2012 Planning Priorities for Cause Marketing

2012 has gotten off with a bang! I've been quite busy with my clients pitching and developing no less than two branded documentary projects for important health-related causes. I also spent the first few weeks leading several "Path to Advocacy" workshops for clients who needed to develop impactful strategies fast. These are half-day or day-long strategic planning workshops that leave you with a strategy for every stage of a campaign from awareness to action to advocacy, with objectives, insight, strategy and metrics. I'm developing a post on my proprietary Path to Advocacy process and will share it with you soon. Meanwhile, I'm feeling confident that my choice to provide shared value strategy to brands and companies was the right one.

Right now, most PR agencies are in the midst of 2012 planning--figuring out what campaigns they will run for their clients through-out the year and I've had quite a few interesting conversations about the demands their own clients are placing on them.  I thought I would share with you a couple of those demands and tips to meet them.

CLIENT: "Be more engaging, I want my community to be active."


AGENCY: "We need to provide clients with engaged stakeholders, not just impressions."

One of my clients suggested that their 2012 plans really needed to be different from previous years. Right now its a very competitive climate, more and more PR and Ad agencies are taking on work in the cause space. Therefore, the usual plans had to satisfy the usual needs for great awareness and visibility, but also had to drive and SUSTAIN engagement, not just one-time giving. Re-upping a plan meant sustaining a community with stuff to do.  Thus, the excuse of low budgets isn't gonna cut it anymore--not with the efficiencies to be gained from social media.

My advice--think about the end goal for your client AND your agency and push your agency to pitch campaigns that build communities that win and sustain more advocates. This means you need to up the strategy ante with campaigns that are results-driven and focused on engagement, not just impressions. You'll need to think about how to get all the stakeholders to actually "do stuff" not just hear the message. If you start with a solid strategy, one that takes you from awareness all the way to advocacy, you'll be more successful. If you leave it as an afterthought, you're campaign will have a big bang up front and deliver impressions, but be weak on sustained engagement as budget dries up. You need to plan accordingly, for the long-haul, and present multi-year plans that expressly say what your goals are for the community of fans you capture and how you're going to activate them again and again and again on behalf of the brand.

I like where this new campaign from P&G's Children's Safe Drinking Water program is going with their purpose-driven brand "Pur." In this Facebook campaign, one "Like" equals one day of clean water provided (actually a monetary donation by P&G). The community is quickly growing. Note the video which helps spread the message virally. This program is part of a commitment "to save one life every hour by 2020," according to P&G CEO Bob McDonald. Now that's a multi-year commitment!

CLIENT: "Bring us award-winning ideas! We want to celebrate our work too."

AGENCY: "Our clients are looking to us to take it to the next level creatively."

Another client of mine suggested the quality of their campaigns were just "OK", they weren't creative enough, they certainly weren't going to win any awards. Right now, there are only a handful of shops winning the top awards for cause marketing. Maybe its because they invested in their digital and production capabilities, maybe its because they have the right partners, or maybe its because the client has high expectations creatively. Either way, as social media becomes a capability of EVERY agency, agencies are being pressed to go further.

My advice--think outside the box and consider bringing in a creative director from a design or advertising background--if you're a typical agency--go the opposite route and partner your creative team with a PR professional. The point here is to mix-it-up. I'm actually helping bring filmmakers together with PR agencies to make branded documentaries, for example. That's taking it to the next level.

Here's a tip. Take a look at the top winning cause campaigns of 2011 and ask yourself--can I get there with the talent I have now? Do I need to a) acquire talent, b) partner and borrow talent, c) hire talent, or d) train up my talent?

2011 PR News CSR Awards Finalists
You can download the ENTIRE PR News 2010 CSR Awards issue here.

2011 Cause Marketing Forums Awards
You can view all of the Halo award winners in every category here.

If you're part of a network like Havas, Omnicom or Publicis, now's the time to make friends and reach-out to your sister agencies in digital, direct and even media buying and planning, what else could you do if you partnered together? My strong recommendation is that you avoid the commerical agency however, as you already know where their bread is buttered...on expensive TV and print campaigns. Ask them to be creative and they'll come back with :30s.

Social Business Infographic

The folks over at London-based Global Dawn are crowdsourcing an infographic on the history of social business. There are some obvious entries and omissions, but they want your help in filling in the major milestones from the 80's forward along three streams, technology, marketing and social. Take a look--what would you add? Let them know, follow and suggest @globaldawnlive.

"Good" Business Booklist Reveals Network in Transition

In the process of developing the syllabus for a course at NYU I'm teaching on Social Media and Cause Marketing, I've come across several new business strategy books on the topic of integrating social responsibility into everyday business and marketing practice. There are so many in fact, I'm beginning to believe that the movement to make "Good" business is experiencing a groundswell. Here are a list of just a few that stand out:

• We First by Simon Mainwaring
• Building Social Business by Muhammad Yunus
• Who Cares Wins by David Jones
• Good For Business by Andrew Bennett, Cavas Gobhai, Ann O'Reilly, Greg Welch
• The Responsibility Revolution by Jefferey Hollender
• The Power of Unreasonable People by John Elkington, Pamela Hartigan

I'm particularly intrigued by Who Cares Wins and Good For Business. Both are by executives from the marketing communications network, Havas. I only just recently wrote about another Havas Network employee, Umair Haque, the director of the Havas Media Lab. Seems like Havas is truly positioning the network around this capitalism reform movement. In fact, Bennett and O'Reilly, two of the authors of Good For Business are also the authors of Consumed, Rethinking Business in the Era of Mindful Spending, a product of the EuroRSCG Knowledge Exchange Network. The Knowledge Exchange is an agency think-tank that produces high-level business strategy content that is spot-on with trends and global shifts in consumer behavior. Check them out to take advantage of years worth of thinking and research on consumer trends.

Here is a short presentation on the material behind Good For Business.

The Four Cornerstones of the Conscious Corporation

Havas CEO, David Jones's new book, Who Cares Wins, the Rise of the Caring Corporation, dives deep into the "Good" business trend, making use of new consumer research from Yougovstone (a market research firm specializing in influentials) and agencies from the Havas network to position the network as a leader in this space. You can read the summary of the book and find the supporting research here. In addition to being the CEO of Havas, Jones is a co-founder of One Young World, a non-profit organization that brings young people together and provides leadership training. One Young World "ambassadors" develop projects in global health, leadership, business, media and other areas.

I'm certain my students will find great value in this material, but I'm still very surprised its coming from an agency network! So often networks like WPP, Omnicom, etc. tend to be voiceless corporate entities. Because most are "public" they rarely express their mission beyond their stated goal of profits, and tend to hold few public opinions to avoid conflict with shareholders and clients. Frankly, the CEOs of most agency networks are accountants not visionaries. Yet, the French network, Havas seems to be taking a different, more courageous approach. Like the corporations who have recently integrated "shared value" into their mission, value chains and marketing, Nestle, General Mills and HP for example, Havas appears to be crafting themselves as a leader of this inevitable swing in the business landscape, brilliant!

Find below a presentation by David Jones at the self-titled Who Cares Wins Conference in 2010.

Expect a Return for Telling Your CSV Story

OK, by now you think I'm a bit of a shill for the work of FSG (Michale Porter and Mark Kramer's social impact consultancy), but no, I'm quite the independent. What I admire about FSG is that they TELL THE STORY. They are superb marketers and they are willing to share their clients stories in order to reposition the social impact space to the "shared value" space.

I'm a big believer in storytelling marketing--but when you look at the Cause space, you see many poorly told stories. In the traditional model of Cause Marketing, a campaign is typically one built on sponsorship of a partnership with a foundation. Typically this is a strategic media buy or donation-based partnership driven by PR or CSR. This can be seen as a workplace benefit, or bringing the corporate values to life. The investment is a tiny percent of their annual investment in marketing, certainly it will be a fraction of their supply chain, because often its viewed as a necessary cost of doing business, but not one that creates profit. The prevailing attitude is--give just enough to be seen as a supporter, but don't expect a return. Increasingly, sustainability and "corporate citizenship" will be the primary investment--and that could effect the supply chain, operations, even what vendors, or suppliers a company works with, in that case, a return is expected and necessary, but then, it's not seen as important enough to be promoted externally. The though here (and it is a misconception) is that consumers only care about the product story (benefits).

"Good" deeds are buried in annual reports, CSR whitepapers or press releases. The marketing budget is sacrosanct and shall not be used for anything but product marketing. This is because marketing budgets are often very large investments back in to the business--they have to work very hard and produce a ROI. Otherwise, its money poorly spent.  This is a wise approach to making the most out of marketing dollars, but companies already engaged in CSV miss the opportunity to turn their marketing into another tool for creating shared value.

It is entirely possible to tell the story of your "good" work and creating a return by making your campaign create action and participation in your customers and employees. Thus, the end goal of your CSV program should be to win on three fronts--the business, society and the with the consumer. To achieve that, companies need to start turning to the marketing agencies, strategists and consultants who live and breathe shared value everyday.

Umair Haque - The Pirate Inside Havas

First, let me say, I've never met Umair Haque, and I've only just learned about his role leading the Havas Media Lab, but man I like where this guy is coming from! Haque is a self-styled blogger, author and "reformer," and author of Betterness: Economics for Humans and The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. The Harvard Business Review blogger's writing has been excerpted in the new Fast Company Co.Exist online magazine and its part of the meme that business can be a force for good, and not just profit. I like to imagine his grand plan is to help capitalism reform itself altogether, but his day job is to help brands see the light at one of the world's best agency networks. Simply, he wants to show that brands must redesign themselves to meet the promise of making a difference, rather than simply differentiating themselves from other brands.

I wonder if  Haque's mission to reform business is even possible from the inside of an agency? Almost every major agency network has a "media lab", but most are focused on gleaning the latest technologies for their client's marketing efforts. They tend to get the "first-look" at what Google, Apple and Facebook are doing...and then they go about translating the tech for global accounts, educating the creative staff, and generally looking for a way to profit by selling more campaigns in the new media. Sounds cool, but no small task to say the least. And these media labs have their fairshare of problems--though they should be mini-think-tanks, they must be profitable eventually and so there is an over-focus on selling new media rather than truly innovating marketing practice. High-minded planners and technologists abound there, but they don't often mesh with the "get 'er done" account culture, and high-profile flame-outs happen all the time. So here comes Haque, and low and behold, he's not talking about how make the new Facebook Timeline integrate across the global "whatever" business, he's talking about "betterness?" What' gives?

Adam Morgan, author of the highly influential marketing book, The Pirate Inside, gave away the secrets of how to create a challenger brand. It seems, Haque, has become a devoted disciple. He's focused on challenging the core of marketing and branding itself at Havas as part of his larger mission to reform capitalism. Where's the hyperbole about Klout and Augmented Reality? Blessedly, absent it appears, instead, Haque is preaching a new gospel. 

Now, to be clear, Haque's not reinventing anything, he's just a brilliantly astute man of his times. We all live in a hyper-connected world now, but he's arguing for an acceptance of that reality from companies and brands. He knows consumers have long since moved on from the industrial marketing habits we purveyed just a few short years ago--pushing TV commercials at Superbowl...though you'd be surprised how many 3 and 4-letter'ed agencies still feel TV is relevant. It certainly pays the bills. But OK, that's the cynic in me. The fact is, the research the Havas Media Lab is doing is actually showing that there is a real shift in consumer demand, from what Haque calls, egocentric demand to "allocentric" demand, that is, from branding that fed consumer ego (aspirations) to branding that feeds consumer desire for meaning and significance.

This isn't necessarily a new view. Similar to the CSV model or shared value model proposed by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer, Haque is proposing an application of a broader social mission to the mission of making a profit (every brand's core mission). He wants us to add "function" to the marketing so that that it doesn't just "show" but "does."

In my opinion, from a semiotic point of view, this is not "langue," its "parole." Where brands were once a language of very valuable signs that the consumer invested in to show that they were doing well, living the American Dream, buying the better product, now the future of brand marketing is actually a "speech act"--something that is simultaneously a message and an action. In this model, the brand is a DOER, helping people to achieve a more meaningful life. This could be making life better, fairer, easier, more significant, more meaningful, as Haque says, "to help people live lives that matter."

An example Haque turns to often is Nike+ where the new promise of Nike is to help make you a better runner, instead of promising that buying the shoes will make you cooler in some way. I like to think that there are MANY brands out there with the potential to become more profitable by being more meaningful, but they must embrace ways to make their consumers lives more meaningful, not just their aspirations. This can happen during the product design phase, but ALSO needs to happen in the strategic planning phase--where marketers plan on how to market their product. The campaign to position the brand or product can ACTUALLY be functional, not just showing the value of the brand, but helping consumers to LIVE more meaningful lives. Consider Pepsi Refresh, Tom's Shoes or even the Tide Loads of Hope campaign. The consumption of these products, soda, shoes and laundry detergent and participation with the marketing campaign leads to a positive outcome not just for the consumer, but society at-large. There is a kind of profit for the company, consumer and society as a result of the engaging the marketing.

So the question for me remains, are agencies today capable of shifting from the old model of strategic planning where they sought an insight based on consumer desire, needs and wants to match a benefit to meet the consumer's ego OR to a NEW kind of planning where they seek the mutual benefits to consumer, brand, and society and design an allocentric campaign? I've got to know some in the last six months, there are no less than two dozen new shops across the US and Europe with this kind of model and I will be writing about them more soon.  For now, imagine the kind of insights and the planning system you would need to generate a successful campaign rooted in the notion of ACTION, PARTICIPATION and MEANING instead of just TELLING. This is precisely the kind of planning I know do for my clients at Shared Value Strategy. If you're interested in learning more, do drop a line. Meanwhile, I recommend you follow Haque's on Twitter--he's up to some radical thinking, and I suspect we'll see Havas agencies begin to adopt his thinking and execute some pretty meaningful consumer campaigns quite soon.