• by Courtney Humiston , January 3, 2008

It seems that marketers will soon be hoping to be invited in for a pot of tea. “Two-way marketing” is an emerging trend where companies hope to get a little more involved in the lives of consumers. “Connecting Through Cookies,” the latest campaign from Pepperidge Farm by Deloitte, is aimed at getting consumers to connect with each other, take quizzes, eat cookies, and then hopefully experience all kinds of warm fuzzies when they think about their friend, Pepperidge Farm. Headlines like “Friendship. Is yours an art form or a lost art?” which appeared in November issues of Good Housekeeping and Redbook, direct readers to a microsite called artofthecookie.com, where spokesperson and “lifestyle expert” Sally Horchow offers advice from her book The Art of Friendship: 70 Simple Rules for Making Meaningful Connections. Could the campaign also be called “make friends and eat our cookies” or would that be too obvious? With tags like “Our friendships with our girlfriends make our lives so much richer,” the campaign seems to be aimed exclusively at women (What? A guy doesn’t appreciate a nice Milano now and again?), and also seems to assume they are pretty dumb.