Tag: brands

Social purpose denialists are the anti-vaxxers of marketing

For every trend there is a counter-trend. For a fast-growing trend of brands trying to find social purpose – there are purpose denialists. Like anti-vaxxers of marketing, armed with dubious research, hearsay and ideologies of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s childhood, they advocate for brands to abandon social purpose, and go back to thinking only about profits and shareholder value.

It’s become popular to attack progress and invoke nostalgia for good old days. Trump’s attacks on climate scientists and activists, Brexiteers’ yearning for the times before EU regulations and protections. Similarly, purpose denialists are clinging to Milton Friedman’s damaging theory that businesses’ sole purpose is to generate profit for shareholders and that those who adopt responsible attitudes would face constraints, rendering them less competitive.

What Friedman and his many present followers failed to see is that market competitiveness and social purpose are not mutually exclusive. Brands that deliver on purpose do not have inferior products or lack innovation. To the contrary, they see innovation in a broader sense, not merely limited to product development, but all aspects of business management. Moreover, purpose denialists’ philosophy that product features and profits are everything present a demeaning view of the role of business in our society.

Now, almost 50 years after Friedman’s short-sighted theory first saw light, we know better. We understand that ignoring environmental and social issues is bad for business. Companies that break environmental regulations get harsh penalties and suffer reputational damage, as well as poisoning their customers. Avoiding tax reduces state budgets to finance healthcare and education, thus depleting the pool of healthy qualified employees. Not looking after staff results in higher turnover and recruitment costs, low productivity and greater difficulty attracting the best candidates.

Quaker Oats president Kenneth Mason wrote in Business Week: “Making a profit is no more the purpose of a corporation than getting enough to eat is the purpose of life. Getting enough to eat is a requirement of life; life’s purpose, one would hope, is somewhat broader and more challenging. Likewise with business and profit.”

Holland & Barrett CMO Caroline Hipperson went even further by writing in The Drum that “brands who don’t live their ethics are headed for danger”. She goes on to say that the reason why brands get it wrong today is that they tend to exaggerate a problem, or an issue or a solution to make a point, to dramatise”

Also the danger of brands jumping on the purpose bandwagon is that it becomes only about advertising with nothing to substantiate their claims (think Pepsi), thus eroding trust and generating consumer backlash. Brands and their parent companies need to find social purpose that is truthful to their product and heritage, live the purpose internally, and only then – communicate.

The strategy of transparency, sustainability and truthfulness is paying off for Holland & Barrett with brand trust scores going up continuously. Sales are on the up too, with group revenues increased by 7.1% year-on-year.

There are many other examples of brands doing social purpose well: IKEA, Nike, Toms, Patagonia, Blackrock, Lego, Divine Chocolate  – all achieving brand growth and high levels of employee and customer loyalty.

But of course we don’t even need a business case. Businesses need to do the right thing because it is the right thing to do.

When Anger is a Force for Good

Last Wednesday I attended “Anger: A Force For Good” event held at the wonderfully hospitable ad agency BMB. The event explored what made people angry, how they channelled their anger (tellingly the talk was held on the anniversary of Trump’s election and the Russian Revolution centenary) and whether anger could be used positively.

Haras Rafiq, the CEO of counter radicalisation think tank Quilliam, talked about the dark and destructive side of anger: islamist, far-right and far-left extremism. I learned that people became radicalised when they had real or perceived grievances and were fed partial truths.

Anthropologist Nazima Kadir illustrated what we unfortunately knew too well (think Brexit, Trump, AfD, etc.) – people get angry when they are ignored.

To lift us out of the darkness of anger’s destructive forces was a presentation by Ian Murray the founder of consultancy house51 and BMB’s own Head of Planning Jamie Inman. A stat that I took out from the research was that almost as many people in the UK (45%) got angry about the injustice of something that happened to other people, as about something that affected them personally (47%). If empathy is key to a more peaceful and happy world, than empathetic anger is nothing less than a driving force for good.

On the day of the event there was hopeful evidence that anti-Trump anger started bearing fruits, as Democrats swept to victory in governor, state legislative and mayors’ elections across the US.

In media and advertising it’s widely accepted that emotive content and marketing perform best.

Top shared media stories are emotional. In case you are wondering which emotions dominate, well, it varies by media. In the last 12 months the top shared story on The Telegraph “Redhead emoji finally on the table after campaign for ginger equality” is 59% joyful (IBM Watson Tone Analyzer). Whereas the Guardian’s top shared article “Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it” is 59% fearful. While The New York Times‘s “Trump’s Lies” is 72% angry.

The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising found that marketing underscored by emotion performed twice as well as campaigns based around rational thinking.

Traditionally, marketing has been dominated by two emotions: happiness and fear. In the first episode of Madmen Don Draper calmly tells his clients: “Advertising is based on one thing: happiness, and do you know what happiness is? … It’s freedom from fear.”

According to BMB/house51 research 60% of the UK population got angry in the past week. So there is a lot of anger out there, and it is important for marketers to be ‘in tune’ with how people feel.

Forget the John Lewis ad, my current favourite is Jigsaw’s pro-immigration campaign. It starts boldly with “British style is not 100% British. In fact, there is no such thing as 100% British”, and finishes with “Fear, isolation and intolerance will hold us back. Love, openness and collaboration will take us forward”.

A great campaign targeted at Jigsaw’s liberal educated target audience, which addresses their anger with Brexit and anti-immigrant climate.

Tesco’s mass-market positioning means that its similarly-themed Christmas ad provoked an angry reaction from the far-right for featuring a Muslim family. Its yet to be seen what it would mean for Tesco’s sales but the ad has worked generating priceless publicity.

Both Jigsaw and Tesco have managed to either chime with existing anger or provoke anger, and both campaigns carry a positive message of love, openness and happy co-existence. So, perhaps the most successful campaigns are three-part dramas that take us on a roller-coaster of a range of different emotions:

1. Set-up: anticipation;

2. Jeopardy: anger;

3. Resolution: joy.

And after more than a year of anger, I can only hope for a joyful resolution to the Trump/Brexit saga.

What social data can tell us about social purpose

Increasingly brands want to know whether people think about social purpose when shopping, whether it lifts their moods or if they talk to others about it. Sometimes asking people about it in surveys may not yield accurate results: people often don’t register what they are thinking about, and may not realise that social purpose matters to them. Others may virtue signal, and exaggerate the importance of brand social purpose to them. And lastly, social purpose can have a different effect on different groups of people.

Thankfully, whilst still not perfect, actual data of conversations on social media can help understand whether social purpose matters to people engaging with different brands, and what effect it has on them.

I looked at over 14,000 tweets in the last 30 days, mentioning UK supermarkets: Aldi, ASDA, Lidl, Morrisons, M&S, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose.

Using IBM SPSS Modeler Text Analytics package, I extracted over 5,000 concepts from these tweets and organised them into 100 themes/categories, ranging from food, drink, taste, price, customer service to emotions, employment desirability and social purpose.

When tweeting about Social Purpose in the context of UK supermarkets, people mentioned 15 different types of action, including fundraising for/donating to charities, paying fairly to staff and suppliers, improving communities and lives, helping victims of disaster emergencies, staff volunteering for charities and local communities, protecting the environment, ensuring sustainable food supplies and supporting food banks.

Present in 5% of all tweets, social purpose ranks joint 5th amongst key themes, behind food, other products, and location but on-par with customer service and offers, and ahead of wine (!), problems and online shopping.

1. Food: 11% of all tweets

2. Products: 10%

3. Location: 8%

4. Store: 7%

5. Customer Service: 5%

5. Offers, Promos, Competitions: 5%

5. Social Purpose: 5%

8. Wine, beer other drinks: 4%

9. Problems: 3%

9. Staff: 3%

9. Online Shopping: 3%

10. Plastic Bags: 2%

Text link analysis showed that social purpose was most likely to appear in tweets about Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and M&S. It was also linked to other themes, e.g. staff, produced in the UK, plastic bags, etc.

 

Waitrose punches above its weight when it comes to being mentioned in tweets with a social purpose theme. It was mentioned in 11% of all tweets but 25% of social purpose tweets, giving it an index of 233. Tesco’s was mentioned in a whopping 41% of social purpose tweets, although a third of those were negative, accusing the retailer of pocketing plastic bag charges. M&S is underperforming relative to its overall tweets share, giving it an index below 100.

 

For Waitrose and people tweeting about it social purpose is hugely important, present in 13% of tweets and ranking 3rd only behind food and store environment.

Text link analysis shows that social purpose is interlinked with other themes. Most importantly it shows that social purpose makes people feel and tweet positively about Waitrose. It also makes them want to work for it.

Overall, premium and mid-market food retailers have higher social purpose indexes vs those competing on price. One could argue that this could be explained by their customers’ greater levels of interest in social purpose.

However, most likely this is due to the brands’ own levels of engagement in social purpose activities, how consistently they live this purpose and how they communicate it to the outside world. This would also explain variations within each category: Waitrose vs. M&S, or Tesco vs. Sainsbury’s. And with one-third of regular Waitrose customers also shopping in Lidl (Kantar/TGI), consumer segments are now shared, and there’s nothing stopping brand getting behind social purpose.