Look past the pink ribbons and yellow bracelets and you’ll find companies uniting cause, the social media "network effect", social innovation, and empowered global consumers to not only make a difference, but make a profit too. If you follow Michael Porter, the Harvard Business professor
who along with Mark Kramer coined the term
CSV or Corporate Shared Value, then
you know CSR is rapidly evolving. More companies find that doing good can benefit
society while also being profitable to the brand, so much so that Nestle for
example, has incorporated CSV into their mission, affecting every aspect of the
way they source, produce and market their products. Turns out, there is also a
new kind of marketing agency emerging to help companies uncover and tell their social
good stories, and they expect to be profitable too.
- Nestle Shared Value Pyramid
Matter Unlimited is the result of months in retreat in
Brazil, where CEO Rob Holzer wondered if the kind of work he’d executed as the
co-founder of Syrup for GE’s ecoimagination program and the Obama election campaign
could make for a new kind of agency.
“Jeff Immelt (GE’s CEO) would say, green is green, we’re
going to make money of this (ecoimagination), and it lead to me thinking, can I
just focus a company on this stuff?”
Holzer believes the best companies seek to create shared
value across their entire organization and that it takes change agent marketing
execs to do it. That’s why he’s built his new agency differently, on-staff he’s
got a former CMO, a venture capitalist and an ex-McKinsey consultant—not the
prototypical start-up shop.
“What we’re seeing, it’s not just a marketing and
advertising challenge, the smartest company’s initiatives cut across product
development, supply chain, and marketing…we may want to do in-kind work for equity
from entrepreneurs, that’s why we put the company together differently.”
While the social good marketing agency might be organized
differently, the need for great creative remains the same. In the last year,
Good Corp’s Starbucks
Create Jobs for America campaign struck a chord with the national media for its
boldness and creativity. Starbucks had the audacity to take on what is usually a government duty--job creation. UK agencies Good for Nothing and
Made by Many launched
the
50/50 Project to bring awareness to famine-stricken East Africa with more
than a dozen agencies donating time and resources to create mini-social media
campaigns for UNICEF. Two years ago, “Real stories” agency,
Flow Nonfiction,
traveled to earthquake stricken Haiti to film ESPWA, a documentary that told
the story of P&G brand Tide and its involvement in donating laundry
facilities to a local orphanage.
“We
started the agency to help companies make good on doing good, and as
filmmakers, we knew our story-telling skills could help create an emotional
connection between employees and consumers, brands and their social efforts,” says David Modigliani, Co-Creative Director of Flow Nonfiction.
*disclosure, Flow Nonfiction is a client
of my consultancy
Through branded films, content and movements, new social
good agencies are exploring a wide variety of creative, but Sharon Chang, CEO
of
Yoxi, does not want to leave the element of spectacle behind.
“Spectacle is incredibly important. Current celebrity
culture is about empty spectacle, but the materials we work with are
substantial. All we are trying to do is bring attention to things that are
already beautiful.”
The substance Chang is referring to is the social innovation
of “SIRs” or the “Social Innovation Rockstars” her agency represents, people like Alison
Cohen, the visionary behind
Alta Bicycle Share which is bringing shared
bicycles to New York City. In Yoxi’s model, helping to connect these rockstar
entrepreneurs to brands benefit both the innovator and brand from the association.
In true shared-value fashion, Chang imagines that SIRs can be anchors, acting
as a lighthouse brand that unites a parallel group of social entrepreneurs and
big brands in order to reduce the top-down, bottom-up effects of innovation.
But is this just borrowing celebrity in a different fashion?
“Borrowing
(reputation) isn’t fake, look at a collaborative consumption model like Zipcar,
isn’t that a good thing? And a true leader always hires people who are better
than them.”
Modigliani believes brands have to meet increased demand
from consumers for more transparency, and key to that is bringing better
content to the table. “As we know, people can avoid advertising, more and more,
the content we see is the content we choose, and if brands want to reach people,
they need to purvey quality content they elect to see.”
“Agencies are going
to learn to be more collaborative, to bring in and manage multiple teams when
needed—at Matter, when I need it, I want the best data visualization guy or the
best technologist, but I don’t want them on staff,” says Holzer. Meanwhile, Chang is pragmatic about the need for agencies to create
shared value for brands.
“I think there’s a disconnect in marketing, who says
you have to market your own IP? If we look at it from a system-wide level,
we’ll see that a brand’s good deed isn’t really a moral imperative but a matter
of survival and efficiency,”says Chang.
Is it a case that CSR and sustainability efforts are not
effective, and that’s why social good agencies are emerging, to close the gap?
Holzer insists shared value is not CSR, and that despite a brand’s social good
efforts, how a consumer chooses a brand can be trumped by economics and it’s
not enough to have a good product.
“This is where
sustainability falls flat, they (companies) think all they need to do is make
the product right, they say people should buy it, but that’s not how it
works. Consumers need to find the need and you have to communicate that. If you
do have a good brand, offering, and a shared value model, it blows up,” says Holzer.
Like any start-up,
these new agencies are finding their footing by remaining flexible, in the
content they create, in how they work with brands, but can they find the right
level of talent? After all, the cause and non-profit marketing space is not
associated with the high-paying salaries and glamour of traditional agency
jobs. Chang notes that her employees have to have a high tolerance for failure
and remain open, saying, “When people really believe in this, they are willing
to make compromises and adjustments.”
Holzer has had no
problem attracting top talent to his new agency, “There’s vast talent out there
that has become disillusioned. We want people who look at their work as a
calling.”
