Download When Content Marketing Makes a Difference Brands that address

When Content Marketing Makes a Difference
Brands that address the social challenges of their target demographics offer consumers the
ultimate value proposition: a better world.
I saw a video recently of a talk given by Rohit Bhargava, a member of Global Strategy &
Planning group at Ogilvy. One of the first questions he asked his audience was how many of
them worked in marketing. A surge of hands. Next, he asked how many of those thought
marketing was making the world a better place. A trickle of hands.
It’s no surprise. For years, marketing has been thought of as a bullhorn through which
numberless brands berate consumers with interchangeable messages. American consumers
are now exposed to upwards of 5,000 marketing messages a day. But with the growth of
social media and its ability to link people together to support social causes, we may be
seeing a sustainable shift from a flood of irrelevant calls-to-action to more nuanced
messaging in which brands and social challenges share a common cause.
Some brands within major Fortune 500s are learning how to align their business goals with
social goals. It makes perfect sense that it can be done: all brands live within a social context
and many were created to serve or solve a human need. In an alarming number of instances
over recent decades, business and social goals have parted ways. But two leading brands at
Johnson & Johnson and Unilever are bringing these goals back together. After all, the
definition of ‘profit’ has never been exclusively financial. A brand can profit by selling
product, but that doesn’t mean a society can’t profit when it does.
The Case for Social Relevance
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Stayfree, a Johnson & Johnson tampon brand, recognized in its India market not simply that
young women often continued to use unsanitary cloth instead of pads, but that young girls
were missing considerable school time due to related infections. They partnered with
UNICEF to launch an educational campaign—Women for Change—designed to promote the
hygienic advantages of tampon usage and supporting local school-based educational efforts,
such as the “Kishori” Programme, which is reaching 7,000,000 girls in 729 schools across
the Indian subcontinent. Results? Awareness rose, infections dropped, and girls missed less
class. Sure, Stayfree moved product, but it had done well by addressing a genuine consumer
need. It knew its audience.
Unilever’s Lifebuoy soap has taken a similar step, as chronicled in an earlier HBR post,
aligning its business goals with social goals, namely the Millennium Development Goal 4 of
reducing the global number of children that die before they turn five. Investigating their
markets, Lifebuoy discovered that two million children around the world die before their
fifth birthday because of diarrhea and pneumonia, two potentially fatal conditions that can
be drastically reduced in frequency by the simple act of handwashing. Unilever paired with
its competition and an organization committed to hygiene to create and evangelize Global
Handwashing Day. Since the day was created five years ago, Lifebuoy has doubled its
market cap and—much more critically—infant and child deaths from diarrhea has dropped
by more than half.
A Three-Step Approach
A simple approach that resembles the model Stayfree used for its program would unfold as
follows:
1) Understand your context: In our socialized environment, it is increasingly critical for a
brand to understand the context of its target consumer. What are the life challenges your
audience faces and is there a way for your brand to support those challenges? Stayfree, by
understanding the life context of Indian girls, was able to support transformative cultural
change. Instead of being just another sanitary product on a cluttered shelf, it is part of a
movement toward better adolescent health and hygiene.
2) Find a committed partner: When it comes to evangelizing a cause, two voices trumps one.
In both examples cited above, the brand found a partner with an inbuilt commitment to its
adopted cause. In some cases, an NGO. In others, a competitive set. In either case, the
brand’s business goals aligned with those of its partner.
3) Lead from behind: It may sound paradoxical, but a key component in the success of both
campaigns was the fact that the brand removed itself from the spotlight. In reality, both
Stayfree and Lifebuoy created the platforms that led to social change. But in a marketplace
dominated by chest-thumping corporations, these brands chose to place an issue front and
center, and simply trust consumers to recognize their contribution to social wellness. It
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worked. Consumers saw the brand as humble instead of arrogant, helpful instead of
troublesome, and patient instead of pushy. As a result, their bottom lines benefited.
From Corporate to Social Capitalism?
Isn’t it time for corporate responsibility to make the shift to social capitalism? Given the
increasing costs of bad behavior—for the environment, for global populations struggling to
cope with the caprice of a globalizing economy—shouldn’t the Stayfree and Lifebuoy
examples serve as a mandate to businesses, rather than simply an admirable model? It’s no
longer enough to mine the whimsical desires of a target audience—preference does not a
profile make. Scott Goodson, founder of global agency StrawberryFrog and pioneer of
movement marketing, has suggested that modern marketing is less about appealing to
individuals, and more about appealing to groups, and less about persuading than aligning
with existing beliefs. To that end, couldn’t our consumer insights expand to include the
collective challenges of a target community, rather than simply a discrete persona within it?
That—the latent social opportunity at the heart of every consumer community—can form
the foundation of a profitable business strategy.
Full Disclosure: Stayfree is a Johnson & Johnson product, and I do work on Johnson & Johnson
brands, but not Stayfree and not this campaign.
About the author:
Jason Hirthler is a content strategist and writer with 17 years of
experience in the marketing and communications industry. He cut his
content strategy teeth working on Olympic bid campaigns, and is currently
Content Strategy Director at LBi New York.
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