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I’m back form San Diego and the Annual TMCA Marketing Conference & Expo 2009.

This year’s event brought in thought leaders like Barry Asmus from National Center for Policy Analysis and Mike Brown from YRC Worldwide (Mike is using Twitter to find more places to speak).  We even heard about measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty from Author Anne Minor and Hernan “Spike” Vera of Ryder Systems.  The list goes on and on, and you can learn more about the content here.  It was all around a great event.

It can be a challenge to market services around moving freight.  The industry is not seen as being sexy like retail or fashion or even software.  My friends at Navistar are bringing a little sex appeal to showing off their new line of International Brand of Harley Davidson Edition Trucks.  This marketing is really well done, integrating video, SMS and micro sites and offline tactics to target independent owner operators and fleets.  The product is sexy, and so the marketing is sexy too.

But all in all, freight transportation can be a tough industry to bring to market.  What’s sexy about warehouses, docs, trucks and moving freight from one place to another?  The folks who do this are unique, dedicated innovators. Against the odds, they find ways to make what they sell attractive and appealing to the audience and not just a commodity.  Here’s a few lessons I’ve learned about these marketers:

1. Genuine passion.  OK.  This isn’t really unique, but it is important.  If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, you should probably do something else.  Marketers in transportation are passionate and do what they do because they care.  They know that their industry is a critical backbone of our entire economy.  Without the delivery of goods, commerce fails.  Transportation marketers rarely get credit for their work in things like Ad Age, Marketing Sherpa and other more widely read industry publications, but they keep going anyway.

2.  Loyalty runs both ways. The majority of marketers involved in transportation have been with the same company for more than five years.  A big portion of those who are members of TMCA boast tenures of 10 and 15 and even 20 years in one place.  In our profession, that’s an anomaly.  Not only are transportation marketers loyal to their companies, the companies they work for are loyal to them.  This is a breath of fresh air in a time when the average CMO tenure is less than two years and a slew of marketers are looking for jobs.

3.  Competitors talk to each other.  What was once a heavily regulated industry in terms of communication between competing companies has moved to an open forum for the discussion of best practices.  TMCA is a hub for this, and thanks to leadership from people like Brian Everett, Spike Vera and even guys like Denny Grim, the association maintains the culture to support idea sharing.  People are willing to discuss what their doing with companies who are all competing for the same dollars, in hopes that idea sharing will raise the bar for everyone.

4.  High stakes.  If you don’t know that times are tough by now you have been living under a rock for the past 12 months.  When the economy tanks, marketers play a big role in trying to right the ship.  Marketers craft the messages needed to rebuild trust, garner confidence among companies and motivate their customers to take action among.  In transportation, the stakes are always high, so stepping up to the plate when times are tough and dollars are limited is simply old hat.

2009 Brought Twitter to TMCA
I want to thank Jessica Powell and her team @emergemarketing, Mike Brown @brainzooming, Exel Transportation’s @janelle_steele, Crowley Maritime’s Mark Miller at @milleratcrowley, and Michelle McManus at @OHLtweets.  All of these fine people helped tweet up the play-by-play of the event at #tmca.  This was a first for the conference, and it was great to see attendees begin to adopt the culture of using Twitter to capture events.  Thanks for helping to bring new ideas to the group!

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