Reaching Levels Beyond Cause Marketing

The ladies of the Ad Council were lucky enough to travel to Boston in September to attend the Beyond Cause Marketing Summit 2011, part of Boston’s FutureM Week. Cause marketing isn’t getting the job done, so the community of Boston organized this opportunity for people to come together and discuss how to shift our thinking and approach. For all the money and attention raised, not enough is being done to address the challenges society faces today.

The summit began with a “conversation gauntlet”, a series of 1:1 interviews with a number of practitioners and thought leaders, moderated by Brian Reich, Senior Vice President-Editor at Edelman.  One by one, six “victims” spent time in the hot seat and were presented with rapid-fire questions on never before explored ideas. The first victim, Robbie Vitrano, co-founder and brand architect of Naked Pizza and founder of Trumpet Group, brought up an important idea on the basis of brand that is often overlooked by our nonprofit clients, and I’m sure, other for-profit businesses as well.

“Your brand is an inside-out construct. A brand is a business idea that attains cultural influence. Cultural influence says you’re developing relationships within a certain set of objectives and you’re going to apply that process in such a way as to achieve a certain level of impact. Brand as an act of behavior; an act of authenticity; something measured internally as well as externally, is a very powerful idea. That conversation can help move you from a wider place to somewhere that you can actually have some impact. The artifacts that you used to define a brand – a color palette, logo, aesthetics, and style -don’t matter as much as behavior, function, and utility of your brand.”

A lot of nonprofits express to the Ad Council their feeling that a change in their logo or their tagline will lead to a greater understanding of who they are. Or that a sleeker look to their marketing collateral will strengthen their brand. These thoughts are very frequently off-target. What they don’t understand is that a brand is made up of much more, and that it’s not just the physical appearance – brand is an “inside-out construct”. Your brand should live in everything you do – and everything you do supports your mission.

To reach and educate more people through means of strengthening your brand, you must strengthen your behavior and be crystal clear on who you are and what it is that you aim to do. To look at this from a wider point, think of your brand as an act of behavior, as Robbie Vitrano suggested. All artifacts like logo and color palette are secondary to message when it comes to the factors contributing to brand. Brand is really what your constituents perceive about your organization and what you do – it’s how the combination of all your actions are experienced by other people. As Michael Eisner of Disney put it, “A brand is a living entity – and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.” 

Understanding the definition of brand and understanding what your brand means are crucial in the success of your not-for-profit organization or for-profit business. No matter who you are, brand is all-defining.

-Annie Sullivan