Author: Drew Neisser

Sometimes good things come in small packages. For me, it was tiny little article in the 12/23/06 New York Times called Strategic Corporate Altruism which lead off as follows:

APPARENTLY, you really can do (extremely) well by doing good.

If companies were to analyze how to be socially responsible “using the same frameworks that guide their core business choices,” they would find good corporate citizenship to “be a source of opportunity, innovation and competitive advantage” argues a bannered article in Harvard Business Review.

The secret, write Michael E. Porter, a Harvard Business School professor, and Mark R. Kramer, managing director of FSG Social Impact Advisors, a nonprofit research group he founded with Mr. Porter, is to make sure a company’s efforts at corporate social responsibility, or C.S.R., mesh with its strengths and marketplace positioning.

“The essential test that should guide” corporate social responsibility, they write, “is not whether a cause is worthy but whether it presents an opportunity to create shared value — that is, a meaningful benefit for society that is also valuable to the business.”

As examples they cite Toyota’s decision to respond to concerns about automobile emissions by creating the Prius, a hybrid electric/gasoline vehicle, and Microsoft’s $50 million five-year commitment to community colleges.

I will track down the HBR article and do some homework on FSG Social Impact Advisors for later posts. In the meantime, I’m thrilled to know that brighter minds than mine are focusing their gray matter on how companies can really do well by doing a little good along the way.

Marketing for Good comes in all shapes and sizes especially during the holiday season. A simple example is how a number of retailers like Barnes and Nobles and Borders have turned over gift wrapping to local charities. The beauty of this example is that it is triple win-win-win, helping the retailer, the charity and the customer.

For the retailer, they shed the costs associated with gift wrapping including supplies and temp staffing. For all but a few retailers, gift wrapping is not a money-making enterprise since consumers seemed to think it should be a free service creating an unhealthy friction between expectations and reality. By turning over responsibility to local charities, suddenly the retailer looks socially responsible instead of the grinch who charged for wrapping.

It is pure win for local charities since it gives their volunteers a chance to educate consumers about their charity while raising money. At my local Barnes & Noble, the volunteers from DOROT, told me all about their organization and how it “enhances the lives of the elderly and brings the generations together.” The three volunteers were enthusiastic representatives of thier cause and was easy to imagine them helping thousands of “shut-in” elderly New Yorkers. As one of 27,000 non-profit organizations in New York, being in Barnes & Noble is prime-time exposure for DOROT helping them raise awareness and money.

For the customer, having a charity wrap your presents turns a potential act of laziness (after all, couldn’t we do this ourselves) into an act of goodwill. Not only did I feel good about donating to DORAT but also I was grateful to Barnes & Noble for providing this time-saving, hassle-reducing convenience. They secured my loyalty for many holiday seasons to come.

In this small example of Marketing for Good, perhaps there is a model for large scale efforts in which marketer, non-profit and consumer can all benefit without significant downside for any of the parties. I’ll be looking. Let me know when you see a win-win-win opportunity.

At a critical point in the modestly entertaining movie, Gung Ho, the Japanese auto chief turns to his subordinate Michael Keaton and says “I like you, you make me laugh”. That line has always stuck with me. This morning on the way to work I heard a portion of David Sedaris’ Santaland Diaries on WNYC. I may be the last person in the world to have heard this since he recorded it 14 years ago, but I was laughing so hard tears were streaming down my face. Sedaris chronicles his adventures as a droll elf at Macy’s during the holiday season. When asked by “Santa Santa” to sing Oh Holy Night for one of the brattier kids, Sedaris’ elects to perform the song as if he was Billie Holiday (needless to say Santa Santa stops him before he gets to the second verse). In a later scene when a mother of a tantrum-throwing kid asks Sedaris to tell her son that if he doesn’t behave Santa will only bring him coal, Sedaris tells the child that Santa will come to his house and steal all his electrical appliance including his TV, refrigerator and telephone leaving the whole family without light, food or power for months. The mother is not amused. I was. Sedaris put the silliness of the season in one wonderful, laughter-filled bundle of satire.

Humor is an important part of Marketing for Good. Laughter is a gift that keeps on giving. Laughter is life affirming. Laughter lightens the load. And laughter sells. In today’s Wall St. Journal the first entry on their Best of 2006 was the viral effort by Career Builder.com called Monk-e-mail. According to the WSJ:

Eleven months later, the monkey emails are still circulating. So far, CareerBuilder says, more than 80 million monkey emails have been played. The site’s traffic rose 34% this year, due in part to the email campaign. CareerBuilder says one of the most important results of its Super Bowl viral push was that it held the interest of consumers, most of whom spent six to nine minutes playing with the make-your-own monkey emails.

So, as you earnestly wrap and distribute presents this holiday season, don’t forget to share a laugh with your family and friends. A little ho ho ho can go a long way.

Cheers,

Drew

I’ve been talking about Marketing for Good for a while now but I haven’t provided too many examples of quantifiable success. Fortunately The Wall St. Journal ran an article yesterday called “Novel Program Blends Charity and Marketing” that provides just the performance data skeptics demand. The specific program discussed is a partnership between Crate & Barrel and DonorsChoose that started with Crate & Barrel sending 18,000 customers a gift certificate that recipients can direct to charities of their choice. Recipients pick from a list of non-profits on the DonorsChoose website. This program worked like gangbusters driving loyalty and changing perceptions of Crate & Barrel:

• 11% of certificates sent were redeemed (vs. under 2% industry average)
• 82% of redeemers were “very likely to consider Crate & Barrel for their next home furnishings purchase”
• 75% of gift-certificate redeemers perceived C&B as community minded vs. 21% for control group

An oh by the way the article also notes: “From green energy campaigns to the so-called (Red) brand–backed by companies such as Gap Inc. to raise money for fighting AIDS in Africa–corporate social responsibility is becoming a core marketing philosophy.” (Note–MFG covered the greening of Wal-Mart and (Red) in earlier posts.) Sounds like Marketing for Good is spreading.

A fellow Renegade recently sent me an interesting article from the September 06 issue of Fast Company called Moving Pictures.  Okay, so I’m a little behind on my reading–who isn’t? Anyway, the article is about Jeff Skoll, founder of Participant Productions, the film company behind Good Night, and Good Luck, Syriana, and An Inconvenient Truth. Jeff made a lot of dough and decided like many moguls before him to get into the picture business. But unlike his predecessors, Jeff took an entirely different approach. This paragraph from Fast Company sums it up:

Participant Productions is the first film company to be founded on a mission of social impact through storytelling. But it’s no charity. It’s a pro-social commercial operation, a hybrid emblematic of the social-entrepreneurship movement. “Ultimately, the goal here is to build a brand around social relevance in media,” Skoll says. He staked the company $100 million for its first three years; every script is evaluated equally on its creative and commercial potential and its ability to boost awareness of one of six issues: the environment, health, human rights, institutional responsibility, peace and tolerance, and social and economic equity. For each project, Participant execs with nonprofit backgrounds reach out to public-sector partners, from the ACLU to the Sierra Club, for their opinions. If those partners don’t think they can build an effective action campaign around the film, it’s a no-go. At the same time, “It can’t be good-for-you spinach, or it’s not going to work,” says Participant’s president, Ricky Strauss, a former production and advertising exec at Columbia and Sony Pictures Entertainment. “The more mainstream the story, the more opportunity to make an impact.”

This is a stellar example of marketing for good. The movies entertain and inspire when conventional wisdom said you couldn’t do both and still make money. Skoll has proved once again that the more people say that you can’t do something, the more you ought to think about trying.

My wife and I are just plain stupid about our dog. Perhaps its just because we have two teenagers who can no longer absorb all the love we have for them. Or perhaps it’s because our dog really is the best dog in the world. Regardless, recently my wife suggested that I have custom postage stamps made with our dog’s picture on them. So I dutifully went to Stamps.com and ordered the customized photo stamps. It was amazingly easy, taking less than five minutes including credit card data entry and photo uploading. A week later the stamps arrived and our holiday cards will never be the same. We laughed for about five minutes and have no doubt that the best part of getting our xmas card this year will not be the cute photo of my kids, will not be my annual (and oh so clever) year-in-review letter. No, the best part of our card will be the stamp on the envelop. I suspect it will even make a few otherwise harried postal workers laugh.Personalized stamps are a novel example of marketing for good, engaging the consumer in product design, allowing the consumer to actually enhance a normally pedestrian product and even creating a little bit of entertainment, assuming the consumer chooses an interesting photo for their stamp. This idea certainly gets my stamp of approval. (NOTE: Non-profit fund raisers may also want to look into customized stamps as a fund-raising opportunity–need to think through the mechanics of such a program but feels like a novel and perhaps painless way to get consumers to make donations while buying something they recognize is indulgent.)