Social Media, Cause Marketing and search for the elusive ‘Lethal Generosity’

Couldn’t help borrowing the term’ Lethal Generosity’ from the famed Shel Israel book ‘Twitterville’. The book goes on to describe how Brands across the globe can use Social Media to create, what can be termed a ‘sustained competitive advantage’ applying  core competencies of the corporation that significantly advances a desired social change and at the same time contributes to ‘real world’ business results.

This is the kind of stuff that progressive Global brands have picked up quite some time back. A brand like AMEX successfully executing a ‘Cause Marketing’ campaign as early as 1983 with their famous ‘renovate the Statue of Liberty’ initiative is a prime example of foresight. (Something that the Tata s have done back here to create the massive Brand Equity they enjoy across minds)  Other rock-star Brands like General Mills have positioned ‘Social Good’ as a core of their marketing campaign since years and such successfully that it has begotten an entire new term called ‘Branded Philanthropy’. P& G’s long-ongoing 1 pack of pampers = 1 vaccines has reportedly protected more than 100 million women and babies from tetanus since 2006, till date.

I personally loved the Coca-Cola ‘protect polar bear’ initiative with WWF (Press Release here:https://www.worldwildlife.org/who/media/press/2011/WWFPresitem24592.html) and the Haagen-Dazs ‘help the honey bees’ campaign (https://www.helpthehoneybees.com).Specially the Haagen-Dazs initiative fantastically ties in their Product truth and probably this is the proverbial ‘holy-grail’ that we all marketers would want to crack in designing a ‘cause marketing’ campaign for the Brand(s) we manage.

I get to thinking and write all these as me and my team recently tasted a little bit of success ourselves rolling out two occasion based ‘cause marketing’ campaigns in the last 20 days (albeit planned in a short period of time and essentially low to medium key in scale) One was to celebrate the World environment day  with our Facebook fans and planting a thousand trees together … the other revolved around ‘Father’s Day’ where we called upon our fans to upload on our page, photographs, videos, illustrations and posts etc , all to celebrate the special bond of ‘fatherhood’. If the first one generated handsome good response with a lot of people publicly thanking the Brand to have taken up a worthy environmental initiative, pledging to actually go out there and plant trees and driving the cause online for a week via thought provoking content and creative, the second campaign actually exceeded our expectations in terms of receiving a huge quantum of crowd-sourced response and content. To put into perspective some performance metrics, the no of Facebook fans on our Brand page has grown by more than 16,000 in the last twenty days (which is more than 22%ge increase from the base we started on 1^st June) and as I write this post we are at a >12 % engagement level (‘People talking about us’) in Facebook which is about 6 times (6X) the nearest competitor. Not to mention, all of these happened at bare minimum spends…

Now both the stated Campaigns were close to some Brand aspect of ours… we believed in them and definitely had some success expectations going in .However to be very honest, the type of admiration, trust and good feeling these campaigns have generated on the online sphere quite exceeded our hopes that we had pegged to these. In a way it’s been an eye-opener …a definite proof of concept that there lies a huge demand and potential in planning Campaigns such as these, possibly even in bigger and higher scales. To a marketing guy this says clearly that your fans and followers are ‘human beings’ at the end of the day and it’s the ‘humanization’ of  our marketing message and the consequential engagement … is what remains the final frontier for we marketers to overcome.

Our little experiments with results actually are in line with the 2012 Global Enterprise Reputation report by the Reputation institute ( www.reputationinstitute.com ). The Reputation institute essentially defines an enterprise’s repute to be based on seven dimensions (See below) and out of them  Citizenship, Governance and Workplace (essential facets of Corporate Social Responsibility) put together, account for more than 42% of the organizational reputation and in turn ‘Brand Reputation’ ( The power and premium a brand commands across the TG mindspace)

Social Media, Cause Marketing and the search for the elusive ‘Lethal Generosity’

Come to think of it, it’s actually quite simple …me, you and all of us would ultimately want to buy, recommend, work for and invest-in an Enterprise and a Brand  that ‘makes sense’ to us , a sensible Brand … a Brand of repute. Isn’t it?

In a country like India which is thriving at 1000 million plus population denouncing all Malthusian probabilities … there’s enough and more possibilities for us to create campaigns that reap rich social dividends. By loving our own people and fans we can indeed earn-back the proverbial ‘love for our Brand’ which we yearn for. I am sure a Brand like Aircel did manage a commendable job with ‘Save the Tiger’ … IDEA with its ‘Save Paper’ campaign, however enormous amount of chances still remain untapped, it’s not even the tip of the iceberg that we have managed to see till date. It now essentially and quite simply, comes down to knowing what matters to your Brand audience and then being an ‘enabler’ to help them achieve what they really want to do. Embark upon a journey of ‘Social Good’ that’s close to your Brand truth and ensure that your audience is on the Driver’s seat … they need to be not just the ‘part and parcel’ but the ‘core’ of your journey,

What better a medium than online and being on Social Media to explore all these …48 million Indians on Facebook , more than 16 million on Twitter and an increasing base at places like Linkedin, You tube etc. Add to it our great demographic divided that reflects online, the rising inclination towards meaningful online activism and more people getting access to internet everyday … smarter access devices coming up at lesser costs, intelligent apps, dropping data charges, increased internet penetration so on and so forth

Here’s an honest, sincere and hearty wish …may we witness some great work and ideas coming up in the near future. May our Campaigns shine, our fans and evangelists amplify and our agencies pick up precious metals demonstrating brilliant thoughts and executions, all of which …make a ‘real world’ positive difference.

Thanks for dropping by. See you back soon.