When the Eat ‘n Park restaurant chain gives each child a free Smiley cookie after dinner, that’s value-added. When UPS and FedEx provide tracking numbers so you can follow the progress of your package, that’s value added.

But beware of providing value-added that fails to add value. That can actually harm your business.

Here’s an example from the business-to-business world: In the course of my work, I recently placed some small advertisements with a local media outlet. Ever since, I have received a weekly e-mail letting me know that my online customer profile has been established and that if I fill it out I will receive a free listing in some under-explained and over-complicated online system. They call it value-added; I call it extra work with dubious benefit for which I won’t be paid.

Here’s another, from the business-to-consumer world: The pharmacy placed four automated calls to my house the other day.

One was important; it directed my daughter to call the store about a question on a prescription she had transferred from another location. Over the next few hours she called several times and nobody ever answered the phone. In the end, she drove to the store and waited in a long line to speak to the overwhelmed pharmacist.

While she was there, I asked her to pick up another family member’s prescription that had been submitted electronically the previous day by the doctor. Not only wasn’t that prescription ready, nobody in the pharmacy could find any evidence it had ever come in. But 20 minutes after my daughter got back home, another robo-call arrived to announce the prescription was ready.

That phone call was intended to be value-added, but instead, it emphasized that that the pharmacy is understaffed and has flawed processes – resulting in the inconvenience of another trip to the store.

By the time I returned home, there were yet two more calls – “courtesy” reminders that it was time to refill some maintenance medications.

I never asked for these reminders. In my household, we order refills after observing that the pill bottle is close to empty. The pharmacy just assumed my family would value these calls and opted us in.

I’m sure there is a way to change the settings for these automated calls. But why should that be my job? I didn’t ask for all this value-added in the first place. Aside from the momentary pharmaceutical chaos in my household, we’re basically healthy and view our business with the drug store as a transactional necessity.

This, of course, is what the pharmacy corporation hopes to change. By offering all this value-added service, it hopes to turn out transactions into a relationship.

It’s having the opposite effect. So rather than figuring out how to change my preferences, I simply seethe in the background while the answering machine records each call.

The lesson is this: If you’re going to offer value added, make sure it really adds value. Otherwise you’re just spending money on something that actually harms your business.

That pays off for any marketer that has persuaded his market that they need what he sells. It backfires when those ‘needs’ are seen for what they actually are–luxuries.

I agree with Godin in both his point and his brevity. But in being admirably concise, he omits a noteworthy nuance. People are more eager to buy things they want than things they need. They’ll go to great lengths to pay the lowest price possible for actual needs – stuff like medicine, groceries, industrial consumables. But they’ll happily spend more on things they want – think wine, golf clubs, a redecorated office.

The point? While Seth Godin is correct that you’ll improve sales by persuading people you can fill a need, you’ll lubricate the sales process and increase pricing margins by convincing people that your product is also something they want.

As evidence, consider:

• Dell v. Apple
• Toyota Yaris v. Mini Cooper
• Emerson audio equipment v. Bose

There’s a lesson for your marketing in that knowledge too.

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Strategy before execution. This should be simple.

But it’s human nature to jump right into doing stuff before sweating out the big questions.

For example, a couple prospective clients have put off small, closed-ended projects that I proposed to help them align operating strategy and marketing. This in turn would  help them answer such daunting digital communications questions as how to deal with social media, and what capabilities does the website need to offer?

It’s my suspicion that what they’ll really learn is the organization doesn’t actually have a unifying operating strategy. But in both cases, the reason given for delaying the little strategy project is that they first have to devote all their attention to the big website project.

I understand that building a new website is daunting. But it’s even harder if you don’t know what purpose the new website is supposed to serve. It’s like getting ready to knock the ball in the hole without knowing whether you’re playing billiards or golf.

That’s why strategy always needs to come before execution. Strategy tells you what you’re trying to do. The website will help you do it. But only if you tackle them in the right order.

In my first month of selling advertising, it was my job to convince would-be advertisers why they should select my products as opposed to anybody else’s.

By the second month, I was answering a much more difficult question: Why they should advertise at all.

Even in 2000, at the height of the first internet bubble, marketers were figuring out how to use digital technology to disintermediate the media – in essence, becoming publishers themselves. That forever changed the nature of the publishing business and it led to my own nine-year journey that eventually resulted in my decision to leave the publishing industry behind.

Here’s just one piece of evidence: A blog from Alan Mutter, the self-proclaimed Newsosaur. He says big retailers have gone much further than disintermediating their former publishing partners; now they’re competing with newspapers by selling advertising on their own e-commerce sites.

Today, every company needs to think like a publisher. Here’s what that means:

Content: Publishers develop content that’s meaningful to their audience. For companies, this means creating content that’s useful to customers and prospects. In the business-to-business world, that shouldn’t be difficult. No matter what product or service you provide, you’re likely to have more technical expertise about it than any trade journal.

The challenge is purely cultural. Most companies rush to say what they want prospects to know. Those that are successful content marketers instead provide information prospects want to hear. There’s a difference; while the marketer’s first instinct is often to load up on features and benefits, the prospects are really looking for solutions. Business-to-business marketers who can figure out how to help prospects solve problems first will quickly gain permission from those prospects to provide judicious and thoughtful sales messages too.

Audience: Publishers spend a lot of resources to develop audiences for their content – and more important, for the advertising messages they carry. Companies now have the capability to develop their own audiences through social media, skilled distribution of valuable information, and dedication to keeping their contact databases current.

This isn’t magic. It’s not easy and it’s not free; the reason companies have been cutting back on advertising over the past decade is to divert funding to become successful publishers themselves. And those that do are succeeding in a world where target audiences play a more active role in the marketing process than they ever did in the heyday of newspapers and magazines.