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CONTRIBUTE BLOGS
04/02/2009 18:22
by Marcia Stepanek
When in Britain last week at
the Skoll World Forum, I was
referred to a recent article
in The Observer written by
Joss Garman, the 24-year-...
03/02/2009 22:35
by Marcia Stepanek
As the recent copyright woes
of Obama poster artist Shepard
Fairey show, there's a war
raging over what some now are
calling a new art form in ...
02/16/2009 07:24
by Marcia Stepanek
I just finished reading an
advance copy of "The Blue
Sweater: Bridging the Gap
Between Rich and Poor in an
Interconnected World,&qu...
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Walking the Talk
Using emotion to make strides with young consumers
Putting duct tape over Christina Aguilera’s mouth took a leap of faith — faith that
spending the entire marketing budget for Aldo shoes on
an edgy AIDS education and awareness effort could have a
discernible impact on young consumers. Faith that the in-yourface
tone of the campaign wouldn’t backfire on the company.
Sure, the Montreal-based shoe firm had done enough market
research to know that education, AIDS, and self-esteem are hotbutton
issues with the so-called Millennial generation — the
roughly 70 million NextGen consumers aged 8 to 24, the prize for
many retailers hot on the trail of new markets globally. And sure,
Aldo also read the marketing surveys showing these same consumers
to be very keen, as well, on volunteering and wanting to
make a difference.
Still, the campaign Aldo launched for its fall 2005 fashion season
had been seen as risky. It did not show any of the
new footwear styles in more than 600 Aldo stores
around the world. Instead, ads showed arresting
black-and-white photographs of singer Aguilera,
model Cindy Crawford, and other celebrities with
duct tape over their mouths — to make the
point that ignoring AIDS will elevate the
pandemic into global disaster. “There was
a tremendous risk that there would be a lot
of negativity to our approach,” says Robert
Hoppenheim, Aldo’s general manager of
branding and strategic development.
Not to worry: Since its 2005 launch, the company’s high-profile Hear No
Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil campaign,
about the dangers of keeping
silent about AIDS, has raised some $3.5
million for Aldo’s nonprofit education
partner, YouthAIDS, and has boosted Aldo shoe sales with many
of the young consumers the shoe company has sought to reach.
Additionally, close to 1 million “empowerment” tags — dog tags
urging people to speak up about the virus — have been sold by
Aldo, elevating YouthAIDS’ and Aldo’s profile; many hundreds
of thousands, if not millions, of people have seen the ads urging
people to get tested for the virus.
Aldo Shoes’ risky
AIDS awareness campaign
helped boost
its market share of
young consumers in
key markets globally.
But the real test? Profits. As far as cause marketing campaigns
go, the Aldo AIDS initiative did precisely what it was supposed
to accomplish: it increased brand visibility, generated
millions of dollars of free advertising for Aldo and
boosted sales. In Aldo’s case, Hoppenheim says, foot
traffic into Aldo stores increased by double digits,
and same-store sales increased by far more than the
industry average; the National Shoe Retailers
Association says same-store sales
for stores in Aldo’s niche were up 6.1 percent
in 2005. And sales remain strong,
Aldo says. The boost is sustainable.
Not bad for what had been a nichemarket
shoe company, market analysts say.
“This campaign helped Aldo to break out
of the pack,” says David Hessekiel, president
of Cause Marketing Forum, a four-year-old cause research and consulting
firm based in Rye, N.Y.
But Aldo is not alone in turning to
cause marketing to crack the tough but
critical youth market. Dozens of companies
are now scrambling to win the hearts and
mindshare of the young with cause marketing.
The current Red Project, the
Bono-brokered effort that is enlisting
companies from the Gap to Motorola to
create special “red” T-shirts and Razrs to
help fund the fight against AIDS in
Africa, is blitzing markets from Manhattan
to Monterey this holiday season.
Dove soap’s Campaign for Real Beauty
effort, meanwhile, continues to feature
full-figured women in a noble quest to
dust off an old brand and redefine the culture’s
definition of beauty, reaping a double-
digit growth in sales in the process.
M.A.C. cosmetics, meanwhile, is once
again this season pushing its AIDS education
campaign, offering to contribute 100
percent of the retail price from the sales of
its $14 Viva Glam lipsticks in hopes of increasing
its affinity among minority
youth. Even a mattress company, Select
Comfort Mattress, Inc., is getting into the
act. Last year, the Minneapolis-based
firm donated $5 for every pillow it sold to
help sick children at Ronald McDonald
House charities to “get
a better night’s sleep.”
The $167,000 it has
raised so far, though, is
no pipe dream.
But how far can the strategic use of
emotion, cause, and compelling creative go
to break through to kids in today’s mediasaturated
marketplace? Very far, say market
experts. “This is a very Web-centric
group,” says Carol Cone, the CEO of Cone,
Inc., a Boston-based cause marketing
consultancy. “They see over 400 to 600 advertisements
a day. How do you get their
attention? Advocating a
cause is a way to break
through, because this is
a very civic, very socially
conscious group.”
No kidding. In a 2006
Cone survey of consumers
aged 8-24, 8 out of 10 said
they will purchase a company’s
product or service if
they think the company is
engaged in a cause that is
relevant to them; 68 percent
said that if price and
quality are about equal, they will switch to
a brand that is advocating a cause relevant
to them. Seventy-nine percent said they will
recommend a company if they know it’s engaged
sincerely and deeply in a cause, and
they’ll recommend it to other people.
Concludes Cone: “If you’re in a business
or you’re a nonprofit and you want to
fundraise from this group or sell to it, look
at their market power. They have a huge
amount of disposable income. It’s almost
$300 billion. And they’re going to vote with
their hands and their feet and their hearts.”
Still not convinced? A full 86 percent of
Millennials said companies have a responsibility
to support social issues and environmental
causes — and another 56 percent
said they don’t want to work for a company
that hasn’t already aligned itself with a
cause. “It’s about employee retention as
much as it is about selling,” says Alan R.
Andreasen, professor of marketing at the
McDonough School of Business at
Georgetown University. “A lot of
MBA students these days would
like to think they’re not going to go
work for potential sleaze balls.”
Dove’s Campaign for
Real Beauty took on
self-esteem as a cause
and won double-digit
increases in sales
across the United
States and Europe.
To be sure, cause marketing,
which broke out of the skids only
a few years back as a new field,
has never been hotter with companies and
consumers. But successful campaigns like
those waged by Aldo and Dove are not easy
to pull off. Such high-profile campaigns
can often take years to put together and require
huge investments of time, money
and strategic planning to get just right.
The Red Project, for example, began
when UN Secretary General Kofi Annan
called in 2001 for a new global fund to
fight AIDS, but it took a
joint effort by U2 rock
star Bono, Bobby Shriver
(whose father, Sargent,
cofounded the Peace
Corps in the 1960s), and
Robert Rubin, the Citigroup
executive and former
Treasury Secretary
under President Clinton,
to start the ball rolling
with the corporate crowd.
But the group still had a
tough time convincing
companies to take the bait: According to a
report earlier this year in The Wall Street
Journal, Apple Computer and Time
Warner Inc.’s AOL unit declined to sign on
at first: some companies worried about being
accused of “AIDS profiteering”; still
others worried that companies can’t both
profit and give money away for very long
without taking a hit on the balance sheet.
But for many companies, seeing cause
as an expense completely misses the
point. Maureen Shireff, North American
creative director at Ogilvy & Mather in
Chicago, who spearheaded Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty in
2004, says cause marketing is a quicksure way for companies to
“get an emotional grip on a new generation of consumers.” It’s also
a way to go up against competing brands without having to spend
a king’s ransom. “Pantene and L’Oreal were outspending us by
huge margins,” she said. “Cause gave us a way to outshine without
spending.”
Sex in the City
Another thing to consider when using
cause to sell: Choose the right
nonprofit partner. Dove has the
Self-Esteem Fund, which raises
money for programs to teach girls
leadership and self-confidence.
Aldo has YouthAIDS; Gibson Guitars had Music Rising, a nonprofit
that was raising money to help get New Orleans musicians
back on their feet after Hurricane Katrina. “It has to be original
tie-in,” says Cone, nothing too obvious or transparent. “Cause
branding efforts most likely to be accepted by the public and the
media will appear neither improbable nor forced,” Cone wrote in
Harvard Business Review. “You don’t want to appear too mercenary,
as in being a bank tied to nonprofits that teach financial education.
But you want to get a business benefit from the cause.”
In Aldo’s case, the firm had been involved with AIDS education
since 1985, spurred by early, high-profile cases of AIDS in the
fashion industry. But it didn’t push the advocacy button really
hard until after the company’s global expansion had gotten under
way. When shopping around for a nonprofit partner, it came
down to a photo of Sex in the City actress Kristin Davis wearing
a “Hello Kitty for YouthAIDS” T-shirt that caught Hoppenheim’s
attention in 2004. He began researching the Washington, D.C.-
based nonprofit group. “I remember having
a sort of epiphany about YouthAIDS, saying,
‘Wow. These are the types of people we
should be working with because of their entrepreneurial
spirit,’” Hoppenheim says.
“They seemed to get the marketing side of
things, which is unusual.”
Cause and Affect
Successful cause marketing campaigns boost sales and contribute to the cause.
Here are some examples of cause strategies that have worked to boost the bottom line:
click to enlarge
Aldo’s New York City ad agency, Kraft-Works, came up with the “Hear No Evil” theme, and in conjunction
with that and a somewhat militant tone, metal dog tags were
designed with the words “See,” “Hear,” or “Speak.” Dubbed empowerment
tags, to resonate with the activism that was obvious in
youth marketing surveys, the tags sold for $1 each at Aldo stores
and online for $5 each, with the entire net profit — about $4 per
tag — going to YouthAIDS. YouthAIDS then leaned on its Hollywood
and music industry connections to recruit celebrities who
would resonate with young consumers in key markets: Aguilera
came on through a friend of Aldo’s in New York. Renowned
fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh
worked at a reduced rate and donated
much of his time. In all, eight megastars —
including hip-hop artist LL Cool J and
actress Salma Hayek — posed for photo
shoots in Los Angeles and New York City.
(An additional 21 celebrities would be
featured in the spring 2006 campaign.)
The final piece: A stand-alone Web site
to sell the tags, provide AIDS information,
and trigger viral marketing for the
cause and the company. People who go
onto the site can e-mail campaign materials
to others, and post campaign banners
on personal Web sites with links
back to the YouthAIDS-Aldo site.
So far so good: Nearly a year after Aldo
started its campaign, the site attracts
about 35,000 visitors a day, with much of
the traffic following links from other
sites. Kate Roberts, the former Saatchi &
Saatchi marketing whiz who founded
YouthAIDS and now runs it, says simplicity
has been key. “ It’s very clear why this
campaign is running and what you have to
do,” she says. “You buy the tag and you go
to the Web site and get educated. We
wanted to make that very, very clear.” Adds
Cone: “In an instant messaging environment
where companies are spending
hundreds of millions of dollars to break
through (to the youth market), wouldn’t it
be great to have a more receptive
ear? I believe that cause
creates that more receptive environment
for other marketing
messages to get through.” Her
point: Beat the path to young
wallets with cause, and it’s easier
to win some mindshare
around pitches for other products.
But cause marketing, as a discipline and
a strategy, is just the beginning, says Cone.
“This industry is so vibrant and those of us
in it are so excited about its future because
you can bring content, relationship, and
feet on the street to get to young people,
and you can energize them around grants
and companies and social issues. It’s about
relationship. It’s about working together.
It’s about doing. The cause provides a sustainability
that we just haven’t seen before.”
 Product (RED)
asks retailers to
donate up to half
the profits from red-branded
versions of their
hottest products to
AIDS charities.
So where’s it all headed? For Aldo, the
next step in its campaign is to go for greater
emotional depth, by getting
the celebrities in its Speak No
Evil campaign to start talking,
telling people how the
funds raised via the cause
marketing campaign are being used to help
people globally. Some of YouthAIDS’
celebrities toured AIDS programs in Central
America in June. A crew from the Discovery
Network filmed the trip for a
documentary, which is to air on World
AIDS Day Dec. 1 — in time for Christmas.
As for the Red Project, the road is wide
open: participating companies have to
make a five-year commitment to the
cause. For those already on board, the rewards
are real. Motorola’s red Razr cellphones
are outselling its silver ones, says
spokeswoman Shannon Swallow.
But is success sustainable? Aldo’s
Hoppenheim says people have sent thousands
of e-mails saying the See No Evil
campaign has personally helped them to
deal with the stigma of AIDS. Sales remain
strong. The campaign has also helped Aldo
to woo new employees; people have applied
for jobs at Aldo who might not have
otherwise. “It has been and continues to be
the most profound work experience I’ve
ever had,” Hoppenheim says. “It’s really
been one of those opportunities where you
can find a way of helping people and helping
business simultaneously.”
— With additional reporting by Marcia
Stepanek and Cara Tabachnik in New York.
Illustration by James Steinberg
Lori Sharn is a former reporter for USA Today and now freelances from Virginia.
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