What do you stand for?
Marketing campaigns can be a great way of showing what your brand stands for, but it can also be seen as virtue signaling, and have the opposite effect!
This month I am plugging the St. Louis chapter of the AMA. To become a member, you can visit https://amasaintlouis.org/.
Sources:
https://www.adcouncil.org/all-articles/what-is-purpose-driven-marketing
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesagencycouncil/2022/12/27/7-steps-to-create-a-purpose-driven-marketing-strategy/
https://www.zenogroup.com/insights/2020-zeno-strength-purpose
https://people.com/bud-light-controversy-everything-to-know-7547159 https://leighraeder.com/breast-cancer-charities-the-best-and-worst/
https://web.archive.org/web/20170329130252/
http://www.summiticeapparel.com/news/
https://apnews.com/article/target-pride-lgbtq-4bc9de6339f86748bcb8a453d7b9acf0
https://www.fastcompany.com/91346998/why-target-pride-merch-feels-so-bad
https://www.patagonia.com/actionworks//#home/choose-location https://portermedia.com/blogs/blog-posts/purpose-driven-marketing-campaigns
https://www.mastercard.com/us/en/personal/find-a-card/true-name.html
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
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TRANSCRIPT:
So there’s this show that was on Comedy Central from 2013-2017 called Nathan For You, starring Nathan Fielder as a business consultant whose qualifications were going to school in Canada and getting, quote, “really good grades.”
If you’ve never watched this show, it’s a ton of fun, because Nathan Fielder tends to offer really outside-the-box thinking about how to promote businesses, like encouraging pedestrians in Los Angeles to use free bathrooms inside a diner but then being barraged with sales pitches to get them to stay for a meal, getting Hollywood tourists to patronize a gift shop by convincing them they’re going to be in a feature film or opening up the market for horseback rides to the severely obese by helping to carry their excess weight with balloons.
One of Fielder’s oddest ideas, though, ties into his ethnically Jewish identity and his concern that there are people in North America who want to deny that the Holocaust ever actually happened. In the show, he brings up the case of a popular Canadian outdoor apparel brand called Taiga that ran a feature in one of its catalogs praising journalist Doug Collins, who was infamous in Canada at the time for writing columns with racist and antisemitic overtones and also engaging in Holocaust denial.
And so in one episode, Fielder embarks on a crusade to find a retailer who will put up a display about the Holocaust in their store but also use it to promote a product. The idea does not go over well, for obvious reasons, and so he winds up creating his own brand, Summit Ice, to offer an alternative to Taiga with the stated mission of educating the public about the Holocaust with the tagline, “Deny Nothing.”
In the episode of Nathan For You, which aired in 2015, the idea doesn’t go over so well, but in real life, Fielder earned enough after the show aired to be able to donate over $150,000 for Holocaust Education in 2017 to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
This is a great example of a real strategy called “Purpose-Driven Marketing” where a brand or company centers external communication on a social cause that fits its core values. Another term for this is Cause-Based Marketing, or CBM, and both fall under the umbrella of CSR, or Corporate Social Responsibility. The idea is, of course, to build alignment with customers who also feel strongly about a cause and to generate feelings of authenticity by taking a stand about something.
Often, it’s something that’s not particularly divisive, like Dove Soap celebrating female bodies of all shapes and sizes or Patagonia taking a stand against oil spills and offshore drilling. And done right, Purpose-Driven Marketing is evidenced in a 2020 study by Zeno Group to cause consumers to be at least four times as likely to trust, champion and purchase from a company and six times as likely to protect them if they’re being criticized.
But Purpose-Driven Marketing also has a credibility gap – the same study found that only 37% of consumers believe most companies actually have a clear and strong purpose. Often, Purpose-Driven Marketing is accused of being yet another way for marketers to pat themselves on the back for taking a stand to “build awareness” without actually doing anything.
So, let’s take a deeper look at PDM and see if it’s truly something that can drive sales… or if it’s really just a vanity project marketers use to make themselves feel important.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
Breast cancer is a big topic on my wife’s side of the family because several women have suffered and even died from it, and so you can bet my wife is a big supporter of breast cancer research. But my wife is also not a fan of products that have a pink ribbon emblazoned on them to support Breast Cancer fundraising.
Why?
Because often, those drives are being done in conjunction with the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which has for years been criticized for giving a minority of the funds it raises to research while maintaining expensive salaries, high overhead and primarily funding awareness campaigns instead of research. A little over 10 years ago, they were frequently accused of “pinkwashing” by using the pink ribbon imagery to direct donations their way but focusing more on driving awareness than actually funding research or screenings.
While the Koman Foundation has been getting better over time and currently has a 4-star, 94% rating on Charity Navigator, my wife would still much rather donate directly to organizations like the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, the Lynn Sage Cancer Research Foundation, the National Breast Cancer Coalition Fund or the Breast Cancer Prevention Partners, all of which donate the vast majority of their proceeds direction to research.
I mention this because in the minds of many consumers, Purpose-Based Marketing is something to be skeptical of, and the unfortunate truth is that many charitable organizations that make themselves broadly available for partnerships with big consumer brands also tend to be the ones that are most prone to criticisms and scandals.
And so I want to be very careful about recommending Purpose-Based Marketing as a blanket strategy because it can very easily backfire.
Just ask Bud Light – by featuring outspoken trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney on a Bud Light can in 2023 in an attempt to reach out to TikTok fans with a targeted campaign, the brand suffered an enormous setback among conservative beer drinkers, but the campaign didn’t receive an influx of sympathetic consumers to replace them.
Bud Light wasn’t really even trying to take a stand by acknowledging the humanity of a trans person, which would have actually be far more courageous than what they actually did – they were really just trying to find a way to stand out and distinguish their stagnant brand from other light beers.
And while I’m not suggesting that this is right or good in any way – I was pretty disgusted by the backlash – what I am saying is that when Purpose-Driven Marketing is done without regard for the core consumers who support a brand, it can be quite damaging, leading to backpedaling and flailing that’s way worse than not taking a stand at all.
Target, likewise, very famously went all in on Pride Month to sell lots of rainbow-colored merchandise in purported support of the LGBTQ+ community, then started to backpedal in 2023, the same year it started pulling back on DEI initiatives it had long touted as a core value.
So with all these bad examples in mind, let’s focus on how to do Purpose-Driven Marketing correctly.
The most important first step is to find a cause that clearly aligns with your brand or organization. For example, if I decided to link my research agency, RPG, to the cause of Organ Donation, that would be very much in line with our core values and business because do a lot of work with organ procurement organizations around the United States. We have a vested interest in seeing organ donation do well because we support that industry with services, but we also really believe in the cause and feel the organizations we’re working with are incredible heroes who are saving lives every day.
But let’s say I decided to have RPG align with a cause like supporting mental health care for veterans. This is a great and worthwhile cause, and I personally feel it’s something we ought to do! But we don’t have any connection to it. None of us are veterans or have family members who are suffering from mental health issues derived from military service, and none of us are active in that community. Our agency doesn’t do any research on the topic or have any expertise in it, and we really don’t have a clear reason to support it other than the fact that we all, as humans, ought to care about our veterans and support them.
This would be an example of a situation where Purpose-Based Marketing would probably not ring true, and unless we had a personal story to connect or a long history of supporting this cause, it would be unlikely to move a lot of our clients and colleagues.
Of course, we’re a small B2B brand, so let’s imagine that we’re talking about a consumer-facing product brand like Bud Light or a retail brand like Target. There are definitely causes that align clearly with those brands – Bud Light has long supported “drink responsibly” campaigns and Target has long designated some of its proceeds to local charitable and community organizations – but these also don’t really differentiate these brands because any of their competitors can do the same.
But let’s say Bud Light decided to lean into Gen Z, which is currently college-bound, and start funding programs designed to make college more affordable and accessible, with the obvious connection being that college students tend to drink a lot of beer. That might be a purpose that would resonate and help them to stand out, though it’d still be easy to copy.
So let’s say Bud Light decided to tap its heritage and make its purpose rebuilding St. Louis since the Anheuser-Busch Brewery is here. That would be very hard for other brands outside the A-B fold to copy, but it would also be limiting as a purpose because most people really don’t care what Bud Light is doing in St. Louis.
So the thought that needs to go into one of these campaigns requires more than just finding a superficial connection and grabbing onto a purpose. It has to be real, authentic, genuine and easy to understand. It has to feel like it’s coming from the heart and not from a marketing committee.
So here are three Purpose-Driven Marketing campaigns that have worked.
The first is Patagonia’s #CrudeAwakening campaign to protect coastlines from oil spills. Patagonia is, of course, a brand that sells outdoor apparel, and they have long been linked with environmental activism. In this particular campaign, an oil spill impacted Southern California beaches miles away from the brand’s headquarters, and so Patagonia used that disaster to build awareness among surfers, kayakers and paddleboarders as well as broader consumers, to organize a protest against an offshore drilling oil platform five miles off the coast and to organize support for several bills limiting offshore drilling that eventually became laws. This powerful stand not only was in line with Patagonia’s values and identity, but also spoke powerfully to the inseparability of its products and its brand promises. You can see why consumers would be six times more likely to support a stand like this!
A second example is Mastercard’s True Name campaign, which was a positive way of engaging the LGBTQ+ community and allies by allowing cardholders to put their desired name on their credit card without needing a legal name change. This was particularly important to transgender and nonbinary people who often change their names socially long before they do legally because of all of the hurdles involved.
While this might seem like a rather trivial idea at first, Mastercard was able to link this idea to credit cards being a personal part of your everyday life and for acceptance to be at the root of not just financial transactions, but how the company values its cardholders. And this wasn’t a trivial promotion; it led to an industry-wide shift among major financial institutions like Citi, BMO and Republic Bank to allow people who are living under a different name than their legal one to be seen and given credibility as financial consumers.
And you’ll notice – no ugly blowback! Mastercard handled this campaign exactly right. They still have it listed on their website and effected real change.
A third example is Lacoste’s IUCN Save Our Species campaign to make consumers aware of critically endangered animals. They did this by replacing their famous alligator emblem for one day in 2018 with ten different animals that need protection, and then they repeated this in 2019 with ten additional species. They also highlighted the population size for each species to make it clear just how endangered these creatures are. And what’s brilliant about this campaign is that Lacoste is not generally focused on this topic, but was able to use its best-known element – the alligator – to authentically connect the brand to the cause.
An integrated media campaign helped to get the word out and Lacoste donated the proceeds of the event to the IUCN, which is the International Union for Conservation of Nature, who not only served as the partner and benefactor but also used the attention Lacoste was shining on the issue to tell those interested how they could be further involved.
One thing I want you to notice about all of these campaigns is that they had a clear idea of who the consumers were they wanted to appeal to. People concerned about preserving the environment due to their love for outdoor activities. People concerned about destigmatizing transgender and nonbinary identities. People concerned about protecting endangered species. These are authentic causes that appeal to particular consumer personas within Millennials and Gen Z and help to get buzz and word of mouth going among them.
But you’d also better bet each of these campaigns was deliberate in selecting appropriate channels through which to promote these campaigns and also in setting KPIs that went beyond vanity metrics. Lacoste, for example, was measuring sell-through on its special polos – and they did sell through, both years! They limited the shirts to the number of that species in the wild, and this allowed consumers to understand the direct effect their contributions were having on building awareness and support for these critically endangered animals.
It’s also important to understand that these campaigns didn’t just fall under “marketing.” They were aligned from top to bottom, involving employees on the front lines as well as in the corporate offices. “Marketing” didn’t take a stand. The organizations did.
And that’s how you make a Purpose-Driven Marketing campaign work. You align it to the types of customers you want to have, you have to connect it to your brand with purpose, and you have to be willing to stand for something beyond just donating some proceeds or slapping a trendy colored ribbon on your packaging. Purpose-driven marketing is about actually having a purpose.
And remember, if you do it right, the rewards are amazingly lucrative!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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