There’s an interesting bit of content marketing research out of The Altimeter Group that’s worth a read – but that also, I think, could follow its own findings a little farther to reach an even more transformative conclusion about content as a – and perhaps the – key to marketing going forward.

HOW TO MAKE CONTENT MARKETING WORK:  WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS
The Altimeter study “Content: The New Marketing Equation,” makes a good case for why, in their terms, marketers need to rebalance both their thinking and their resources to leverage the opportunities in and demand for content, arguing that marketers and their agencies must become storytellers rather than mere product sellers (easier said than done). And it offers up an infographic-style “state of the business” report delineating Altimeter’s view of the five stages of “Content Marketing Maturity, (above).

Allow me to paraphrase what the report refers to as the four fundamental steps toward “Content Marketing Maturity”

1.    Accept the fact that content marketing isn’t free… or even inexpensive        I have to agree with them here… too many clients still think that content is a  magical marketing freebie (the same clients who think that social media is free and easy).  Part of the problem is driven by the outdated content-as-quantity approach, particularly within blogging and article writing, that has given rise to an enormous, ridiculously cheap and almost useless offshore industry of keyword stuffers, er “content writers” It takes considerable time, thought and talent to create, execute and actively manage a decent content marketing program – just as it does  for any professional-grade marketing effort.

 2.    Content marketing requires a shift in your corporate thinking        Moving from a mindset of push to pull, from that of product sellers to content providers, demands a shift, from the C-Suite down, in both attitude and allocations of resources. That is, it ain’t just about the marketing department anymore.

3.    Content marketing shouldn’t replace advertising, it should leverage it      Marketing directors can be forgiven for thinking that content marketing Is the next stand-alone silver bullet for all of their marketing problems. After all, those other content marketers, formerly known as the media, love to go on and on about how each successive innovation or trend, whether social media, mobile, content or whatever, is going to be the death of advertising.  The truth is that all of the above, and especially content, should not only integrate with advertising but, in fact, transform it (more on that below).

4.    Focus on quality content, avoid technological and tactical gimmicks      Developing content strategies pegged to the highest value interests and needs of your audiences, and then investing the time and money to satisfy  those needs with quality, creative content, is much more important than jumping on every content platform and technology. In other words, as Altimeter puts it,  try to avoid the distraction of “bright, shiny objects.”

HOW TO MAKE CONTENT TRANSFORM ALL OF YOUR MARKETING
There’s much more to discuss in the Altimeter report, but I’d like to return to point three above – the idea that content should integrate with advertising.  Partly this is an obvious statement – with the modern mega-multiplicity of possible touchpoints, mostly determined by consumer choice, marketers have no realistic option but to pursue integrated efforts via multiple channels and modalities.  But to say that content should integrate undershoots the mark.  A creative approach to content should infiltrate, infuse, inform and incite every corner of our marketing efforts. Here’s how to start in three not-so-easy steps:

1.   Change your concept of content.      Content isn’t just words – as in blogs, white papers, or the talking heads of a million cheap YouTube video interviews. Content  is substance.  In whatever form it takes, content needs to deliver real value.   Let me repeat:  Content is substanc

2.    Change your concept of advertising.    If content marketing is substance, then it must automatically be at odds with advertising and its worship of style, no?  No. Advertising in any of its paid media form cans be harnessed to the delivery of content – and can even be conceived so that it offers valuable “substance” along with its vaunted style.

3.     Change your resources.    One of the oldest tropes in content marketing is “learn to think like  a publisher.”   I’d extend that to “learn to think like a reporter… and novelist, playwright, artist, songwriter, historian, social scientist, talk show host.”  In short, get creative with content, and look to unconventional resources to provide unexpected creativity. Don’t just be marketers –  be the new Medicis.

My creative marketing agency is currently bidding for a significant project involving brand re-positioning, a new brand identity, development of a professional-community website concept and website design, plus all the attendant online content creation – not to mention an overall B2B marketing plan (which will include trade show tactics such as my all time business-to-business favorite, trade show TV). Although we are based in the Chicago area, the RFP came from a fairly large, sophisticated technology company based in India.

An Emerging Issue in Brand Trust
I mention this not merely as a chance to include that string of keywords in the opening paragraph, nor to make you think we’ve moved away from our core business as a project-based branding and marketing agency for à la carte creative services in advertising, sales collateral, direct marketing and the like (ah, sorry… can’t kick the keyword habit). It also represents an emerging issue in terms of brand trust, namely: Does brand trust travel across borders and, if so, how?

Global brands have been trying to figure this out for years, slowly, often painfully learning to brand globally but speak locally. Now, in a world where any and every company can have international reach via the Internet, we all have to figure out how to not only create trust in our brands, but also make that sense of trust travel across borders and cultures (especially when branding services, which may not physically manifest themselves anywhere, domestic or international).

New Resources, Old Recommendations
Much like consumers, business-to-business prospects are using the Internet to look for resources and recommendations. Our prospective client from India found us listed as one of the top content creation companies on topseos.com. But how can they be confident of what they read? To be sure, the question of brand trust travels across borders – but how do we help international prospects answer that question?

“Old” offline techniques are still operative. Yes, the more distant our prospects, the more pervasive and persuasive our online presence needs to be, via our own websites, social media, online PR and press, advertising… the works. But in our particular example, and I am sure most others, it will come down to a very old-fashioned form of reassurance: the professional peer recommendation. In this case, we can offer our far-flung prospect Fortune 500 references in and out of his field. He may never call them – but just having their names, numbers and the reassurance of the big brand name behind them may still be the best-of-all permission to believe. It’s hardly new media rocket science – just another example of how business basics still matter.

As a slight aside, it is interesting to me that this may represent a B2B reversal of emerging online consumer behavior. That is, one recent study shows how consumers are increasingly vetting the much-vaunted and cultivated recommendations of friends with follow-up online search.

But back to our original subject, and one more question… What are you doing to make build trust in your brand across borders?

A recent study by Northwestern University professor Frank Mulhern finds – perhaps not surprisingly to anyone in the insurance industry – that insurance customers trust the insurance agent more than they trust the brand.  The study was conducted with access to the data of a large, multi-line insurance provider with a captive agent force, presumably with a brand already firmly established in the consumer consciousness.

Customers Need Agents, Agents Need Branding
I wish they had also studied the relative effects of agent versus brand in the independent agent channel.  While it’s hard to argue that a trusted, personal, often long-term relationship with one’s agent is more essential to retaining business than is the more distant brand and it’s various communications, it’s also hard to believe that agents could easily initiate that client relationship, or even effectively convert referrals, without the benefits of established brand reassurances going in.*  I have worked extensively in the creation of marketing to and for the independent insurance agent channel, and have seen first hand the distress of agents during mergers and the resulting change of brand names (and values)… but also the positive impact that creative, aggressive and on-going agent and employee brand engagement efforts can have.

In short, the agent may be more important to your customer than your brand is, and therefore must be cultivated and incentivized, but insurance companies still need to activate and support that crucial agent-customer relationship with strong branding, effectively communicated to – and lived out day-to-day – with both groups.

And How About Investors? Do They Trust the Financial Advisor or the Financial Brand?
A note to Professor Mulhern and colleagues:  I know you want to extrapolate this data to all agent-driven service businesses, but I encourage you to make your next study about the effects of branding (both B2C and B2B) on the relationship of financial advisors and investors, both independent and wirehouse.   Judging not only from my experience creating campaigns to reach both investors and advisors, but also from our collective financial trauma of the last few years, I believe it would make for very interesting reading.

Any thoughts from the rest of you?

* I always encourage clients to observe this in the direct selling of insurance, too, noting that while the best data-driven program may get you directly to the door of exactly the right prospects, if you’re standing at the door as a stranger, it’s not likely to open.  Branding can be your introduction, your deliverer of trust, and it not only can but should go along with all the best techniques at a direct marketer’s disposal.

Millennials seem to mesmerize (or mystify) marketers in a 1001 ways, not the least of which is in the matter of brand trust. But I think a lot of people are confusing “brand trust” and “brand transaction,” which is to say that for this group of young people (born 1980-1995) it may not be so much a matter of believing a brand promise as accepting a “brand bribe.”

A whitepaper released just last week – combining studies from Edelman PR, Pew Research and others – got me thinking about this. Apparently 8 in 10 Millennials report having taken action on behalf of a trusted brand. My question is… have they taken action on behalf of the brand or have they simply accepted an offer from a brand? And if the latter is true, is the reassurance of trust or the enrichment of transaction the true motivator? In a short-term business sense (and is there any other these days?), one may not be better than the other, as they may both lead to the holy grail of repeat purchase, but I think marketers need to understand and observe the difference.

Brand Loyalty vs. Brand Currency
Ideally, brand trust engenders loyalty, the kind that can bridge gaps of negative experience and keep consumers connected to a favored brand long-term (as a number of articles have noted, Toyota is the latest, and perhaps most perversely impressive, example of this). Brand transaction, like any transactionally-based relationship, engenders not loyalty but, rather, only currency – that is, the presence and importance of a consumer’s relationship with a brand is only as current as the presence and importance of the latest exchange of value.

What Has Your Brand Done For Me Lately?
Of course, brand transactions can be very important. Like any classic direct mail offer, they get people to act. But, like those same offers of immediate, and limited, value, they are most useful as initiators of brand interaction but limited as shapers and solidifiers of brand loyalty. In fact, this latest marketing survey typifies millennials as “brand loyal in a way that brands and services crave, yet with a what- have-you-done-for-me-lately attitude they fear.” Which to me isn’t trust-based loyalty at all, but an “only-as-good-as-your-last-gimme” kind of relationship.

Turning Millennial Momentum into Lifetime Customers
And that brings me to the cautionary note for all brands banking on Millennial money. While Millennials are defined by (and defining) this new era, they are also inevitably life-stage bound.. that is, if they are lucky, they will grow older, take on the limits, responsibilities, disappointments and even traditional power that can come with age – and that will have them relating to brands not completely unlike older age groups do now. All of which means that, while you can stoke the fires of brand lust with Millennials via offers, promotions, entertainment and myriad incentives, marketers looking for a long-term consumer commitment will be wise to look toward communicating and delivering more lasting brand core brand values. And to do that, they’ll still need to identify their core brand truth, communicate it effectively and deliver on it daily.

PS:  Speaking of brand transactions, whether you are a Millennial or not, you can get a free $5 Starbucks coffee card for being one of the first ten people to comment on this post.

OK, so no one actually took me up on my plea for ideas as to how we might improve the believability/accountability of political ads.  Here’s one techno-possibility: The Truthy Project, out of Indiana University.  Yes, the name was inspired by Stephen Colbert’s oft-imitated use of “truthiness” (not actually his coinage), mentioned today in an interesting piece in The New York Times Magazine and recently also in FastCompany, wherein it is described as “a sophisticated new Twitter-based research tool that combines data mining, social network analysis and crowdsourcing to uncover deceptive tactics and misinformation” on Twitter.  The article continues to say that Truthy can therefore detect “when PR teams inject memes into the discourse by disguising them as genuine “grassroots” behavior. With the simple click of a “Truthy” button, users can call BS on claims that smell fishy.”  (Please note that the Truthy architecture, below, includes “Klatsch Analysis”… coincidence?)

If technology can provide a collective conscience to tisk-tisk on Twitter, why not in other outlets for political ads?  Of course, there’s still the question of, even if exposed, will enough people on any side of the political spectrum care about the lies to make a difference? Do we all just want to believe what we want to believe, and the truth be damned (and our society along with it)?

One other sobering notion for all of us in marketing, guilty by association with those vilified PR teams above… if Truthy can be applied to political tweets, why not also commercial mis-messaging?  I suppose the “easy” fix then would be for all to stick to the simple truth about their brands.  (Let the laughter begin…)

A recent poll shows that political advertising is the least believed category of advertising, prompting total disbelief in nearly a third of the American public.  What a shock!  Of course, if one reads further, it becomes apparent that the truly depressing news is that voters/consumers find many major categories of consumer advertising nearly as incredible, rating these as “totally” unbelieveble:  16% for energy/oil company ads, 14% for credit cards, 11% for investment companies, and 5% for automobile manufacturers.

But wait, the news gets worse.  The benefits of a good life, such as income (and supposedly the higher level of education that goes with it) don’t improve things:  the higher the household income, the greater trust in political advertising. (Young Americans also are more gullible, er, trusting of political pitches, but we’ll give them a pass for now, hoping they grow out of it).

So, can anything be done to improve the believability/accountability of political ads, given our guarantees of free speech, and if so, what?

First of all, welcome to copyklatsch, the little blog that looks to take on a big subject: truth, as in brand truth, truth in advertising, truth in media sources… and the consequences of a lack of trust in all the above. I’m Chuck Kent, President & Creative Director of Creative on Call, Inc. and the subject matters to me professionally because our whole purpose is to help marketers identify and communicate the simple truth about their brands; it matters to me personally because the side-effects of a growing lack of trust and attachment to the truth extend far beyond marketing and advertising.

I hope you’ll sit down and join in, over a cup of coffee… on us. If you haven’t heard, the first ten registered followers to comment on select copyklatsch blog posts will receive a free $5 Starbucks coffee card. So please…. register and give us a piece of your mind. (And follow us on Twitter… @creativeoncall… to get notice of when these “select posts” come up) because this is one of those send-me-a-coffee-card posts…

Can You Trust Brand Trust Surveys?
It’s hardly shocking to proclaim that brand trust persists as a hot topic. There’s the Nielsen Global Trust Study. The Edelman Trust Barometer. The new-this-year MillardBrown TrustR report. There are also numerous smaller, typically self-serving and conflicting surveys that are little more than self-promotion (which is not to say that larger sample size indicates greater purity of intent). But whose results can you trust and, taken together, can they be made to add up?

We Believe Family and Friends Most….
The Nielsen Global Trust Survey for 2010 makes an unequivocal case that social recommendations, from family, friends or online reviewers, are blowing away traditional media and brand messaging for garnering consumer trust, with rates around 60% (depending on where you are in the world), versus a confidence level in, say, TV advertising that at best is in the 10% range.

But We Don’t Even Believe Family & Friends Much…
However, the Edelman Trust Barometer shows a precipitous decline over last year results for consumers’ trust of recommendations by people they know, from a 2008 high of only 45% to a current rate of 25%. So who’s right? Is word-of-mouth from the truly personal social network the dominant trust-maker… or is even that now-sought-after favor factor losing any significant influence?

I have the awful feeling that both findings are correct. And I say “awful” because, looking past our slobbering excitement over social media, I see a core – and growing – lack of trust not only in marketing messaging but in the personal foundations of our lives – the trust in family and friends (after all, the other way to look at the Edelman findings is that three-quarters of us are so jaded that we don’t even believe the people we personally know).

So, what do you think? How do you read the data… if you trust it?