Marketing For Dummies. McMurtry Jeanette

You need to commit some of your resources to doing good in the world just like you commit resources and budget to your advertising efforts and media spend.

      ❯❯ Doing good is not just a good thing to do; it’s a competitive advantage that makes your brand worth shopping, referring, and being loyal to.

      This movement to align with good brands has become so powerful that it has actually sparked an era of anti‐consumerism. A leading consumer activist group called Adbusters has grown consistently since the late 1980s and actively engages in what it calls “culture jamming,” which describes its movement to interrupt consumer experiences and expose underlying and not‐so‐positive truths about large corporations while jamming their profits from sales. It has exposed advertising it believes communicates unrealistic and misleading promises from companies that engage in child labor or other unethical practices, and it organizes movements that send messages to big corporations. Its best‐known movement is Occupy Wall Street, which successfully jammed New York’s Wall Street district in 2011 and sparked similar protests against big banks worldwide.

      

What marketers need to know most about Adbusters is its mantra: “Fight back against the hostile takeover of our psychological, physical and cultural environments by commercial forces.”

      Although this statement may be an extreme expression of an extreme consumerism group, it reflects the level of distrust and angst toward big brands that other research from Neilsen, Edelman, and Cone Communications has reported in reports on trust, consumer social media, and so on.

      As you go about reading this book and developing your own positioning strategies, messaging, and marketing and engagement programs, keep in mind the power of transparency, truth in all communications, integrity of your deeds and alliances, and the values you stand by and spread. You don’t want to be featured on Adbusters’ website or in its widely circulated magazine.

      We’ve seen a lot of consumer action toward brands because of their positions on social issues. Remember what happened to Target’s stock value when it announced customers could self‐identify their gender to decide which bathroom they wanted to use? And all the boycotts of Chick‐fil‐A when the CEO’s comments opposed same‐sex marriage?

      You need to consider your company’s positions and how you’ll communicate them if the need ever arises, because in a market driven by consumer expectations and demands that transcend products and prices to social issues, you need to understand how your actions and words can trump even the best and most carefully crafted marketing plan. We’re not suggesting that you change your values for financial gain but rather that you consider how you communicate about and respond to social issues. There is power in taking a stand for what you value and believe. As a brand, you need to plan for both positive and negative feedback.

      

A marketing plan is not just a road map for how you’ll develop products, build distribution channels, and earn profits; your marketing plan must also define the following:

      ❯❯ What you stand for

      ❯❯ How you’ll act responsibly for society and the environment

      ❯❯ What causes you’ll support and how you’ll engage your customers accordingly

      ❯❯ How you’ll build relationships with customers based on common values and causes

      ❯❯ How you’ll communicate with transparency to build trust equity for your brand

       Building relationships with customers

      Your biggest competitive advantage is not how clever or fun your social and traditional marketing campaigns are, and, as you’ll read throughout this book, it’s not your price. It’s your ability to build relationships with customers on trust, value, and relevance.

      

Customers seek to align with brand personas that are “just like them.” Your brand is first a reflection of what matters most to you and the customers you serve. It’s also a community of like‐minded people – your executive staff, frontline employees, customer service representatives, and customers.

      Your marketing plan is thus not just about building a sustainable and profitable business through the right sales channels, distributors, social engagement, and advertising strategies; it’s about building a community.

      Brands that have done this well and which are referenced in detail in this book include TOMS, Wildfang, and Patagonia. Check them out online after reading their stories in later chapters and stay on top of what they’re doing to build strong emotional bonds with customers who have like values and purpose.

      

Building a community around your brand is more than announcing your CSR program action items. It’s about inviting people to engage with you, to volunteer together to impact local communities, and to donate time and money to a common charity, maybe the Salvation Army, Red Cross, or children’s advocacy groups. Communities are also centered around sharing information to guide others on their journeys, whether it be to make a sound and wise investment or to join an association, support a cause or a political campaign, and so on.

      Communities need to make sense for the products you sell. If you sell clothing, creating a community effort around helping people in underprivileged situations to get professional clothing for job interviews and jobs is likely to be meaningful to your base. Building a community around carbon emissions or climate change, not so much.

      Ask yourself the following questions to help guide your actions that present your values as you build a community of like‐minded people:

      ❯❯ How can we make our brand about consumers’ needs, not our business’s?

      ❯❯ What common goals and ideals do we share with our core customer groups?

      ❯❯ How can we align marketing, community relations programs, and brand values with those common goals?

      ❯❯ What programs can we execute that bring us together, online and offline, with our customers to further our common goals?

      ❯❯ What is the reputation for the retailers that distribute or sell our products and how could their reputation, positive and negative, potentially impact our reputation with customers and communities?

Improving Customer Experiences for Sustainability

      As customer expectations and demands change from generation to generation, so, too, does the nature of marketing campaigns in general. Changes we’ve seen recently include refocusing the marketing department to become the customer experience department.

      Some businesses have even renamed their chief marketing officer (CMO) to a chief experience officer (CXO) and are replacing advertising campaigns with customer experience initiatives for both their online and offline worlds.

      How is customer experience defined today? Customer experience is the entirety of interactions between a brand and a customer beginning with her first purchase to the end of her purchasing life cycle. Interactions take place during each step of the decision process, which includes the following:

      ❯❯ Problem or need identification: Consumers realize that they need to purchase a product to solve a problem or fill a need. For example, they need a good home computer.

      ❯❯ Discovery: Consumers conduct research and explore options for products that fit their need and decide on the functions and features they need. For example, should they buy a laptop, notebook, desktop, or tablet?

      ❯❯ Evaluation: After they’ve found options or product categories they want to purchase, consumers start to evaluate brands.

      ❯❯ Trial or purchase: After research, and engaging with various brand representatives online or in stores, consumers make a purchase.

      ❯❯ Confirmation and reassurance: Consumers gather information