By Bill Valentino
Success in business is based on the relationships companies have with people. It is the key job of marketers to build these relationships with consumers, customers, distributors, partners and stakeholders if they want to achieve success in today's hypercompetitive marketplace.
Creating a marketing strategy encompasses the development of clear goals, and identification of audiences or customers who ultimately must be moved to action. In this situation it is imperative to understand core products and how value propositions can succeed in meeting needs and desires. At the same time it needs to be determined how critical the development of key emotional and intellectual messages are in moving customers and stakeholders to act.
How to determine a healthy balance of "value" and "values" for a company in product development and in marketing to customers is the challenge faced by marketing managers who set out to integrate corporate social responsibility into the marketing function.
But for CSR mangers integrating marketing into their own CSR initiatives, this can be a relatively straightforward task. Using marketing activities to undertake major initiatives to support social causes and to implement CSR initiatives comes in three forms: cause–related marketing, cause promotions and corporate social marketing.
Using cause–related marketing, companies make contributions or donate a percentage of revenues to a specific cause based on product sales. Most commonly this offer is for an announced period of time, for a specific product, and for a specified charity.
Through cause promotions companies provide funds, in-kind contributions, or other corporate resources to increase awareness and concern about a social cause or to support fundraising, participation or volunteer recruitment for a cause.
Corporate Social Marketing is utilized to support the development and /or implementation of behavior change campaigns intended to improve public health, safety, the environment, or community well being. The distinguishing feature is the behavior change focus, which differentiates it from the cause promotions that focus on supporting awareness, fundraising and volunteer recruitment. (Philip Kotler/ Nancy Lee)
For marketing managers who understand the value of integrating CSR into the marketing function, they need to strike a delicate balance between the value proposition they offer to customers and the social values they express in the creation of their product and marketing. A value proposition is a clear statement of the tangible results a customer gets from using products or services. The "values" proposition is the socially responsible message through which a company expresses its core values to clearly differentiate itself from the competition. This is often aimed at creating competitive advantage, where this type of differentiation enables them to position their brand; advance causes, and create real relationships with customers.
Viewing such relationships from a holistic perspective, marketing and CSR are strategically intertwined because companies today emphasize a focus that is customer centered. This means that they are driven by the perceived needs of consumers and stakeholders and are paying more attention to learning about their desires, perspectives, and values.
In their book "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" by Al Ries and Jack Trout, come out as staunch supporters of the maxim that "Marketing is not a battle of products" but " a battle of perception." By studying how perceptions are formed in the mind and by focusing marketing programs on those perceptions, companies can easily link the core mission of a company’s values, voice, and business development ultimately to their bottom line through melding CSR with their marketing plans and strategies.
This idea of marketing being "a game of mental warfare… a battle pf perceptions – not products or services" is a contemporary approach that is fully in tune with today’s intensely competitive and fast changing business environment.
Marketing as a core part of business strategy, is not something a company does to purely promote a product or service or to proclaim the CSR efforts of the company. Instead, developing a marketing strategy, along with tactics that introduce and sell products to customers, is one of the basic foundations of business.
Marketing has historically been based upon customer demographics used to identify potential to create a unique selling proposition to market and sell products. But in the past few years, psychographics – how companies look like on the inside focusing more on passions, beliefs, and values, shows that customers’ decisions are being driven more and more by their perceptions of reputation. This poses the deeper questions of: how do customers feel about a company and how do they feel about themselves as a result of doing business with them? This reflects heightened expectations of companies to not only provide excellent products and but also doing it in a responsible way.
Corporate reputation is the second most important driver of customer demand only after the perception of the quality of a company’s products or services. Building community around a brand and reputation amplifies the importance of CSR in the marketing mix. That mix is made up of the Four Ps, – product, pricing, promotion and place. CSR intersects with "product" element it that it is seeks to identify how actual goods or services are related to the end-user’s needs and values. But CSR intersects most importantly with the element of "promotion" where it plays a key role in the various methods of promoting a product, brand and reputation.
Regarding brands, marketing combined with CSR is about building relationships by developing a brand story using an authentic voice.
Here brand emerges as the authentic expression of an organization and the aggregate experience that stakeholders have with an organization. Especially under these circumstances, great brands must reflect the true essence of an organization’s mission, culture, and the delivery of their "value" and "values" propositions.
Marketing today is made up of the processes, functions, exchanges or activities that create perceived value by satisfying needs of customers, consumers and stakeholders. These processes succeed in moving people closer to making a decision to purchase and anticipate, identify and satisfy customer requirements profitably by successfully managing these relationships.
Because marketing is essentially about creating relationships, the key question is what kind of relationship is a company building with their customers and stakeholders?
The clear trend is that people do not want to be marketed to anymore. This is a reaction to the old-school marketing thinking of selling products or services by looking for a manipulative way to gain mind share from a target audience. This relationship between a company and customer in this scenario is purely transactional.
New school marketing is based upon satisfying needs. It is based on the growing trend that customers are increasing altering their buying habits to assure that they buy from companies that speak to their values.
Affected by skepticism about companies and surrounded by a world of print and electronic advertising and promotion clutter, newly empowered customers and consumers increasingly desire and search for deeper relationships and meanings and are looking for integrity driven institutions to fill a values vacuum. They are no longer passive after years of being marketed to. They are altering their buying habits to decide if they buy from companies because they like the tangible value they provide them but more and more because they like the social and environmental values that they are espousing.
Building a values-driven relationship with customers has marketing professionals today recognizing that for-profit companies have a massive impact on the world and as a result have responsibilities beyond just maximizing return for shareholders. This new breed of marketers do their best to balance their company’s need for a fair profit with the environmental and social needs of the community and their employees.
Setting their focus on acting as socially responsible businesses, companies are beginning to understand that their relationship with communities, customers, consumers and stakeholders need to be developed as being long-term and sustainable, not short term and transactional.
A growing awareness and appreciation for how marketing through the creation of meaningful customer and stakeholder relationships benefits business and positively impacts the world by leveraging this function, places it unequivocally in the MBA’s toolkit for CSR. But this shifts the attention from just the quantity of interactions with customers and stakeholders to the quality of those interactions. This helps to build relationships that allow companies to understand the needs and desires of the marketplace and to make strategic choices that effectively leverage their resources.
A business can design and implement marketing to deliver value and values by blending the traditional value, profit, market share, and positioning goals that all companies utilize in their marketing strategies, with social, environmental, employee, and community engagement goals and initiatives.
Integrating socially responsible business efforts with strategic marketing tends to put more weight on the value of emotions over reason. The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotions leads to actions while reason leads to conclusions. It takes actions not conclusions for customers to buy products.
About the author:
Bill Valentino, continuously working for Bayer in China since 1987, holds a MBA from Thunderbird, the Gavin School of Management, and a MA in Technology and Communications from Columbia University, New York. He co-directs the Tsinghua-Bayer Public Health and HIV/AIDS Media Studies Program and is a Senior Guest Lecturer at the Center for International Communications at Tsinghua University. He is also currently the Chairman of the European Chamber's CSR Working Group and a long-standing member of the AmCham CSR Committee in Beijing.
