“We see a new phenomenon emerging called ‘Mutual Social Responsibility,’ where consumers and the brands they interact with every day take a mutual interest in and a mutual responsibility for being good citizens. It’s a natural fusion of corporate social responsibility and traditional cause-related marketing.”

 “Consumers are seeking a more personal, co-creative role in everything from product development to brand marketing,” said Mitch Markson, President of Edelman’s Global Consumer Brands practice and founder of goodpurpose.  The survey of 5,600 consumers in nine countries (the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Japan, India, and Canada), conducted by Strategy One, also revealed that consumers are more involved than ever in social action, with 88% saying they feel it is their duty to contribute to a better society and environment. Among all respondents, “helping others and contributing to the community” was cited as the second most important source of personal contentment, after “spending time with family and friends.”

The goodpurpose Consumer Study is believed to be the first to tap not only consumers’ attitudes about social purpose around the world, but also the actions they take on their personal beliefs, and the role they believe brands can play in making a difference.

 “The results of our study tell us that social purpose as a marketing imperative has global consumer appeal and can help brands build deeper relationships,” Markson noted. “The success of popular brands like Dove, Rama, The Body Shop, Virgin, and Coke, which are connected to social purpose in the minds of millions of consumers, are a testament to the active role that brands can play in advancing good causes. Yet it’s interesting to note that worldwide, only 39% of consumers are aware of any brands that actively support good causes through their products or services. With 56% of consumers more likely to recommend a brand that supports a good cause than one that does not, it’s clear that if brands align themselves with a good purpose that consumers care about, they will strike a meaningful chord in their hearts and minds.”

Highlights of the study findings include:

• Consumers care deeply about social action.

Sparked in part by a rising tide of concern about the common good and visible social action among celebrities, government leaders, the media, and Internet activists, consumers are showing a renewed interest in supporting and getting involved in social causes.

o                          In eight of nine countries surveyed, more than 50% (and up to 70%) of consumers say they are more involved in social causes than they were two years ago.

o                          56% of consumers are currently involved in supporting a good cause. On average, consumers are involved, either directly or through a member of their families, in more than two social or environmental causes.

o                          Areas of greatest concern among consumers include “protecting the environment” (92%); “enabling everyone to live a healthy life” (90%); “reducing poverty” (89%); “equal opportunity to education” (89%); “fighting HIV/AIDS” (83%); “building understanding/respect for other cultures” (82%); “helping to raise people’s self-esteem” (77%); and “supporting the creative arts” (69%).

• Consumers prefer brands that help make a difference.

o                          57% of consumers are comfortable with the idea that brands can support good causes and make money at the same time.

o                          78% like to buy brands that make a donation to worthy causes.

o                          When selecting a brand, 52% indicate that quality is the most important factor, followed by price (29%). When choosing between two brands of same quality and price, social purpose is what would most affect consumers’ decision (41%), ahead of design and innovation (32%) and the loyalty to the brand (26%).

• Consumers are ready to engage with brands in Mutual Social Responsibility.

o                          70% of consumers say they would be prepared to pay more for a brand that supports a good cause they believe in. More than seven in 10 (73%) would be prepared to pay more for environmentally friendly products.

• Brands have an opportunity to reach consumers through social purpose.

Despite growing number of brands that support good causes, consumer awareness of them is relatively low worldwide. Brands have an opportunity to more effectively engage consumers with their work in social purpose and make a bigger impact on issues that matter to them.

o                          Worldwide, only 39% of consumers are aware of any brands that actively support good causes through their products or services.

o                          Brands need to help consumers find easy solutions for getting more involved, as time (for 52% of consumers) and money (41%) are considered the main barriers.

• Word of mouth is the most credible source of information about brands that support good causes.

o                          61% of consumers say “a person like myself” is the most credible source of seeking information about brands that support a good cause.

• Interest in social purpose and action across developed and developing countries varies in unexpected ways.

o                          Led by Brazil at 63%, the number of consumers in developing countries like India (42%) and China (32%) who are more involved in good causes today than they were two years ago is comparable to those in developed countries (U.S. – 40%, Italy – 38%, Canada – 36%, and the U.K. – 33%).

o                          In traditionally Catholic countries like Italy or Brazil, the Dalai Lama inspired more consumers to good causes than the Pope, whereas in Japan, with its Buddhist heritage, the Pope was more inspiring for good causes than the Dalai Lama.

o                          When consumers talked about reasons why they were not more involved with good causes, developed countries such as United States (59%), Germany (58%) and United Kingdom (48%) said there was not enough money, whereas in less wealthy countries such as Brazil (79%), Italy (64%) and China (61%), consumers said that lack of time more than money was a barrier.

More information about the goodpurpose Consumer Study and consultancy, interviews with managers of brands that are engaged in social purpose, and news about socially active brands are available at the cooperative’s Web site, GoodPurposeCommunity.com.

About the goodpurpose Consumer Study

StrategyOne conducted 5609 interviews across nine countries in September – October 2007. The study was an online survey of consumers, nationally representative of each of the country populations. For India and China survey was conducted as face to face and CATI respectively. Sample sizes per country are: U.S. = 1004, China = 1000, U.K. = 582, Germany = 510, Brazil =505, Italy = 501, Japan = 503, India = 500, Canada = 505. The margin of error is +/- 3.1% for the U.S. sample and +/- 4.38% for the U.K., German, Italian, Brazilian, Japanese, Indian, Chinese and Canadian samples. +/- 2.53% for the European (UK/Italy/ Germany) sample, +/- 3.1% for the North American (US and Canada) sample, +/- 2.53 for the Asian (Japan, China and India) sample and +/- 4.38 for the Latin American (Brazil) sample.

Bahrain City Centre, due to open in September, will have its first major anchor stores including Debenhams, H&M, Virgin, Carrefour and Freedom Furniture trade from day one.

The mall’s General Manager, Derek Rossel, announced the names of the stores saying, ‘Very soon visitors will be able to explore what will be the crown jewel of Bahrain’s retail, leisure and entertainment offer, they can browse and buy from some of the first stores that will be trading.’

‘These stores represent a good portion of the 350 stores that will ultimately be on offer by 2009, and they will give guests a glimpse of the spectacular and unparalleled experiences they can come to expect at the mall.’

‘By next year, when our two Kempinski hotels and the incredible indoor & outdoor Water Park open, Bahrain City Centre will truly become one of the region’s finest shopping, leisure and entertainment resorts.’

When completed in 2009, Bahrain City Centre will also offer hundreds of other ‘firsts’ to the Kingdom. Providing visitors the full spectrum of choice from luxury-seekers to price-conscious consumers.

MARKETING’s greatest invention is the brand. In effect unheard of 100 years ago, brands and branding now march triumphant. Everything and everybody — places and destinations, political parties and social movements, people (first celebrities and politicians, now, it appears, all of us) — are brands.

Yet, aside from a few usual suspects such as Apple, in the branding heartlands, all is not well. Y&R executives John Gerzema and Ed Lebar highlighted the problem in 2008, when they reviewed longitudinal evidence from Y&R’s Brand Asset Valuator research programme. In their book The Brand Bubble, they charted a ‘precipitous’ decline in brand trust since 1993, along with sharp falls in consumer perceptions of quality, brand awareness and ‘brand esteem’.

In 1993, for example, consumers trusted 52% of the brands researchers asked them about. Fifteen years later, the figure had fallen to 25%. Gerzema and Lebar pointed out that stock markets may have been pushing up the value of brand-owning companies, but brands themselves were being ‘hollowed out’.
Then came recession. Halfway through, Promise chief executive Charles Trevail observed that “according to every survey and index on trust in institutions and organisations from around the world, trust is in terminal decline”. Even when the recession was supposed to be lifting, Alterian chief executive David Eldridge commented on his company’s latest research: “Consumer trust is at an all-time low.”

So what’s the problem? How can brands and branding be so successful, yet so sickly at the same time? The answer may lie with the occupational diseases of brand management — diseases that are generated by the daily working lives of brand managers.

MASKING THE PROBLEM
Brand management as ‘mask management’ is the most common of such diseases. Because brands are all about external communication, many brand managers find it hard to resist the temptation to paint ‘lipstick on the gorilla’ — telling customers what the brand manager knows they would like to hear, rather than keeping to the truth of what the organisation can, or actually intends to, deliver.

In reality, the most important part of the brand manager’s job is one of internalisation: bringing customer views and perceptions from outside the organisation inside, so that the organisation understands, responds and resonates to customers’ changing demands. Yet, activity-wise, the minute-by-minute focus of the day job is external communication. When changing the external message is easy (and fun) and changing the organisation inside is hard (and painful), the lures of lipstick-on-the-gorilla mask management can become irresistible. In fact, they can even be dressed up as a new theory. Remember when we were told that punters didn’t buy the beer, but its advertising? Remember George, the Hofmeister bear?

Next on the list is brand hubris. Not long ago, it was fashionable among brand consultants to show their clients a chart depicting the relative prices of different T-shirts. Some sold for a fiver or less, while branded ones were at least £50. “Which T-shirt do you want to be?” the consultants would ask. The difference between being able to charge £5 and £50 lies in “branding”, they would say. “We can help you become experts at ‘branding’.”

Well, they may have been experts at branding, but they were dunces at economics. If you sell 1000 T-shirts for £5 with a £1 margin, you make £1000 profit. If you sell 10 for £50 with a £48 margin, you make £480 profit. By implying that the supply/demand curve could be ‘branded’ away, these consultants were usually doing their clients a real disservice. While they were doing the rounds with their presentations on ‘branding’, full of impressive words such as ‘intangibles’, the brand that romped it on the high street was Primark.

That is not to say that discounting is always the best strategy. Rather, it is to challenge the widespread belief that it’s the ‘extra stuff on top’ — the stuff added by ‘branding’ — that is the source of brands’ margins and profits. The fact is that, apart from some special cases such as luxury goods, if you look at most successful brands — such as Amazon, Apple, Dell, easyJet, Facebook, Google, IKEA, Nike, Starbucks, Tesco, Toyota, Virgin and Wal-Mart — what marks them out is not superb ‘branding’ (sometimes it’s superb, but very often it’s not) but that they deliver outstanding customer value, often via breakthrough innovations, technology and/or underlying business models.
‘Branding’ alone hardly ever makes a business successful. It is businesses, including their culture and ethos, that make brands successful. And as soon as the business drops the ball on innovation, service, quality or price, or forgets its cultural roots, the brand quickly loses its lustre.

CLARITY OF PURPOSE
Brand narcissism is our third, closely related, occupational disease. Brand narcissism works on two levels. At the first, every brand manager desperately wants their target audience to recognise their brand, love it and be loyal to it by, for example, acting as an unpaid yet enthusiastic brand advocate.
There is nothing wrong with these dreams per se. They are natural. What is wrong is when we morph the wish into a ‘strategy’ of ‘success by being popular’ — where getting people to talk about and ‘love’ the brand becomes an end in itself, pretty much divorced from the value it’s supposed to be delivering.

The second level of this brand narcissism, which is even more dangerous, is where the brand manager forgets the underlying purpose of the brand and starts acting as if it’s the job of the customer to add value to the brand (by paying a price premium or being its advocate, for example), rather than the job of the brand to add value to the customer.

An obvious point, perhaps, but it can be difficult to remember in a world where your every passing thought, and key performance indicator, is about how well-remembered you are, how preferred you are, or how many people are talking about you.

Our final occupational disease is toolkit myopia. Brand managers are surrounded by a dizzying array of sophisticated tools and techniques for research, testing, data-gathering and evaluation. They are on an endless quest for the breakthrough insight and the sparkling creativity. It’s difficult to master all these things and the quest easily becomes obsessive. So much so, that it soon seems as if excellence at these diverse technicalities lies at the heart of successful branding — when it is not.

You can, for example, use exactly the same technical toolkit, excellence, to build a brand that perfectly communicates a brand’s unique value.
And to hide the fact that the brand is nothing more than a me-too mediocrity. You can use technical excellence to articulate specialness and hide sameness, but content-wise, they are opposites, having an opposite meaning to the customer.

The one thing that branding as mask management, brand hubris, brand narcissism and toolkit myopia have in common is that they destroy trust. They are potentially catastrophic mistakes, yet they are in the air brand managers breathe, growing naturally in their working environment. So they have to be combated on a daily basis.

How? What’s the antidote? To remember that a brand’s real job is to build trust, and that everything the brand does must be tested against this yardstick. It’s this simple human understanding that successful brand managers never let anyone forget.