Branding for Social Marketers – Part 1

Nonprofits and government agencies are generally several steps behind the commercial sector in applying marketing concepts to their health and social issues.  Branding is a word that is thrown around a lot by marketers of all stripes without a complete understanding of what it actually means.  We know we want to have a strong brand, but to some that just means creating a logo and tagline.  A brand is much more than just the product itself, or the visuals you create to promote it.

Your brand is how your audience thinks about your product and connects with it emotionally.  It’s the combination of how you market your product and how the audience experiences it.  It’s the feeling that by using the product someone becomes part of an elite group, and membership in that group reflects the image of who that person aspires to be. 

Think about the most successful brands and the emotions they evoke among their fans — Harley-Davidson, In-n-Out Burger, Starbucks, Apple Computer…  They inspire loyalty and positive feelings toward the products created by that brand.  You’d have to pry my Mac from my cold, dead fingers before I’d ever consider using another type of computer; when I was discussing branding in my training last week another participant said that as soon as she saw that I was using a Mac for my presentation, she felt an instant kinship with me as a fellow Mac user.  That to me was a perfect illustration of my point.

No amount of amazing advertising is going to create an effective brand for you if the product stinks.  In the case of social marketing, the product is the health or social behavior you are promoting — if the audience tries doing what you want them to do but has an awful experience, the brand image suffers.  Or the brand may be your organization, with various products that you offer falling within that brand (e.g., if you are at a local health department with initiatives addressing different health topics).  So branding involves strategically crafting all the elements of your audience’s interactions with your organization and its products so that they support the right image and evoke the right emotions.  Your product or organization may already have a brand image — but is it the one you want?

Some social marketing campaigns have been quite successful at building an effective brand.  The truth campaign is the archetypical example.  By looking at what emotions/values are important to youth, they were quite successful at redirecting the instinct to rebel against authority from “smoking to rebel against their parents” to “not smoking to rebel against the tobacco industry.”  The truth brand stands for being savvy to the deceptive tactics used by tobacco companies, being part of a youth movement to take on the industry, and being hip to youth culture.  The Verb campaign is another example of a social marketing brand. 

The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation‘s pink ribbon campaign is a cause marketing brand that is instantly recognizable.  They’ve created a visual – the pink ribbon – that is applied in many different ways, such as pink Yoplait lids, pink bats at major league baseball games, pink vacuum cleaners, Ford’s sale of scarves, the Race for the Cure and other products.  Every partnership they build and event they hold contributes to the image of the brand — health, women, and wholesome American icons.  I don’t think you would see the Komen Foundation partnering with Hooters or Absolut Vodka, for example (though in Hooters’ defense, they have just donated $1 million to another foundation for breast cancer research).

So how can you develop your social marketing brand?  Tune in for Part 2 tomorrow.

flickr photo credit purplelime

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