December 14, 2007 Issue No. 60

This Christmas, Stop Giving

Stop.

Stop contributing something to every charitable organization that comes asking. Instead, focus on a single cause aligned with your Brand. Cause-related Branding allows you to make a meaningful difference in one particular area and get people thinking about you in a way that reflects the essence of your Brand as cemented in your Brand Foundation.

There are approximately 1,000,000 registered charities in the United States and more than 80,000 in Canada. They aggressively and expensively compete with each other for the same pool of dollars. If all companies simply focused their giving on a single recipient, imagine the marketing dollars these charities could save and redirect to their own causes.

Cause-related Branding is an especially powerful way of getting employees and customers to connect with your company. It not only makes you feel great, it makes people feel great about doing business with you. Your customers will understand and appreciate a company that supports a good cause. And those ever-scarcer good employee candidates will warm to an organization that puts its money where its mouth is.

Junk and Women's Health

1-800-GOT-JUNK? is a terrific example of meaningful alignment between Brand and cause. It has aligned with Yard Sale for the Cure, an annual fundraiser for breast cancer research and treatment, that stockpiles donations from messy basements and garages. On the day of the big event, JUNK? runs its own gigantic sale and donates the proceeds. The alignment between 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and Yard Sale for the Cure works because breast cancer is obviously an important issue for the Brand's primarily female target market.

The Audacious Richard Branson

In the early part of 2006, concern about global warming was reaching a fever pitch. Virgin Group PLC chairman Sir Richard Branson, never one to miss a Branding opportunity, offered a prize of $25 million to the first person or group to develop a means of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. This was a follow-up to his commitment the previous September to donate a whopping $3 billion toward the global warming fight. In a truly remark-able move, Sir Richard promised to direct all profits made in the next 10 years by his travel companies, including Virgin Atlantic Airways and Virgin Trains, toward the $3 billion donation.

In vintage Branson style, both donations fit the Virgin Brand - audacity - perfectly.

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The above is an excerpt from Chapter 16 of our new book, Brand: It Ain't the Logo* (*It's what people think of you™) now on sale at www.booksforbusiness.com and Amazon.ca.

Acclaim for Brand: It Ain't the Logo*

“This is a book about perspective and understanding. The kind of perspective that marketers need - not just for themselves but for those with whom they work every day and rely upon for support at planning time. Brand: It Ain't the Logo* should be required reading for anyone who sits around the "big table" and for anyone who seeks to influence their decisions.”
Ken Wong
Associate Professor, Business and Marketing Strategy
Queen's School of Business

“Ted gives us pause for thought that branding should become a corporate metric. If companies were to directly correlate the billions of dollars they spend on brand-building to their ROI, I suspect they would discover it to be negative - because they fail to grasp that a brand, indeed, 'is what people think of you.”
Neil Glasberg
President and CEO, Invis
Head of Mortgage Services, HSBC Financial

“Brand: It Ain't The Logo* is a great read. I couldn't put it down. Great stories and great insights. I plan to lay it on our MBAs to help them in GettingItDone!”
Brendan Calder
Professor, GettingItDone
Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

“Ted Matthews wraps a persuasive argument in a lively read. This book is packed with fascinating examples that back up its clear-sighted analysis of how to build your brand—and, just as important—how not to.”
Jim McElgunn
Senior Editor
PROFIT Magazine

“Matthews and his team are champions of Brand actualization. They validate the business rationale for emancipating Brand from the confines of market fads, cyclical ad budgets and management whim. Thus, Brand is justly positioned as a cornerstone in corporate strategy, organizational behavior and leadership. The impact? The amorphous definition of Brand evolves into a tangible, actionable set of behaviors for individuals throughout any organization to embrace and strengthen, or dismiss and destroy, with their every interaction.”
Michael Boydell
Former Vice President
Yahoo!