SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR |  RSS | | REPRINT
|
Culture Shift: The Give and Take of Cause Marketing
May 05, 2008
There's plenty of talk about "cause marketing" these days, but is most of it missing the point?
By Paul Levesque
Diving Instructor: All right class, one last key safety issue. When you're deep in the water by yourself, who can tell me why it's important to return to the surface before their air in your tanks runs out?
Student: Because otherwise the tanks may get damaged?
Diving Instructor: Correct. You must never remove every last bit of air while in deep water, because the water pressure can do serious damage to your tanks.
Ummm…wouldn't there be an even more compelling reason for a lone diver to return to the surface before his or her air runs out?
Whenever I encounter reports about businesses "thinking green" or getting behind this or that community initiative or other worthy cause, I experience the same kind of "aren't you forgetting the most important part" feeling as I get from the imaginary diving-instructor scene above.
"'Cause marketing' is a current buzzword in corporate circles," declares AOL Money & Finance senior editor and blogger Amey Stone in an April 28, 2008 online article entitled Can You Boost Sales By Doing Good? As the article explains, the object is to "…convince more people to buy your products if you promise to give some of the proceeds to a social or environmental cause." Like other articles of its kind, this one goes on to describe in more detail how to make such exercises in "customer convincing" more profitable.
But wouldn't there be an even more compelling reason for any business to get behind a worthy cause its employees can support and believe in?
The Cynicism Crisis
The vast majority of organizations have a problem with apathetic, cynical workers. This is no trivial problem—a dispirited workforce hurts businesses in more ways than anyone can count.
Yet ironically, we're at a point in history where there's greater social awareness of global warming and related environmental issues, of widespread hunger and disease, and of all kinds of social ills and injustices than ever before. It's the perfect time for businesses to engage their workers in any number of worthwhile environmental, social, or community causes. There's never been a better time to wake these sleepwalking workers and get them fired up about doing something exciting together to make things better for customers, or the community, or the world at large.
Instead, all the literature I see about so-called cause marketing describes it as little more than a ploy to try and convince customers to buy more, in order to boost profits. Never a syllable on how motivational this can be for workers.
Cynicism is the belief that everyone is acting purely out of self-interest. Social and philanthropic causes represent a potential antidote to cynicism, by getting employees engaged in making things better for people outside the organization—pushing profit and self-interest slightly to the side, in other words, in order to pursue a greater good. But when workers can plainly see their organization is jumping on this or that philanthropic bandwagon purely as one more "profit strategy," not only does this do nothing to correct employee cynicism, it can actually make the problem worse.
Worthy Causes as Shifters of Culture
A diver must have air to survive, but that does not make air the primary measure of a successful dive. A business must be profitable to survive—but that similarly does not make profit the primary measure of success in business. When we think of the most successful businesses over the past decades, we think not only about how much money they made, but also about how they made the world a better place in some way. It's a question of give and take: not just how much they took in—but also how much they gave. That's the ultimate measure of business success.
How can you get your workers involved in worthy causes, but in a way that will reduce cynicism and boost morale?
1. Support a cause that links directly to your business. Avoid the appearance of "latching onto the first worthy cause to come along." If you're a bookstore, you may want to think about doing something to raise literacy in your community. Barbers, how about free haircuts for shut-ins? Florists, free evening classes on floral arranging?
2. Let the employees own it. The above are top-of-the-head examples, but let your workers brainstorm ideas of their own. Let them find a useful cause that links to your business, let them work out the implementation details, let them experience the "helper's high" that comes from actually helping others as part of their regular jobs.
3. Build employee recognition around it. Collect comments and thanks from appreciative recipients of these good works, and use this feedback as the basis for ongoing employee recognition. Let all workers hear all the happy sentiments from all the people who have been touched by these initiatives—and watch motivation and pride in the organization shoot skyward.
 Editor's Note: Hear more about how companies are boosting not only their profits but their employees' motivation as well in Paul's "Culture Shift" podcast this week at www.incentivemag.com/cultureshift.
We want to hear your feedback on "Culture Shift" columns! Send comments to stacy.straczynski@nielsen.com to let us know what topics you'd like discussed in upcoming episodes of the "Culture Shift."
INCENTIVE online "Culture Shift" columnist Paul Levesque is an author, seminar leader and public speaker with two decades' experience as an international business consultant specializing in the connection between employee motivation and customer satisfaction. He is a senior consultant with Boston-based Novations Inc., and is also founder and CEO of Customer Focus Breakthroughs Inc.
|
SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR | RSS |
|
|
| Back to Incentive Index |
|
|
