Beyond Cause Marketing: Emotive Customer Bonding
The landscape is littered with cause marketing campaigns. So much so that it is tough for any one campaign to stand out. We are bombarded wherever we shop and whatever media we consume. What is the answer to this cause clutter?
According to Jason Saul, a leading expert on strategy and performance measurement in the social sector and author of the new book Social Innovation, Inc: 5 Strategies for Driving Business Growth Through Social Change, businesses and causes must move to a totally different model for linking social good and good business.
Saul says that most companies think about society as a “responsibility” and focus on mitigating risks by doing good (charity) and not doing bad (risk management). But he urges business to embrace social strategies as the powerful business strategies that they can be. Saul, sounding very much the social entrepreneur, says that some of humanity’s biggest problems, such as lack of healthcare, poor funding for education, and the deteriorating environment are today’s biggest business opportunities.
“Emotive customer bonding” is one of Saul’s five strategies for changing the way business approaches social change. Such bonding is “a powerful new form of customer loyalty” that leverages the customer experience “to address meaningful social problems,” thereby building an almost “familial allegiance” to a brand.
Saul uses OfficeMax and its “A Day Made Better” (ADMB) initiative as an example of emotive customer bonding.
OfficeMax first asked customers what social issue was most important for the company to focus on. The answer was education. During its research of educational issues, OfficeMax discovered just how often teachers bought school supplies for their students out of their own pockets—-to the tune of about $4 billion a year. The company decided to raise awareness of this problem and provide free supplies to teachers. Thus was born “A Day Made Better.”
The company picked 1200 U.S. schools, and on one day, Oct 1, 2009, sent 4,000 OfficeMax employee volunteers to classrooms, surprising teachers and students with free supplies worth about $1200. These included staples such as paper and pencils but also digital cameras, supply carts, and furniture.
OfficeMax partnered with Adopt-a-Classroom, a nonprofit that matches donors with classrooms to offset the personal expenses that teachers shoulder in order to equip their classrooms.
Adopt-a-Classroom helped OfficeMax identify deserving schools near a thousand OfficeMax locations and recruit worthy teachers. Several celebrities, ranging from Penny Marshall to Dakota Fanning to Dustin Hoffman, helped bring attention to the effort.
OfficeMax designed this campaign to both benefit the business and inspire a national movement of grassroots support for teachers. You can imagine the delight of teachers and schools. One school principal quoted in Saul’s book said, “A Day Made Better improves teacher morale, provides more supplies for our children and our classrooms, and ultimately impacts the quality of education we offer.” The campaign resulted in an 832% increase in new classroom adoptions by Adopt-a-Classroom and a torrent of media coverage.
But, the commercial outcome was just as important to OfficeMax. The company sought especially to influence a “prototypical customer” called Eve. Eve, not surprisingly, is a thirty-or forty-something woman who purchases office supplies and is likely a mom, a teacher, or both. She cares deeply about education and is emotionally attached to efforts to improve education. ADMB was designed to create an emotional connection with the thousands of Eves that happen to drive much of the market for office supplies.
The commercial outcome was a big increase in website traffic after the promotion, the redemption of coupons included in brochures as part of ADMB, which generated revenue, plus OfficeMax won several bid contracts with school districts as a direct result of the campaign. In addition, ADMB gave meaning to the thousands of employees involved in ADMB from packing boxes of supplies to delivering them to the teachers during the event.
ADMB is now an annual event and has become identified with OfficeMax’s brand and culture. The program even escaped the budget cuts that were made during the recession because, as Saul says, “The company recognized the deep value the program has brought to its target market and the company itself by forging deep emotional connections to ADMB and OfficeMax more broadly, all while addressing an important social problem.”
What makes ADMB such an unqualified success? Saul points out four attributes that make it work:
- It has a clear business objective. It has to drive real return on investment and focus on a key business priority. It is not a short-term sales promotion.
- It leverages the core business. It uses the primary engine of the business to solve a social problem.
- It creates new value. It uses emotional connections to tap latent value in the social capital market. It creates customer loyalty and engages employees.
- It makes a meaningful social impact. Donating a few cents from a product sale to a charity doesn’t cut it. It has to create a meaningful bond and make a meaningful difference.
Emotive customer bonding is only one of these five strategies that Saul identifies in his book:
- Create revenues through submarket products and services
- Enter new markets through backdoor channels
- Build emotional bonds with customers
- Develop new pipelines for talent
- Influence policy through reverse lobbying
Together they form a catapult to the next iteration of corporate social responsibility. As Saul so well puts it, “…it’s no longer enough just to ‘associate’ with a good cause–even one that makes sense for your company….Emotion requires intensity, and intensity requires deep, meaningful engagement.”
This book should be read by both businesses and nonprofits. A multitude of case studies illustrate each strategy, providing a heaping spoonful of motivation and inspiration for both causes and companies. I was certainly convinced by Saul’s argument: to reach the next level of social innovation, charities and businesses will need to approach social change in a new way.
Source: About.com
