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Best Companies Deliver Profits and Purpose

October 31, 2010 in Corporate, Social Marketing, Social Messages with 1 Comment

For the last few days, I’ve been cleaning up from my work on The Women’s Conference 2010. It was a massive event — 6 days, 7 events, 160 speakers, 70 sponsors and partners, 300 exhibitors, 350 credentialed media, and more than 30,000 attendees. I was enormously proud to be a part of it.

If you have worked on any event, you will understand this statement: I didn’t get a chance to see any of the speeches or conversations live. It was all just a behind-the-scenes blur.

I’m getting a chance to watch it all now on-demand and I was particularly charmed by this main stage conversation moderated by Brian Williams and featuring Nike Co-Founder and Chairman Phil Knight, Starbucks President & CEO Howard Schultz, and New York Times Columnist Nick Kristof.

The conversation was titled “Values, Vision and Voice: Men Who Get It” and it covered topics ranging from the influence of women, lessons learned and finding purpose in one’s career to business, philanthropy and corporate social responsibility.

The discussion builds slowly but all of the panelists seemed to get into their respective “zones” after Brian Williams introduced and played the Nike Foundation’s captivating and inspiring Girl Effect animated film. The video is not new but it generated quite a buzz during and after the conference. Attendees raved about it, and for good reason.

For me, the highlight of the conversation was Howard Schultz drawing meaning from a childhood story. When he was seven, his father broke his leg and hip, was unable to work, and lost his job. Schultz referred poetically to the experience of being injured and unable to work, with no health insurance and no workman’s compensation, as the “fracturing of the American Dream”.

This experience, Schultz notes, informed his business philosophy and inspired him to create a company that delivered not just profits, but a strong sense of purpose, too.

I never imagined on any level that one day I would be building or be responsible for a company the size of Starbucks. But I thought early on that we should imprint the values of Starbucks in a way that would make my father proud of a company that perhaps he never got a chance to work for. And so Starbucks became the first company in America to provide comprehensive health insurance to every single employee, including part timers. What I’ve learned over the years is that you can build a company with a conscience that makes a profit, that does good in the world, that attracts new employees…if you can build a company or brand that has a reservoir of trust — not because of its product but because of its values — then it endures.

I respect and admire each of the men involved (who knew Brian Williams was such a cut up?), but I thought Schultz was the star on that stage.
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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Sorry, Blockbuster: An Enemy Deserves No Mercy

September 25, 2010 in Corporate, Social Marketing with 0 Comments

Photo by @Dave Dugdale

Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy this week and a classic philosophical riddle was solved. Finally, we know whether a tree that falls in the forest makes a sound if nobody is around to hear it.

Blockbuster was, plain and simple, an enemy to its customers.

This week’s news stories recounting its near-death state have all been much too generous to the aging behemoth. Yes, Blockbuster grew too big and lost its agility. Yes, the rise of digital, on-demand entertainment challenged its business model.

But the truth is, Blockbuster couldn’t respond to its customer’s shifting demands and consumption patterns because they were too busy exploiting them to ever take the time to understand or serve them well.

In 2000, Blockbuster earned $800 million in customer fees, which means that 16% of its business was penalizing customers for using its core service.

That is a large enough percentage of revenue to say that Blockbuster was also in the fees service business. They rented you movies, sold you candy, and charged you fees.

When Netflix began to challenge Blockbuster’s dominance with a convenient, audience-friendly and socially-marketed business model (surprisingly, they seemed to actually like their customers), the company tried to persuade consumers to celebrate the end of late fees.

But it was too late — they had become better and more efficient at delivering annoying fees than entertaining experiences. They had already become irrelevant.

Blockbuster was tricked into believing that they could afford to develop an adversarial relationship with its customers. With as many as 9,100 brick and mortar stores at its peak in 2004, they were the only player in many towns around the country. They controlled access to audience.

The Web has changed all that. Accessing audience is no longer a business advantage — and more importantly, a business barrier.

If no company can control access, then the only way to ensure success is to be hyper-focused on serving, understanding, friending, delighting and over-delivering for audiences.

Web-based companies like Amazon, Zappos and Netflix have ushered in an audience-first social revolution because they understood that their success depended upon it.

The Blockbuster brand is a dinosaur that stood strong for a long time, but it stood against this new business philosophy for too long.

Goodnight, Blockbuster. You were mighty, but you have earned this extinction.

I’m making it a Netflix night.

-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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Is Apple Anti-Social?

September 11, 2010 in Advertising, Branding, Corporate, Social Marketing, Social Messages, Social Technology with 2 Comments

In the days leading up to Apple’s press conference last week, this video of a shorts and sandals-wearing Steve Jobs (circa ’97) introducing the Think Different campaign went viral. Perhaps the appropriate term is that it went bacterial. It was a fairly local outbreak. In a span of three days, I saw it appear on at least six different blogs I read regularly.

It really is a terrific look back at a company on the verge of reinventing itself — and a valuable primer on branding from a natural marketer. Jobs make three key points in this video:

1. “Marketing is about values…”

2. “Apple, at the core – its core value — is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better…”

3. “Values, core values, shouldn’t change…”

And so I ask: Has Apple changed its core values since this remarkable moment?

In 1997, Jobs articulated a radically progressive worldview. Under his leadership, Apple’s “soul” would be about empowering bold, creative, revolutionary people to “change things” and “push the human race forward”.

It seems to me, Jobs wanted to position Apple as a brand that offered a positive definition of freedom — a freedom to. To create. To take risks. To change the status quo. To mix it up. To blaze a trail. To be yourself. It was all about positive freedom.  All outward looking.

Success hasn’t been kind to this early vision, though.

The now infamous late night email exchange between Gawker’s Ryan Tate and an unfiltered Steve Jobs revealed how much of the CEO’s worldview has shifted since Apple’s underdog days.

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Choosing Customers: “The night, too, is for sport”

August 22, 2010 in Advertising, Corporate, Social Marketing, Social Messages with 1 Comment

After reading Seth Godin’s short blog on the subject a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about the extent to which brands choose their customers.

His take was that we can choose the customers we desire, the audiences we want to associate with.

Yes, you get to choose them, not the other way around. You choose them with your pricing, your content, your promotion, your outreach and your product line.

I watched this Puma ad (hat tip @GuidoWongolini) with that lens on. According to Creative Review, the ad was created by Droga5 and directed by Ringan Ledwidge.

Besides being a well crafted, beautifully written, pitch-perfect piece of commercial art, it’s also a case study in social messaging and how to define your audience.

All athletic footwear brands have lines of sneakers retailers refer to as “casual” or “urban footwear.” What makes this campaign interesting is that Puma is the first of the high performance, pure sport athletic brands that thought of creating a new tribe for this product (side)line.

With this campaign, Puma is choosing their customers: the social athletes, the play harders, the revved up revelers.

Welcome to the world, the “after hours athlete.” There was a time in my life when I would have met you on this playing field, would have joined your team, but I go to sleep way too early for your pick up games.

I’m content to admire your endurance — and watch you get some action — from the bleachers.

-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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Levi’s Workshopping Brand Relevance

July 18, 2010 in Branding, Corporate, Social Marketing with 4 Comments

I love what Levi’s is doing with its Go Forth, Ready to Work campaign (creative above by Wieden+Kennedy, of course).

The campaign is being made concrete through old-school, pop-up community “workshops” debuting around the country (concept and execution by NYC-based Sub Rosa).

One just opened for business in the Mission District of San Francisco and it’s a brilliant strategic move for a classic American brand struggling to maintain its relevance.

The workshops are creative in the roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty kind of way. With its fully functional letterpress, screenprinting and typesetting equipment, along with its classes and “forums where local pioneers in design, sports, technology, sustainability can engage and collaborate,” the workshops are a celebration of the past in the spirit of modern, indie hipness.

It’s such a perfectly-branded interactive project.

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Panera Breaks Bread in St. Louis

June 5, 2010 in Corporate, Non Profit, Social Marketing, Social Messages with 0 Comments

USA Today’s Bruce Horovitz reported recently on the opening of Panera’s new non-profit cafe in a suburb of St. Louis.

The community-building concept is the brainchild of Ronald Shaich, who stepped down as CEO of the company to pursue this new social entrepreneurial vision and expand it nationally.

Upon entering Saint Louis Bread Company Cares, customers are asked to “take what you need, leave your fair share.” There are no cash registers, just a donation box. The hope is that some of the more affluent customers will contribute more than the suggested price of their order, which would allow the store to meet the needs of customers who don’t have the means to pay full price. Even the guests who are unable to pay are invited to do volunteer work and give back to the store.

I’m pulling for this project. I hope it’s as sustainable and scalable as Shaich’s plans suggest.

I know other restaurants have tried similar “pay what you can” models with varying degrees of success, but I think Shaich’s business acumen and strong purpose motive will be the difference makers.

You can tell Shaich believes deeply in his new mission. He describes the project as the company’s “community work” and as an experiment of “mutual responsibility.”

This an exciting social message (progressive, in the best sense of the word) for a rapidly growing (and therefore, increasingly influential) restaurant chain.
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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Colonel Sanders Has a Case of Pink Eye

May 29, 2010 in Advertising, Branding, Cause Marketing, Corporate, Social Marketing, Social Messages with 3 Comments

So much criticism has already been heaped on KFC for its “Buckets for the Cure” cause marketing partnership with Susan G. Komen.

Various accusations of “pinkwashing” have come from cancer researchers, nutritional experts and other cause marketing analysts and there is no need to rehash them all here.

Yet as a communications strategist, I feel compelled to comment on an issue that I haven’t yet seen raised.

From my perspective, what helped the campaign rise to the level of absurdity was the terrible timing of KFC’s corporate communications.

Simply put, I’ve never seen a company’s brand message so poorly planned, managed and sequenced.

At its best, a cause marketing campaign is a story about a group of ordinary characters (a corporation, a charity, often a celebrity) who find their purpose motives aligned in some important way and decide to do something extraordinary together.

However, when it seems like one of the characters shouldn’t be in the story — when they appear out of nowhere or out of sequence — the whole narrative feels forced, inauthentic and inappropriate.

KFC became one of those characters.

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Focus Grouping the Future

April 11, 2010 in Cause Marketing, Corporate, Social Marketing with 2 Comments

Ad Age recently reported on a joint project between BBMG New York and Los Angeles-based Passenger dubbed The Collective.

The Collective is a just-launched private online community that will connect cause-marketing brands (read: current and future BBMG clients) with a select group of 2,000 cause-minded consumers.

“To our knowledge, we’re launching the first private online community for connecting conscious consumers with sustainable brands and related causes,” says Mitch Baranowski, founding partner and chief creative officer of BBMG. “This is about much more transparent, trust-driven collaboration—co-creativity. It stops being … about marketing to consumers, but marketing with them.”

Community members are screened with an extensive battery of questions and must meet certain cause-oriented criteria (values and behavioral) to participate.

All of which leads me to this question: is “co-creativity” just a fancy new term for a focus group?

I’m all for marketing “with” consumers, and not “to” them, but is The Collective really anything other than a new online toolbox for an old offline marketing tool?

This is how the project’s purpose is described in the Frequently Asked Questions:

Our sincere hope is that The Collective becomes a vibrant forum for connecting with consumers for insights, innovation and advocacy that can drive more sustainable products, policies and practices. Rather than clients making imperfect assumptions about your likes, dislikes and what really motivates you, we’re inviting you into the process. Call it co-creativity. It’s going to be the next wave, we think.

I’m intrigued by the advocacy piece of this. If The Collective can become a platform for empowering these 2,000 influencers to drive further action online and offline — beyond the private, gated community — then it will be elevated it to a higher standard.

Even if the Collective is just a focus group with more fashion, it’s a smart move for BBMG. I see both consumers and brands lining up to be involved in this, which ultimately positions the agency as a key convener in the cause marketing space.
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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Promoting Purpose Pays Off

March 31, 2010 in Branding, Cause Marketing, Corporate, Social Marketing with 0 Comments

Yesterday, BrandWeek reported on yet another survey that showed that consumers are continuing to warm up to the idea of supporting companies for their good corporate citizenship.

The survey measured consumer perceptions of corporate social responsibility practices and ranked companies that are the most responsible. It found that despite the recession, 75% of consumers believe social responsibility is important, and 55% of consumers said they would choose a product that supports a particular cause against similar products that don’t.

“[Corporate social responsibility] can be the olive branch between struggling industries and consumers in cases where consumers are experiencing the highest expectations and the biggest let downs,” said Scott Osman, global director of Landor’s citizenship branding practice, adding that the industries with brands that have performed poorly, are the ones in which responsibility is valued most.

The survey results don’t surprise me, but I am shocked by Scott Osman’s clumsy “olive branch” analogy for corporate social responsibility practices.

CSR and cause marketing are not about companies offering after-the-fact peace treaties with the consumers they have been warring with for years.

That is a cynical and inauthentic use of cause marketing.

To be successful, a company must practice social responsibility because they want to inspire, enlist and engage audiences to join an important cause from the outset, not because they want to pacify and bait consumers into buying more products from a brand they’ve already been disappointed in.

Read the whole article here.
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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What Do Drugs, Guns & Kids Have in Common?

March 21, 2010 in Advertising, Cause Marketing, Corporate, Social Marketing, Social Messages with 1 Comment

Photo credit: Flickr @anksmcskanks

The Body Shop wants you to know that they are all “sold on a street corner near you.”

Last week, The NY Times Media Decoder Blog shined a spotlight on the Body Shop’s campaign against the exploitation of children through sex trafficking, and I was impressed by the retailer’s comprehensive approach to issue advocacy.

In addition to issue research and the aggressive advertising campaign, the Body Shop also sponsored a film screening and panel discussion on the child sex trade.

Seeing their stores as “amazing communications platforms,” the company has trained their salespeople to be able to educate customers about the issue and direct them to their Web site for more info.

A special line of products was also created to empower customers to raise funds for two organizations, the Somaly Mam Foundation and the ECPAT International, a global network of organization working to End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes.

The Soft Hands Kind Heart Hand Cream urges customers to “lend a hand, or two” to stop the trafficking and sexual exploitation of children and young people.

Sexual exploitation is a tough, unglamorous cause and the Body Shop should be applauded for taking the risk on it.

Social advocacy campaigns are not new territory for the retailer, though. They have been taking on domestic violence as part of their core values for a decade.

The Body Shop is a company that understands the potential positive social impact of its brand.
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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