best brand communications deliver a service

The concept of the best marketing ideas being those that deliver a service was, for me, one of the most interesting things discussed at the big Venice Festival of Media conference earlier this week.

It came up in passing a few times but the most in-depth mention was in a presentation by the COO of Mediacom, Harvey Goldhersz. However, it’s something that a colleague, Stefan Moritz, has been exploring for a long while too, in the context of bringing the practice of “service design” – the subject of his Masters dissertation – into the communications world. So, I picked Stefan to give me a quote. 🙂

This notion of thinking of communications as being a service ties in with the broader concept of marketers having two businesses to run – “the revenue business and the citizenship business” – as Esther Lee put it at the Venice conference (she’s chief creative officer from Coke, and her presentation was the clear highlight of the conference). In fact the concept of giving something back, being genuinely socially responsible, came up in several instances which was a really pleasant surprise. I especially liked the JC Decaux presentation that talked about how they’re installing free bikes in urban cities in Europe which anyone can use to cut back on taxis/cars.