customers in just a way to compel their support of the non-profit and I’m positive that print creativity can do just that.

(View Denso Wave’s trademark info here.)

But Denso Wave has not protected its trademark, and over the years, the industry has used the term as a generic for mobile 2d response codes. Think of all of the references in white papers, research papers, publications, marketers, printers, blogs, and newsletters . . . how many times have you seen the trademark used?

Call me clueless, but I’ve never seen one. So when my client forwarded me an email from Denso Wave asking not only that the trademark be used with every reference to QR Codes® (apparently, Denso Wave also wants it with a capital C), but also that the phrase “QR Code is a registered trademark of DENSO WAVE INCORPORATED” be included somewhere on the Web page or in the publication, if I’d been dead, I would have turned over.

The fact is, there are many different types of mobile 2d response codes. QR Codes®, Datamatrix, BeeTAGG, MS Tag, SnapTag, JagTag, and the list goes on. What’s different about QR Codes® is that Denso Wave chose to make the code open source, so anyone can download it and create their own. Just Google free “QR code generator” and see how many companies have done it.

Combined with lack of enforcement (or, at the very least, selective enforcement) from Denso Wave, the result has been an explosion in use of QR Codes® (which I’m sure pleases Denso Wave), but also a genericization of the term QR Code® itself, which clearly does not.

I understand the desire to protect a trademark, but there is a certain level of common sense here, too. Can you imagine what writing on this topic would be like if every company trademarked the names of their codes or insisted on the ® be used after the ones that are?  Then the phrase “[such and such] is a registered trademark of [company]” be listed for every one? You’d use up your word count before you ever began writing.  Plus, every magazine article, piece of marketing collateral, and white paper would end up looking like a press release or advertisement.

I don’t know whether Denso Wave has suddenly changed its policy and decided to enforce its trademark more aggressively after all of these years or whether one of its employees simply got a burr under his or her saddle and sent the email on his or her own accord, but it reminds me that, in this industry, we need a generic term for 2d mobile response codes that doesn’t involve someone’s brand name.

So let me suggest one — 2d mobile response codes. It’s not as clean as QR Code®, but it’s a true generic that will prevent letters from trademark attorneys or vigilante employees and marketing collateral and publication pages that look like alphabet soup.

For service providers, there is opportunity to help marketers achieve their mobile-related goals.  One area in which this is true is related to mobile websites. As the number of smartphone owners continues to rise, so will mobile web traffic.

The technology to build and provide mobile websites for other companies exists. But how can a print service provider sell this solution to their clients and prospects?

Here are 3 ways to get that conversation going:

As a Service That Complements QR Codes

If you are currently creating, tracking, and/or printing QR Codes for your customers, then you have a tremendous opportunity to engage them in a conversation about mobile websites.

Many of the QR Codes that I see “in the wild” today still point to regular websites that were designed for viewing on a desktop computer or laptop.

This is bad for many reasons! For one, it means that the person who puts forth the effort to scan the QR Code with their smartphone is going to have trouble simply reading the content on the website! Even if you rely on them to tap-and-zoom, chances are that they are going to be less than pleased with their interaction with your company. Big images may cause the site to load slowly, and certain functionality may not work at all (such as Flash).

Since QR Codes are going to be accessed by folks on mobile phones, the value of pointing people to mobile-optimized content should be clear to your clients.

By presenting your ability to provide that service to them easily, it should help you to grow your business!

Also, it should help them to increase the success of their QR Code efforts.

Become the Local Mobile Expert

While there is no doubt that mobile is a very hot topic in the marketing world, there are still many people that are not yet up-to-speed with how it affects their business.

This means that you have the opportunity to aggressively educate your customers, prospects, and other businesses in your local area about items such as mobile websites. If you can position yourself as a thought-leader, your chances of being the ones that they turn to when they realize they have a need should absolutely increase.

This educational effort can be done in a number of ways. Here are a few:

• Offer to speak about mobile marketing at local Chamber of Commerce events (or similar events that bring together local businesses)
• Write about it on your company’s website and blog
• Discuss it in your monthly newsletter
• Talk about it on your social networks
• Send direct mail and emails that highlight important mobile statistics… and your services

Set the Example

Of course, one of the best ways to convince someone why they need your services is to walk-the-talk.

If you are going to tell someone that they need a mobile website, then you certainly will want to investigate what it will take to create a mobile website for your own company.

Not only can this help to demonstrate that you truly believe in the importance of “going mobile”, but it also can be a great conversation-started (“Hey! I noticed your website looks different on my phone”) and a way to increase your effectiveness as you seek to reach the growing mobile audience.

I am looking for some case studies or statistics that talk about increased response rates using PURLs. What type of response rates have you experienced when using PURLs? Or do you know of a source where I can find those stats? I have tried [industry vendors] and most other reputable sites without any luck. They talk about how it works, but not much in the way of numbers.

This request came from one of the industry ListServes. When was this request written? Last month? Last week? This morning?

The the other day, my seven-year-old spilled water on the keyboard of my MacBook. Although she sopped the water up up quickly, the keyboard did not survive. That put me back on my old MacBook from, well, the turn of the century (I’m not completely kidding about that.)

After being pleased that it fired right up, I began poking around some of the old files still on the hard drive. One of the files is a column I wrote for a publication (no longer in print) for nearly a decade. The quote above came from one of the oldest folders still on the drive – 2007.

Just in case you missed it, yes, the quote at the top of this post was written in March 2007.

Reading it gave me quite a jolt because I still read requests like this on ListServes and social media forums like LinkedIn.  Haven’t we learned anything since 2007?

The answer then, as it is now, is that there are no meaningful statistics on the lift provided by PURLs or any other element of a marketing campaign. This is because the lift will depend on all of the other aspects of the campaign, such as the list, the creative, the offer, and many other factors. The PURL, QR code, or other element of the campaign is just a response mechanism like an 800 number, tear-out form, or web address. It’s all but meaningless by itself.

That question concerned me back in 2007 because, as budding marketing service providers, the participants on this ListServe should have known the answer to this question. That’s what being a marketing services provider is (although they were calling themselves “one-stop shops” back then) about. That so many in the industry are still asking the exact same question today is unnerving.

Haven’t we learned anything?

In searching for high resolution versions of the five stamps, I happened upon a wonderful website, BeyondthePerf.com.

For those interested in the art and design of U.S. stamps, the site features a video interview with the five USPS art directors who bring illustrative meaning to “decorative stamp.”

Ethel Kessler talks about the talents of the five people who work on the stamps. “Each of us has different passions, different strengths. And we’re relentless, [asking] what can we do at every level to enrich it.”

Phil Jordan, who created the USPS Civil War series, says his effort seeks to honor past acts of courage or accomplishment. Getting there wasn’t easy. “What evolved was a labor of intense scrutiny… I wanted to express what people were thinking and what the common person was doing, particularly the common soldier.” Was all the research worth it? “What we have, we know will stand up to scrutiny,” says Jordan.

Kessler researched the Nobel Prize winners series just as diligently. Rather than detailing each scientific achievement, she was dedicated to capturing the essence of this highly coveted award. “Ethel really did an amazing job says Derry Noyes. “She was working with murky photographs of scientists and complex formulas. This could have been a recipe for disaster, but everything went beautifully.”

Antonio Alcalá’s favorite series spotlights industrial design from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Greg Breeding also is partial to this Pioneers of American Industrialism series, which he says has inspired so many objects we use today, including the iPad, telephones, etc.

What does the stamp series add up to?

“We’re telling a story; we’re telling America’s story,” says Kessler — and that story is complex in more ways that we can imagine. Consider, for example, the Latin Music Legends series. “I worked with Raphael Lopez who is himself a musician and a brilliant illustrator. We decided what we were looking was ‘performance,’ so that we could hear the music.”

Likely, only a designer can discern the many possibilities that comprise a powerful picture. “What is it that grabs you? Is it the title, the color, the graphics? Is it pretty, is it edgy? Designing stamps is more work than you think,” Noyes concludes. “It’s a real collaborative effort. If the collaboration has worked well, then we have a great stamp.”

Kessel adds, “Our biggest success is when it looks easy.”

BeyondthePerf made me remember that this institution upon which direct marketers have built their livelihoods does many things well — and most of it looks much easier than it is.

So, hurray for the American stamp and hurray for one of our greatest institutions: The U.S. Postal Service.

Wikipedia provides a very broad definition of personalization, which I do like: “using technology to accommodate the differences between individuals.” Specific to the groups that I am referring to, I believe that personalization can be more precisely defined as leveraging data to deliver relevant content to specific individuals.

That’s still pretty broad; what kind of data? what kind of content? what channels are being used? With this many constituencies looking to use personalization in their own ways to meet specific goals, those answers can range extensively. Furthermore, when these groups end up talking to each other about personalization, it can cause confusion and miscommunication. To clear the air, so-to-speak, I wanted to shed some light on the different ways personalization is being employed by these different groups.

• Cross-media Direct Marketing: You’re likely familiar with the personalization model for cross-media campaigns: a digitally-printed direct mail piece (or e-mail) with variable text and graphic elements and a personalized URL, which links to a personalized microsite with variable text and graphic elements, often highlighting the recipient’s name in some way. Personal and demographic data is primarily used to drive the personalization in these applications. Depending on the client/campaign, additional data may be used for more granular, relevant content.
• Digital Marketing: Personalization is popular with digital marketers. E-mail is a popular spot for personalization: according to a 2011 study by marketing technology provider Alterian, 72% of marketing professionals surveyed reported using personalization for their e-mail campaigns. E-mail marketing complexity ranges from mass blasts to segmentation to real-time individualization, typically using customer data and purchase history data to make recommendations. Another prominent personalization tactic for marketers is retargeting, which involves serving ads to a specific user after they have left a Website in efforts to raise brand awareness, recapture their attention, and drive people back to their Website.
• eCommerce: Business-to-consumer eCommerce was and still is a center of innovation in Web personalization, driven by Amazon.com and other eTailers looking to provide a custom-tailored experience for each individual user in hopes of getting them to buy more. For these sites, personalization often comes in the form of a recommendation engine, which tracks your browsing habits, shopping cart, wish list, reviews, purchase history, and other facets to deliver personalized recommendations on what the system thinks you would like. It should be noted that digital marketing goes hand-in-hand with eCommerce; real-time individualized e-mail marketing is common for eCommerce companies, and retargeting helps bring back shoppers that left the conversion funnel.
• Publishing: For print publishing, personalization often means mass customization, specifically in the print-on-demand model for books, where eCommerce orders trigger specific books to be printed, often in one-off fashion. Services like MagCloud and Time Inc’s Mine Magazine endeavor represent personalization efforts for magazines. On the Web and in digital media, personalization is geared more toward delivering relevant content based on an individual’s specific interests or preferences. Sometimes meeting this objective requires readers to input specific information about their tastes; other times, information like a Twitter, Facebook, or Google Reader account may be analyzed to assess your interests and deliver content based on who you’re friends with, who you follow, or what news you already read. A great example of this method is exhibited through Zite, a “personalized digital magazine” mobile app.
• Social Networking: Social networks are rife with different types of individuals’ data, making them ideal for personalization. Social networks typically employ personalization to deliver relevant content feeds from a user’s friends or connections on a network, as well as to deliver highly-targeted display advertising. For content delivery, networks may use algorithms to interpret connections, interactions, and profile information among users and deliver content based on what it believes is most relevant to each user. For advertising, networks typically act a facilitator between advertisers and users, presenting key profile characteristics of users that advertisers can choose to target.  Facebook generated over $3.5 billion in revenue through this type of advertising.
• Search: Search engines have always utilized algorithms to determine the display results of a user’s query, but these algorithms have recently started to take user information, such as profile or location data, into consideration before displaying results. Just recently, Google stepped up its game in this area, launching “Search, plus Your World“, which integrates a user’s Google+ data into everyday search queries. Advertising is a critical component to search, and generated over $35 billion in revenue worldwide for Google in 2011. Up until now, most search ads have been delivered based on the content of users’ search queries, but location information and even personal information are starting to be used to deliver more targeted search ads to users.

At its core, all that is needed to enable personalization is data, content, and a mechanism to have one drive the other. As has been covered, applying personalization for different use cases has a substantial impact on the type of data being used, the content that is being tied to that data, and the types of delivery mechanisms that enable that personalization. Understanding these differences and requirements for each application can help different stakeholders communicate more effectively when pursuing personalization, as well as open the door to new opportunities

The commercial showed the response of three different sets of consumers to the product — a recent college graduate, a mid-life couple, and a retired couple. Each asked a set of questions that presented a need that was answered by the product.

At the end of the commercial, the college graduate boasted that he got his quote online. The mid-life couple beamed that they got theirs by calling an 800 number. The retired couple said they got theirs by walking into one of the brick-and-mortar stores.

Well done, I thought. It wasn’t heavy handed, but it was there. There were multiple ways to respond to the offer depending on the needs and inclinations of the different segments of the marketer’s target audience.

This is a lesson we need to be taking to heart.

You may have worked hard to convince a client of the benefits of using personalized URLs to update their contact list or add additional variables, for example, but it’s important to give people another way to respond, as well. Give them a phone number, a tear-off form, a QR code to an online form. You worked hard to convince the client of the benefits of this approach, so you want people to use it, of course, but you don’t want to lose people who are interested in the offer but don’t want to use the personalized URL either — and they’ll be out there.

Not sure it’s worth undermining your efforts to market certain types of campaigns or technologies to your client base? Do a simple A/B test. Send the offer with the personalized URL (or whatever response mechanism you are working with) only. Then send the same offer with multiple response mechanisms. Everything else is the same. Track the response rates for each set and see what happens.

Anyone out there done a similar test? I’d love to hear your experiences.

I recently purchased a nice little toy, the Snow Wovel, which is like a giant snowshovel on a wheel. Clear your driveway 3x faster, so they say, and with last night’s snowstorm and a 1/4 acre blacktop driveway, I could sure could have used the help. This morning, I had a two-hour school delay and a Wovel still in a box . . . with a QR code.

The QR code had no instructions. No text of any kind telling me what it was or what scanning it might do, but since I know a bit about QR codes, I suspected that it might have something handy like a tutorial on how to put the thing together. I had hungry, undressed children, a rapidly shrinking time budget, and a 1/4 acre of blacktop to clear.

I scanned the code and was taken to the product’s non-mobile website, with product images, customer testimonials, and lots of other information that was already on the box. The customer testimonials might be nice for someone trying to make a purchase decision in a store, but I’d learned about the Wovel online and purchased it online.

The box contained instructions, but what I really needed was a step by step on how to put it together—fast. I didn’t get what I was looking for.

My point? While not everyone scanning a QR code is looking for the same thing, marketers — your clients — should take the time to step back from their sales push and ask the questions, “Why am I putting this code on here? Who will be scanning it? What will they be looking for?”

When it comes to success with QR codes, help your clients stop thinking like salesmen. Instead, help them start thinking like consumers.