By Bianca Gonzalez
While many brands successfully use their platforms to promote social change and clarify their business practices, others miss the mark through superficial virtue signaling. Here’s how you can find the right causes that your brand can support without simply virtue signaling.
Why implement a cause-based marketing strategy? With 88% of Americans saying they are interested in hearing about businesses’ corporate social responsibility efforts, brands are taking a stand on all kinds of political issues. But corporate social responsibility is only expected to become more popular in 2021 and requires that corporations go beyond basic marketing ethics and legal obligations to impact social issues.
If you want to market your company based on its social impact, you must find a social issue that compliments your brand by finding a cause that aligns with it’s values. Findings from previous studies on corporate social responsibility reveal that “87% of Americans said they’d purchase a product or service because it advocated an issue they cared about,” while “76% said they’d refuse to purchase if a company didn’t support their beliefs,” and “89% said they would switch brands to one associated with a good cause despite similar price and quality.” These insights reveal that today’s consumers know how to use their buying power to incorporate social responsibility into their purchasing decisions.
The more cohesive your brand’s cause is with the overall mission of your organization, the more successful it will be both as a marketing strategy and social impact. An example of a cohesive cause branding marketing strategy is Always, a menstrual hygiene brand that advocates for women’s health, education, and empowerment.. They donated over 200 million menstrual products to women in need and worked with over 65 partners in over 50 different countries to show support to communities around the world. This brand strengthened its public identity as a women’s product through its efforts to positively impact women’s lives on a global scale..
Consumers have criticized many brands for greenwashing, or marketing to make a brand look more sustainable than it actually is. H&M called out for greenwashing in February 2020 after planning to use Circulose, a more sustainable material to create fast fashion, in their Conscious Collection. Because the fast fashion industry encourages overconsumption, material changes do not properly address the root of what makes the industry unsustainable.
So when H&M boasts about reusing and recycling 29,005 tonnes of garments, which is equivalent to 145 million T-shirts in their 2019 Sustainability Report, the truly conscious consumer would be concerned about how so many garments reached the end of their life cycle so quickly. Rather than deflecting attention from your unsustainable business practices, assess where you can improve and publicly pledge to do so.
Whether or not we like it, our actions as people and corporations have both a positive or negative larger impact. If you want to successfully align your brand with a social issue, you must first identify your brand’s current perception and influence. By looking at the current state of inclusion, sustainability, and transparency in your organization, you can commit your brand to social change and subsequently attract consumers.
Bianca Gonzalez is a queer, disabled Latina writer and advocate. She became a brain cancer survivor at the age of 20. Find her on Twitter at @ourstellarwords, Instagram at ourstellarwords, and on her website, stellarwordsfreelance.com.
