7
Perception versus reality
MARKETING ON HIGHER GROUND

This may just be the happiest chapter in our book.

Many of the topics we’re trying to cover are tough and challenging ones, where the purpose of changing the world adds a layer of complexity and a degree of difficulty, and possibly even a measurable financial cost, to your business model. Granted, the mission usually bestows a corresponding opportunity as well.

But when you start to talk about marketing a social enterprise, you enter a realm of nearly pure opportunity to gain competitive advantage.

■ UNLOCKING THE SIXTH PARADOX
A product as good as the mission is your strongest competitive advantage.

More Than Cause Marketing

Please understand this right away, and understand it well: We are not talking about “cause marketing.”

Cause marketing is the practice of publicly aligning a company with a high-profile cause or a nonprofit organization with which the public sympathizes. Generally, the alignment 100is created through the donation of promotional dollars, tied to consumer purchase of the product, to the partner organization. For example, “With each purchase of a widget between now and Christmas, we’ll make a contribution to Children Without Widgets Worldwide.”

Being aligned with a cause was a point of differentiation when the first cause marketers attempted it. Today, it is so wide spread that its differentiating power is vastly diminished. We see distinct signs that consumers are becoming more suspicious of the sincerity and motivation of the marketer.

Entire marketing firms have devoted themselves to the practice of cause marketing. At the forefront of their new business pitches, they cite a slew of data claiming that consumers want cause marketing. In fact, the research says that consumers want cause, period. They can do without the attendant marketing.

In fact, the very litmus test of your standing as a social enterprise may be found within this discussion of cause marketing. If you are cause—if the reason you are here is to change things for the common good, if, as Kevin Jones of Good Capital puts it, “you’d have to dismantle the whole business in order to get rid of the mission”¹—then you are, in our view, a social enterprise. If you are merely marketing—if you’re just talking about a cause—you may be many things, ranging all the way from a socially responsible company to a “green-washer,” but you are most definitely not social enterprise.

As cause, you’ll probably even find your enterprise ap -proached from time to time by marketers who wish to make it the centerpiece of their campaigns. This is especially likely if your social enterprise uses a nonprofit form. When the offer comes, it’s surely worth looking at. You could gain wonderful exposure, to say nothing of hard dollars and cents, by taking part.

But be careful. Be very, very careful. Don’t talk yourself into believing that cause marketing has some purpose other than maximizing returns for the marketer’s ownership. By defi nition, it can’t.

Understand further that it has many pitfalls. Often, the recipient organization becomes captive to, and dependent on, the sponsoring marketer. Frequently, the core social message is co-opted by the marketer and loses its essence. Make sure your interests are fully represented at the table, not held hostage to the marketing agenda. Require a large enough, long-term enough, stable enough commitment to your organization to really make a demonstrable impact on behalf of the cause.

We also caution you to get good legal advice. Most certainly the corporations working with you have legal representation making sure the agreement document you’ll sign represents their best interests. Don’t do any less for your organization and cause.

And most importantly, choose your partners even more carefully than they chose you. Cause marketers are hoping that some of your fairy dust will rub off onto them. Fair enough, if the exchange of value back to your enterprise is clear and reasonable. But be keenly aware that something about the marketer will rub back onto you. It’s not uncommon for a company to seek the borrowed goodwill of a good cause to counteract some bad will of its own. Be certain to do your due diligence to assure yourself that the practices and behaviors of the company are consistent with your values. Always negotiate an exit clause allowing you to disassociate from a company if it starts to deviate from your values.

■ PRACTITIONER’S TIP
Be careful about cause marketing.

Be Good

Fundraisers are fond of using the axiom “Don’t give till it hurts; give till it feels good!” (Lynch has used this line himself. It works!)

But when it comes to marketing your social enterprise, you must flip the axiom on its head. Don’t expect customers, even those who most keenly support your mission, to buy if it hurts. People will not accept any degree of product inferiority, or frankly even parity, just because of your social purpose.

Your mission actually sets the bar higher for your product or service. A certain sensibility among buyers demands that your offering be well above the average competitive offering. It’s as though people want to be completely passionate about you—not just about your mission but about the mission as it is embodied in a superior product.

■ PRACTITIONER’S TIP
Mission + mediocre product = Dissonance
Mission + killer product = Magic

Rick Aubry put it bluntly when he told us, “The primary reason why grocery stores buy from us, or customers buy from us, is that it’s the best cake in the dessert case.”² (Those would be fighting words to Walls, were it not that Greyston sells brownies, not cakes.)

Aubry is quick to point out that mission does play a role. Of course it does. But it comes after the product, not before: “We also, of course, highlight the social good that gets achieved by a nonprofit, where the majority of the work is being done by people who otherwise would not have jobs, and 100 percent of the profits are used to fund all of the programs that we provide. In some situations, that adds value.”³

In some situations, he notes, that adds value. But note: in all situations, customers want good products. More often than not, customers expect those good products to come from credible companies. In this respect, your mission might even work against you. It’s not hard for consumers to figure out what you already know: that certain forces in a social enterprise business model tend to conspire against product excellence.

Rebuild Resources operates in a highly competitive business-to-business industry. Dozens of different service details, mishandled, can make a customer’s life (usually that of a corporate buyer) miserable. Customers often have large-scale national logo’d apparel programs as well as smaller localized needs. Some of the very biggest customers will give Rebuild their small local orders but not the real big chunks of business. Their going-in assumption is, it’s too big a risk. They question whether a company “full of junkies and drunks” can actually deliver the goods—and it’s a legitimate question. They’ll give Rebuild the little deals that, if they get messed up, won’t really hurt them, but not the mainline business. Lynch and his team have to spend a long, long time proving themselves on the small business before the big customers will trust Rebuild with the family jewels. Once the trust develops, it’s wonderful, but it’s a very long process.

■ PRACTITIONER’S TIP
The market will assume you can’t “perform” as well as a traditional business.

We have unscientifically observed that social enterprises tend to make higher-end consumer products. But many, like Rebuild, like the industrial baking division of Greyston, and certainly like Give Something Back, operate in commodity or near-commodity markets. Give Something Back, according to 104Hannigan, has to actively fight the misperception that the mission bears a cost that the customer must absorb. Hannigan wants his enterprise to be held to the same standard to which a customer is holding its current vendor. But the customer often carries an unspoken objection to a presumed “hidden” social cost. Hannigan’s team must fight hard to convince the customer that no sacrifice is involved in choosing his enterprise.

Within the social enterprise community there is widespread admiration for KaBOOM!. Few social enterprises have grown as meteorically, and fewer yet enjoy as powerfully positive a brand identity, as Darell Hammond’s organization. Yet he would argue that the success of the brand is almost entirely a matter of the product itself:

You had better be good—good on quality, good on service, good on value. Once you’re good on those things, your mission can come shining through. That’s the core of Hannigan’s spaghetti sauce analogy:

■ PRACTITIONER’S TIP
All the mission in the world won’t make someone eat a lousy, overpriced spaghetti sauce. You have to be good.

The Mission Advantage

You’re making a great product, surrounding it with great service, and delivering it at a fair price. Now let’s bring your mission to bear on your marketing.

Nobody does this better than Judy Wicks and her White Dog Cafe. Judy is fond of saying that she “uses good food to lure innocent customers into social activism.”⁷ Her mission is her marketing. It is impossible—literally impossible—to have any interaction whatsoever with Judy, with her employees, or with the White Dog itself without encountering her ubiquitous mission. Her trick? She cocreates the mission with her stakeholders. For example:

• She doesn’t just buy from local farmers, she seeds them, she teaches her competitors how to buy from them, and she creates educational programs that teach consumers how to buy local too.
• She gives 20 percent of her profits to her foundation, solicits contributions from her customers as well, and invests the funds in customer-designated community projects.
• She hosts activist speakers at the White Dog Cafe every week.
• She takes customers on fair-trade trips.
• She publishes a newsletter with robust editorials on the issues of the day.
• She speaks tirelessly about the environment, buying local, alternative energy, and living wage all over the country.

Judy’s been at it a long time, and every aspect of her mission-marketing mix is organic, down-to-earth, and personal. She has mastered the art of bringing not just the customer but all stakeholders to center stage as cocreators, or better yet, as coconspirators, in the accomplishment of the social purpose.

■ PRACTITIONER’S TIP
Cocreate with your customers.

Once your customer is inside your tent, no longer standing passively outside, you have a distinct advantage over your competition. Your customer is standing alongside you, satisfied by your product, committed to your mission, and willing to pay for these benefits. A customer relationship such as this can command premium pricing, attach people to customer-loyalty and frequency programs, create powerful word of mouth and buzz networks, and even, should it ever become necessary (and let’s hope it never does), earn you a bit of forgiveness should you ever stub your toe.

Creating Connection

Umpteen forces are at work to commoditize and depersonalize the world. Try getting through an automated phone system to reach a real human being at your cell phone company if you need any proof. People still crave connection, perhaps even more so amidst the dearth of it. Only an enterprise authentically focused on the common good can truly deliver on that. Therein lies a tremendous advantage for you.

Here are some tricks our fellow practitioner friends are using to create connection:

• Make the mission human: Give it a real face whenever possible. At The Enterprising Kitchen, each soap that goes out the door is signed by the escaping-from-poverty woman who made it.
• Connect the mission to the product’s attributes: At Rebuild, when Lynch’s team is making a sales call to a large potential corporate customer, a recovering student-employee helps make the presentation. Customers love to hear what is usually an inspiring story of the employee’s journey at Rebuild. But what really makes the sale is when the employee tells them “Because Rebuild has helped me turn around my life, I am going to do a great job printing your order because doing a great job for you means that we get to keep helping more and more people.” The effect on the customers is profound. They don’t just get to be inspired by the mission. They also get to see that they will get a better product because of it.
• Quantify the mission whenever possible: Find something akin to Guayaki’s simple formula: “A bottle a day for a year is equal to one acre of reforestation”—to make a direct link between what you are asking a customer to do and what that action will create in the world.
• Connect your customers not just to you but to larger movements: Everything that KaBOOM!, its volunteers, its staff and its board do is not just about the direct connection that they are making to make kids’ lives better. It’s also about fertilizing and tilling the ground that makes society value kids, community, and civic responsibility in a more significant and greater way. This is what allows Darell Hammond to say, “What makes the business succeed is that it is about a movement. It’s about something larger than ourselves.”⁸
• Use what you have: When you connect customers with names and faces and movements for social change, they 109come to expect a lot of you. But they don’t expect you to be slick and overbranded. Here’s what being unslick and unpolished accomplished for Scott Blackwell at Immaculate Baking Company:

• Bring yourself to the public in unexpected ways: Take a page from Judy Wicks, who does not let a single opportunity for activism in greater Philadelphia go by without lending some kind of support from the White Dog; from 110Rebuild Resources, which supplies printed T-shirts at cost to just about any recovery event that asks; or from Kevin McDonald, who loves to “bring the lepers out” as volunteers in his community:
  Lepers used to not leave their community; they were just isolated. And sometimes addicts can be looked at the same way. But somebody who is a mother, father, sister, brother—they are part of the community. So volunteerism from TROSA has become pretty well known in this community… It’s socially good for the people to interact with other people and to volunteer, instead of just people volunteering to help us.¹⁰
• Create ambassadors of your product or service, company, and story: Remember what Darell Hammond claimed a few pages back. Most of the marketing for KaBOOM! is done by community partners who just can’t help but talk about how much they love his organization.
• Create multiplier effects: A big piece of Rebuild’s screen-printing business is the event T-shirt market, where a customer may order thousands of printed T-shirts for a single event. Rebuild takes the time to put a hangtag with the Rebuild story on every single piece that goes out the door. The hangtag program multiplies the impact from making one sale to one customer to reaching thousands of end users, many of whom will some day become buyers themselves for their own businesses, teams, organizations, churches or events.
• Create opportunities for conversation: Greyston Bakery is introducing its gourmet consumer brownie, the Do-Goodie, into retail channels with lots of in-store sampling. Certainly, Walls wants consumers to taste what is arguably the fi nest 111brownie in the world. But equally important, he wants customers to talk with the samplers because that’s how people can best learn the Greyston story.
• Be open source: If you’re really doing social enterprise, you’re doing something pretty special. People want to peek inside that and see how you do it. Let them see. Give tours. Speak publicly whenever and wherever you can. Take a page from Greyston, which publishes its open hiring model on its web site for all to see. Get real about what’s proprietary (not much, when you get right down to it, in the age of Google), and share what you know. It will fascinate people. It will connect them. And hopefully it will even spawn competition, which can only make you better.

Live by Marketing, Die by Marketing

We called this the happiest chapter because, as you may have surmised, marketing is a fun and hopeful topic—so much so that you could write an entire book on it (as did our fellow Social Venture Network authors, Chip Conley and Eric Friedenwald-Fishman, in their fine volume titled Marketing That Matters). You should also be cautioned about a couple of items.

The first is an item of extreme sensitivity and integrity. You may be passionate, but you are not perfect, and you must never inflate what you do on the mission side any more than you should make unsubstantiated product claims. Do not allow your passion to migrate toward puffery. Be intentional about not letting your myth get ahead of your truth.

Along these same lines, even while you strive to humanize and personalize your social purpose, you must be careful to not exploit it by turning the people who benefit from your work into “poster children” for your cause. Lee Zimmerman walks this fine line every day at Evergreen Lodge:

We advocate the simple practice of using first-person statements and testimonials from anyone you feature in your marketing. This practice honors your mission and will mean more to your public than anything a copywriter could dream up.

■ PRACTITIONER’S TIP
Avoid puffery that misrepresents your product or exploits your people.

You were put here to change the world. We implore you to stay true to that mission. If you do, you will gain a huge point of leverage over your competition. And your marketing efforts will be a blast. Go forth and have fun.