In 2001, U.S. companies devoted $9 billion to social causes. Few, however, approached their charitable activities with an eye toward enhancing their brands. Those that did committed talent and know-how, not just dollars, to pressing but carefully chosen social needs and then told the world about their cause and their dedication to serving it. Through the association, both the businesses and the causes benefited in ways they could not have otherwise.
Over the years, such cause-branding strategies have helped social causes enjoy financial rewards and unprecedented support both inside and outside companies. They've also helped corporations enhance their reputations, deepen employee loyalty, strengthen ties with business partners, and even sell more products or services.
In 1993, the cosmetics giant Avon committed itself to raising breast cancer awareness in the United States, particularly among medically underserved women, as an essential first step toward early detection of the disease. Avon's independent sales representatives now routinely distribute educational materials on their sales calls and participate alongside customers in fund-raising walks. All told, Avon has raised and contributed $250 million for the cause.
| Companies…that demonstrate a sense of social responsibility stand out in a world of increasingly undifferentiated goods and services. |
| — Carol L. Cone, Mark A. Feldman, and Alison T. DaSilva |
ConAgra Foods, another leader in cause branding, has embraced the cause of combating child hunger by underwriting 100 after-school cafés now serving about one million hot meals each year. The program, called Feeding Children Better, also encourages employees to raise money and serve meals, donates products and trucks to food banks across the United States, and leads a national public-service advertising campaign to raise public awareness of child hunger.
In both these cases, the causes have acquired not only additional funds but a higher profile and a bigger cohort of supporters. Meanwhile, the companies have witnessed employees' increasing commitment to the causes and to their jobs. That's especially worthwhile at a time when a wave of corporate wrongdoing has left the public clamoring for good corporate citizenship. Companies like Avon and ConAgra Foods that demonstrate a sense of social responsibility stand out in a world of increasingly undifferentiated goods and services.
Indeed, going public with a cause program can make a company significantly more attractive to stakeholders. According to our 2001 Cone/Roper Corporate Citizenship Study, 88 percent of employees aware of cause-related programs at their companies feel a "strong sense of loyalty" to their employers. And 53 percent of employees at companies with such programs chose to work at the organizations partly because of their employers' expressed commitment to various social issues.
Consumers, for their part, increasingly shop with a cause in mind and consider a company's support of social causes when deciding which products to buy and recommend to others. Aware of that trend, County Line, a ConAgra Foods brand, conducts an annual Christmas promotion in which it lets customers know it will donate one cent to Feeding Children Better for every pound of County Line cheese sold. In the past three years, the program has raised more than $210,000.
Despite its many advantages, cause branding does have limitations and pitfalls. It is not, for example, an antidote to a damaged reputation. Rather, it is a way of making a strong brand even stronger. Nor can a cause ever turn a brand into something it's not. A tobacco company, for example, might love to affiliate itself with an organization dedicated to fighting smoking by minors, but the public wouldn't buy it, even if the organization's leadership did. And if a company supports a cause that's embraced by dozens of other firms but fails to claim a special piece of the cause as its own, it won't be able to differentiate itself in the marketplace. Companies typically make a bigger difference in a less popular area than a crowded one.…
Select a cause aligned with your corporate goals
Most cause-branding programs should be, at their heart, about enhancing corporate brands in ways that are meaningful to key constituencies: customers, employees, communities, public officials, or suppliers. Avon's customers—primarily women over thirty—didn't need to be convinced that breast cancer posed a threat to themselves or to women generally. But not every company can be like Avon and find a cause that fits its brand like a glove; that's okay, because it's not strictly necessary. The target audience for a product doesn't even have to be the prime beneficiary of the cause. ConAgra Foods' prime consumer is obviously not a child who goes to bed hungry, but the link between the company's product and its chosen cause is clear, and the association has helped win the loyalty of other stakeholders such as suppliers and retailers.
| Almost any social cause can find a home in some cause-branding program. |
| — Carol L. Cone, Mark A. Feldman, and Alison T. DaSilva |
Indeed, almost any social cause can find a home in some cause-branding program. In the aftermath of the Columbine shootings in 1999, Chevrolet decided to put its muscle behind school-violence prevention and helping youth in general. Someone at the organization noticed that one of the victims had been the owner of a cherished vintage Chevy truck. But the alignment wouldn't have made sense if the program had not served one of Chevrolet's specific business objectives. In particular, the organization wanted to add the drivers of the future, who were worried about remaining safe throughout the school day, to its customer base. It also wanted to forge a stronger connection with its dealers, which serve as the business's entry point to local communities, so it decided to match dealers' cash contributions to local youth-development programs. The program, called Chevy ROCK (Reaching Out to Communities and Kids), reached a new audience and added a compelling facet to the Chevrolet brand. Chevrolet also sponsors the National Association of Students Against Violence Everywhere (SAVE) as part of Chevy ROCK. The automaker helps finance SAVE's school-violence prevention programs nationwide and funds their annual summit, which attracts more than 1,000 youths each year.
As it happens, most companies' chosen causes tend to cluster under the consumer-friendly umbrellas of education, health, and children. But some companies have successfully branched out and taken more risks. When Levi Strauss was considering taking up the cause of AIDS prevention in the early ‘80s, discussion of the syndrome still provoked dismay in middle America. Yet the company's image was edgy and nonconformist, and it was headquartered in San Francisco, a city where a relatively large proportion of the population was affected. So the organization went ahead. Not long ago, most companies would have avoided associating themselves with hard realities like AIDS, but those realities no longer seem quite so dissociated from customers' own lives. In the words of Kurt Ritter, the general manager at Chevrolet who launched ROCK, "We are Main Street America, but Main Street has changed."
Ritter puts his finger on another reason not to play it entirely safe: the problem of crowding. "You can jump in and help fight breast cancer," he says, "but you're going to be one of many. It's a relatively well-understood cause, whereas school violence is something that is not well understood and isn't well funded."
Avon coped with the problem of crowding when it first decided to become involved with breast cancer (more than 300 businesses have since gravitated to the cause) by avoiding any association with research, the focus of support at the time. The cosmetics company initially addressed underserved women's critical unmet need for access and screening. As other companies took up the themes of awareness and screening, Avon, instead of abandoning the field, expanded its commitment by adding new, innovative programs such as the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, thereby preserving its distinctive profile.
Avon notwithstanding, it's possible that the fit between brand and cause can be too close. Financial literacy is an obvious issue for banks to embrace—so obvious and overdone that most of the banks' multitude of programs no longer inspire employees or capture the public's attention.
ConAgra Foods set itself a somewhat easier task than Chevrolet did by selecting a critical social problem that would be a natural fit for a food company. It had a history of donating food to the needy, but when it took a systematic look at what was being done, it discovered that hunger, like breast cancer, was a fairly crowded field. None of the existing programs, however, went out of its way to help hungry children. Because ConAgra owns brands such as Healthy Choice, Butterball, and Orville Redenbacher's but isn't a consumer brand itself, the company's initial business goal was to strengthen ties with its employees and its retail and food-service customers. Since the launch of its Feeding Children Better program more than three years ago, over 100 ConAgra plants and facilities have contributed approximately 200,000 pounds of food to America's Second Harvest, a nonprofit organization that distributes donated food to hungry adults and children. Among retailers, Quizno's, a national chain of 2,000 restaurants, stood out by donating a portion of the proceeds from its sales of its turkey subs, made with Butterball ingredients, to the Feeding Children Better program.
