Monthly Archives: June 2010

P&G: Purpose & Growth

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We were very excited to read in Marketing today that P&G global marketing and brand building officer Marc Pritchard told the audience at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival that the company has developed an ethos of “purpose inspired brand building” with a strategy around “creative ideas that spark movements”, as opposed to straight advertising campaigns.

It is frankly music to our ears hear a company such as P&G with a portfolio of fantastic household-name brands talk with such energy and passion about the future of brand building in this way.

“Consumers have a higher expectation of brands and want to know what they are doing for the world. But it has to be authentic with a genuine desire to do it,” said Pritchard. “Our brands’ individual purposes are brought to life by ideas that touch people’s hearts and get them to participate in a brand community.”
        
People love brands with purpose and we see that it is increasingly a feature of category leading brands. In our work for Good Energy we used their social vision and purpose to re-energise the brand. We focused on revealing the provenance of the energy and reconnecting customers with its source through the brand idea. Then joining Good Energy is more than simply switching utility supplier, it’s about being part of the ‘homegrown energy’ movement.

Perhaps most encouraging aspect of P&G’s commitment to this approach is the role they identify it has in creating economic value in the future. To this end, Pritchard says “If we come out of the recession and move back to marketing through campaigns that aim to sell, we’ll only survive until the next recession. We have to do more to actually thrive.”

Let’s hope that more Marketeers see the opportunity for growth that P&G has so clearly identified in building brands with purpose.

A fresh take on Utilities for Good Energy

The energy sector is currently driven on price promotion and functional benefits. Energy is an invisible commodity, traditionally bought by default with little active choice or emotional engagement. However, with climate change and energy security becoming increasingly concerning for some consumers, there was an opportunity to challenge this.

Good Energy is no ordinary energy company, and it was important to use the business’ wider social purpose to differentiate the brand and to connect with a broader customer base. We launched the idea of  ’homegrown energy’, focused on revealing the provenance of the energy (100% renewable energy sourced from 1,300 British generators) to reconnect customers with its source and goodness. To further highlight the customer’s key role in helping Good Energy to achieve its vision we also developed a new strapline ‘Together we do this’.

You can join the homegrown energy movement at www.togetherwedothis.com

Scope: brand audit, strategy, concepts and naming

Interface on sustainable innovation

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This month Ramon Arratia at InterfaceFlor tells us how the company embraces sustainable innovation and what it means for the brand.

Interface’s sustainability vision is huge…

Absolutely agree. In order to inspire change you need to set an outrageously ambitious goal.

Why’s that?

Our Zero Impact vision is extremely demanding, and some people say it was naïve to think it achievable. But it has inspired fundamental changes in the way people work at Interface because it is so challenging – whatever you do, you can always do better and push a little further towards the goal.

Has that helped your organisation to think bigger then?

Yes. Our employees are continually striving to come up with innovative processes that contribute to achieving the long-term vision, rather than making small adjustments to existing processes to meet less demanding targets. Mission Zero™ demands real innovation. If we can’t achieve our goal using the technology we have available to us, we are continually challenged to come up with new ways of doing things.

How much do those ‘new ways’ need to come from outside the business?

You need to mix internal-led innovation with fresh ideas. Internal-led innovation is great when you depend a lot of the implementation phase. That’s why it’s usually good for engineering projects. The problem is that people usually get trapped by their paradigm, by “the way we do things here”. And that’s where fresh ideas are useful.

Is sustainable innovation important to your brand?

When you view a company in terms of the products it makes, you frequently learn that the vast majority of environmental impacts lie outside its operational boundaries. For our company around 68% of the impact is in the raw materials while only around 10% is in-house. So improving the impacts of products, either at raw material level or use level is the smartest thing to do. It’s also the best thing to differentiate your brand and get a competitive advantage from sustainability – you don’t get much competitive advantage from having the best assurance statement in the CR report or the highest level of conformance to GRI!

What would you say are the critical factors to success?

Here’s my top five:

  1. Set an outrageously ambitious goal to inspire real change
  2. Address the elephant in the room
  3. Let the business case speak for itself, right from the start
  4. Use sustainability as a source of innovation
  5. Give sustainability status in the company

Help Interface with its campaign to change European waste legislation by going to http://waronwaste.interfaceflor.eu/en/

Reviving meaning in the Müller brand

Mission Goodness

Müller, the UK’s number 1 yogurt brand, was losing differentiation and preference in the short-life dairy product fixture. The brand needed to reestablish its uniqueness, and find a way to build greater levels of conviction into its promise.

Through our brand audit we identified that nearly all Müller’s milk comes from within 30 miles of its Shropshire-based factory. This provided the necessary platform to reestablish direction in the business and meaning in the brand. We reoriented its mission around providing goodness for all its stakeholders – bringing fresh local produce to consumers, renewing long-term partnerships with neighbouring farmers, giving employees a clearer sense of the difference they make in their work.

All leading to the best performance for the brand in both volume and value terms for three years, and a brand social equity score up by 25%

Click here to watch the ad

Scope: brand audit, strategy, concepts and naming

Activating Cadbury’s social mission

Dear Cadbury

Cadbury wanted to find an efficient way to engage widest possible audiences in its socially responsible business practices and asked us to help them produce an innovative reporting format. Normally these kinds of reports are thick, uninviting, generic, dense and uninviting.

First we conducted a materiality review to find out what was important to people and Cadbury. Then we spoke to different stakeholder groups from consumers to investors. What was clear across the board was that everybody loved Cadbury – even investors were fans. Everyone wanted to hear good things to make them feel even better about buying and supporting the brand. Even the slightly edgy letters from consumers asking about things like packaging and Fairtrade would always start ‘Dear Cadbury..’. So, we that’s what we named our online brand platform. We created specific expert and ‘explorer’ journeys and content. This is a show not tell report where Cadbury lifted the bonnet and showed people the real stuff that they were doing – real emails, memos, press articles and interviews.

We broke with CSR reporting orthodoxy, but the critics responded favourably, and over 26,000 people came to visit.

www.dearcadbury.com

Scope: brand strategy, naming, content creation, animations, website design and build