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Good ‘purpose marketing’ requires a business purpose, too

Cause or “purpose marketing,” along with the explosion of marketing driven by big data, dominated discussions at the Association of National Advertisers’ annual conference here, which attracted a record crowd of more than 2,800.

With millennials’ insistence, if not demand, that the brands they buy support philanthropic causes, one CMO after another detailed their causes. More so than in recent years, however, many cautioned that “purpose marketing” for its own sake was pointless, especially given the impact they said matching the appropriate cause and brand can have on the bottom line.

Some saw cause marketing as more integral to consumer marketing than highlighting product benefits and attributes.

“Purpose marketing should drive business results,” said Mark Addicks, General Mills senior vice president and chief marketing officer.

 
Mark Addicks of General Mills and Blair Christie of Cisco.
Photo by: CLARION PICTURES (2)
“A good purpose isn’t just feel-good stuff for the brand. It really should drive relevancy, bonding, commerce and profit. But it asks bigger questions, like what do you want to be?”

American Standard Brands used a “Flush For Good” program, which donated disease-preventing sanitary toilet pans to developing countries for each of its “high-performance” Champion toilets sold. The program helped turn around the company. “Purpose without purchase is pointless,” said Jay Gould, American Standard president and CEO.

Still, more than one marketer noted the degree of difficulty in balancing purpose and profit. “The pendulum has definitely shifted more to the purpose side, but you go back [to work] and there are different kinds of urgencies,” said Paul Alexander, executive vice president and chief communications officer at Liberty Mutual Insurance, a U.S. Olympic Committee and FIFA World Cup sponsor. “The challenge is executing against that purpose strategy and still meeting the everyday demands of your company.”

> BIG AND GETTING BIGGER: The promise of big data and the analytics they allow has been a hot topic at the ANA conference for some time, but with data breaches in the news, and some business-to-business and business-to-consumer applications just coming to light, the topic still generated a fair amount of debate in Orlando.

“The promise of what data can do or not do is very much in the conversation,” said ESPN sales czar Ed Erhardt. “Marketers are trying to find the best way to use big data and still keep consumers feeling that their privacy isn’t being violated.”

The privacy versus service dilemma is a hot issue. Every time a major retailer gets hacked, consumers get more skittish. On the other hand, consumers may learn the benefits of giving their data to marketers and even enjoy the results. “We’ll get into hyper-personalization,” said former Kodak CMO Jeff Hayzlett, now an independent consultant. “Who doesn’t want to walk into a restaurant and be [automatically] served their favorite beverage like a king. … The average consumer wants that, without feeling that it’s creepy.”

Examples of more marketing-focused data-intensive applications came from Visa CMO Kevin Burke, who cited recent work with Facebook during the FIFA World Cup to create content using “custom clutter and dynamic targeting” layered with social and transactional data to create customized content that “changed the way consumers feel about the brand.”

Both Target CMO Jeff Jones and Wal-Mart CMO Stephen Quinn discussed apps that not only locate items in stores for consumers via GPS, but also map the store to create the best path to retrieve the items on their list.

“That capability is going to be expected,” said Wal-Mart’s Quinn. “Within the next two years, I will be surprised if every retailer doesn’t have it.” Visa’s Burke supported that contention, citing research showing that 70 percent of consumers would rather consult their mobile device than interact with a store clerk.

“We can’t be focused enough on data,” said Andy England, MillerCoors executive vice president and chief marketing officer. “Millennials would rather have a smartphone than a car. That’s a pretty telling statement. So we have to be not just developing for mobile, but developing for mobile first.”

England compared MillerCoors’ current attempts at tracking beer consumers’ behavior with big data to fishing with dynamite, “but when everyone is paying for everything with their mobile phone, that’s going to change. Then I can see the different locations where they are buying beer and possibly what else they are buying.”

Starcom CEO Lisa Donohue said her media-planning agency now has 50 people dedicated to data and analytics. At large clients, she said, the problem is that extracting data is far too difficult. “Data exists. The biggest problem is that it’s often siloed and limited by organizational structure,” she said. “In a converged world, that’s all over. When you can do that, then you get to the data that matters — and that can drive business strategy.”

Roel de Vries of Nissan
Photo by: CLARION PICTURES
Still, even those marketers welcoming the rigor of analytics and data as a means of validating their decisions cautioned that they should not become the deciding factor in their business. “Marketing is more than ever a science, but we should make sure that it never becomes less of an art,” said Roel de Vries, global head of marketing for Nissan.

> CONTENT: When companies such as Microsoft are talking about their “newsrooms,” you know everyone is in the content game. The reason is clear; as Blair Christie, Cisco senior vice president and CMO, put it: “We’ve all moved from promotion to engagement.”

However, as Subway Global CMO Tony Pace put it, distribution is just as important as production value.

“You can spend a lot of money on content and end up with something you like but is not necessarily seen by a lot of people,” said Pace, who was elected as the ANA’s new chairman. “Collaboration with the appropriate distribution media channels is integral. Given the amount of media fragmentation we’re all contending with, getting what you pay for in terms of audience delivery is a popular topic here.”

Still, the new reality was clear: Even the biggest budgets won’t guarantee results at a time when there are so many media choices.

“You can’t buy your way to the top anymore,” said Michael Kelly, media/communications manager at American Licorice, which relies heavily on social media in a category where it’s massively outspent in traditional media by the candy big four: Hershey, Mars, Mondelez and Nestlé. “Brands with the most creative content will get the first-mover advantage and earn disproportionate share.”

> WORDY: The ANA is always our favorite place for new buzzwords or terms. Some of the ones we heard for the first (and hopefully final) time included infobesity, authentic differentiation, macroecosystem, reverse mentoring, post-click attribution, and points of persuasability. Pick your favorite. Or not.

Terry Lefton can be reached at tlefton@sportsbusinessjournal.com.

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