Marketing, first and foremost, should do good for the brand. And by good, I mean, sell product. A well-meaning socially responsible campaign that doesn’t sell product is no good. The folks responsible for said well-meaning campaign will either lose their jobs or be pushed aside by marketing managers who can correlate their efforts to positive sales results. That said, if we only look at marketing through our “results glasses” then we end up with bomb scares in Boston.
Let’s revisit the Boston bomber incident from a results only perspective. As Seth and Naomi pointed out on this blog a couple of days ago:
What they successfully did was reach a very broad audience. How many other ad campaigns create this much coverage? Everyone in America knows there is a new cartoon on the Cartoon Network…and most of us didn’t even know a Cartoon Network existed until yesterday.
Yes indeed, the $2.0 million Time Warner ended up paying to assuage Boston was a bargain relative to the media value created by this stunt. Aqua Teen Hunger Force became a household name overnight. Even the tactic, however odious, reinforced the subversive credentials of Adult Swim and its ‘man boy’ target. On this basis, this stunt did good for the brand. BUT the other part of Marketing for Good is the recognition that marketing needs to do good for the brand AND the world we share. To only do good for the brand takes a myopic, short-term perspective that will inevitably come back to bite the brand or parent company (in the case of Time Warner) in the proverbial tuchis.
So where does one start, selling or saving the world? Snickers focused on selling when it created its meant-to-be comical Super Bowl commercial that showed two men accidentally kissing. Next thing you know, gay organizations are protesting noting that the ad was “offensive to gays.” USA Today treated the Snickers story as headline news today as Masterfoods’ announced that they were pulling the plug on the commercial. Since they had planned a whole online extension of this campaign with alternate endings, this couldn’t have been an easy decision. Frankly, I think this is a tempest in a teapot and as one gay activist noted in USA Today not everyone was offended by this spot:
Cyd Zeigler, co-founder of Outsports.com, a website for gay sports enthusiasts, says he saw it at a Super Bowl party with 30 gay friends — and no one had a problem with it. “I simply wasn’t offended by it,” Zeigler says. “I just don’t see how a couple of mechanics pulling out chest hair because they kissed is offensive.”
Marketing for Good does not embrace only doing “safe” ads that offend no one. Frankly, if you offend no one, you often appeal to no one. Burger King saved its business by not playing it safe. More on that tomorrow.