Now more than ever, consumers not only want to like the products they buy — but also who they buy them from. Increasingly, they’re holding businesses to higher ethical standards, and placing ever greater importance on the extent to which a company shares their values and aims to improve the community in which it operates.
Businesses have taken note and responded with changes in their brand messaging to reflect evolving consumer preferences.
Social Impact Marketing
Social impact marketing highlights a company’s pro-social values to customers. You’ll see this strategy used by mom-and-pop shops and global brands alike. And it’s become a significant part of the mission and messaging of many successful brands, including some that you’re no doubt familiar with:
- Tom’s Shoes: Footwear for the needy, safe water, gun violence.
- Life is Good: Life is Good Foundation for vulnerable children.
- The Body Shop: Anti-animal testing, bio-bridges, plastic recycling.
- Always: Girls’ and women’s confidence (#LikeAGirl).
- Starbucks: Ethical sourcing, refugee hiring, FoodShare.
- Burt’s Bees: Animal welfare, recyclable packaging, honeybees.
- Dove: Paternity leave advocacy, campaign for real beauty.
Social impact marketing isn’t new. If you don’t recall the Coca-Cola “Hilltop” commercial with the jingle “Buy the World a Coke,” you may have seen the 1971 spot memorialized on the series finale of Mad Men. In a memorable TV moment, a soft drink manufacturer forever associated the image of its popular beverage and brand with a message of world peace and multicultural inclusion.
Clearly, even before the days of big data, companies understood the potential value of marketing with social responsibility in mind.
Social Responsibility is Good Business
The political activism of the early 1970s has given way to more recent social and economic justice movements. Increasingly let down by government and other societal institutions, consumers today are actively engaging in brand democracy, promoting the changes they want to see in the world by voting with their wallets.
According to the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, a 16,000-person survey across eight countries released by the trust and reputation management firm, 81% of respondents reported brand trust as a deciding factor when purchasing. Trust fell behind several other considerations, including: quality, convenience and value. This finding comes despite the fact that only about a third of respondents said they trust most of the brands they buy or use.
According to Edelman, trust also has important ramifications for the employer-employee relationship and is directly related to a company’s bottom line. Two-thirds of those surveyed reported that they would either not work for or would demand higher compensation from an organization that “did not share their values or provide the opportunity to address societal problems.”
Companies that have earned greater trust also enjoy greater loyalty and levels of endorsement from stakeholders. And along with seemingly greater resilience in the face of adversity, Edelman found that “high trust” companies outperformed their sector in terms of stock market performance by 5%.
Edelman identified four dimensions of trust: ability, integrity, dependability and purpose. Purpose relates to the belief that an organization is working to have a positive societal impact. Companies can leverage their purposeful and meaningful actions to gain a greater competitive advantage in the marketplace. “Trust is a critical asset for any organization, and as such, it needs to be protected, promoted and managed to improve the chances that an organization will succeed in the long term,” the report says.
Social Impact as Corporate Responsibility
Recent developments in the business world have potentially elevated the role of social impact from a mere marketing message to a corporate mandate. Business Roundtable, a nonprofit association of CEOs of major U.S. companies that promotes business-friendly public policy, recently revised its Principles of Corporate Governance to reflect new thinking on the role of business in society. The guidance update effectively redefined the purpose of a corporation for the first time in more than two decades.
In a significant departure from its previous stance, the association has expanded the role of a corporation beyond serving shareholders to include the interests of all stakeholders — a group that now also encompasses customers, employers, suppliers and the communities in which they operate. On the last point, they assert, “We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.”
This means that in order to comply with the new guidance, corporations would now have an obligation to operate in a socially responsible manner. Social impact marketing is one way to demonstrate and communicate that commitment. But whether you’re a corporation or not, social impact marketing makes good business sense in today’s economic climate.
Where to Start?
While the Business Roundtable guidance does not define any specific compliance requirements, companies can highlight their efforts in this area even if their business is not primarily associated with socially or ecologically responsible products or services. Social impact marketing does not have to incorporate every aspect of your brand — you can begin with shining a light on a charity that your company supports, whether through financial giving, hands-on volunteering or simply informing customers about your sustainable business practices.
From a content planning perspective, social impact marketing is also a convenient opportunity to add variety to more aggressive promotional messaging. You can highlight your social impact throughout your content marketing channels, including:
- Blog posts
- Social media
- Newsletters
- Web content
- Press releases
- Ad copy
- Signage
- Email marketing
- Brochures
- Video content
- Podcasts
Many organizations donate money and products as well as do pro bono work. Why not highlight your contributions on social media and enlist others to help out a worthy cause? You can use your platform to help get the word out for charities you support.
If your business is not actively involved in charitable giving, consider seeking out a nonprofit that ties in with the products or services you offer. A paint manufacturer, for example, might think about supporting Habitat for Humanity; for a clothing retailer, women’s shelters may be a good charitable fit.
Opportunities abound for businesses to help make a difference in their communities and contribute on a societal level. And there’s a good chance your organization is doing something already. So use your voice and brand messaging to show your customers, and the rest of your stakeholders, where your values meet.
Sources:
https://opportunity.businessroundtable.org/ourcommitment/