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The Body Shop’s content strives to inform current customers about its history and raise awareness for the work they do. The majority of its global content marketing focuses on its corporate social responsibility programs and social good messaging. Social media is key for the company, and YouTube is as an especially strong channel. One ongoing video series is tutorials for upcycling Body Shop packaging into creative, new items. Another series details from where The Body Shop sources ingredients and packaging, like paper from the Himalayan Bansbari community, and tea tree oil from the foothills of Mount Kenya....
Australians are increasingly favouring ethical brands, with more than three quarters of respondents to a Havas PR study showing some conscientious consumption. In the past, almost three fifths of respondents reported failing to act conscientiously.
Transparency can look different depending on the audience and the context. Find out which brands exemplify what it means to be transparent today.
Openness has never been more important in marketing and in business. Being transparent begins with knowing your customers—it requires having a relationship with your community of customers and engaging in ongoing dialogue, and many brands are increasingly turning to an online insight community to enable this type of deep engagement and learning.
As the examples below show, transparency can look different depending on the audience and the context. Here are 5 brands that provide examples of what it means to be transparent today....
In a consumer-driven economy, the good a company does is increasingly becoming its defining competitive advantage. While CSR, cause marketing and sustainability might have seemed like nice-to-dos just a few years ago, articulating your brand's core values is now critical in terms of the reputational, employee productivity, and bottom line impact to your company.
As Rich Fernandez, Director of Executive Development at Google, said recently at Sustainable Brands '13, If a company's product is not improving lives, it's diminishing them." In the face of rising consumer activism, Marketing 3.0 will be won by those who become purpose-driven social brands. To do so, the CMO, CSO, CSR, and Foundation leads must align to bring a cohesive brand story to life that clearly defines the company's "social license to operate....
Some of the worst PR stories for fashion retailers happened in recent weeks. But will it cause any major upset of the business’ financial performance. It’s been a dreadful couple of weeks for garment workers and fashion retailers. There was a glimmer of joy this week when Bangladesh rescuers found a survivor 17 days after a garment factory collapsed and killed more than 1,000 workers. Then last week, teen idol retailer Abercrombie & Fitch stirred up a social media controversy when CEO Mike Jeffries confessed A & F would never make sizes XL for women because the brand is targeted toward “the cool kids”....
Thirty minutes or less was not the mantra of two major pizza chains in Paraguay recently when they deliberately delayed deliveries to hungry customers. Thirty minutes or less was not the mantra of two major pizza chains in Paraguay recently when they deliberately delayed deliveries to hungry customers. Frustration, anger and grumbling stomachs were just a few of the symptoms of this recent cause marketing campaign. According to trend spotter Springwise.com, the companies partnered with the Food Bank Foundation and intentionally made customers wait to give them a little taste of what it's like to be hungry. When the pizzas finally arrived, each came with a note stating, "When you're hungry, you understand hunger." For their trouble, customers got their pizzas free of charge, and they could also donate to the Food Bank Foundation to help fight serious cases of hunger. The campaign has already raised enough money to collect 50 tons of food and provided customers a reality check on what it feels like to be hungry.... [Smart and creative marketing - JD]
When it comes to determining the primary audience for sustainability reports, is it investors, customers or another stakeholder group? A recent study by Ernst & Young and GreenBiz.com found employees to be the second most important audience for sustainability reports. That’s not surprising when you consider that the study also found employees to be second only to customers as drivers of sustainability initiatives. But consider this: the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer found that company communications are distrusted by workers at all levels. Only 29% of executives and 21% of employees trust such communication. That’s a wake-up call to leaders and communicators for less spin and more candid, meaningful narrative....
"...a big question for companies is to what extent CSR - specifically behavior that affects the environment - actually alters shareholder value. Is it better to pursue a single bottom line, or do shareholders benefit more when a company supports the “triple bottom line” that includes people, the planet, and profits?..." Worth reading!
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What’s in it for them?” is, perhaps, the most important question that you can ask yourself before you enter into cause-related business (or any business, for that matter). So often, marketers know a ridiculous amount about their product, their points of differentiation, their mission or even their cause, yet when asked about their customer, they run out of things to say rather quickly.
The secret to fostering engagement with your customers lies in knowing what they are really buying from you. If you want your business to do good, it better be the kind of good that people care about. People save the cute and cuddly animals first. Baby fur seals and koalas are far easier to rescue than the blowfish. This is not to diminish the importance of any cause, but if we fail to be honest about the way that consumers buy and buy in, then we fail to understand the nature of “good” in business....
Investigating the gun industry, Muslim extremists, and high-stakes litigation, I’ve grown accustomed to deadline intimidation from corporate legal departments or an executive’s personal PR squad, but only this week am I getting a feel for what it’s like to be the target when a sovereign nation goes into crisis-communication mode.
Worried about revelations in Law of the Jungle, my soon-to-be-released book about the epic Chevron (CVX) oil pollution case, the Republic of Ecuador’s U.S. public relations advisers, New York-based Ketchum, has sent a six-page, single-spaced memo to Ecuador’s ambassador to the U.S., Nathalie Cely. Marked “reservado y confidencial,” the memo, prepared in Spanish throughout, outlines “difficult questions” the book raises “that negatively affect Ecuador,” and includes an ad hominem swipe. “It remains unclear when and how many times Barrett visited Ecuador or if he interviewed anyone from the Government,” the memo states. “This can be converted into a point that we can raise, but only in suitable settings and among appropriate journalists.”
I obtained a copy of the memo from a helpful noncombatant who works for neither Ketchum nor the ambassador and who requested anonymity for all the obvious and usual reasons. The damage-control document is a peculiar combination of advice on how to discredit the messenger—“this can be converted into a point …”—and admissions that the book raises issues that do not reflect well on Ecuador’s government....
Hidden in plain sight, the controversial oil fields are an industrial expanse where forests once stood....
...Even when you round a certain bend and see some of the view, it’s hard to grasp the scale: This is a place where trucks are literally the size of houses, storage tanks are the size of football fields, and machines for processing the oil are the size of small office buildings. When the oil fields are fully developed, they'll cover an area the size of the state of Florida....
To be successful in reaching Millennials, businesses need to give themselves the freedom to re-think their entire marketing strategy. To achieve their business objectives businesses need to communicate effectively with the values of consumers. Brands that are becoming more socially conscious today will positively affect their bottom-line, their communities, and the world of tomorrow.
In a telephone interview with David Burstein, author of "Fast Future: How the Millennial Generation is Shaping Our World," he said Millennials are highly connected to and are extremely conscious of their values. They "see the world from a values perspective," he continued, "Reaching Millennials requires a real investment [from brands and organizations] in social responsibility."...
MHPM Project Managers has taken a different approach with the release their first CSR (Corporate Sustainability Report). Instead of the normal text report that other companies release, MHPM created an infographic poster with all of their sustainability information. It serves as a great example to their clients of how even CSR data can be designed in an engaging way. [Innovative model and CSR reporting tool~ Jeff]
Dan Rather says public relations should be for public interest... Dan Rather urged PR professionals to recommit to working on behalf of the public’s best interest. When public relations operates at its best, it is helping more than a client or corporation — it is helping the general public, said Rather, the keynote speaker during the PRSA New York Chapter’s 25th annual Big Apple Awards last night....
We're pleased to feature a guest blog today from Matthew Yeomans, a leading expert on social media in the area of sustainability and CSR. We asked him to tell us a little more about the Social Media Sustainability Index, an impressive report that he recently authored on the state of social media sustainability communication among major international companies. Read what he has to say, and then download the free report in full over at the SMI website. It's full of practical tips on how to communicate effectively about sustainability using social media - and of course there's a top 100 list to pore over at your leisure....
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The Body Shop’s content marketing focuses on its corporate social responsibility programs and social good messaging for causes like ending animal testing.