Author: Drew Neisser

Marketing for Good embraces a broad range of marketing efforts as “good” including those that simply entertain. In the 3/07 Business 2.0 magazine (call me a Neanderthal but I still like reading mags offline!) , I spied an article on a company called CoreStreet and their daring use of comic books to build buzz for its emergency response handheld computers. Here are a few highlights from the article:

…he turned the pitch for Pivman (the product), a brand name that sounds like a superhero, into a comic book. It wasn’t such a wacky idea. Several Japanese manage and graphic novel titles are enjoying a boom in bookstores… It was surprisingly easy and cheap, for Sinkov (the client) to create and publish the Pivman comic.

CoreStreet published the Pivman comic in September, and Sinkov says it has worked better than any marketing ploy he’s ever tried, delivering twice as many high-quality leads as the company’s usual brochures. The early buzz…was enough to win Corestreet a piece of a security contract with the city of Los Angeles.

It is nice to see a risk, however modest this one was, rewarded. Marketing for Good is not about playing it safe. It’s about playing it smart, like Pivman did with its comic book program, helping them cut through in an unexpected, entertaining and ultimately engaging manor. Using comics did not belittle the product or the message but rather placed them in almost heroic context. Comic results indeed.

Every once in a while one gets a chance to attend an event that is both humbling and inspiring. Last night I had the good fortune to attend just such an event. Held at the UN, which in and of itself is humbling, the event was hardly your ordinary scholarship fund-raiser though that’s exactly what it was. The tone of this event was captured in the program notes which featured this Anne Frank quote:

Isn’t it wonderful that nobody need wait a single moment to start improving the world.

A panel discussion, moderated by celebrated author Anna Quinlin, spanned the generations by highlighting the accomplishments of four remarkable gentleman who have dedicated themselves to “improving the world.”

Robert DeVecchi, aged 77, spent over 30 years helping refugees with the International Rescue Committee.

David Carmel, aged 34, co-founded Jumpstart, a national service program that pairs college students with pre-schoolers needing individual attention, while he was still in college. After a tragic swimming accident paralyzed him, David became active in the field of stem-cell research helping to raise $3billion for research in California and now works for StemCyte, a leading stem cell therapy company.

Billy Parish, aged 25, co-founded the Energy Action Coalition while still at Yale and was recently named “Climate Hero” by Rolling Stone magazine. He travels all over the country (in his vegetable oil powered bus) to encourage climate-responsible decisions and actions at colleges and business.

John R. Lewis, an eleven-term congressman from Georgia, was the son of sharecroppers and a leading activist in the civil rights movement alongside of Martin Luther King, Jr. Arrested more than 40 times, Lewis and his colleagues exhibited incredible courage until they brought about sn end to legalized segregation and racial discrimination.

All four of the speakers were inspiring, each tackling different issues but united by their desire and dedication to making the world better. This unity of purpose is what we need in the marketing arena. Sure we need to do good for our brands. But why not do good for the world we share at the same time?  It really isn’t that tough.

Last Friday, Stuart Elliott of the NY Times wrote about GQ Magazine’s new “charitable” marketing campaign supporting “The Gentleman’s Fund”:

The project will be promoted in a print and online campaign that carries the theme “Better men. Better world.” The fund begins with $325,000 and has a goal of raising $2 million, said Peter King Hunsinger, vice president and publisher at GQ, part of the Condé Nast Publications unit of Advance Publications.

Mr. Hunsinger said the seed donations came from 55 contributors, including Bloomingdale’s, a division of Federated Department Stores; the Carat North America media agency, part of the Aegis Group; the Gucci Group; Moët & Chandon, owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton; and the YouTube unit of Google.

The always perspicacious Elliott sees the growing trend toward Marketing for Good describing it as follows:

The project is an example of cause-related marketing or cause marketing, which is becoming increasingly popular on Madison Avenue. The idea is to burnish the image of a brand or company by forging ties with a philanthropy or charity. Cause marketing has been around for more than two decades, but recently seems to be gathering steam. One reason is the ardent interest in causes among younger Americans.

Marketing for Good embraces this campaign as a positive step towards aligning the interests of the brand (in this case, attracting readers and advertisers) and the world it shares. Being a well-dressed gentleman (or just a gentleman) should include a generosity of spirit and the recognition that its not just about looking good but also being good.

While campaigns like this can feel forced, this particular effort can be traced back to an article from the December issue of GQ called “The New Rules of Charity,” which noted “that this new generation of guys wants to be involved and find a way to make a difference.” GQ is smart to embrace this enlightened spirit and I for one, hope it enlightens and inspires everyone it touches.

Saw this in Promo Magazine and thought it was an interesting approach for the US Postal Inspection Service (which, quite frankly, I didn’t know existed). Here is the program description from the 1/2007 Promo:

Social networking sites have long been a magnet for creeps looking to harm young girls. But parents have a new ally in their fight to protect their daughters: The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS). The service has launched a $1 million viral campaign called 2 SMRT 4 U. The objective: To urge teenage girls to be careful when using social networking sites and blogs.

Central to the effort are free stainless steel rings engraved with a safety message. Roughly 82,000 have been ordered by girls online, and the initial order of 100,000 had to be doubled last month due to high demand, says Debbie Spencer, senior vice president, management for Campbell-Ewald, the agency handling the campaign.

What I find interesting is the motive and funding source for this program:

Why are postal inspectors involved in fighting online crime? Many predators also operate by mail, thus bringing them under the purview of the USPIS, Smith notes.

The best part is that the budget is from the service’s “forfeiture fund,” containing seized proceeds from criminal activity. “We’re using the bad guys’ money,” Smith says.

Public service campaigns are, by intent, almost always Marketing for Good. What I like about this particular one is that they are communicating the campaign in both traditional and non-traditional ways, enlightening teen girls about the problem and engaging them with the 2 SMRT 4U rings.

As you might expect, I’m hunting for examples of Marketing for Good all the time. What surprises me is that despite having eyes wide open, I often find myself sitting at my computer with little or no fresh content to share. Last night, I poured over the Wall St. Journal and could only find one ad worth writing about. Produced by Goldman Sachs, the ad discusses IFFIm initiative and how six European governments are funding immunization programs with the help of Goldman. The copy of the ad reads as follows:

A new way to use the capital markets.
A different future for ten million children.

Every year, 27 million infants go without vaccination against the most common childhood diseases. Now, for the first time, there is a way to use the power of the capital markets to help them. Six European governments determined to accelerate the funding they pledge for immunization programs. A small team at Goldman Sachs dedicated two years to this initiative and worked with the initial sovereign sponsors, the World Bank and other development partners to turn the idea into reality. The result is the International Finance Facility for Immmunisation (IFFlm), which funds immunization programs in 70 of the world’s poorest countries. IFFlm launched its first $1billion bond in November 2006. The money raised will help the GAVI Alliance protect more than 500 million children over the next decade-saving an estimated 10 million lives over time. To learn more about the IFFlm initiative, visit gs.com/iffim

This is the first I had heard about this program and I am awed by its magnitude. Goldman Sachs has made its employees and clients zillions over the years with unrivaled financial acumen. It is logical but not to be assumed that they would apply this expertise to a global problem like funding immunization programs. Every company has the opportunity to apply their expertise to help make life a little better, or, in the case of Goldman and the IFFIm initiative, make a lot of lives better. Not every company does.

This morning, my coffee cart guy (I wrote about him before) was talking about the impending rain. With his usual upbeat perspective, he said, “The rain is good, my friend. It will clean the streets of all the black snow.” I hadn’t had my coffee yet so his wisdom didn’t sink in until I got to the office. The rain, however annoying, will also cleanse the air and feed the trees. Marketing messages rain upon us everyday and are mostly annoying. Perhaps a few of the good ones like the Goldman ad will nourish our souls and inspire others. Ah yes, the good with the bad.

—postscript—

For more about the actual bond issue, see Financial Times article from November 06 which was posted on http://xinkaishi.typepad.com.

The New York Times published a fascinating article on Toyota’s road to “world domination” last Sunday. To set the stage, here’s a paragraph on the car makers recent success:

By any measure, Toyota’s performance last year, in a tepid market for car sales, was so striking, so outsize, that there seem to be few analogs, at least in the manufacturing world. A baseball team that wins 150 out of 162 games? Maybe. By late December, Toyota’s global projections for 2007 — the production of 9.34 million cars and trucks — indicated that it would soon pass G.M. as the world’s largest car company.

The article searches for the seeds of Toyota’s “outsized” success and finds it in their basic philosophy:

Toyota is as much a philosophy as a business, a patchwork of traditions, apothegms and precepts that don’t translate easily into the American vernacular. Some have proved incisive (“Build quality into processes”) and some opaque (“Open the window. It’s a big world out there!”). Toyota’s overarching principle, Press told me, is “to enrich society through the building of cars and trucks.”

The author notes that this sounds like typical corporate baloney but goes on to realize that this was in fact deeply ingrained in Toyota’s DNA:

Historically the idea has meant offering car customers reliability and mobility while investing profits in new plants, technologies and employees. It has also captured an obsessive obligation to build better cars, which reflects the Toyota belief in kaizen, or continuous improvement.

The article is well worth reading with lots of insights into how Toyota has come so far while most other car companies are crashing and burning. From a Marketing for Good perspective, Toyota recognizes first and foremost they must satisfy their customers by building better cars. Product enhancements in Toyotas aren’t usually obvious things like the hybrid engine in the Prius. More often the enhancements can be found under the sheet metal, incremental improvements that make Toyotas the most reliable vehicles on the road. This isn’t marketing magic. In fact, one could argue that Toyota’s advertising has been relatively pedestrian over the years. What isn’t pedestrian is the product itself.  It literally walks all over the competition.