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[This essay is from this week’s “Beyond Selling” idea-email sent by Hammock each week. You can subscribe to it here.]

Not long ago, the most powerful word in marketing was the word FREE.

That ended with the creation of spam filters.

Today, the most powerful word in marketing is THANKS.

In his book, The Thank You Economy, Gary Vaynerchuk explains how the internet has created a shift in the way businesses are expected to behave — one which evokes an earlier age when customer and seller knew each other by name. In this new era, the word thanks can no longer be merely a clichéd coda to a business transaction. Gratitude for the customer is now the necessary mortar for cementing relationships in which buyer and seller are bound by mutual trust, respect and thanks.

Of course, the word thanks is not merely a powerful marketing word. Scientists are discovering that living with a sense of gratitude is connected to a wide array of physical and emotional benefits.

Tomorrow, those of us who live in the United States will celebrate a holiday that is focused on an even higher role of gratitude as we commemorate the prayerful thanksgiving of the country’s first European settlers.

In her new book, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, Anne Lamott writes about this form of thanks: “Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides…When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.”

Happy Thanksgiving. And, thanks.

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[This essay is from this week’s “Beyond Selling” idea-email sent by Hammock each Tuesday. You can subscribe to it here.]

In May, when Apple introduced the current-generation iPad, they used this statement to open the presentation: “We believe technology is at its very best when it’s invisible. When you’re conscious only of what you’re doing, not the device you’re doing it with.”

Think about that. The company that is responsible for some of history’s most revolutionary consumer technology is saying the goal of their innovative products is to be invisible.

Marketers (and we confess, we’re guilty) too often focus our efforts on telling the world how great our products and services are. We do all we can to look and sound awesome.

But the goal of great marketing should be to make the customer smarter, stronger, happier, or whatever the customer wants when they purchase a product or join an association or sign up for a service.

When you emphasize how your product can help customers achieve something, they don’t think of it as marketing. They think of it as help. And that’s when marketing is at its very best.

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[This post is part of the series, The Basics of Customer Media and Content. A version of this post previously appeared on the blog of Rex Hammock, RexBlog.com]

There are two kinds of online content* that really matter to customers: 1. Chronological content (or what at Hammock, we call, Flow Content), the type of news and information that keeps us abreast of what’s happening now, real-time, that is of importance to us in our work or personal lives. 2. Contextual content (or what we call, Flow Content), the type of every-green content that provides us the  understanding and knowledge when we need it.

Flow Content: This is the content that’s important because of its time-stamp. It is a never-ending stream and river of news and information that comes when the sender decides we should receive it, not necessarily when we expect or need it. It comes in the form of tweets, updates, email, text-messages, RSS feeds, etc. We can’t live without it. Often, it’s this kind of Flow Content that customers say over-loads them. That makes sense, as it over-loads all of us, especially if we don’t know how to organize it. In that case, we ignore it.

[Part of the series “How Great Companies Use Customer Media”*]

At Hammock, we are inspired by people who run companies and organizations that are leading the transition away from viewing marketing as a series of promotional activities that end with a transaction. These savvy leaders now view marketing as a process of building relationships focused on helping customers reach their goals or aspirations.

We’re especially inspired by the country’s oldest catalog retailer, a family-owned business founded in the 1850s called Orvis. Orvis is ahead of the curve in embracing new forms of media or content that help them teach and learn from their customers, so it was an easy decision to feature it as the first company of our new series called “How Great Companies Use Customer Media.”

In many categories of consumer or business-to-business marketing, it’s difficult to find companies that have fully embraced the value-delivering philosophy we sum up with the phrase, “Don’t sell customers hammers and nails; teach them how to build something.” But when it comes to the outdoor-enthusiast retail category, several companies are so good at mentoring their customers that many of their promotions have evolved into significant profit centers.