(Mary Nesbitt)

In the sausage factory that is the news business, marketing tends to be viewed as the people who sell the sausage once the editors have produced it.

But how good would it be if sausage-maker and seller had a common, powerful idea of a new kind of sausage that would make sausage-eaters swoon? An idea that informed the whole process, from grinding and seasoning through stuffing, packaging and selling?

That’s what’s been happening at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, where a strikingly simple and so powerful idea – “How can we help you?” infuses a significant part of the newspaper’s reporting and its marketing.

Five reasons why I think it’s terrific:

• It’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of the concept of “integrated marketing”, beloved of marketing textbooks, brought to life in the daily pages and activities of a newspaper. Imagine – a newspaper that not only claims to help you, but does. What a brand!
  
• The concept is simple, direct, inviting and hugely compelling. And note that it’s not “We can help you.” It’s “How can we help you?”
  
• It’s strongly reader-focused, tapping into one of the experiences – “looks out for my interests” – that Readership Institute research has identified as having strong potential to connect with readers.
  
• It produces a wide range of very good journalism – from a “watch” feature (an idea pioneered by the San Francisco Chronicle a few years ago) to consumer columnists to daily stories that help readers stay safe, get things done and manage their resources wisely. This page on the Sun-Sentinel’s website gives a flavor of what the eight-person Help Team does.
  
• The Help Team’s work is prominently displayed, frequently on the front page, and it is promoted in the paper and externally in attention-getting ways.

Much of this is down to the vision of vice-president and editor Earl Maucker and Jeff Levine, vice president and director of marketing. Levine showed a Growing Audience seminar in June how the newspaper’s content and marketing campaign work together. Especially compelling are the commercials in which Help Team members look directly into the camera and ask “How can I help you?” This is more than a tagline – it’s a genuine commitment to help readers have a better life in South Florida.

Our colleague Bobby J. Calder, who teaches at the Kellogg School of Management and has directed much of the Readership Institute’s research, writes that the goal of integrated marketing “is to create a consumer or customer experience that is as meaningful and relevant as possible. That experience comes from a set of contacts or touchpoints with a product/company over time.”

For a newspaper, contact points are the kinds of news and information it chooses, the relative emphasis they’re given, the way stories are told, different formats that are used, headlines – and scores of other contacts. (And that’s just the news content touchpoints. Then there’s advertising content; sales and service interactions with customers; promotions; marketing campaigns; and on and on. As marketing guru Scott Miller is fond of saying, “everything communicates.”)

A few years ago, using consumer research from across the country, the Readership Institute developed four news concepts – or news content contact points – that would significantly change the experience of people with light newspaper-reading habits. We called them Update, Debatable, Enrichment and Guide. Calder later wrote about the Debatable idea and showed how to develop an integrated marketing campaign (See the chapter “An Illustration of Integrated Marketing” in Kellogg on Integrated Marketing, John Wiley and Sons, 2003)

The Sun-Sentinel pushes the idea way forward, and that’s great to see. Others like what they’re doing too.

Editor & Publisher (subscription needed to access article) just named the Sun-Sentinel in its seventh annual “10 That Do It Right” feature, which identifies newspapers that “shatter the perception that this is a slow-moving dinosaur of an industry that refuses to adapt to rising needs and fresh opportunities.”

Maucker just won Tribune Company’s Management Award “for his leadership in helping strengthen the newspaper’s relationships with its readers through solid, innovative journalism.”

The newspaper’s readership is up too, almost 3% weekdays and 1.5% Sundays. That’s some sausage.


By Mary Nesbitt (m-nesbitt@northwestern.edu)
Mary Nesbitt is managing director of the Readership Institute.