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    Path to Purpose: How to use cause marketing to build a more meaningful and profitable brand
    Path to Purpose: How to use cause marketing to build a more meaningful and profitable brand
    Path to Purpose: How to use cause marketing to build a more meaningful and profitable brand
    Ebook230 pages2 hours

    Path to Purpose: How to use cause marketing to build a more meaningful and profitable brand

    By Carolyn Butler-Madden

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    About this ebook

    Marketers and leaders recognise that developing an authentic purpose helps to build a stronger
    brand that attracts followers and collaborators, rather than just customers and consumers.
    In a world that needs solutions, people increasingly look towards businesses and their brands
    to help solve society’s problems.
    In

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Cause Effect Pty Ltd
    Release dateOct 18, 2017
    ISBN9780648087557
    Path to Purpose: How to use cause marketing to build a more meaningful and profitable brand
    Author

    Carolyn Butler-Madden

    Carolyn's 30-year international marketing career includes 18 years as an agency owner, working with some of the world's best brands. Since starting her Purpose Consultancy, The Cause Effect in 2017, "Profit with Purpose" has become her guiding mantra. She has helped corporate leaders and leaders of both medium and small organisations to define and articulate their purpose and embed it strategically into their organisations. Her first book, Path To Purpose, published in 2017, was Australia's first on cause marketing.

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      Book preview

      Path to Purpose - Carolyn Butler-Madden

      INTRODUCTION

      Have you ever had goosebumps listening to a speech? I have. In 2012, I was at a cause marketing conference in Chicago listening to Nada Dugas, a senior marketer from Procter & Gamble (P&G), talk about the Pampers Nappies ‘one pack = one vaccine’ campaign in partnership with UNICEF. It was an extraordinary moment and one that went onto change my view of the role that brands can have in society.

      Dugas had been involved in the Pampers campaign from its very early days. She talked about the impact of the campaign. Back then, in 2012, the campaign had been running for six years and had helped to eradicate Maternal and Neonatal Tetanus (MNT) in eight countries by funding over 300 million vaccines and raising over US$40 million in donations.

      During her speech, Dugas highlighted that the campaign had been one of P&G’s single most successful marketing campaigns globally, delivering exceptional volume and market share growth. She went on to say, with more conviction than I’ve heard from any marketer before or since, that P&G and Pampers would not stop in their efforts until MNT had been completely eradicated from the world. And they haven’t. Today, in partnership with UNICEF, they are within a hair’s breadth of achieving that outcome.

      It’s an incredible example of the power that brands can bring to the world today, creating much needed social impact and, in so doing, delivering the commercial outcomes that are essential to business profitability.

      Pampers is just one really powerful example of a brand creating social impact and doing well as a result. There are plenty of others. There’s a name for this marketing strategy. It’s called cause marketing. To define it simply, it’s when a brand aligns itself with a cause to drive social impact and create brand value. An authentic alignment between a brand and its selected cause partner allows the brand to develop a credible social purpose. This is then marketed in a way that enables the brand’s customers, consumers, its company’s employees and partners, and even the wider public, to become collaborators in creating social impact around that purpose.

      Done well, it has the power to change the world.

      Path to Purpose is a book written for 21st century CEOs and marketing leaders who want to build a more meaningful and purposeful brand that will thrive in a fast-changing, high demand environment.

      So, let me declare my position and my credentials upfront. I have over 30 years’ experience working on the agency side of marketing – first in London and then, for the last 20 years, in Australia. I have worked predominantly in below-the-line marketing and brand activation, i.e. unabashedly focusing on sales driving and engagement results. I’m particularly motivated by a desire to offer up creatively-driven solutions that deliver hardcore results. In other words, I’m not wed to being creative for the sake of creativ-ity. For me, the end game is clear. It’s about delivering tangible results.

      As the marketing environment has changed over time, it’s become harder to deliver those results and, like many in the industry, I’ve been operating in over-drive trying to figure out how to engage consumers in this new environment.

      My own path to purpose came through direct experience. First, in delivering local community marketing programs for retail clients and second, by delivering cause marketing campaigns for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) and retail clients. It was through these direct experiences that I realised that here was a strategy that could enable brands to genuinely connect with consumers. The early results we generated were proof of the commercial benefits – improved sales and brand health. The social benefits were also obvious as we were able to fundraise and increase awareness of the cause and the work of the cause partner.

      That’s when a light switched on for me and I took myself off to Chicago to the aforementioned conference to find out more about this thing called cause marketing. That conference was an eye-opener. The sophistication with which companies were leveraging this strategy was astonishing and made me realise that, in this particular area of marketing, in Australia, we might as well be living in the Dark Ages.

      What bewildered me though was this: the problems that a cause or purpose-led approach solve are just as relevant to the Australian market as they are to the US and the other countries’

      markets, which are active in cause marketing.

      If you’re responsible for the marketing of a consumer-facing brand, there’s a high likelihood that you are dealing with one or all of the following challenges: 

      Brand awareness and brand health. In today’s media-fractured environment, you recognise that you need a strategy that will cut through and seize the attention of consumers, that goes beyond pricing offers and other tactical initiatives. You also understand the absolute necessity for your brand to build trust with its customers.

      The number crunchers need you to deliver sales today. That focus on short-term sales makes it incredibly hard to build a brand of substance, particularly if budgets are being cut year on year.

      Employee engagement. Fast becoming recognised as a crucial part of the marketing mix, most CEOs and CMOs realise that a disengaged workforce will affect customer experience, making it increasingly harder to deliver a believable brand promise.

      Cause marketing is rarely considered as a marketing solution to these problems because ‘cause’ sits in the realm of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and is seen as a cost to business as opposed to a business opportunity. There is also a distinct lack of awareness in Australia on its successful use as a strategic marketing platform.

      When cause marketing is approached strategically and executed well, it doesn’t just solve one or two of the three problems highlighted above, it can solve all three of them at the same time.

      This takes me back to my question of why Australian marketers are so under-informed about this particular type of marketing. Are we really so different to other markets? I don’t think so. The reason I’ve written this book is to address this lack of awareness directly and, in doing so, to highlight the successes of both global and local brands that have used cause marketing and/or a deeper purpose-led approach.

      Speaking of purpose, you may be wondering about the relationship between brand purpose and cause marketing.

      Purpose has had a lot of airtime recently in marketing circles. There’s no lack of information on why a brand should consider a purpose-led strategy. Despite all the chatter, there appears to be some haziness surrounding the idea of just how to hit the ‘go’ button on purpose. Inevitably, building a brand purpose is seen as a big strategic play, which for some businesses, especially in Australia’s risk-averse environment, is perhaps too big and too risky.

      There are a number of ways you can build a purpose-led approach for your brand. This book focuses on just one: cause marketing. It makes the simple case that, in a world where trust is the new currency and authenticity is the value by which it’s judged, actions speak far louder than any words possibly can.

      Cause marketing is about what your brand does and, just as importantly, what it enables, rather than what it says it is. When you take a cause marketing approach, it doesn’t have to mean a complete repositioning of your brand. A cause marketing campaign can be a credible and powerful first step on a path towards purpose. For brands that already have an established brand purpose, cause marketing can also be a strong way to bring your brand purpose to life.

      In a world where trust is the new currency and authenticity is the value by which it’s judged, actions speak far louder than any words possibly can

      This book also highlights the impact that Millennials are having in driving the change in what people now expect from businesses and brands. It explains the science behind cause marketing and also makes a powerful case for why doing good is good for business.

      Perhaps most important is the inspiration within these pages. Fourteen case studies, more than half of which are from Australia, will inspire you and give you confidence in exploring how cause marketing can work for your brand.

      The examples come from a variety of business categories. They demonstrate the versatility of the strategy and reinforce how powerful it can be when done well.

      For those of you who want to understand how to go about developing a cause marketing approach for your brand, I share my six-step methodology. It’s a common sense methodology developed from my own direct experience, as well as from deconstructing cause marketing campaigns from all over the world. This methodology will enable you to:

      create a program that strategically aligns with your brand and your business’s key priorities

      get support and engagement across the business and with the company’s leadership team

      develop a powerful marketing platform that builds year on year

      create powerful storytelling opportunities and unlock media value beyond your dollar investment

      avoid the pitfalls associated with poorly developed or constructed cause marketing campaigns.

      Central, of course, to all of this is delivering genuine social impact. This is the driving force behind every successful cause marketing campaign. When people feel a part of something important and meaningful, the effort follows, regardless of whether you’re a consumer, employee, a partner or a supplier.

      My hope is that once you have read this book, you’ll understand why cause marketing is growing so quickly and you’ll understand the power of a brand standing and acting for something and attracting followers and collaborators.

      A lovely mantra that is commonly used in cause marketing circles is ‘doing well by doing good’. It neatly sums up what cause marketing offers brand marketers today. And when you know how, it’s really not that hard.

      HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF PATH TO PURPOSE

      This book has been written so that if you’re unfamiliar with cause marketing and you want to read it cover to cover, you can. If time isn’t on your side, or you are already familiar with the subject, I’ve summarised the key points at the end of each chapter. You can start with these and dive in deeper to the chapters you want more information on.

      The case studies and examples are the meat in the sandwich of this book.

      There are 14 case studies and they range from one-off campaign-led activities to brands that have gone on to integrate a cause or purpose into the heart of what they stand for. The shining examples will be obvious to the reader, but I encourage you to read all of them with an open mind and recognise the value that each offers – not just in creating social impact but also in getting a brand started on a path towards purpose, given that getting started is usually the hardest part of the journey.

      You may notice a little bit of repetition in these pages. This is deliberate in that it enables the reader who chooses not to read the book cover to cover to get as much value from it as possible.

      Part 1

      Chapter 1

      THE POWER OF

      PURPOSE

      The Thankyou organisation is a social enterprise. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s an Australian business with a product range including water, muesli, hand soap, body care products and, more recently, baby products. Its goal is to empower Australians and New Zealanders to make a difference in the world through making a simple choice within their everyday life – to purchase a brand that contributes to a good cause. Once all the costs of bringing Thankyou products to market are taken care of, every remaining cent funds life-changing projects in the developing world through partnerships with project-specific not-for-profit (NFP) organisations such as World Vision and the World Food Programme.

      In their early days, Thankyou Water (as they were then known) had been unsuccessful in getting distribution through Coles and Woolworths. Their distribution was limited to 7-Eleven, Australia Post outlets and a network of independent super markets. Without the support of Coles and Woolworths, the opportunity for the organisation to fulfil its purpose was, at best, limited.

      In 2013, the organisation launched a social media campaign to pressure Coles and Woolworths into stocking its range. It released a video calling on their supporters to upload videos and post comments to the Coles and Woolworths Facebook pages to show they’d buy the products if they were stocked. The Thankyou team already had a meeting scheduled with Coles, but this time they wanted to bring more than just a product to their presentation, they wanted to bring them an opportunity.

      SUPPORTERS TAKE TO SOCIAL MEDIA TO CREATE OPPORTUNITY

      Social media went mad. The Coles and Woolworths Facebook pages were inundated with messages and videos in the weeks leading up to the team’s meeting with Coles. To support the social media campaign, the Thankyou team employed stunt tactics as helicopters flew huge banners over both retailers’ head offices. An appearance on one of the main television network morning shows rounded the campaign out.

      The campaign succeeded. In unleashing a torrent of public

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