AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION
AMA.ORG
AUGUST 2019
GREENING CONSUMER BEHAVIOR INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION ECO-FRIENDLY WEB DESIGN
C H R O N I C MISPERCEPTION AUGUST 2019
CANNABIS MARKETING AFTER ‘JUST SAY NO’
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table of contents AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION
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SEEN ON AMA.ORG
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ANSWERS IN ACTION
• Snapshot • Core Concepts • Ethical Marketing
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Chronic Misperception How a content marketer with a background in journalism is helping to reverse cannabis stigma—the result of decades of anti-drug propaganda—by focusing on the facts.
22-25 SCHOLARLY INSIGHTS • Cannabis Marketing • Research Digest
30-34 EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS • Tiffany K. Schreane • J. Walker Smith
60-65 CAREER ADVANCEMENT
• Sustainable Web Design • In-House Agencies
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AND NOW, A WORD FROM ...
44 W hen the Smog Has Cleared
H ow Brands Can Help Consumers Green Up Their Act As consumer demand for sustainable products has risen, brands have become greener. But are greener products and marketing enough to change how consumers behave?
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Pittsburgh has long been known for its sports teams, french fries on sandwiches and—perhaps most iconically—the great steel mills that once kept the city shrouded in smoke and grime. But it’s no longer an industrial behemoth, instead shifting to become a leader in sustainability. Now the city’s tasked with telling a new chapter in its story.
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR AUGUST 2019
Green Shoots of Progress
VOL. 53 | NO. 7 AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION
Stacy Armijo Chairperson of the AMA Board 2019-2020
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s a marketer, when you hear the word “green,” you probably imagine an efficiently built skyscraper or a piece of recycled packaging. In this issue, we expand the concept of “green” and dive not only into sustainability, but also marketing within the marijuana industry. Cannabis has a perception problem. For decades, public-service ads told kids— and adults—to stay away from drugs. But today, we know that marijuana is both safe and legal for many Americans. On page 36, we explore how one journalist-turnedmarketer is helping to add legitimacy to the weed industry by way of sciencebacked research, one content-marketing piece at a time. This issue also discusses how Pittsburgh is transforming its image from an industrial stalwart to a green city haven. “Pittsburgh has been a success story among Rust Belt cities that struggled after the industrial decline of the 1980s, as it now touts its prowess in technology, education and medicine,” writes managing editor Sarah Steimer, who grew up in the city. “But how can a city rebrand itself as a green
Russ Klein, AMA Chief Executive Officer rklein@ama.org EDITORIAL STAFF
Phone (800) AMA-1150 Fax (312) 542-9001 E-mail editor@ama.org David Klein, Chief Content Officer dklein@ama.org Molly Soat, Editor in Chief msoat@ama.org Sarah Steimer, Managing Editor ssteimer@ama.org Julian Zeng, Assistant Managing Editor jzeng@ama.org
metropolis when one of its most beloved icons, the Pittsburgh Steelers, harkens directly to its gritty past? The answer isn’t to launch a massive campaign, but to tell a story that resonates with locals and impresses outsiders.” How have you seen “green” marketing change your industry? MOLLY SOAT Editor in Chief @MollySoat
P.S. Let it be known to our back-page star Smokey the Bear that our cover art was properly extinguished.
Katie Powers, Editorial Intern kpowers@ama.org Bill Murphy, Designer wmurphy@ama.org ADVERTISING STAFF
Fax (312) 922-3763 • E-mail ads@ama.org Sally Schmitz, Production Manager sschmitz@ama.org (312) 542-9038 Nicola Tate, Associate Director, Media Channels ntate@associationmediagroup.com (804) 469-0324 Samantha Couture, Recruitment Advertising Specialist Samantha.Couture@CommunityBrands.com (727) 497-6565 x3302 Marketing News (ISSN 0025-3790) is published monthly except June/July and November/December by the American Marketing Association, 130 E. Randolph St., 22nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60601. Circulation: (800) AMA-1150, (312) 542-9000 Tel: (800) AMA-1150, (312) 542-9000 POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: Marketing News, 130 E. Randolph St., 22nd Floor, Chicago, 60601-6320, USA. Periodical Postage paid at Chicago, Ill., and additional mailing offices. Canada Post Agreement Number 40030960.
CONTRIBUTORS
Opinions expressed are not necessarily endorsed by the AMA, its officers or staff. Marketing News welcomes expressions of all professional viewpoints on marketing and its related areas. These may be as letters to the editor, columns or articles. Letters should be brief and may be condensed by the editors. Please request a copy of the “Writers’ Guidelines” before submitting an article. Upon submission to the AMA, photographs and manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed, adequately stamped envelope. Annual subscription rates: Marketing News is a benefit of membership for professional members of the American Marketing Association. Annual professional membership dues in the AMA are $300. Nonmembers: Call 1-800-633-4931 or e-mail amasubs@subscriptionoffice.com. Single copies $10 individual, $10 institutions; foreign add $5 per copy for air, printed matter. Payment must be in U.S. funds or the equivalent. Canadian residents add 13% GST (GST Registration #127478527).
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STEVE HEISLER
LISA PREDKO
Steve Heisler is a Chicago-bred journalist whose work can be found in Rolling Stone, GQ, The A.V. Club and Chicago Sun-Times. He’s a veteran of the marketing industry, a former creative writing instructor and has been praised as a “good writer” by Mel Brooks.
Lisa Predko is a Chicago-based photographer who specializes in conceptual and narrative images and is co-author of Lisa Food, a photo-centric gluten-free cookbook. Lisa’s two favorite design elements are lighting and color; upon entering a room, the first thing she typically looks for is a dimmer switch.
Advertisers and advertising agencies assume liability for all content (including text, representations and illustrations) of advertisements published, and also assume responsibility for any claims arising therefrom made against the publisher. The right is reserved to reject any advertisement. Copyright © 2019 by the American Marketing Association. All rights reserved. Without written permission from the AMA, any copying or reprinting (except by authors reprinting their own works) is prohibited. Requests for permission to reprint—such as copying for general distribution, advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works or resale—should be submitted in writing by mail or sent via e-mail to permissions@ama.org. Printed in the U.S.A.
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LETTER FROM THE CEO
Winning the Transition Game
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here are heavy consequences to ineffectively managing transitions, and sports are one of the best demonstrations of how it can affect a unit. For example, the punt is arguably the most important play in football. Or think of other effective game transitions such as getting back on defense in basketball, hockey, soccer and lacrosse, or turning a double play in baseball. Each star coach in every sport will tell you the game is often won or lost in transition. To me, it stems from the fact that these transitions all place the executing teams in a highly vulnerable state, in which both the risks and rewards are heightened. The No. 1 reason organizational growth stalls is failure to innovate. Change and change management are inherent in innovation. Change leaders typically focus on the current and future states, but they may overlook the most important element: the changeover period. Today’s winning formula is no longer “built to last,” it’s “built to adapt.” Organizations in a state of constant adaptation must be mindful of the executional leaks that can occur when an intentional risk mitigation strategy and strong communication plan are lacking. Once an organization accepts the premise of why transition management is critical, it should do an audit of its key transitions. The number of transitions occurring every day in your organization and ecosystem will measure into the hundreds or even thousands. As a leader, you must identify the high-yield and high-consequence transitions. Don’t assume that because a decision was made, the necessary steps will occur. This is one of the red flags identified by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton in their book, The KnowingDoing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action.
Millions of dollars can be made or lost during transitions. New product introductions, withdrawals, shelf resets and packaging changes all place your business in a vulnerable state. Brand name changes, product or service redesign and new distribution channels are very public transitions that impact both shortterm performance and long-term reputation. Then there are the internal handoffs, such as those between marketing, sales, operations, supply chain, manufacturing, distribution and finance. Every movement from A to B to C, all the way to Z, requires diligent documentation and communication to ensure connected intelligence. When transitions are humming along, it can be the difference between “knowwhat” and “know-how.” For a journal article titled “The Mundanity of Excellence,” social scientist Daniel Chambliss studied the anatomy of excellence among swimmers, with findings that could translate to anyone from plumbers to social workers to marketers. Chambliss found that excellence at all levels of swimming—from middle school to the Olympics—is not a function of natural talent or working harder. Instead, Chambliss determined three distinguishing characteristics of the best swimmers in the world: technique, discipline and attitude. The same paper also referenced Peter Drucker’s 1985 assertion, that “to be effective does not require special gifts, special aptitude or special training. Effectiveness as an executive ... demands doing certain—and fairly simple—things. It consists of a small number of practices.” How many athletes have reported making a few mundane changes in their technique that accounted for breaking out of a slump and winning it all? Consider the three characteristics identified by Chambliss as they relate
to marketing: qualitative or technique improvements made to processes and frameworks; the application of good disciplines such as cross-functionality, communication protocols, time management, project management and measurement; and having the attitude that attention to detail is in pursuit of an epic narrative in which individuals can see themselves playing a starring role. These can all add up to create a values-driven culture that understands the mundanity of excellence. I encourage you to recall those three watchwords—technique, discipline and attitude—whenever you’re faced with a challenge. All it takes is the self-awareness of the mundanity of excellence and the overt decision to buy in to transition management. Remember that mundanity should never be confused with negativity. A culture should be established in which inquiry and curiosity about transition are valued and not perceived as a drag on the organization’s momentum. It’s about moving at the speed of trust, with an attention to detail that might save you.
RUSS KLEIN CEO
AUGUST 2019 | MARKETING NEWS
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SPONSORED CONTENT PROVIDED BY HOOTSUITE DOWNLOAD THE FULL REPORT AT AMA.ORG
Higher Ed Institutions Learning to Socialize
98%
Hootsuite’s Social Campus Report shows social media use at schools is ubiquitous, but many struggle to measure ROI
of higher education institutions surveyed are using social media
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ootsuite’s Social Campus Report shows a widely shifting landscape of social media trends in higher education. The social media management platform’s 2019 report is based on a global survey of more than 500 social media leaders in higher education, examining how schools implement and measure their social impact, and identifying opportunities for institutions to improve their digital presence. The report identifies a high adoption of social media among higher education institutions at every point of a student’s journey, with 98% of polled academic institutions using social media. From building brand awareness for prospective students and engaging current students, to improving alumni engagement and conducting fundraising campaigns, schools are doing more than ever to stay at the forefront of their domains in the digital world. The strategic role of social media has become an established focus for executive teams—68% of teams buy in to its importance and 64% agree social media is connected to the institutional mission and strategic plan. “Schools have a responsibility to stay on the cutting edge of social innovation at every touchpoint, as their audience is made up of digital natives who have high expectations,” says Jeremy Wood, VP
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The strategic role of social media is fully established on the social campus
68%
64%
of executive teams see social media as a strategic area of focus
agree social media is connected to the strategic plan and institutional missions
of product marketing at Hootsuite. “Organizations that understand how to harness that in a unified way are in a better position to realize the benefits of social.” Declining enrollment numbers at higher education institutions is one of the top three factors driving social adoption, alongside heavier student use demanding more social engagement and increased competition from other education providers. Yet despite most schools
acknowledging social media’s importance on campus, not enough is being done to quantify the benefits across a student’s entire academic journey. Only 33% of schools reported an understanding of social media’s direct impact on student applications. One reason for this disconnect may be the lack of a surefire way to measure ROI. Only 25% of schools have social media integrated with their CRM systems, preventing them from tying attribution of applications
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THERE IS HIGH ADOPTION OF SOCIAL AT EVERY POINT OF THE STUDENT JOURNEY AWARENESS
RECRUITMENT
ENGAGEMENT
ADVOCACY
82% run targeted campaigns to build awareness
77% run targeted campaigns to attract prospective students
94% share school news and promote events
72% improve alumni engagement
57% respond to customer service inquiries (e.g., health, parking, housing, facilities, etc.)
72% promote alumni events
66% listen and monitor public sentiment
47% conduct fundraising campaigns
62% manage crisis communications
INCREASING STUDENT APPLICATIONS AND FUNDRAISING EFFORTS ARE INADEQUATELY REALIZED BENEFITS 2019
2017
INCREASED BRAND AWARENESS
78% 70%
BETTER ENGAGEMENT WITH STUDENTS
68% 64%
IMPROVED BRAND PERCEPTION
59% 50%
BETTER INFORMATION-SHARING ACROSS CAMPUS
49% 41%
IMPROVED ALUMNI ENGAGEMENT
44% 39%
PREVENT AND MANAGE CRISES MORE EFFECTIVELY
34%
INCREASED NUMBER OF STUDENT APPLICATIONS
33% 26%
INCREASED SUCCESS OF FUNDRAISING EFFORTS
21% 15%
INCREASED QUALITY OF STUDENT APPLICATIONS
18% 11%
or alumni fundraising back to social media activity. “Higher ed institutions can measure organic and paid social data together to better understand how specific tactics impact the student journey,” Wood says. “Those metrics will help social media specialists uncover more efficiencies, such as which content they should produce more of and what content can help lower the cost of customer acquisition with social ads.”
A key recommendation that comes out from the report is that crossdepartmental collaboration and operational efficiency of social media on campus must improve in order for schools to realize the full benefits of social. Georgia State University invested in designing and implementing a social media strategy that would scale across the institution. It centralized content and processes to empower teams and individuals across campus
with easy-to-share quality content. “I never saw it coming, how much the leadership team would like ... our social media strategy,” says Terry Coniglio, director of content strategy at Georgia State University. “Prior to this program, our leadership team was hesitant to use their personal social media. The app has been critical to getting them comfortable with the idea of posting and engaging on social media.” —JULIAN ZENG AUGUST 2019 | MARKETING NEWS
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Healthcare Leaders: Here’s How to Recruit —and Retain—Generation Z Healthcare organizations are uniquely positioned to deliver quality healthcare employment experiences to Gen Z
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y 2020, more than 20% of the workforce will be Generation Z. Healthcare leaders, take note: This is an enormous opportunity. The oldest of this cohort, arriving on the heels of the millennial generation, are graduating from college and are ready to launch their careers. They’re hungry for specific kinds of opportunities and healthcare organizations are uniquely positioned to deliver them. That is, if health systems take time to understand what Generation Z truly wants from their workplace. Research from NRC Health reveals insightful information about Generation Z’s professional preferences. In it, leaders will find some promising
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trends that can give healthcare organizations a distinct advantage in the battle for high-quality talent.
Who is Generation Z? Generation Z is not Generation Y. Generation Y—also known as millennials—entered the workforce in the shadow of 2008’s Great Recession. When many of them graduated from college, they faced relatively scarce job opportunities and felt unprepared. Generation Z, by contrast, has the benefit of the millennials’ experience. As millennial researcher Dan Schawbel puts it, “Gen Z has a clear advantage over Gen Y because they appear to be more realistic
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instead of optimistic, are likely to be more careerminded … [and] since they have seen how much Gen Y has struggled in the recession, they come to the workplace better prepared, less entitled and more equipped to succeed.” So how can healthcare leaders entice this new generation to join their organizations?
What Does Generation Z Want? One survey, conducted in 2018, asked 970 Gen Z healthcare workers about what keeps them engaged in their work. Fifty percent of respondents said that good communication with colleagues is the primary driver of satisfaction with their job. Pride also plays a role: 82% said they want to be able to talk up their organizations among their friends. And finally, on a daily basis, Gen Z healthcare workers want to feel that they’re making a difference: 71% reported that this makes them feel that they “love coming to work every day.” These statistics should be encouraging to healthcare leaders. After all, “making a difference” is an intrinsic part of working in the industry, and large health systems frequently command an eminent position in any community.
What Are They Afraid Of? This shouldn’t suggest that Gen Z will flock en masse to healthcare roles. They have real fears about their future in the workforce that could become serious liabilities for health systems that want to hire them. Foremost among these fears is a general sense of declining opportunities. Cooling rates of economic growth and the rise of automation leave them feeling uneasy about their professional futures. Seventy-seven percent of Gen Z respondents believe that they’ll have to work “much harder than previous generations” to have a satisfying career. Reflecting that fearfulness, 69% would rather have a steady job than one they’re passionate about. Such large-scale pessimism aside, Gen Z also worries about interacting with their colleagues: 45% of Gen Z believe that working with the baby boomer generation will be “very or somewhat difficult.” They worry that boomers will not take their ideas seriously.
How to Create Loyal Gen Z Employees With this fuller understanding of Gen Z’s expectations, it becomes clear how health leaders should approach recruitment and retainment. They should strive to create the workplace culture Gen Z is looking for, while simultaneously allaying their fears about an uncertain future.
It’s easier said than done, but here are a few important ideas to emphasize, in order to secure Gen Z’s enthusiasm. • LISTEN TO THEM
Reservations about working with boomers reflect Gen Z’s fears that they won’t be heard in their new jobs. Fortunately, this is a concern that leaders can tackle with face time. Despite having grown up in the era of ubiquitous messaging technology, 53% of Gen Z report that face-to-face conversations are the most meaningful way to communicate in the workplace. Simply taking the time to talk in person with Gen Z staffers will go a long way toward assuring them that their voices matter. • OFFER WORK-LIFE BALANCE
Unlike millennials, who consider work-life balance to be something of a perk, Gen Z sees it as a baseline expectation: 40% say that it’s an important career goal. This is a challenge in healthcare. Direct patient care can be a 24/7 job and affords few opportunities for remote work or telecommuting. But leaders should bear in mind that Gen Z workers will appreciate any flexibility that organizations can afford. • DELIVER SECURITY AND GROWTH
Forty percent of Gen Z report that job security is important to them, and 64% say the same about opportunities for advancement. Careers in healthcare have long been prized for their stability. The industry is about as “recessionproof” as any employee could hope for. Career advancement, however, is another question. Gen Z is an ambitious generation; 32% believe they’ll be in a supervisory role within the first five years of their career. To retain them, it may help to give them clear, fair and straightforward criteria for promotion into managerial roles. This will help spur high performance and incentivize them to stay.
Conclusion Managing a multi-generational workplace will always be a challenge, but it’s not insurmountable. By keeping an ear tuned to what each generation demands, leaders can find ways to bring everyone’s concerns into consideration and cultivate the kind of workplace that works for all. While compromise is an inevitable part of working together, disengagement is not. —BRIAN WYNNE AUGUST 2019 | MARKETING NEWS
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and informed permission of data subjects. Unauthorized use of data could have a terrible impact on the data subject if it were to be made public or abused by individuals with ill intentions.
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Invest in the Right Data Management Resources (Even if They’re External)
5 Tips to Make Your Organization Data-Smart How organizations can ensure data is securely held and responsibly collected as consumers reclaim power over their data
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n 2019, most companies would agree that they have vast amounts of information about consumers at their fingertips. From storing cookies on websites to tracking consumer locations, organizations are collecting and storing huge quantities of data every day. Recent regulations in Europe (GDPR) and those soon to be implemented in California show the beginning of a journey for consumers to reclaim power over their data. But there is still more to be done within organizations to ensure data is securely held and responsibly collected. Here are five ways organizations can be data-smart:
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Respect the Human Behind the Data
When collecting personal data, organizations should remember that the data reflects real people. Decision-makers should consider how they would want their own data to be treated by an organization and apply these thoughts to the company’s processing activities. It’s easy for organizations to forget that personal data belongs to the data subject, not the company that collected it. As an organization, your accountability for the personal data you collect extends to ensuring that it is protected from unauthorized access or disclosure without the clear
The processing of personal data may unleash an organization’s potential, but it should be considered an important asset to protect whenever it’s used. It’s important to invest in both human and technical resources that allow you to manage your dataflows accordingly. This means training your operational teams and investing in cybersecurity. Organizations should carefully curate the tools and methods used when processing personal data and should pick tools that ensure they are embedding concepts like privacy by design and by default into processing activities. The tools themselves should help fulfill promises to data subjects (as well as legal obligations). Investing in independent data protection and privacy expertise is another way to effectively and safely process data. Both SMEs and large multinationals should make sure that the decisions they are making about personal data are consistent with the fast-developing practice and receive an external viewpoint that isn’t driven by profit considerations.
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Be Transparent
Organizations must be transparent about the data they are collecting and what they intend to do with it (including with whom it is going to be shared, in what form and under what conditions) with the people they are collecting it from. The company’s intentions should be made clear to everyone, regardless of age or technical competence. This must include the plans for current data usage as well as those
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for the future. Data subjects don’t like to discover a change in purpose operated without their knowledge. Organizations should think not just about how they plan to use personal data today, but how they intend to use it in the future. These plans should be communicated to build trust with those who provide their data to an organization.
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Don’t Be a Hoarder
We’ve all heard the benefits of decluttering our personal lives and homes, but organizations should apply these same anti-hoarding attitudes toward their data. Having an unusable lake of outdated personal data only increases the risk of leaks and consequent fines that can bring down organizations. You should only collect necessary data and limit the
collection of personal data to those relevant for the project.
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Know Your Data Flows
Organizations are accountable for the data they are processing and using. Not knowing the source of data or the conditions under which they can access it is not an acceptable excuse to avoid the responsibility of data breaches. Therefore, organizations should be aware of all data coming in and going out of the organization across all teams. Many organizations only need to make small changes to ensure they are data-smart. When consumers are putting their trust in organizations to handle their information safely, companies can’t afford not to secure consumer data. —FINN RABEN
The processing of personal data may unleash an organization’s potential, but it should be considered an important asset to protect whenever it’s used.
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Virtual Influencers Are Becoming More Real—Here’s Why Brands Should Be Cautious Virtual influencers are eerily human and have massive followings, but their presence could complicate consumerbrand relationships
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ecent reporting from The New York Times highlights the rise of virtual influencers, those carefully curated AI-generated personas who promote products and services on social media. Often, these figures are eerily human and could easily fool an unsuspecting consumer. But brands that use this tactic risk losing their credibility with consumers, particularly when it becomes difficult to identify them as a fabrication. One well-known virtual influencer is Miquela Sousa, or Lil Miquela (pictured above), who currently boasts 1.6 million followers on Instagram. Her account represents the platform’s standards of a picture-perfect life: She’s constantly surrounded by (mostly virtual) friends, attends high-profile events and poses in designer clothes. According to The New York Times, Sousa is the product of Brud, a Los Angeles-based tech startup, and first appeared on Instagram in 2016. Since then, she’s been featured
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in campaigns by several brands, including Calvin Klein and Prada. Dior, Balmain and Fenty Beauty, among others, have also used virtual influencers in their ad campaigns. Vanitha Swaminathan, a professor of marketing at the University of Pittsburgh, acknowledges that using a virtual influencer instead of a reallife human to sell a product has advantages for brands. “Virtual influencers are the modernday version of fictional brand characters or mannequins in shop windows that are suddenly more lifelike and real,” she says. “These virtual influencers never have an off day, always stick to a script and always look perfect. Thus, unlike their real-life counterparts, they can easily be shaped to suit whatever objectives a company is seeking to achieve through persuasive communication. Since they also don’t have independent thoughts or opinions, this is essentially another way of communicating sponsored messages to consumers.”
The New York Times reported that the Federal Trade Commission has yet to specifically address virtual influencers, but has warned that companies using fictionalized characters as a marketing tool should make sure that “any claims communicated about the product are truthful, not misleading and (can be) substantiated.” But Swaminathan believes there are challenges surrounding a consumer’s ability to distinguish between a virtual influencer and a real-life one, which has the potential to harm consumerbrand relationships over time. This could lead policymakers to take a more conclusive stand in the future. “The FTC is tasked with ensuring that advertising to consumers is clearly identified as involving corporate sponsorship,” she says. “If consumers believe that virtual influencers are real-life influencers who are providing independent views about a product or brand, and consumers are being misled by their beliefs regarding these virtual influencers, then the FTC is likely to regulate such behavior. Specifically, I would expect that the FTC would insist that companies reveal the identity of virtual influencers and clearly tag them as being ‘virtual’ and not having a real counterpart.” The New York Times reports that virtual influencers are becoming more common. But according to data from Captiv8, consumers still interact far more with real-life influencers. Swaminathan believes that virtual influencers have the potential to become more prevalent, so long as marketers and consumers approach the tactic with transparency and caution. “As AI and robots become more pervasive in our society, virtual influencers may be a cool new marketing tool that companies employ to bring their brand to life,” she says. “I think with regulation, consumers may be in a better position to discern the difference between real and virtual influencers, which will make it a more acceptable approach.” —KATIE POWERS
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answers in action
SNAPSHOT
How Fake Tacos Highlighted Real University Prowess An April Fool’s Day video from the University of Texas drew viewers in with an unexpected invention, then underscored the school’s accomplished faculty and top-tier facilities BY SARAH STEIMER | MANAGING EDITOR
ssteimer@ama.org Goal Marketers love a good April Fool’s Day activation, and the trend isn’t relegated to well-known B2C brands. Higher education has gotten in on the joke, typically pulling pranks via fake announcements. In 2016, the University of Florida and Florida State University faked a merger, while Virginia Commonwealth University announced
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tattoos would be required for admission. This year’s April Fool’s holiday saw the University of Melbourne in Australia announcing that 3G and 4G mobile network signals would be permanently shut down across all campuses. These pranks are usually an inexpensive way to elicit on-campus chuckles, but the University of Texas saw April Fool’s Day as an opportunity
to hype its educational and research prowess—all by harnessing the power of great visual storytelling and the region’s love of breakfast tacos. Action Inspiration for the video came from a decidedly non-scholastic source: “Big Top Pee-wee,” the 1988 comedy film in which Pee-wee Herman grows a hot dog tree. Thomas Swafford, multimedia producer at the University of Texas, saw the school’s new $9 million greenhouse as the perfect staging area for such a fictional plant. But instead of hot dogs, he opted to put a local spin on the concept and have researchers grow breakfast tacos (fully intact, foil wrappers and all). The video didn’t just showcase the new greenhouse—Swafford shot other parts of campus and interviews with prominent UT professors and President Greg Fenves. The guiding principle for the team, which included digital content producer and managing editor Sara Robberson
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SNAPSHOT
Lentz, was the overall UT marketing communications strategy. “That was the key, because it was funny but it really fit our strategy,” says J.B. Bird, director of media relations and issues management. “The takeaways were that we do research here that does change the world and it has a huge impact. You see that through the choices of the people in the video.” Lentz and Swafford had existing relationships with their interview subjects, having worked with them previously on more serious videos. “We worked with them and sold them on the idea,” Lentz says. “They were pretty much [improvising] the whole thing as we coached them through it, to talk about what they’re experts on and then compare it to the breakfast taco. That’s where the humor came in.” The video intertwines shots of the campus and breakfast tacos with faculty interviews, featuring Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation and co-inventor of the Ethernet (“This new discovery is bigger than the personal computer, it’s bigger than the internet,” he says in the video); Livia Eberlin, assistant professor of chemistry and inventor of the cancerdetecting MasSpec pen (“It’s really going to change the world, it’s a breakthrough”); Dan Stanzione, executive director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (“It’s hard to imagine a breakthrough with the scope and potential impact of this one”); and Art Markman, professor of psychology and author of Smart Thinking
answers in action
featured are real, but unfortunately the taco innovation is not.”
ORGANIZATION
The University of Texas at Austin LOCATION
Austin, Texas CAMPAIGN TIMELINE
April 1, 2018 CAMPAIGN RESULTS
The campaign reached more than 1 million users on Facebook and engaged 80,000 users; Twitter content for the campaign saw almost 6,000 engagements and more than 110,000 impressions; news coverage accounted for a local ad value of more than $200,000 and reached a local viewership of 2.8 million people; the campaign won a 2019 Shorty Award in the education category.
(“Suddenly, there’s a plant-based breakfast taco—we all know the breakfast taco is the best food on the planet”). Lentz wrote a press release to accompany the “Breakfast Taco Innovation” video that links the school’s various areas of expertise with the invention, ending with an editor’s note: “Experts and their accomplishments
Results The full campaign included the main video and press release, along with visual content for UT’s social media channels. The video organically reached more than 1 million users on Facebook and engaged 80,000 users. Twitter content for the campaign saw almost 6,000 engagements and more than 110,000 impressions. But the breakfast taco news grew beyond social networks: More than 100 media outlets shared stories about the campaign. “I was talking to my mom who lives in Arizona and I was like, ‘Yeah, I just made this April Fool’s video about breakfast tacos growing at UT,’” Swafford says. “And she was like, ‘That was you? I was doing the dishes and had the TV on and it was on the news!’ ... So I went and pulled the numbers—we had no idea.” News coverage accounted for a local ad value of more than $200,000 and reached a local viewership of 2.8 million people. The campaign went on to win a Shorty Award in the education category this year. “It’s a surprise when a more traditional brand like education takes a risk like this,” Lentz says. “I believe even in today’s world that good content rises to the top and we hit a nerve with a story that really resonated with people.” At this time, the team has no plans to repeat this sort of prank campaign, but Lentz says she believes UT can achieve the same result in a different way. She says the breakfast taco campaign was a success because it was unexpected. “One reason [the campaign] can stand out in a crowd is because it’s zigging where others zag,” Bird says. “If you watch educational videos, they—like corporate videos—tend to have a similar quality to them. This approach obviously stands out because it is about what a great university we are, it’s about our strengths, but it’s coming at it in a way that engages the audience with the unexpected and that is something that we do bring to all of our content projects. That’s the biggest lesson for us moving forward, to bring that spirit into all of our work.” m AUGUST 2019 | MARKETING NEWS
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answers in action
CORE CONCEPTS
6 Ways Marketers Can Win High-Value Attention with Gifts Most customers don’t like the gifts they receive from businesses, but a well-given offering can help marketers win the battle for attention BY HAL CONICK | FREELANCE WRITER
halconick@gmail.com
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hen TimeTrade wanted to win over a new client, it sent gifts. The appointment-scheduling software company sent golf balls to the target company’s sales operation team and a putting mat to the sales leader. TimeTrade told the potential client that if they accepted a call, they’d receive a Callaway putter to complete the in-office golf set. “That was a creative campaign,” says Daniel Gaugler, CMO of PFL, a marketing and printing company that specializes in tactile marketing—which others might simply call gift-giving. “It allowed them
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to get all the decision-makers that they want on that initial call to understand the whole problem. … They saw a 20[time] return on their investment on that program, which slayed anything they were doing previously.” People typically think of promotional gifts as swag bags, T-shirts or promotional stress balls handed out at trade shows. But Gaugler says that a well-timed gift to a potential client—particularly in B2B marketing or high-value sales—can nudge companies into doing business with you. At the very least, it goads the company into briefly paying attention to the gift-giver.
In one campaign led by PFL, a company sent a potential client’s executive decision-maker an autographed football from former NFL quarterback Steve Young. The rest of the decision-maker’s team received replicas of that football. PFL says that its client saw a 15-time increase in ROI compared with its usual campaign. Jignesh Shah, CEO of digital gifting company Rybbon, says that gifting works because it helps companies win the battle for attention, which he believes is half the battle in marketing. Gaugler agrees: The value of gifting isn’t the gift, it’s using a different channel than usual to capture attention. Where Shah differs is the medium—he believes that a well-timed gift sent via email can make people pay attention. “There’s always two or three messages in my inbox on some webinar,” Shah says. “If there’s a coffee or gift attached, that makes me stop and pay attention.” But the problem with corporate gifts is that the recipient often wants something completely different. Alyce, an AI-powered gifting service, released a survey on corporate gifting in 2016 and found that 88% of people would trade in a corporate gift for something else. And while 70% of people said that thoughtful, uniquely selected gifts would encourage them to do business with a company, 11% said that the traditional promotional items might dissuade them. Here are six tips for companies looking to send gifts and win high-value attention from potential clients.
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Combine Physical Gifts with Digital Tracking Both Shah and Gaugler’s companies tie their services to CRM programs, as does most every corporate gifting company. Gaugler says tying a gifting campaign to CRM allows companies to see when the gift was sent, when it was received and what happened after the client received it. They can then tie the physical act of sending a gift to digital marketing. Marketers can track the success of what is essentially a direct-mail campaign through a digital dashboard.
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Shah says that his company’s giftsending process is entirely automated. For example, if a company wants to send out a survey, it automates sending a digital gift certificate to people who completed the survey. As soon as survey-takers are finished, they receive their gift card and the surveyor’s CRM system tracks that the survey had been completed. These tracking systems also let the company know when someone hasn’t taken a gift, Shah says, which is important—15–20% of digital gifts are never claimed. These unclaimed gifts can be reclaimed in his company’s system, Shah says.
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Make Your Value Proposition Clear Don’t make your gifts too cute, Gaugler says. Potential customers shouldn’t have to connect the dots when they receive a gift. Instead, the message must be clear and direct, the value proposition easily understood. The benefit of gifts is creating a moment of attention and selling clients on doing business with you—not forcing them to complete a puzzle. “The gift can be a hook that’s going to provide a connection,” Gaugler says. “It gives you a little bit of incentive— the putter to do the call. But more importantly, the company sending this gift delivers their value proposition [when they send the gift].”
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Avoid Overspending on Gifts In creating a moment for potential clients to understand your value, remember that the value isn’t in the gift itself. Companies won’t do business with you simply because you bought them something—regardless of how useful
or fancy it is—so there’s little reason to spend a large portion of your marketing budget on gifts. Gaugler has seen expensive mistakes, such as sending Google Homes to cold prospects or sending items to people who no longer work at the target company. The gift’s purpose is less about its monetary value and more about the value of your proposition. “We see a lot of people who want to send a name brand,” Gaugler says, noting that many companies want to send prospective clients YETI mugs, which can be expensive. “But a mug that is almost the same and costs a fraction of the price can improve your return on investment.” Instead, Gaugler suggests spending enough to make your target stop and take a moment to briefly consider how your company might solve one of their problems.
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Give People a Choice Shah says that a benefit of digital gifts is choice. Rather than sending an unwanted physical gift to offices, he says that giving digital gifts allows people to choose what they want. Do they want a Starbucks gift card or one from Target? Would they prefer to donate their gift card to charity? Shah says that these small choices allow the gift to be more engaging and suited to the recipient.
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Match Gifts to Your Sales Funnel Gaugler says that high in the funnel, companies tend to stick with less expensive gifts or high-value marketing collateral. The number of people to whom they send these will be greater, the success
answers in action
rate lower. Sending out Google Homes at this stage would likely be a money pit. As potential customers move down the sales funnel, Gaugler says that companies will send higher-value items to ensure executive and organizational buy-in. This would be akin to TimeTrade sending golf balls to the sales team and leader. Often, a personalized message is included in this stage, letting the new gift recipient know that you’ve been speaking with others on their team, then informing the latest recipients of your value proposition. Gaugler says that this brings more people into the sales cycle, accelerating the deal. This stage is akin to a political candidate stumping for votes. Toward the bottom of the funnel, Gaugler says that it becomes important to get more buy-in across the company, to turn the tide of opinion in your favor. Proofpoint, a PFL client, sent its clients a kit that included a pen, journal and nameplate. Gaugler says that other people at the company saw the personalized gear and asked how they could get their own. After a sale is completed, Gaugler says gifts can be used as a way to say “thank you”—this may be where higher-value gifts work well—and an opportunity to celebrate milestones. Done well, this stage can help foster a stronger relationship.
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Know Your Audience Golf balls and a putter are easy and inoffensive, Gaugler says; very few will be upset by TimeTrade’s gifts. But sending beef jerky to a vegetarian—a mistake Gaugler has seen—is never a good idea. “If you do miss,” Gaugler says, “you actually take away from—rather than add to—the conversation.” m
Companies won’t do business with you simply because you bought them something— regardless of how useful or fancy it is.
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ETHICAL MARKETING
Gamification is Manipulative. Is It Ethical? The gamification market is poised to reach almost $23 billion in the next three years, gaining popularity by psychologically engaging customers and employees. But researchers warn that gamification can make for a powerful and unethical tool if used incorrectly. BY HAL CONICK | FREELANCE WRITER
halconick@gmail.com
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he first time Andrea Thorpe heard about gamification, it was touted as a fantastic business tool, one that could get people to do whatever you want. Thorpe—a professor of strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship at France’s Kedge Business School— immediately pondered the ethics of gamification, which are game-like processes used to encourage human engagement with a product or service. If businesses could coerce consumers through a game, Thorpe thought it could be an ethical disaster waiting to happen. Thorpe and Stephen Roper, a professor at England’s Warwick Business School, wrote a paper titled, “The Ethics of Gamification in a Marketing Context,” in which they examine how businesses could manipulate people using gamification. When Thorpe and Roper first submitted the paper, their editor pushed back with questions: How is this different from other aspects of marketing? What’s the difference between persuasion and manipulation? “It’s a really interesting point,” Thorpe says. “It made us think, maybe this is almost like a spectrum. … Gamification wasn’t so much different from marketing tools and techniques, but it’s certainly at the far end of the spectrum of manipulation simply because it’s so hidden, it’s so subversive.”
they argue that gamification in marketing is different from other marketing tools and gamified environments in important ways. Gamification’s aim is to convince people to buy something, which differs from other games but not marketing. Yet it’s different from marketing because, they write, it “includes aspects of design that covertly or subversively persuade engagement.” By way of this subversive engagement, Thorpe and Roper write that gamification’s aim is to get people to buy or buy-in, whereas advertisements aim to persuade. Gamification wants to engage you directly; advertisements and
marketing are typically more passive. As Gabe Zichermann writes in the book Gamification By Design, “gamification is 75% psychology and 25% technology.” Although gamification is covert, it’s most recognizable in external marketing, such as in apps, websites and contests. If you’ve won Gold status on Uber or become a Premier 1K member of United Airlines’ MileagePlus program, you’ve done business in a gamified environment. The most familiar example of gamification is likely McDonald’s annual Monopoly game, in which customers receive faux board-game pieces with their order for the chance to win more food, money or prizes. The game incentivizes customers to buy repeatedly for more chances to win. In 2013, McDonald’s claimed that the game helped the company raise profits by 5% in one quarter. Gamification is also used for internal marketing, such as training and engaging employees in new software, programs or projects. For example, CRM software company Salesforce engages employees with a gamified system called Trailhead, in which users collect points for completing training tasks. Such gamified environments are becoming more common in business, extending into employee retirement planning, healthcare
How Gamification is Used In Thorpe and Roper’s paper, published this year by the Journal of Business Ethics,
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and recruitment. In the case of America’s Army (“The Official Game of the U.S. Army”), gamified recruitment extends to members of the U.S. military. While a game can’t make a consumer or employee do whatever a company wants, as Thorpe was initially told (a study titled “Does Gamification Work?” found that gamification does work, but it’s dependent on users and context), it does engage consumers on a psychological level. And businesses know it: Analysis firm Prescient and Strategic Intelligence predicted in 2016 that the gamification market would reach $22.9 billion by 2022, a more than 2,000% increase from the 2014 gamification market. As the industry better understands the psychology of gamified environments, they will become more powerful and likely more covert, Thorpe and Roper write. “In the research aspect, we’ve become more concerned with the ethics,” Thorpe says. “But it’s not quite spilled over to industry. … Not all, but a majority of companies are not going to pay attention to the ethics of something unless there is that code of regulation in place.” Thus far, she says, no body representing the interests of marketers, advertisers or businesses has an ethical code of conduct for gamification. Is the Manipulation Hidden? Gamification is manipulative, writes Yu-kai Chou, known as a pioneer of gamification. But so what? Manipulation is human—saying “please” when you want something is manipulative, as is trying to persuade someone to go to a party when they tell you that they’d rather not. The difference lies not in the fact of manipulation, he writes, but whether the manipulation is hidden. Chou writes that he uses a two-pronged test to determine the ethics of humanfocused design: Is there transparency of the design’s intended purpose? And does the user implicitly or explicitly opt into the system? If both questions can be answered “yes,” he believes it’s an ethical system.
“However, I believe that gamification is completely unethical when there is a hidden agenda that users are not aware of,” he writes. “For example, when users think they are signing up for something, but in reality they are signing up for something else. False statements, lies and a lack of authentic transparency create unethical interactions.” Gamification could also be unethical if the decision-maker loses sight of why their action is desirable, a process that Tae Wan Kim calls “bullshitification.” Kim, assistant professor of business ethics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, writes in a paper that bullshitification often leads players to become enamored with points, badges and leaderboards, rather than the reasons why something is good to do, thereby putting their action at ethical risk. His solution: Give players more time to think about and understand the aim of the game, just as you would the aim of any other action. “My suggestion is that players—that is, workers or customers—in gamified environments have what I want to call ‘Solemn Time,’ in which they learn about what their works or jobs are really doing, such as helping others, contributing to society, or enhancing important moral goods such as friendship or sustainability,” he writes in the paper. If someone is given Solemn Time and realizes that they dislike the aim of the game, Kim says that they should be able to opt out. He offered an example: Many employees at Microsoft recently signed a letter asking the company not to sell AI products to the U.S. military. These employees wanted to avoid letting the technology they created turn into weaponry and should be given the choice to opt out of the process. Others may not have minded and should be allowed to continue their work. “Here’s a basic ethical principle that can explain this: You can expose another [to] risk without violating her autonomy if you obtain consent from her,” Kim says. “It’s a separate matter whether producing killing machines is ethical or not. The point is not that. It is autonomy.”
answers in action
The Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios of Gamification There is a moment when gamification moves too far toward the manipulative end of the spectrum, Thorpe says, but that moment is hard to quantify. What’s acceptable to a company and its shareholders may be unacceptable to a consumer and vice versa. McDonald’s shareholders are happy if the stock rises because millions of customers play the Monopoly game, but is it good for customer health? Thorpe believes that the best-case scenario is a completely transparent gamified experience, one where the consumer knows that they’re playing. Thorpe says that some companies think the strategy loses its power when the customer knows they’re in a gamified experience. She says that this is a myth, one proved wrong in her own life. Thorpe drives a Nissan X-Trail, a car that gamifies whether she’s been driving in an environmentally friendly way—how much gas is she using? Is she changing gears in an eco-friendly manner? At the end of each ride, the car gives her a score. “I know this is gamification,” she says. “I know my best-ever score is there in front of me and I have to try and beat that. I know it’s gamification. I love being played with and I know the idea is to get me to drive it in a more environmentally friendly way. … It’s very transparent. I know exactly what’s going on. I can even tell you what aspects of behavior or competition are being manipulated. And yet it still works with me.” The worst-case scenario, Thorpe says, is that gamification gets better and more powerfully manipulative but remains opaque to consumers. The industry is at a crossroads right now, she says, and the marketing and business world must ensure gamification remains ethical. “When businesses build a gamified system, it’s a really complex process,” Thorpe says. “Businesses should be stopping and pausing to think: Is this a good thing that we’re doing? It’s just a simple matter of being not only a good working professional, but also a decent human being.” m AUGUST 2019 | MARKETING NEWS
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scholarly insights
CANNABIS MARKETING
Navigating the Uncharted Territory of Cannabis Marketing JEREMY KEES, M. PAULA FITZGERALD, JOSHUA DORSEY AND RON HILL
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s cannabis becomes more accessible to consumers throughout the U.S., marketers and public policy makers must adapt to this changing landscape. Taking cues from the tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical industries, our new research in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing discusses how marketing this controlled
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substance will affect consumers in general, while placing a distinct emphasis on vulnerable populations. The laws of supply and demand from basic economics provide a simple frame to capture this situation. As costs for its acquisition—as well as dangers associated with previous search strategies—are reduced, it should come as no surprise
that people of all ages will find it more enticing. Marketers will need to ensure that people with legal access to these products have the information needed to make informed decisions, and that those more vulnerable to cannabis harms either have restricted access (e.g., minors) or a clear understanding of the potential benefits and harms of the product (e.g., pregnant women). In terms of packaging and labeling, policymakers may benefit from following the alcohol industry’s lead. For example, some state laws require potency (i.e., alcohol by volume) to be clearly labeled on beer products to help consumers make informed decisions on how much of the product to safely consume. For cannabis, labeling should clearly identify products with high amounts of THC,
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while also disclosing quantities of CBD, to account for the increased popularity of high-CBD (low-THC) goods. Yet, little information exists about how consumers will respond to cannabis labeling; we encourage evidence-based regulations that are shown to be effective in providing consumers with the relevant information they need to make informed decisions that best meet their goals. According to Section 843 of the Controlled Substances Act, advertising of any Schedule I drug is prohibited and any violation of this act is a felony. Thus, promotion opportunities are limited presently; major digital marketing platforms such as Google and Facebook have prohibited cannabis marketing for the foreseeable future. Digital marketing could be well-suited
as a primary marketing communication medium for the cannabis industry; for example, marketers could use advanced geotargeting technology to target consumers only in states where cannabis is legal. Distribution presents a challenge, with state-level restrictions differing considerably. Take California, for example: Under current state law, individual cities can ban retail cannabis sales. And, while distribution of cannabis via the U.S. Postal Service is illegal (because it is a federal entity), local governments in California are prohibited from preventing cannabis deliveries on public roads. Thus, delivery services potentially negate the same laws designed to keep cannabis away from schools and may facilitate illegal distribution. New
scholarly insights
laws and regulations will undoubtedly address this new world, as distribution opportunities unfurl alongside e-commerce. Price considerations will also be key; as demand increases, public policy makers may initiate excise taxes. Studies of the alcohol and tobacco industries show that high excise taxes reduce smoking initiation and long-term usage. But we caution that artificially high prices due to taxation of legal cannabis may have the unintended consequence of continuing black-market exchanges, given that such a system has existed for decades. Educating consumers will be key in marketing cannabis responsibly. Marketers can learn from the tobacco industry’s missteps and lead the way in clearly informing the public of risks. Because few researchers have investigated marketing cannabis to date, this field of study will certainly multiply. Marketers should remain abreast of these trends to avoid being unprepared. For cannabis marketing, the future may already be inextricable from the present—greater marketing knowledge is needed to navigate this uncharted territory to allow consumers to chart their best path. m JEREMY KEES is a professor of marketing and the Richard J. and Barbara Naclerio Endowed Chair in Business at Villanova University.
M. PAULA FITZGERALD is the Nathan Haddad Professor of Business Administration at West Virginia University.
JOSHUA DORSEY is a marketing professor at The Sales Leadership Center of California State University, Fullerton.
RON HILL is a visiting professor of marketing at American University.
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scholarly insights
RESEARCH DIGEST
Latest Research Insights Highlights from the AMA journals—and what the findings mean for practitioners
In Mobile We Trust: The Effects of Mobile Versus Nonmobile Reviews on Consumer Purchase Intentions LAUREN GREWAL, ANDREW T. STEPHEN
Forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research, 56 (October 2019). >>IN A NUTSHELL: The authors
investigate how reviews created on a mobile device impact consumer perceptions and behaviors. They find that because consumers think mobile reviews require more physical effort to write, the review is more credible. This greater perceived credibility results in a rise in consumers’ purchase intentions for mobile versus nonmobile reviews. This pattern only holds when the review is positive and the beliefs surrounding this process are not interrupted by the presence of other pieces of information that are more easily accessible indicators of review effort or credibility (e.g., review length, written by a top contributor, etc.).
>>PRACTITIONER TAKEAWAYS:
On some popular online review platforms, consumers are explicitly made aware if a review was posted from a mobile device. The authors show that this knowledge can positively influence consumers’ evaluations of a review. They find that knowing a review was written on a mobile device can lead to higher purchase intentions.
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RESEARCH DIGEST
Harmful Effects of Mental Imagery and Customer Orientation During New Product Screening
Addictive De-Vices: A Public Policy Analysis of Sources and Solutions to Digital Addiction
ERIC D. DEROSIA, RYAN S. ELDER
SACHIN BANKER, SALIL KHETANI
Journal of Marketing Research, 56 (August 2019), 637–51.
Forthcoming in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 38 (October 2019).
>>IN A NUTSHELL: When
evaluating an idea for a new product to launch, managers need a clear-eyed and neutral assessment of the likelihood that the product will succeed. Too often, they are unrealistically optimistic about new product ideas and develop products that should have been rejected early on. The authors find unrealistic optimism can be caused by managers assessing new product ideas by asking themselves questions such as, “Would this product meet a customer need?” The authors find this can spark a cognitive bias when they spontaneously engage in “visual mental imagery” of customers interacting with the product.
>>PRACTITIONER TAKEAWAYS: To reduce unrealistic optimism, avoid visual mental imagery about customers when considering how well a product would satisfy their needs or wants. You should perform all those considerations without visual mental simulation.
Enhancing Consumer Attitude Toward Culturally Mixed Symbolic Products from Foreign Global Brands in an Emerging-Market Setting: The Role of Cultural Respect XIAOLING GUO, MARTIN HEINBERG, SHAOMING ZOU
Forthcoming in the Journal of International Marketing, 26 (September 2019). >>IN A NUTSHELL: Marketing
culturally mixed symbolic products (hybrid products) from global foreign brands in emerging markets can be challenging. From a marketing perspective, this mixing of two cultural elements in one product is an innovative and exciting strategy (for example, Starbucks moon cakes). It moves beyond simple adaptation of an existing product to an international market to an integration of local iconic attributes into a new product. The authors explore how to avoid the pitfalls of this strategy.
>>PRACTITIONER TAKEAWAYS: Cultural respect is key in effectively tapping local cultural sources for global foreign brands in emerging markets.
>>IN A NUTSHELL: We are
addicted to our digital devices, or more precisely, the digital experiences they enable. Our addiction is both akratic (we are aware of the negative consequences) and engineered (designed on purpose). Marketers are complicit in this engineering: Via digital networks and big data, they ubiquitously monitor and experiment on consumers. This knowledge is being used to create even more addictive digital experiences enabled by devices and the platforms and content available on them.
>>PRACTITIONER TAKEAWAYS: The authors discuss policy solutions and how informing, guiding and restricting consumers can help ameliorate the problem and promote the public good. Marketers can have a role in decreasing addiction to devices.
scholarly insights
Managing Laggards: The Importance of a Deep Sales Bench JEFFREY P. BOICHUK, RAGHU BOMMARAJU, MICHAEL AHEARNE, FLORIAN KRAUS, THOMAS J. STEENBURGH
Journal of Marketing Research, 56 (August 2019), 652–65. >>IN A NUTSHELL: The
authors measure the effect of an initiative that sales organizations can add to quota-bonus plans to improve the performance of low performers. This initiative, termed the “bench program,” involves hiring trainees and telling salespeople that these trainees will replace them at the end of the year if they fail to hit their quota and place last in their district. The bench program’s threat of punishment includes the detail that trainees are hired and trained proactively. This ensures that trainees will be available to undertake salespeople’s territories in short order if necessary.
>>PRACTITIONER TAKEAWAYS: The bench program the authors describe has deterrent value because salespeople view it as a credible, vivid threat. The research suggests that implementing the program can increase the performance of chronically underperforming salespeople who might not find standard quota-bonus plans motivating. AUGUST 2019 | MARKETING NEWS
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SPONSORED CONTENT | PROVIDED BY COLLEGIS
Refocusing Higher Ed Marketing as Enrollment Continues to Decline Undergraduate fall enrollment in the U.S. is down for the seventh straight year. Reasons cited range from a declining birthrate to low unemployment. But it’s clear that competition is increasing, and universities can no longer rely on traditional marketing tactics to engage prospective students. Marketing News spoke with Megan Danielson, associate vice president of marketing at Collegis Education, about some new strategies for navigating these changing market forces. Danielson has 14 years of experience in the higher education space and built her career around creating cutting-edge digital strategies and go-to-market solutions for educational clients. She leads the team responsible for helping clients with branding and creative through digital advertising, website strategy, conversion rates and SEO at Collegis.
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What shifts are you seeing in the education market and what prospective students expect of higher education?
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There are definitely some interesting dynamics at play. Because of low unemployment, more competition and the shift in student preferences, institutions need to work harder to gain a student’s attention. Really, a lot of the change has to do with consumer communication preferences. If you think about your own shift in decisionmaking behavior—how you use your mobile device today versus 10 years ago when making purchases or conducting research— some of those preferences should be clear. Shorter content. Multiple touchpoints and engagements. Mobile-ready web pages. Simplified web experiences. With increased mobile-centric consumer needs, consumercentric marketing experiences for the smaller screen are needed now more than ever. Also, institutions have to own their brand identity and understand what differentiates them. Everyone has “online, quality, flexible” programs. Students want to know something different about you—that they identify with your values—and you need to communicate that within three seconds of them visiting your website.
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Q
What do you see as the best way for university programs to market themselves to prospective students?
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Q A
What kinds of experiences are today’s students looking for?
Prospective students are just like any other modern consumer—they want experiences to be frictionless, relevant and distinct. Most universities let their internal processes and functional silos dictate their consumers’ experience instead of the other way around. Some of the steps students need to go through just to get started are not aligned with the desired outcome. Students shouldn’t have to provide personal information like their birthdate on initial forms just to begin a conversation. Instead, this should be a simple, integrated process already mapped out with the student in mind. Another inquiry form example is on the “thank-you” page. As an industry, we have been so motivated around generating the inquiry that we focus on the form and forget what happens after a prospective student clicks “submit.” Doing nothing at all is a missed opportunity. Is that really how you want to introduce someone to your institution? All it takes is a simple “thank you” to show you appreciate them and to help boost their excitement.
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It’s amazing to me how much focus in higher ed marketing is still on acquisition through list-buying and paid media. Those strategies bring in quantity, but don’t necessarily bring quality applicants or drive sustainable yield improvements. An institution’s website is the primary source of brand and enrollment engagement. If you’re not communicating your brand and driving students through the enrollment process on your website, then you can’t leverage any of your marketing to its best advantage. The first step is understanding the prospective student’s needs and aligning your brand and program differentiation. Don’t just use catalog or academic content to populate your key marketing and enrollment assets. You need to start thinking about communications from their perspective. For website delivery, this really means filtering your webpages, communicating key pieces of information quickly and identifying what action you want them to take. Be strategic about addressing the students’ needs and build your website to address those needs through content and design.
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Q
What are the biggest website performance issues you see in higher education that prevent growth?
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Most institutions manage their website for multiple owners. When your website incorporates input from faculty, deans, alumni and current students, it dilutes the intent to engage core audiences (prospective students, current students, academics). Universities need to shift their thinking to show how their content aligns to these needs. Knowing your data and understanding who is coming to your site and who you’re designing it for makes a huge difference. At Collegis, we center an entire discovery period around identifying a university’s unique audience and helping them navigate placing the best mix of information on their homepage to serve multiple audiences while engaging prospective students. A lot of universities might not feel like they have that kind of data from their website. What big, long-term wins can universities pull from the data they currently have? Actually, universities have data all over the place—it’s just in silos. To get to long-term wins, you need to make connections in your data to inform what kind of students you should go after. Dig into alumni databases and enrollment records to see who has been successful at your institution and who hasn’t. Look at student profiles to develop unique identities at your university. That kind of data can inform your conversations about marketing direction and help tighten up those critical engagement points in the student experience.
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How can universities set themselves up to get the data they need that will help them differentiate in the future?
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Data is extremely intimidating for most of us. It will always be messy and it will never define truth. But it should lead to an outcome—and the best way to accomplish that is to start with a set of questions. With a tool like Google Analytics, you don’t need to be a super user to inform questions like where your students are coming from and what social media communities they belong to. Websites and data don’t need to be intimidating if you think through them the right way. One individual—even several teams—can’t organize this information and communicate on it alone, though. Align on the key questions that you want the data to address and use that data to empower decisions that you are making about your overall brand differentiation.
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executive insights
HIGHER ED MARKETING
Winning at Marketing in Higher Education: Three Strategies for Success BY TIFFANY K. SCHREANE
tschreane@gmail.com
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igher education is a crowded and intensely competitive industry. Traditional college trips and high school campus visits are no longer the optimal strategy to target prospective students. With the emergence of online learning platforms such as Coursera, Udacity and Lynda, prospective students now have more efficient and arguably more effective options to equip themselves for successful careers. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, college enrollment across the country is declining at a rate that places it near the benchmark level from 10 years ago. Meanwhile, Research and Markets projects that the online learning platform industry is expected to reach $325 billion by 2025. What can higher ed marketers do to help mitigate decreasing enrollment numbers? How can these institutions position themselves as effective resources where prospective students can gain the skills needed for success? I asked a few higher ed marketing experts to weigh in on successful strategies they are implementing that have helped them relaunch, reposition and reevaluate their institutions for their target audience.
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Relaunch Schools must look to relaunch and redefine college. They must go beyond traditional college trips and market to their target audience where they are most present. “There are more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the country,” says George Heddleston,
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vice chancellor of communications and marketing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “An umbrella marketing strategy, often prepared by an outside vendor such as an advertising or marketing agency, usually does not work.” Such a plan typically comes with a high price tag. UTC is a mid-major university of about 11,000 students, a median GPA of 3.24 and athletic teams in most major sports. Heddleston says the first step in a marketing strategy is to know your standing within the industry of colleges and universities. Taking its mid-market size into consideration, UTC set a marketing goal to increase its visibility using traditional and social media coverage. In just under a two-year time frame, UTC has executed the following: • Placed 12 advertising inserts in newspapers and magazines. • Earned coverage in 62 local newspaper articles. • Issued more than 200 web stories. • Created 140 videos and 521 photos on websites. Delivered 400 pieces of marketing collateral to highlight the university. In addition to available majors and academic programs, Heddleston suggests driving awareness of other amenities that would make prospective students choose a particular school. “UTC is considered the crown jewel of the UT System,” Heddleston says. “We have highly rated housing and we are in a growing city with interesting outdoor recreational activities that draw students. We use that to our advantage. Additionally, we have ramped
up international recruiting and today we have students from nations all over the world.”
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Reposition Higher ed institutions must shift their brand narratives, adjust their overall marketing objectives and ensure that their value is clear to their audiences if they are to stay aligned with their mission and strategic priorities. The Fashion Institute of Technology was founded in 1944 as a fashion industry trade school in New York City. However, people have a much different perception of FIT 75 years later. The school boasts alumni such as designer Michael Kors, Elle Magazine Editor-in-Chief Nina Garcia and Google Vice President of Hardware Design Ivy Ross. FIT has remained relevant to prospective students and creative industries across the world. Following the development of an institutional strategic plan that engaged the FIT community, school president Joyce F. Brown formed a Brand and Image Consortium of faculty, trustees, administrators, alumni and students. Facilitated by branding experts, the consortium focused its discussions and deliberations on FIT’s strategic goals and how to position the college to reach them. The consortium’s work became the foundation for execution and activation by FIT’s Division of Communications and External Relations. A subset of the consortium became the division’s advisory group and, in FIT style, conferral and consultation were part of the development process. “We called this initiative ‘powering the brand,’” says Loretta Lawrence Keane, vice president for communications and external relations. “We were not reconceiving this great institution, but we knew we needed to clarify it in the marketplace and ensure that our brand goals reflected FIT’s strategic goals. From the first market research study, the work took about three years and our North Stars were strategic goals, market research and community engagement.” According to Keane and Troy Williams, the acting associate vice president for
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HIGHER ED MARKETING
marketing and brand management, FIT undertook significant market research to understand their brand in the context of myriad target audiences. This research included testing for familiarity of the name usage of FIT versus Fashion Institute of Technology and case studies of peer institutions. As a result, the market research findings helped FIT hone its place within industries and among its stakeholder groups. The school’s brand and messaging were clear to prospective students, parents and high school guidance counselors, as well as to industry partners and the public. “Fashion is our history and legacy, it’s in our DNA,” Williams says. “As we continue to power the FIT brand, we want to be clearly understood as an
innovation center for creative industries worldwide.”
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Reevaluate “Universities need to do a deep dive to determine if they are offering relevant information in their courses,” says Scott Cowley, marketing professor at Western Michigan University. Academic programming is the bread and butter of colleges and universities, meaning institutions should reevaluate their course offerings to ensure that the material is appropriate. Cowley and other marketing professors studied the course offerings at marketing programs across the country and rendered concerning results. “One in three undergrad programs in the U.S. don’t teach a digital marketing or social media class,” Cowley says. “In
executive insights
2019, they shouldn’t get to call themselves a marketing program.” Cowley also noted that a lot of larger companies are changing degree requirements. “For example, Apple doesn’t require a degree for certain jobs anymore,” he says. “The job market is now more interested in the skills you bring than your academic credentials.” Here are some tactics that institutions are employing to ensure they are executing premium offerings for prospective students: • UTC aims to build bridges beyond the classroom, connecting students to the foundation of a successful career. Every program has to be approved by the state. “Our key to building the bridge is experiential learning,” Heddleston says. • “Through courses such as design thinking, we make sure our students do not leave as the traditional business students and that they are not conventional thinkers,” Williams says. • “I check current job descriptions to ensure that much of what I offer students in the classroom can be added to their résumés,” Cowley says. “The perception is that higher ed is not equipped to teach digital marketing skills, so I create coursework that is much more experiential and skill-based that we can quickly communicate the relevance of our digital marketing program to the industry, and to make the transition from college to career easier for students.” Moving into 2020 and beyond, more colleges and universities should take these steps to create more strategic marketing campaigns that align with their overall institutional goals and develop success metrics to ensure campaigns are measurable. Students should be achieving a return on their investment that is relative to the current job market. m TIFFANY K. SCHREANE is a marketing professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and Borough Manhattan Community College. She is a marketing, advertising and branding professional and has held media director roles with Publicis Media and Ebiquity.
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executive insights
THE STATE OF HAPPINESS
Creating Value from an Abundance of Happiness BY J. WALKER SMITH
jwalker.smith@thefuturescompany.com
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ith New Zealand’s announcement that its 2019 national budget would prioritize human well-being over economic growth, happiness is back in the news. Called the Wellbeing Budget, New Zealand’s national plan requires that all new spending be devoted to one or more of five cornerstone areas related to quality of life: transitioning to a sustainable, low-emissions economy; creating social and economic opportunities to thrive in a digital age; boosting the incomes and opportunities of indigenous people; reducing child poverty and family violence; and supporting mental health,
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particularly for young people. Alongside these well-being priorities, investments will continue in housing, health, education and infrastructure. New Zealand has committed to monitor progress of its well-being plan in conjunction with its traditional economic and fiscal outlook. The elevation of well-being as a top priority in New Zealand’s 2019 budget has won a lot of praise and admiration around the world. But there is a noteworthy nuance in the budget policy statement that has not attracted much attention. The well-being outlook informing the budget priorities found that “New Zealanders
enjoy relatively high levels of overall wellbeing but that there are challenges and disparities to address.” In other words, despite some important problems that require immediate and urgent attention, happiness is generally not in short supply. Mother Jones blogger and political pundit Kevin Drum reacted to the news of New Zealand’s 2019 budget by posting a chart on Twitter that suggests happiness is in greater abundance than people realize. The chart comes from an Ipsos study called “Perils of Perception” that has been conducted annually since 2012. This research is designed to quantify the gap between perception and reality across a wide variety of social and economic areas. The chart posted by Drum (on page 34) shows that happiness is an area in which people have the greatest misperceptions. The horizontal axis shows the percentage of people in a country who rate themselves as happy. The vertical axis shows the guesses that people make about happiness levels in other countries. If guesses about happiness matched the actual ratings that people give of their own happiness, all countries would line up in a perfect correlation along an upward 45-degree diagonal. Of course, it’s too much to expect a perfect correlation, but the data doesn’t even show a reasonably good one. People underestimate the happiness of others by a substantial margin. The happiness data shows that the percentage of people in a given country who rate themselves as happy is much higher than the guesses made by people outside that country. For example, 90% of people in the U.S. rate themselves as very or rather happy, but people in other countries think that only about half of Americans are that happy. This pattern of results is true for every country in the world. The world is happier than anyone realizes. This is not to overlook the scourge of unhappiness and misery that plagues the lives of many people, but pockets of joy are equally if not more commonplace. Happiness is the prevailing mood and is so pervasive that it can be a potent force for social good. It could even
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executive insights
THE STATE OF HAPPINESS
take marketing in a fresh direction. Marketing is rooted in the idea of scarcity, of people lacking something. Marketers offer products and services to fill that gap. The late Harvard Business School guru Ted Levitt once defined the purpose of a business as getting and keeping a customer. How do you do that? Levitt reminded us that people don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems—what companies must study are the problems people are trying to solve. As Levitt famously put it, people want quarter-inch holes, not quarterinch drill bits. To summarize Levitt more conceptually, people want ways to slake the scarcities in their lives. But regarding happiness, marketers are dealing with abundance, not scarcity. Maybe the best way to approach happiness is not in terms of a gap to fill but as a resource to be developed and
utilized. In decades past, when economic levels were lower and product quality was mixed, perhaps discontent was the undercurrent of life and happiness was scarce. But whatever it was then, that is not the case today. The opportunity nowadays is in finding ways to create value from the abundance of happiness, not from relieving a scarcity of happiness. When scarcity prevails, consumers want to get things to fill gaps, so marketers deliver those things. With abundance, consumers have plenty and marketers should consider offerings that enable consumers to share. Rather than worrying only about deficits of happiness, marketers should help more people get more out of the abundance of happiness. Consumption is no longer just about getting, it’s also about giving. Marketing is no longer solely about filling
gaps, but about transforming riches. No longer does value come only from satisfying needs; it comes from spreading abundance, too. With scarcity, people think mostly of themselves. But abundance encourages people to think more of others. This shift is at work in today’s marketplace, with basic values moving from extreme, narrowly focused self-absorption to a more balanced and inclusive consideration of others. The future of status is self-sacrifice, not selfenrichment. This makeover of happiness from a problem of scarcity to an opportunity of abundance is bubbling up in many ways. For example, a group of people referred to as the New Singerians is practicing effective altruism by working highpaying jobs that enable them to give as much money as possible to charities that have been vetted for effectiveness. They follow the utilitarian philosophy of Peter Singer, who argues that money should be spent to produce the biggest increase in net utility or happiness. In practical terms, this means that the unit of happiness a rich person gets from spending a dollar is less than what a poor person gets, so the abundance of happiness enjoyed by rich people is better shared than spent. Many social trends reflect this focus on others and the aspiration of self-sacrifice, whether it’s Greta Thunberg’s climate change activism; David Brooks’ leadership of Weave: The Social Fabric Project, sponsored by the Aspen Institute; or the Green New Deal that was first articulated in 2006 and has only now achieved widespread awareness. Brands are also catching on. Most famously, Nike and its Colin Kaepernick ad grabbed headlines. More and more, this is what consumers will demand: brands that find ways to create and share the value available from the underutilized abundance of happiness. m J. WALKER SMITH is chief knowledge officer for brand and marketing at Kantar Consulting and co-author of four books, including Rocking the Ages. Follow him on Twitter at @jwalkersmith.
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MISPERCEPTION
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How a content marketer with a background in journalism is helping to reverse cannabis stigma—the result of decades of anti-drug propaganda— by focusing on the facts BY STEVE HEISLER PHOTOS BY LISA PREDKO ART DIRECTION BY VINCE CERASANI ASSISTANTS: TOM MICHAS, TONY ESPARZA INTERN: OLIVIA LEONARDI MODEL: ANDREA DONADIO HAIR & MAKEUP: MEGAN ROBERTS RETOUCHING: TOM MICHAS
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CHILDREN OF THE 1980S WERE INDOCTRINATED BY NANCY REAGAN IN THE WAR ON DRUGS WITH THE INFAMOUS TAGLINE, “J U S T S AY N O .” And the propaganda, particularly against cannabis, was relentless. Perhaps the most well-known anti-drug PSA involved an egg and a hot frying pan: “This is your brain on drugs,” said the voiceover, as the egg crackled and browned. It aired across the country in 1987 and has since been parodied countless times. But in 2018, it was reimagined as a pro-cannabis PSA titled, “This is Your Brain on Cannabis.” The spot begins with an egg being tossed into a frying pan, but then a chef adds fresh vegetables and plates the dish, resulting in a colorful, appealing appetizer. The video, created by the marketing agency Artisans on Fire, signals a clear shift in public opinion on cannabis: The stigma is being lifted. “This substance has been misrepresented at the highest levels of authority for so long,” says Ricardo Baca, who runs the Denver-based communications agency Grasslands. “The education campaign that is needed now is so incredibly rare.” Marketers in the cannabis space are challenged with promoting a substance that has long been the subject of avoidance campaigns. They’re also faced with a smattering of laws that greatly limit where and how they advertise their goods. It’s unexplored, legally ambiguous territory—and the first step is reeducation. At Grasslands, Baca and his team are helping to
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change the conversation by representing clients in the cannabis space, which includes marijuana and hemp. Their clients demonstrate a desire to promote cannabis as a substance to be enjoyed recreationally, used medically or generally favored—not demonized. Baca has worked in newsrooms for 20 years, most recently at the Denver Post as the nation’s first “marijuana editor,” and in that time has honed a sense for a compelling cannabis story that values facts over talking heads, cutting-edge cannabis science over Cheech & Chong. Baca takes this knowledge to Grasslands and leads content marketing and public relations efforts like a reporter on the beat— knowledgeable and adaptable, with the ability to serve new information to the public. The tagline of Grasslands, founded in December 2016, is “A Journalism-Minded Agency,” referencing the newsroom mindset by which Grasslands approaches communications: Sources are vetted, content is synchronized to a news cycle and copy is edited. It’s a reflection of Baca and the work environment to which he’s accustomed. His job as the marijuana editor found him overseeing the Cannabist, the weedcentric vertical of the Post created in late 2013 just before weed was recreationally legalized in Colorado on Jan. 1, 2014. Colorado became the first legal marketplace for recreational marijuana in the modern world, and the Cannabist would come to be scrutinized on an international level. Baca spent three years in the position, during which he and his team completed investigative reports, deciphered arcane policy, discussed weed’s role in pop culture and reviewed dozens of strains of marijuana. Much of it is captured in the 2015 documentary “Rolling Papers,” which chronicles the first few weeks of postlegalization and the early days of the Cannabist. The site eventually delivered gangbuster traffic. In October 2016, a few months before Baca stepped away, the Cannabist raked in 885,000 unique views, beating industry stalwart High Times. One particular multimedia package, chronicling the harrowing journeys to Colorado some families took to secure unconventional cannabis-based medication for their ailing children, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2014. The Cannabist was a certified success, but Baca still saw the writing on the wall. He watched as long-time Post colleagues were let go and budgets were slashed. In December 2016, it was time to make his exit. “I was watching colleagues laid off regularly on the [Post] side, yet we were able to hire on the Cannabist side because of readership and how well the site was monetized and performing,” he says. “Eventually, that performance started to dip and it wasn’t as big of a revenue-generator as it had been. I figured if the site was potentially going to see layoffs like the rest of the
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newspaper . . . I never really felt like I had job security even at the height of the Cannabist’s success and I felt it was time to make a move.” He set out on his own, with no investments or support, and founded Grasslands. He believed his journalism skills would translate to the content marketing world with his deep bench of cannabis knowledge from his role as marijuana editor, plus he could leverage his industry relationships into clients. “I had been fortunate enough to develop a new skill set, that of drug policy and what marijuana legalization looks like,” Baca says. “I had a front-row seat to all that, with access to some of the most influential players in the game.” Content marketing in the cannabis space was difficult in 2016 and remains challenging today because of the substance’s waning and inconsistent legality. Illinois recently joined 10 other states and Washington, D.C. in legalizing marijuana (the law takes effect Jan. 1, 2020); medical marijuana is legal in 22 more states. Yet weed is still designated as a Schedule 1 drug by the federal government. This bars cannabis companies from advertising on Facebook and Google—by far the two largest platforms for advertising. While the science behind medical marijuana still lacks critical consensus, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence available, but companies can’t talk about it at all. Victoria Mendicino, who serves as the vice president of community outreach at the Illinois-based cannabis producer Revolution Enterprises, explains that marketing a substance straddling the line between federal and state laws is fraught with land mines. “There’s a lot of gray area, which makes things all the more tricky,” she says. “If there were specific rules it would make it easier to follow them.” Fortunately, Grasslands is led by someone uniquely suited to slash through ambiguity: a journalist.
Ricardo Baca
THE WEBSITE FOR GRASSLANDS FEATURES A LIST OF CLIENT CRITERIA. In order to be deemed a good fit, a potential client must demonstrate inclusivity, engagement, transparency and respect for the contributions of journalists. “We demand on only spreading vetted information. We’re not willing to bend the truth or practice hyperbole,” Baca says. “And because we still abide by ethics and standards, we’re not the right fit for many clients.” He’s had to invoke this clause before, at one point politely refusing to represent an industry stalwart in what would otherwise have been a lucrative piece of business. “He has a complicated past—we’ll just leave it at that,” Baca says. And after conducting research and chatting with others in the industry, Baca didn’t believe this person had outgrown his past misdeeds to warrant taking him on as a client. It seems odd that a young agency would actively turn down business, but Baca is aiming for longevity. “Once we do find people, there’s so much understanding that we continue to work with them longer than we would clients who don’t have that shared value,” he says. This manifesto of sorts ensures the voices Baca and his team pitch to the media are going to engage in fact-driven dialogue and further the discussion of cannabis as a part of people’s lives. Once clients are on board, Grasslands runs those accounts like a newsroom. Baca’s first hire at Grasslands was the same person he first brought over to the Cannabist from a different Denver Post assignment desk: Aleta Labak, who works as Grasslands’ copy chief. The content team regularly collaborates with the PR team much like a newspaper would hold an editorial meeting to solicit ideas between departments. The result is a suite of strong content marketing that captures the attention of the media for its resemblance to, well, actual journalism. Baca says they pitch thought leadership pieces in the same way a journalist would pitch an article, emphasizing a news peg and a target audience that aligns with the publication’s readership. They never link to second-hand sources, such as a piece that quotes a study—only the study itself. “So many of the tenets of journalism inform our content creation process,” he says. “News judgment is not something you can study. You learn it in a newsroom, and the only way to understand it is to dive into the news cycle and make those decisions daily.” Baca interacted with plenty of public relations representatives as a journalist, particularly while he worked as a Denver Post music critic prior to taking the role at the Cannabist. He found many of those interactions lackluster and vows to rectify PR
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shortcomings at Grasslands through active engagement with media personnel. “Unfortunately, a lot of publicists happen to come off as extremely lazy: They don’t do the work to personalize pitches, don’t do work to put themselves in reporters’ shoes, don’t do work to make their news release stand out from the crowd by paying attention to the content and the words,” he says. “I believe words matter infinitely, and it was frustrating to see how little thought was put into these things.” Grasslands approaches PR on a more personal level, often by inviting members of the media to its parties. Face-to-face interactions skirt limitations on cannabisrelated communications and allow Grasslands to forge relationships with the folks to whom they’ll be pitching. Many of these parties are attached to conferences like MJBizCon or the National Cannabis Industry Association event. Grasslands also throws the occasional Grasslands Nightcap shindigs, which take place in their Denver office or in Baca’s own backyard. Clients and prospects are invited to network, partake in top-shelf cannabis and sip the occasional CBD-infused cocktail. While Grasslands has accepted some clients in other regulated industries, such as healthcare and technology, the future of Grasslands seems to remain in the controlled substance domain—now featuring psychedelics. In May, Denver voted to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms, also known as magic mushrooms, and Grasslands is now pursuing an American nonprofit looking to break into that space. Baca’s thrilled to be continuing the fight against the War on Drugs: “How often in your lifetime do you have the opportunity to cover or work in a brand-new industry that didn’t exist seven years ago?”
THE U.S. MAY BE BECOMING MORE LIBERAL IN TERMS OF DRUG POLICY AND PERCEPTION, but traditional marketing and communications avenues are tightening up. In May, despite continued changes to drug policy across the nation, Facebook announced it would continue to ban advertisers from promoting or selling marijuana, including “drug-related paraphernalia such as bongs, rolling papers and vaporized delivery devices,” according to its posted advertising policies. This also includes cannabidiol, or CBD, the non-psychoactive part of weed. Google lumps marijuana under the headline “Dangerous products or services” and explicitly bans “ads for substances that alter mental state for the purpose of recreation or otherwise induce ‘highs,’” according to its advertising policy on “dangerous products or services.” Guillermo Bravo, who runs the content agency
Foottraffik, says there exists somewhat of a workaround to circumvent advertising restrictions on social media and search engines, but it’s not easy and by no means guaranteed. Step one: Write an ad that mentions your business while avoiding any words directly associated with cannabis use. Step two: Link that ad to a version of your website that’s been scrubbed of all mention of cannabis. Step three: Hope the bots don’t read too closely between the lines. “It’s not a feasible approach,” Bravo says. Things aren’t much better offline. Laws vary significantly by state, but in California, where medical marijuana has been legal since 1996, restrictions on dispensary advertising resemble the alcohol and tobacco industry. According to PolitiFact, ads are prohibited within 1,000 feet of schools, playgrounds or youth centers, and can only be placed in areas where at least 71.6% of the population is expected to be older than 21. Content marketing and public relations offer ways to skate around traditional advertising, as ultimately the company is merely informing, not proclaiming, and the content lives at media outlets or online blogs, not on billboards. But the future of content marketing in the cannabis space is less about physical placement and more about where brands position themselves in the market, relative to other companies. Larry Mishkin, who serves as counsel at Denver-based Hoban Law Group (which bills itself as “the nation’s premier cannabis business law firm”), sees intellectual property as the biggest barrier to brand identity. “I can’t get a trademark on Blue Dream right now,” he says, referring to a popular marijuana strain found at dispensaries around the country—or so they claim. “Well, who’s to say what they’re growing is the same Blue Dream as what I’m growing? . . . Customers take for granted that, ‘I know this Blue Dream is close enough, it doesn’t have to be the exact same thing.’ Well, for medical patients that’s a huge difference. And even for adult-use patients . . . the hallmark of effective marketing is if I go and buy a Big Mac in New York or San Diego, you could blindfold me and I’m not going to be able to tell the difference.” Cannabis brands like Revolution aren’t even allowed to identify the names of the strains they offer, proprietary or not, to the general public. “That could be interpreted as marketing our product,” Mendicino says. “We really rely on our retail partners for that—who don’t have those same kinds of restrictions, of course, because they are the ones who are doing the educating on [our] products.” It’s up to the individual dispensaries, then, to inform customers that Revolution products include the strains Bear Dance, Florida Orange, Wild Cherry Cola and Gorilla Glue #4. Not even Revolution’s own website lists these names.
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Revolution is based in Illinois and is therefore subject to rules set forth by the Illinois Department of Agriculture. Regarding dispensary marketing, the law reads, “Cultivation centers may market their products directly to registered dispensaries or physicians through direct mail, brochures or other means directed solely to the dispensaries and not available to the public.” Therefore, Revolution aggressively targets dispensaries. They provide branding documents aimed at budtenders, a cross breed of bartender and sommelier, who work at dispensaries and can make recommendations on particular strains. They also maintain a web portal where budtenders can find detailed descriptions of Revolution’s products. Brand representatives regularly visit dispensaries to answer questions as well. In addition to delivering product information in person, dispensaries are afforded the opportunity to post strains to Leafly.com or similar sites. Leafly acts as a sort of IMDB.com for weed—each strain lives on its own page and includes a description, lineage breakdown, lists of effects (relaxed, euphoric, hungry, etc.) and space for customers to leave reviews. Dispensaries are incentivized to use Leafly because of its location services; each page includes a list of nearby dispensaries where a particular product is available, based on the user’s location. Bravo, whose agency aids dispensaries with additional marketing opportunities, explains a major conundrum related to medical claims—one of the hottest topics in cannabis today. Dispensaries aren’t allowed to directly make any such claims, yet Bravo says that the two biggest growth markets are baby boomers and women, both of whom are interested in the potential health benefits of cannabis products. “You have to be somewhat vague on the medical side—you can’t mention any correlation of curing or treating an ailment in any way,” he says. But companies can discuss the basics, such as terminology (sativa versus indica) or methods of consumption (how to use a vape pen). It’s best to start here, he adds, because the average consumer has “little to no education” about cannabis. Companies can get in trouble for eschewing substance in exchange for sexy fluff. Part of the fear in how weed is marketed, Mishkin says, is that cannabis advertising will follow the path of tobacco and alcohol in sensationalizing the substance to young and malleable audiences. “The devil’s bargain [cannabis companies] make with the prohibitionists is that they’re not going to come out full bore with, you know, gals and sexy bikinis during the Super Bowl to explain why you should be smoking marijuana,” he says. Companies are still figuring out how to strike the proper tone and reach target audiences without running up against federal and state restrictions. Baca, however,
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learned how to properly present cannabis to a mass market by practicing every day at the Cannabist.
BEFORE BACA ACCEPTED THE POSITION OF MARIJUANA EDITOR, THE JOB ITSELF MADE HEADLINES. A former colleague of Baca’s at the Post noticed a listing in the employment section of the paper— the Denver Post is a union paper, which means every opening has to be advertised even if there’s an internal hire in the mix. They shared the description on social media and it went viral. The job found its way into a monologue on “The Tonight Show” and as part of an episode of “Saturday Night Live.” Baca joined the publicity blitz in December 2013 by appearing on “The Colbert Report,” telling Stephen Colbert, “I don’t smoke pot; I do eat it, though.” In truth, Baca was by no means a marijuana enthusiast before his role at the Cannabist. He says he hadn’t even “consumed successfully” until 2013, a year after voting for legalization. By “successfully,” he means feeling the effects of marijuana; he tried smoking previously but didn’t enjoy the harshness on his throat. It was a chocolate bar, procured from a medical dispensary prior to recreational legalization, that finally did him in. He says he laughed all night, woke up without a hangover and told his wife he likes weed more than alcohol. Still, he rarely partakes these days and remains a bit shell-shocked from growing up during the War on Drugs. “I was listening to ‘Just Say No,’ to my teachers and to Nancy Reagan throughout the ’80s,” he says. He didn’t consume a single substance, including alcohol, until he was 21 years old. Baca found his way to the Post newsroom via the Rocky Mountain News, the vaunted publication that ceased production in 2009. At 14 years old, he delivered editions each morning; in 1995 he secured a scholarship to Metropolitan State University in Denver from the News, making him the first person in his family to graduate from college. He worked for the News in college, enjoyed a stint at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times in Texas after graduation, then landed at the Post in 2002. At that point, the journalism industry was beginning to see a dip. As the Cannabist prepared to launch, Baca’s colleagues at the Post approached him with feelings of misplaced optimism. “There was this underlying hope that cannabis journalism could actually help save the Denver Post,” Baca says. “That was always sad to me because I knew that if the [Denver] Broncos and the immense readership they bring to the Post properties can’t save the newspaper, then even legal marijuana coverage wasn’t going to make
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that much of a dent in the bottom line. So I always did my best to manage my colleagues’ expectations.” At its height, the Cannabist employed seven full-time staff members and actively swayed public opinion and policy reform. One of the site’s first big stories, written by Baca, identified an edibles manufacturer whose chocolate bars tested far below the stated amount of THC; the piece led to statewide changes in regulations. The Cannabist sparked a recall of THC concentrates when they found high levels of pesticides in the product. The site also tackled the term “organic” and what it really means in the cannabis industry. On a less serious note, Baca recruited Whoopi Goldberg, whom he met on the set of “The View” during his early press tour, to write an occasional column for the site. Since his departure, the Cannabist and the Post have hit upon hard times. In March 2018, the paper abruptly laid off 30 people, one third of its staff, due to extreme budget constraints. A month later, the hedge fund owners of the Post decided to replace the Cannabist staff with bots that comb the web for content to aggregate. “I would have loved to have stayed. It was my heart and still very much how I define myself,” Baca says. “But I think [Grasslands] was the right opportunity to get out of journalism and try my hand at something new, something that I felt had more of a future.”
BACA VIVIDLY RECALLS HIS FIRST BRUSH WITH THE WAR ON DRUGS. In elementary school, he was handed a sheet of paper with the outline of a man walking hunched over, his stomach full of pills. His class was asked to color those pills—an act of busy work. After actively pressing crayons against the contents of this poor man’s bowels, the children were handed an important lesson: Just say no. “I really felt our primary purpose as journalists in that nascent era of legalization was to educate the public not just about cannabis, but also what we were told that was just simply untrue,” he says. Baca still works as a journalist on occasion. His word carries weight in the niche of legalizing controlled drugs; he recently wrote an op-ed for the Denver Post about the piece of magic mushroom legislation that passed in Denver. He has also continued to host a podcast called “Cannabis & Main,” which explores how cannabis is infiltrating business and culture. Episodes include the pragmatic “Cannabis & Corporate Social Responsibility,” the ephemeral “Cannabis & Diversity” and the kooky “Cannabis & Sound Healing.” These thoughtful communications about cannabis are a far cry from what existed in the 1980s, when antidrug messaging was convoluted at best, questionable and
HOW OFTEN IN YOUR LIFETIME DO YOU HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO COVER OR WORK IN A BRAND-NEW INDUSTRY THAT DIDN’T EXIST SEVEN YEARS AGO?
terrifying at worst. Some attempted to couch its scare tactics within a fried egg. Others, particularly one “scare film” from 1989, delivered anti-marijuana news bites via a man in a ski mask nestled alongside two teens, as kaleidoscopic visualizations pelted his silhouette.But as marijuana legislation loosens, so do the lips of cannabis enthusiasts and medical patient advocates. The fact that Grasslands hosts parties during which weed is available and encouraged is not going to be novel at some point. Baca wrote about this phenomenon in a piece for the Cannabist in 2014, about what his life has been like after covering Colorado legalization. He marveled that his friends were willing to use their full names for the story and admit, on the record, that they liked weed. As the first-ever marijuana editor, Baca reported on the cultural acceptance of cannabis as an everyday occurrence, whether it’s watching someone spark up on television, the street or your grandmother’s retirement party. Now a marketing professional in the cannabis space, he has established himself as the ultimate thought leader—someone with the knowledge and savvy to talk about cannabis with clarity and authority. Much of this can be attributed to journalism, as the tenets of accuracy, advocacy, curiosity and adaptability are required skills to navigate an industry that, not long ago, was illegal. “I think I’ll end up dedicating much of the rest of my life to spreading quality information about substances,” Baca says. “We should be applying journalism to everything we do for the rest of our lives.” m
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HOW BRANDS CAN HELP CONSUMERS
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AS CONSUMER DEMAND FOR SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTS HAS RISEN, BRANDS HAVE BECOME GREENER. BUT ARE GREENER
PRODUCTS AND MARKETING ENOUGH TO CHANGE HOW CONSUMERS BEHAVE?
BY HAL CONICK
H
otel Felix bills itself as Chicago’s first green hotel. Inside, hidden from view, hotel staff separates the contents of guests’ trash bins—recyclable material is picked out from the items that go to landfills. The decade-old hotel boasts Silver LEED certification, Earth-friendly cleaning supplies and carpeting made of 45% recycled material in guest rooms. Each facet is meant to signal the hotel’s environmental friendliness. But area general manager Todd Van Winkle says that the hotel doesn’t use much green messaging in its marketing, nor does it push guests to participate in its green mission. Hotel Felix is in a challenging spot— both geographically and financially—and must focus on what makes the most money. The hotel has 228 guest rooms and targets an occupancy rate between 82% and 86%, all while trying to attract tourists in the posh River North neighborhood where you can’t walk a block without stubbing your toe on a hotel. Choose Chicago reports that in Chicago’s business district—of which River North is a part— there were a record 15.6 million rooms available in 2018. That same year, after Deutsche Bank filed a foreclosure lawsuit against Hotel Felix, Crain’s Chicago Business reported that the hotel defaulted
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on a $47 million loan, then restructured its mortgage to narrowly avoid foreclosure. Competition is fierce and Hotel Felix has fought to stay alive, but Van Winkle doesn’t believe that eco-friendliness can win enough new business to be the focus of the hotel’s marketing, nor would forcing guests into being greener be good for business. Hotel executives care about reducing their carbon footprint, but it doesn’t matter as much financially as maintaining cost and upkeep. Hotel Felix aims to reduce its carbon footprint by 1% each year, saving $5,000–$10,000 and gaining 2–3% of its business per year from green consumers, but price and quality attract the most new guests. The hotel gives guests the option to refuse housekeeping and linen laundry services—5–10% of guests participate each night, Van Winkle says—to save energy and water. But like any hotel where people stay when visiting a city, Hotel Felix is first and foremost a place for them to lay down their bags and sleep. “That’s why we use the linen reuse [service], because we can’t stop you from taking a shower,” he says. “We can’t tell you, ‘Hey, it’s a five-minute cutoff.’ … We try to influence the consumer as much as we can, but it essentially boils down to [whether the] consumer is doing their part.”
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PHOTO: HOTEL FELIX CHICAGO
Hotel Felix bills itself as Chicago’s first green hotel.
The same is true of all businesses, Van Winkle believes. If consumers want brands to become greener, consumers must lead the charge—brands can only do so much. If 10% of Hotel Felix’s guests are green-minded enough to forgo housekeeping service, he says that’s a positive mark on the world. But what else can the hotel do, especially amid such fierce competition? Van Winkle doesn’t believe that knocking on doors to tell guests to stop showering or using so much energy is a moneymaker, so the hotel cuts energy consumption where it can and hopes that guests will at least turn their lights and TV off when they leave for the day. Can brands do more to push consumers toward acting greener? Or like Hotel Felix, do they simply hope consumers follow their lead?
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he term “sustainability,” as we use it today, comes from the United Nations’ 1987 “Our Common Future” report, also known as the Brundtland Report. “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” the report says.
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In the 30 years since the Brundtland Report, two major factors have driven the change among businesses, according to Alexa Poortier, founder of sustainable tourism advocacy group itmustbeNOW. The first factor has been consumer brands, such as Unilever and Patagonia, driving the change from the C-suite—the executives wanted green changes and made them happen. Hotels, such as the Taj Group and Soneva, have moved toward carbon neutrality and green certifications, just as Hotel Felix attained the Silver LEED designation. Even so, Poortier says that few hotels have committed to becoming rigorously sustainable, and those that claim to be lack transparency. Airlines merely talk the talk, Poortier says—flights produced 859 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2017, according to the Air Transport Action Group, but Poortier says that few airlines have committed to sustainability. “Sustainability is a powerful marketing opportunity and tool, but it must be rigorous with transparency and this makes a lot of companies nervous,” Poortier says. “It must focus on meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
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The second factor has been consumer desire for sustainable brands. Most companies only change when consumers demand it, Poortier says, and that desire for change is increasing with younger generations. For example, Nielsen reports that sales of sustainable products hit $107.3 billion in 2014, but they’re predicted to reach anywhere between $142 billion and $150 billion by 2021, with a 2015 report from Nielsen reporting that millennials will pay more for sustainable products than older generations. But green marketing has a dirty little secret, says Jacquelyn Ottman: Consumers of all generations use green products the same way they do any other product—often, they’re wasteful. Consumers have grown comfortable with what’s familiar and their pattern of consumption is hard to change. Ottman, author of The New Rules of Green Marketing: Strategies, Tools, and Inspiration for Sustainable Branding, realized this secret after working as a green marketer for 30 years. She saw that people would give their money to greener brands but still use the products wastefully, which eventually led to her quitting her work as a green marketer. Now, Ottman serves as chair of the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board, which advocates for zero waste in New York City. “If Poland Spring contacted me today … I would not work with them,” Ottman says. “I would turn down the project. I don’t want to sound holier-than-thou, but I would rather spend my time and expertise advocating for consumer culture change than switching out a regular, single-use bottle for one that’s 100% recycled. Why would I want to spend my time giving people an excuse to continue to drink bottled water?” Like water bottles, most green products can still be used wastefully—even easily recyclable water bottles tend to end up in landfills. An airline can change its boarding processes and on-flight utensils to be more sustainable, as United Airlines recently did, but each passenger on a coast-to-coast flight still creates just under a metric ton of carbon dioxide. A writer for The New York Times recently calculated that his family’s trip from New York to Miami created enough carbon dioxide to melt a
pick-up truck-sized chunk of arctic ice. Even Patagonia, a green-friendly clothing company with environmentally conscious consumers, has trouble changing how its shoppers behave. After Patagonia launched its clothing repair program, the Common Threads Initiatives, its sales rose 30%, according to Fast Company. Patagonia’s faithful looked at Patagonia’s advertisement for the program—a full-page ad that said “Don’t Buy This Jacket”—and bought the jacket anyway. That’s one of the problems of green marketing, Ottman says: There are opportunities for brands to change how shoppers consume, but they don’t come passively. “We need to change the default from buying new to acquiring used or sharing, swapping, donating, borrowing, lending, renting, buying and selling to each other as an alternative to buying new,” she says. Although the younger generation demands more sustainable products, Ottman’s advocacy for reusing, trading and borrowing feels retro. Buying new is a relatively recent trend that built steam between the 1920s and 1940s on the back of credit, new technology and plastic production, which increased by 300% amid World War II, according to the Science History Institute. Consumers who had their milk delivered soon found containers of milk they could buy, throw away and buy again on their next trip to the store— eventually, the refillable delivery bottles were all but gone, a quirky relic or premium service rather than the norm. With plastics and other disposable containers making production less expensive, brands offered consumers products in a convenient way and consumers became used to that convenience. Far away from the dairy aisle, landfills piled up with plastic bottles and wrappers. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased about 30% since 1960, according to The National Academy of Sciences, which has coincided with NASA and other groups finding rapid temperature warming since the 1970s. While these facts are often debated politically, there’s little debate among scientists and researchers that the Earth’s climate is changing and much of it is due to how modern humans
S ALES OF SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTS
$107.3 BILLION IN HIT
2014, BUT THEY’RE
PREDICTED TO REACH ANYWHERE BETWEEN
$142 BILLION AND $150 BILLION BY 2021.
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live. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, most greenhouse gases come from transportation, electricity and industry, which all entail how we consume, travel and throw away our trash. The need now, as it was in 1987 when the Brundtland Report was released, is merging the need for sustainability with the desire to make money. The report called this need “a new era of economic growth—growth that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable,” echoing the concern of Van Winkle and countless other brands attempting to go green while staying profitable.
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any brands have tried to reduce their impact on the environment by making changes to products and suggestions to customers, akin to Hotel Felix. Patagonia asked people not to buy its jacket and Colgate asked consumers to “Turn off the Faucet.” In travel, green consumers can now buy carbon offsets, which send money to carbon reduction projects to make up for the carbon they produce by traveling. For example, United’s Eco-Skies CarbonChoice program allows travelers to streamline the process of creating and offsetting their carbon in one fell swoop. In hotels, Poortier says that the larger groups—Hyatt, Marriott, InterContinental Hotels and AccorHotels—
Operated by recycling company TerraCycle, Loop sends consumers refillable bottles of products through a UPS delivery in a tote bag.
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create their own sustainability programs, but most don’t or can’t prove that they match the rigor of a group like the Global Sustainable Tourism Council, an independent nonprofit which offers accreditation for sustainable tourism. With these actions, the brand changes and suggests greener practices to consumers, but the consumer is still left to act on their own. Green consumers will likely act green, but no one knows exactly how many people comprise this group, meaning the results are often incalculable. If the product and its packaging are produced in an eco-friendly manner, but consumers still send them to landfills, is the product actually green? To get consumers to change their actions, brands must present products and services differently, reframing a new, green action as essential. Not only must the greenest action be truly green—greenwashing, an attempt to capitalize on the demand for sustainable products, has led to multiple lawsuits against brands—the new action must seem easy, obvious and beneficial to the consumer. A number of consumer goods companies are now experimenting with whether they can change consumer action through a project called Loop. Operated by recycling company TerraCycle, Loop sends consumers refillable bottles of products through a UPS delivery in a tote bag. Once Loop customers are finished using the products, they put them back into the tote bag and schedule a pickup. The empty containers are retrieved, cleaned, refilled and replaced at the consumer’s door. For now, Loop is only available in Paris and parts of the Mid-Atlantic region, but it already has 300 branding partners, including Coca-Cola, Mondelēz and Clorox. Andrea Rudert, associate director of corporate responsibility for Clorox Co., says that one reason the company got involved in Loop was to better understand consumer demand for “circular economy solutions.” “We anticipate we’ll learn more in the future when we take a step back and examine the trends from Loop consumer activity,” Rudert says. “By developing actionable insights on consumer sustainable shopping behaviors, we can influence the products that we sell and how we sell them. Ultimate success is if Loop becomes a mainstream hit,
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scales nationally and becomes economically sustainable for all participants.” Loop seems like a return to the days of the milkman, a step back in time to take a step forward toward sustainable consumerism. In an interview with GreenBiz Group, TerraCycle’s CEO and co-founder Tom Szaky echoed Ottman, saying that brands can’t recycle their way out of the garbage crisis—they need a foundational shift to change the way brands work and how consumers consume. Szaky sums up TerraCycle’s vision with a question: “How do we solve for disposability at the root cause, while matching the benefits?”
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onsumers have long said that they desire green products and sustainable actions, but their behavior often doesn’t match their desires. In a 2007 survey from McKinsey, 87% of consumers said that they were concerned about the environment and would shop with that concern in mind, but only 33% said that they had bought green products or were ready to do so. As a 2004 article in MIT Sloan Management review put it, “When consumers are forced to make trade-offs between product attributes or helping the environment, the environment almost never wins.” This seemingly hasn’t changed over the past 15 years, as an article in the July-August 2019 issue of Harvard Business Review found that the “intentionaction gap” is still intact—65% of consumers say that they want to buy from brands that advocate for sustainability, while 26% of consumers actually buy from those brands. The intention-action gap plays out in many different ways in travel and shopping. This year, a group of researchers published an article in the Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science titled “Recycling on vacation: Does pro-environmental behavior change when consumers travel?,” which studied how vacationers in North Carolina recycled. The article found that even environmentally friendly vacationers were significantly more likely to recycle at home than they were while on vacation. Of the group of vacationers who didn’t recycle, 67% said that they didn’t know how or where to recycle, while 15% forgot and 14% said that
it was too messy or too much of a hassle. Their values were those of a green consumer, but their actions were confused, dismissive or forgetful. Jason Oliver, an author of the vacation study and associate professor of marketing at Roger Williams University’s Gabelli School of Business, says that this intentionaction gap has always existed in the green movement, whether customers are on vacation or at the store. There’s a small group of consumers who are fiercely green and will spend money on green products or abide by green practices no matter what—Oliver says that this is about 7% of consumers; other measures of hardline-green consumers vary—but there’s a larger group of consumers who avoid green products. The puzzle green brands must figure out, he believes, is how to win over the largest group: the people in the middle. About 60% of all consumers fall in this middle ground, Oliver estimates, and they’re on a spectrum. The spectrum ranges from those enticed but not won over by promises of green products to those who likely won’t care about a green promise but also won’t be dissuaded by it. Generally, Oliver says that this middle group is more likely to be won over by ease, price and quality—these are the areas where he believes that brands must place the buying decision. If a green product and its equivalent nongreen version have the same cost and quality, Oliver says that the average consumer will usually choose the greener product. But most green products still aren’t equal in price and quality. Patagonia, for example, has high-quality clothing, but its prices are also high. Oliver does believe that price, quality and greenness are starting to level out in the market. Because of that leveling, brands can reach consumers in the middle with a green product, even if the consumer’s environmental values aren’t well-defined. So far, Oliver believes that most consumers are sticking with what they know because green marketers are targeting known customers for easy sells. By solely advertising a product’s sustainable values, green marketers are preaching the benefits of their products solely to the top green customers—the people who are already won over—and ignoring the larger group in the
87% OF
CONSUMERS SAID THAT THEY WERE CONCERNED ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT AND WOULD SHOP WITH THAT CONCERN IN MIND, BUT ONLY
33% SAID
THAT THEY HAD
BOUGHT GREEN PRODUCTS OR WERE READY TO DO SO.
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HOW TO MOVE TOWARD
SUSTAINABILITY AS A BRAND
Alexa Poortier, founder of sustainable tourism advocacy group itmustbeNOW, gave six steps for how brands can move toward becoming sustainable: • HAVE A BRAND
CUSTODIAN, someone who sincerely wants the brand
and the world to be better in the future. • REVIEW THE VALUES OF THE BRAND, integrating sustainability in every
strategy and in each action. • BUDGET RESOURCES, both financial and people, and form a core sustainability team. • JOIN AN ACCREDITED
SUSTAINABILITY PROGRAM with certifications.
• ASSESS THE OPERATIONS to understand existing challenges. • DRAFT A VISON 2030 AND ACTION PLAN in line with the Paris Agreement.
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middle that needs to hear more about the product’s benefits. Too often, brands trying to appeal to the middle group tend to focus on easy wins, a cynical move that’s more likely to win a moment of good PR than loyal customers. Consider companies that have banned or reduced the use of plastic straws, including American Airlines, Starbucks and Hyatt: Of the 9 million tons of plastic waste created each year, research shows that straws account for about 2,000 tons, a tiny percentage of the problem. Getting rid of straws is an easy win, but are Starbucks’ recyclable plastic lids any less likely to end up in a landfill? What’s the true benefit of these moves, other than a moment of good PR? Brands also try to use alarmist tactics to win business from the middle group—Oliver mentions the oft-used traditional green ad model of showing a polar bear on a shrinking block of ice to illustrate what happens if you don’t buy this product—but he believes that the average consumer will turn away from alarmist or fear-based marketing and brands will most certainly lose consumers less apt to care about green issues. Instead of such thoughtlessly narrow segmentation, easy wins and fear- or shamebased marketing, Oliver says that brands should sell the product’s primary benefits to the middle group. In the case of Loop, the company touts its benefit of easily replacing products—green is a benefit, but it’s not the only benefit. That may be why so many brands quickly joined Loop. Those brands can offer consumers a way to buy their products without having to leave home—just stick a tote bag outside and the product will be refilled. Reducing waste can be the primary or secondary benefit, depending on the consumer, which is likely to win over a larger segment. Or take an LED lightbulb, known for lasting as much as 50 times longer than an incandescent lightbulb. Oliver says that the marketing collateral could address how consumers can get rid of their step ladder and save money on the electric bill. If the product is a roll of sustainable paper towels, Oliver says that the brand can discuss the towel’s improved quality or quantity—that is, after all, why the average consumer buys paper towels. And if it’s recycling
on vacation, properties can find a way to make recycling easier, more rewarding and perhaps even Instagrammable. Brand marketers must ask themselves how to get people engaged with the product or process, Oliver says—is there a way to make the green action the one that appears to be the best value, quality or most socially acceptable? Simply changing the materials likely won’t engage consumers, nor will it change their actions. Todd Weaver, a professor of business at Point University in Georgia, says that the big message for brands is that whether a product is green is not the most crucial factor to every consumer. When brands ask consumers to shop or consume differently, they must offer them good trade value. If price and quality are equal in green and non-green products, Weaver says that gives the green product a big advantage. Weaver, who co-authored a 2018 article in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing titled “The Intersection of Sustainable Consumption and Anticonsumption: Repurposing to Extend Product Life Span,” says that repair and reuse of old items must be part of the answer. Companies such as Patagonia—which allows consumers to repair and trade in clothing—and Eileen Fisher’s Waste No More are finding a niche in repairing, trading and reusing old clothing. Weaver’s paper found that consumers enjoy the process of trading, repairing or repurposing products not for environmental reasons, but for pleasure. Still, this gratification won’t be enough to win most customers over, Weaver says. Just as there are few one-issue voters, most consumers consider multiple factors when shopping. If the product is bad, too expensive or if its benefits are unclear, people will likely buy what they’re familiar with and use it in a customary way. Green marketers must make their products’ value proposition clear, all the better if there are multiple selling points. Oliver gave the example of Tesla and how it markets its vehicles. Tesla’s stated mission is “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy,” but you’ll likely hear more about the car’s literal acceleration. For example, most YouTube videos about Tesla being a green car have about 30,000 views
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or fewer, but search for reaction shots to its Insane Mode feature—which allows the car to accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour in 2.5 seconds—and you’ll find reaction videos totaling 7 million views. Even if the product’s benefits aren’t cool enough to accrue millions of hits on social media, benefits should be easily explained. Think big picture, Oliver says: Why should the consumer buy one product over another? The answer can’t simply be “because it’s good for the environment.” A vacation property that wants guests to recycle should be able to provide visitors with instructions and benefits—if the benefits aren’t there, the company should consider creating them. For example, in a future experiment, Oliver is considering offering vacation property guests 10% off their next stay if they can remain under a limit of energy and water consumption. “If you act responsibly, we’re going to incentivize that behavior,” he says. Perhaps most importantly, a brand that highlights the other values or incentives of its green products helps the consumer live with more integrity. A customer that feels good buying a brand’s product is likely a loyal customer. A 2018 survey by Futerra finds that 96% of consumers believe that actions such as ethical buying and recycling can make a difference; 88% of consumers want brands to help. But the same survey finds that 43% of consumers believe that brands make it harder for them to have an effect and 29% say that they don’t know what role brands play. Being green is ultimately a perception issue for both brands and consumers, Oliver says. Without knowing it, consumers likely ask themselves a question when they see a green product: “Is this something I can actually use, or is it just something I’ll waste money on so I can feel good about myself? “That’s why I like the other approach to say, ‘OK, how can we get people on board through convenience or performance or cost savings?’” Oliver says. “There’s a way to get people on board. You just have to figure it out.”
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f brands can influence a change in consumer behavior, they’ll have to take the lead. In a 2017 research paper from the Journal of Marketing Research titled “Turning Off the Lights: Consumers’
Environmental Efforts Depend on Visible Efforts of Firms,” researchers found that brands can lead consumers to act greener by example, namely by “visible (costly) evidence of the firm also expending effort on environmental efforts.” “[W]e show that programs should always couple their requests to consumers with proof that the firm is also exerting effort,” the researchers say. “We also show that reactance is a part of the underlying process of consumer response to firm programs, driving both consumer perceptions and consumer behavior.” If a consumer feels that a brand is instructing them to be greener without any evidence that the brand itself is green, researchers write that “a host of negative perceptions can be activated and compliance can decrease.” So, Hotel Felix’s Van Winkle was at least partially correct: A green company can have quality, compete on price and ask but not demand for its consumers to participate. That will at least partially convince consumers to be greener. Hotel Felix clearly invests in being greener—it uses expensive and environmentally friendly L’Occitane soaps; its staff spends hours picking through garbage for recyclable items; and its guest rooms are free of microwaves, refrigerators and coffeemakers, by mandate of LEED certification. Even its recycled artwork is a sign that the hotel spends on sustainability, and perhaps a reminder that you can also help by refusing your housekeeping for the day. But beyond leading by example, there’s a new generation of green brands thinking of creative ways to change consumer actions as they change their own. Once businesses start going green, Ottman says that they investigate the ways they can create innovative models to save consumer time and money while providing them better service. Done correctly, green innovations can mean more loyal customers, more money saved and a better brand reputation. “In my mind, green marketing has evolved,” Ottman says. “It’s not slapping ‘green’ on the label, however much it’s in line with the FTC Green Guides. It’s actually promoting positive change in consumption culture.” m
65% OF
CONSUMERS SAY THAT THEY WANT TO BUY FROM BRANDS THAT ADVOCATE FOR SUSTAINABILITY, WHILE
26% OF
CONSUMERS ACTUALLY BUY FROM THOSE BRANDS.
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Industrial Evolution
Pittsburgh has long been known for its sports teams, french fries on sandwiches and—perhaps most iconically—the great steel mills that once kept the city shrouded in smoke and grime. But it’s no longer an industrial behemoth, instead shifting to become a leader in sustainability. Now the city’s tasked with telling a new chapter in its story.
By Sarah Steimer
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hree new buildings sit nestled against a hillside, centered around a small lagoon and surrounded by plants. One building, the Center for Sustainable Landscapes, is considered one of the greenest on Earth, awarded four of the highest green building certifications and producing its own renewable energy on-site. The second, the Exhibit Staging Center, is a former public works building, which now prioritizes the health and well-being of its staff and features photovoltaic solar panels on its roof. The third building, the Nature Lab, is a children’s learning facility constructed from non-toxic materials that hints at the green possibilities for modular structures. They make an impressive trio, as eye-pleasing as they are eco-friendly. They appear not on the California coast, but tucked into the Pittsburgh landscape, emblematic of an ongoing rebranding of a city once described by American author James Parton as “hell with the lid taken off.” Today the former steel capital of America has become a leader in sustainability. It’s not a surprise to Pittsburghers, though, who kayak its rivers and work in its LEED-certified buildings. But for those outside of the city, this new image hasn’t always been as obvious. Pittsburgh has been a success story among Rust Belt cities that struggled after the industrial decline of the 1980s, as it now touts its prowess in technology, education and medicine. Yet how can a city rebrand itself as a green metropolis when one of its most beloved icons, the Pittsburgh Steelers, harkens directly to its gritty past? The answer isn’t to launch a massive campaign, but to tell a story that resonates with locals and impresses outsiders. “There is a sort of common sense of place, which is wonderful,” says Bill Flanagan, a broadcast journalist and chief corporate relations officer at the Allegheny Conference on Community Development. “There’s enough collaboration … that we seem to be staying on message and marketing. A big part of that is just delivering a message that resonates.” Urban branding is an opportunity to convey the city’s image to the world, giving it a competitive advantage regionally and internationally. A study published in May in the Housing and Building National Research Center Journal found that “without a brand, cities will be less able to shape the powerful image that leads to sustainable urban development.”
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PHOTO: PAUL G. WIEGMAN
Clockwise from top: The Phipps Conservatory Welcome Center; Center for Sustainable Landscapes at Phipps; solar panels at the Phipps campus.
Pittsburgh isn’t trying to change its history, but it is trying to help the audience see its sustainable future. The three buildings previously mentioned are part of Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, an institution that opened in 1893 and has helped bond the city’s past and future. The new, ultra-green facilities sit behind the original building, were designed and built primarily by Pittsburghers and other Pennsylvanians and are worthy of the world’s attention. Perhaps the most internationally recognized example of Pittsburgh’s new story came in 2017, after President Donald Trump, in reference to pulling out of the Paris Agreement climate pact, said, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto responded: “As the mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy and future.”
Yet Pittsburgh’s rebrand—its storytelling strategy—has been more focused on inclusion than retorts. City stakeholders are working to reach beyond the young people lured in by tech jobs and captured by its livability, to include longtime residents who feel pushed out or to outlying suburbanites who rely on jobs in the fossil fuels industry. But Pittsburgh is no stranger to competing forces: While it was once a leader in steel production, the region was also home to conservationist Rachel Carson, author of the landmark environmental science book Silent Spring. There’s room for both stories in its history books. The city’s enthusiasm to rebrand by telling an inclusive, green story was evident when 10 leaders, representing public and private stakeholders, quickly agreed to participate in an interview with Marketing News. Assembled at Phipps Conservatory, with the trio of internationally recognized green buildings as a backdrop, the group discussed the
progress Pittsburgh has made in its sustainability efforts. What was perhaps more telling was that they spent less time hyping what they’ve accomplished and more time mulling over how to meet new challenges.
Attracting Visitors Ten years ago, Pittsburgh played host to world leaders at the 2009 G-20 Summit—but the location choice baffled some. “They literally laughed at the White House press room,” recalls Flanagan. The White House cited Pittsburgh’s ability to rebound economically from a struggling Rust Belt city and, as Flanagan puts it, the region saw an opportunity to milk its moment in the spotlight. “We’re going to have thousands of reporters in town—do we just try to spin it and tell this wonderful story about Pittsburgh?” Flanagan says. “We made a conscious decision very early on in the process: We are going to just be completely honest. We’re going to AUGUST 2019 | MARKETING NEWS
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talk about the things we do well and [that] we’re proud of, and we’re going to talk about all the work we have left to do.” The bet was that being honest would give the city more credibility. Flanagan says they tracked about 7,000 stories written about Pittsburgh after the G-20, most of which were positive and articulated the city’s transformation. The city tries to be authentic by showing rather than telling. VisitPITTSBURGH CMO Tom Loftus points to 2005 as one of the first times the rest of the world, or at least the nation, started to take note of Pittsburgh as a green locale. That summer, the city hosted the CITGO Bassmaster Classic, placing its rivers in front of television audiences. “It really launched Pittsburgh as a green and friendly city and got that image out of people’s minds of the smoky industrial city that it used to be,” Loftus says. “ESPN was showing people fishing on the rivers in Pittsburgh and pulling up big bass. That’s something that you can’t put in a brochure or put in a video and try to promote.” The city continues to ride a media wave of acknowledgements. In addition to the international focus from the 2009 G-20 Summit and President Trump’s comments, The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Pittsburgh as the second-most livable city in the U.S. in 2018, behind
Honolulu, per its criteria of healthcare, culture and environment, education, infrastructure and stability. Glassdoor recognized the city as one of the nation’s best for jobs in 2017 and 2018. But Pittsburgh has also had to battle less savory rankings, such as receiving all F’s on the American Lung Association’s annual air quality report card. “We have so many shoulders to stand on and so much to celebrate; at the same time, we’re not there yet,” says Scott Bricker, executive director of BikePGH. “We still have some pretty bad air quality and some things that are wrong. I think the story is more about [how] we’re trying and we’re making the right investments and we’re leaning into this effort to change the story, to make the region more green or the city more green and sustainable. … It’s not, ‘Come here and experience the most green city on Earth.’ We can’t do that because it wouldn’t resonate with people.” Although there’s room for improvement, the city appeals to sustainability-seeking visitors with its existing buildings and activities. For instance, the David L. Lawrence Convention Center became the largest LEED Gold Certified convention center in the world when completed in 2003. It’s now the highest-rated LEED Platinum Certified convention center in the U.S. Or take the Pittsburgh Passport, a series of events
and activities for the approximately 2,000 interns from 35 states and 25 countries based in the city during the summer. It’s part of an effort led by the Allegheny Conference to convince the interns to stay and make Pittsburgh their home, and many of the activities are designed to showcase the quality of the region, including its outdoor spaces. “People are taking note of Pittsburgh,” Loftus says. “From a marketing standpoint, we adopted the branding ‘Pittsburgh. Mighty. Beautiful.’ to keep on letting people know that you’ll be surprised by our beauty as soon as you come through the Fort Pitt Tunnels or come across Mount Washington. You’re not going to believe how beautiful it is. And it’s not just us, it’s people that are visiting that are telling us that.” Bill Campbell, vice president of marketing and communications at Chatham University, says that for a city of Pittsburgh’s size—its metropolitan population of 2.3 million makes it 27th-largest in the U.S.—it has an outsized number of cultural, educational and environmental qualities and amenities at its disposal. His own university is a pioneer in the green educational space with the Falk School of Sustainability & Environment. Campbell says a visitor coming through the city and immediately encountering facilities like the convention center and Phipps
PHOTOS: KAYAK PITTSBURGH/VISITPITTSBURGH, MELISSA MCMASTERS/VISITPITTSBURGH
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We have so many shoulders to stand on and so much to celebrate; at the same time, we’re not there yet. PHOTO: JP DIROLL
Conservatory is presented with a very green picture of Pittsburgh. “These things illustrate what matters to the city,” he says. Another piece of marketing collateral that hyped the city to outsiders came from the city’s pitch to become home to Amazon’s second headquarters. The video looked at Pittsburgh’s past and present, and the narrator acknowledged, “You’ve probably heard something about Pittsburgh,” before the scenes of steel mills gave way to images of green spaces and self-driving cars. It was a nod to the better-known titans of the city—steel, the three rivers, Fred Rogers—and a nudge to consider what else it has to offer.
A Leader in Sustainability As Pittsburgh has worked to rebrand as a sustainable region, it’s sought to position itself as a leader in the field. This includes individuals like Richard Piacentini, president and CEO of Phipps Conservatory, who has led the award-winning green efforts at the center—although he was sure to note that the commendations aren’t
the point: “If we think it’s right, we’re going to do it even if it doesn’t get us points.” Piacentini can rattle off the efficient qualities of the various facilities at Phipps: how natural light is bounced in the offices to reduce the need for artificial lighting; what a challenge it is to locate carpet free of so-called Red List building materials; how all water is captured, treated and reused on-site. One of Pittsburgh’s more successful rebrands has been as a leader in education, which has also helped the city up its sustainability game. Piacentini says local universities— namely the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University— were included in designing the Center for Sustainable Landscapes. “[A] lot of times, people build green buildings and nobody knows if they work,” Piacentini says. “We offered that building to both universities to say, ‘We’ll let you put sensors all throughout the building and you can use it as a lab for your students.’ They’ve both written, I think, six research papers based on that building.” University involvement can provide unbiased messaging to the
public, removing any presumed spin that could leak to news from the government or other organizations. A Politico roundtable of city mayors, policy and funding experts suggested that the seal of approval from respected third-party, nongovernmental organizations such as universities can boost the credibility of a project, particularly when trust in government and politicians is low. “The more people you have at the table—organizations, government, foundations—that’s actually what creates the believability and credibility,” Campbell says. “As an external or internal marketer, you want to point to that because it says this is a group effort.” Mayor Peduto has also worked to be a leader in city-led sustainability efforts. In 2018, he announced the creation of OnePGH, a strategic plan to address city challenges through initiatives for clean air and water, livable housing and economic opportunity. The plan was developed in conjunction with the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative, whose member cities make up a global network intended to offer help and educational resources AUGUST 2019 | MARKETING NEWS
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You can’t tell someone in Pittsburgh, ‘You can’t do that.’ They’re going to find a way.
PHOTO: KEVIN OAKE/VISITPITTSBURGH
to others. The city also released its Climate Action Plan 3.0 in 2018, which includes a goal of 80% greenhouse gas reductions from 2003 levels by 2050. The Natural Resources Defense Council called it a “bold, comprehensive strategy for change.” The city has been particularly drawn to positioning itself as a leader among cities with a similar size and shared past: mid-sized, post-industrial towns. “We’ve been intentional about who we play with,” says Grant Ervin, the city’s chief resilience officer. “Just yesterday, we signed an agreement with the city of Aarhus, Denmark. … We create this relationship with people who are challenged with the same things that we are, which is a post-industrial economy.” Ervin rattles off a list of Pittsburgh’s collaborative cities: Glasgow, Scotland; Dortmund, Germany; and Gelsenkirchen, Germany. This network of cities with backgrounds similar to Pittsburgh are working on issues related to climate change, equity, energy and mobility. “We’re more comfortable with St. Louis, Tulsa [Oklahoma] and Cincinnati because they’re dealing with the same size, scale and challenges that we have, so the lessons that we can learn are transferable and scalable,” he says.
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Bringing Residents into the Story In an interview with The Place Brand Observer, a web resource on place branding, researcher Dalila Brosto said cities are successful in their branding when their residents find it believable. Brosto, a knowledge and innovation adviser at the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy, researched city branding to promote sustainable development, finding that the best outcomes depend on cooperation between the residents and governments. “We need to make sure that the conversation includes everybody, that there is a pathway for everybody to see themselves as part of the story,” says Joylette Portlock, executive director of Sustainable Pittsburgh. Part of the story of Pittsburgh’s modern renaissance is that plans for inclusion didn’t always keep pace with change. The result has been some negative press for the region, tripping up its progressive brand story. A City Lab article from April, “A New Plan to Correct a Historic Mistake in Pittsburgh,” focused on the Lower Hill District, a region of the city that once saw the construction of a highway and the now-demolished
Civic Arena displace about 8,000 people—mostly low-income black renters. New redevelopment plans for the Lower Hill aim to be green and more inclusive, but the affordable housing crisis in the city continues. In recent years, Pittsburgh has seen an influx of tech companies, whose young employees have priced out longtime residents in some neighborhoods. “We’re still grappling with a lot of issues that we need to overcome to get to a more sustainable place,” Portlock says. “It’s important for people to understand that sustainability—we’re not just talking about eco-friendliness. In order to think about a society that can sustain itself, it’s not enough to just think about how we use natural resources, although that is a very important piece. It’s also about, how do we care for each other and how do we generate economic prosperity for all? The sustainable solutions for Pittsburgh, for this region, are going to come from looking at the intersection of those things and not making the trade-offs that may have led to some of our social and economic issues in the past.” One way the city has worked to communicate its commitment to all residents—not some—has been through deliberative forums. These
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public meetings differ from more traditional New England-style town halls and aim to engage differences in the community as positive resources. These forums consist of small group discussions, rather than main speakers with audience respondents. The city has also begun to provide food and childcare at the community forums, as well as language services. “It has been really important, the work that the city’s done and others to pull out that inequities are still a problem here,” Portlock says. “But that is also part of this story of the transition, that we’re not there yet. Part of where that story is now is a much more intentional approach ... to figure out how to make sure the tables are inclusive.” Many of the city’s green updates are particularly appealing to younger generations looking to ditch their cars in favor of bikes or otherwise reduce their energy footprints. This newer, greener story can feel at odds with the rest of the region, though: Of the 2.3 million people who live in the metro area, only about 300,000 reside in the city itself. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, is made up of 130 municipalities. Getting everyone on board with a new, sustainable vision can be tricky. “People outside the immediate city or maybe the immediate urban core of Allegheny County, to see themselves in this narrative also is a challenge,” BikePGH’s Bricker says. “They can’t see themselves in this story. They come to the city potentially on weekends or for work and they don’t understand these investments and they have a very visceral, negative reaction to it. We’re challenged with [determining] how to reach these folks who have an outsized effect on the change that we are trying to create here, even though they really don’t live in the city.” It may not always be that if you build it, they will come. Instead, Pittsburgh has tried to stretch its sustainable practices outward. For example, Chatham’s Eden Hall
campus, home of its Falk School of Sustainability, is about a 35-minute drive from its main campus in the city. “We found that the partners that are there at first were skeptical,” Chatham’s Campbell says. “But as time has gone on, [they] have become big supporters and partners and now we have great relationships with the township. The township has a sustainability officer that they’ve put in place. The good of Pittsburgh going out where it’s applicable in other areas is important, because to just sit there and say it from the city defeats the purpose.”
The Ongoing Story It’s impossible to talk about the story of Pittsburgh without also mentioning one of its greatest challenges: population loss. The city lost a sizeable chunk of its population, which once stood at 676,000 in 1950, when the Rust Belt lost its manufacturing prowess. Population figures have continued to slide, but recent U.S. Census estimates suggest the number is beginning to stabilize. Somehow, even these losses are viewed as an opportunity by city stakeholders to further Pittsburgh’s story. With fewer people in the region, the residents have taken up the mantle to get things done themselves. “There are a lot of cities where you can’t see the fruits of your labor,” says Anna Siefken, executive director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University. Herself a recent transplant to the city, she’s been impressed with residents’ willingness to roll up their sleeves and involve themselves in the city’s narrative. “In Pittsburgh, you have a very direct connection to something that you can work on. You see a problem and it’s very entrepreneurial, which is a part of the DNA.” Piacentini agrees: “Pittsburgh is all about innovation. Something that I’ve noticed since I’ve been here is you can’t tell someone in Pittsburgh, ‘You
can’t do that.’ They’re going to find a way.” The industries in the city have changed, and it’s certainly become greener, but the working spirit has continued to be part of the city’s story—one that’s still being told and aims to be inclusive of everyone who helped and continues to build it. “One of the reasons that we have such a strong sense of place is because the people who live here and are happiest here are invested, are integrated into their communities in a way that you don’t see in a lot of other places,” Portlock says. “That’s a strength. But it makes it harder in some ways to tell the story, because for those who are already integrated it’s obvious—you don’t need to explain it. But for people coming here, that’s a story that we need to get better at telling.” m
PHOTO: FRIENDS OF THE RIVERFRONT
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career advancement
SUSTAINABLE WEB DESIGN
Why Eco-Friendly Web Design Matters
B Corporation that provides web designers and developers with resources to create sustainable products and strategies. He offers insight into why brands should opt for an eco-friendly online presence and how they can achieve it.
sustainability principles to do that, outlines different techniques that range from SEO to performance optimization. Essentially, if you think of things you should do [in web design]—such as making it accessible for people with disabilities, using web standards and tools when you program it, making it load quickly, making it user-friendly—all those things are about making it more efficient and optimized. That means it’s better for people and less timeconsuming. Because websites are powered by energy, they use less electricity. So, by making your site fast, efficient and easy to find and load, you’re making it better for the planet.
Q
Q
A
A
How digital marketers can implement sustainability principles in their online presence BY KATIE POWERS | EDITORIAL INTERN
kpowers@ama.org
A
s brands increase efforts to lessen their impact on the environment, their online presence shouldn’t be an afterthought. The internet’s annual carbon footprint is 830 million tons, which puts it on par with the aviation industry. If the internet was a country, it would rank sixth in electricity usage. But digital marketers and web designers can lessen their organization’s impact and improve consumer relations through efforts to create energy-efficient user experiences. Marketing News spoke with author and entrepreneur Tim Frick, founder and CEO of Mightybytes, a Chicago-based Certified
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What are some eco-friendly web design techniques that digital marketers could use and how might implementing these techniques benefit a brand?
Designing for Sustainability, the book I wrote about creating digital products and services and using
If brands are interested in implementing some of these techniques, what are some resources or tools they could consult to get started?
Mightybytes has built something called Ecograder, in which you enter a site’s URL and it spits back a report
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SUSTAINABLE WEB DESIGN
with things you could do to improve that page. It’ll rank you based on highlevel indicators for performance, user experience, SEO ranking and whether your site is using renewable energy. If you wanted to estimate how much CO2 your website emits, you can go to the site WebsiteCarbon to get a general estimate of your emissions, so you can work to reduce or offset that by investing in renewable energy projects.
Q
When looking at the internet’s impact on the environment, why is it urgent that web designers and digital marketers implement these sustainable practices?
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We are in the process right now of dematerializing many of our products and services and putting them online at a massive pace. Historically, the internet has been thought of as a green solution since it replaces paper. The virtual version of something is supposed to be the green version, but digital is growing at such a rapid pace across the world. On its own, a digital product might be lighter in terms of carbon emission and environmental impact, but when you multiply that by the number of users on the internet, that’s a potentially very large environmental impact and a big concern. It’s especially concerning because so many people aren’t thinking about it alongside their other environmental efforts. People say, “Oh, my website doesn’t emit that much compared to the products I make or the way I produce, so I’m going to focus on those things.” It should be in addition to, as opposed to instead of. It should be about including your digital footprint as part of your overall carbon footprint. The University of Massachusetts Amherst put out a report saying that training a single AI algorithm emits the same amount of CO2 as five average American cars in the (vehicles’) lifetimes. That doesn’t seem like much as a single algorithm, but when you talk about the fact that people are creating thousands of algorithms and constantly training
career advancement
On its own, a digital product might be lighter in terms of carbon emission and environmental impact, but when you multiply that by the number of users on the internet, that’s a potentially very large environmental impact and a big concern. them, it’s a scale thing. The fact that these things are scaling up rapidly shows the amount of damage they could potentially cause, and we need to talk about the number of people using them.
Q
How might implementing green web design techniques improve consumer-brand relationships?
A
One way is mapping out your stakeholders and including the planet as part of your stakeholders. When many people build websites, it’s about who they’re trying to target. The whole UX world is focused on making sure you’re creating something for the user—and that’s completely valid. But there could be other stakeholders in that process—internal stakeholders, external stakeholders and the environment. Make sure that you’re casting a wide net and doing system-thinking exercises at the start of a project that includes all players, especially your consumers. Having those conversations early and being upfront about potential impact is important. At a recent sustainability conference, I consistently heard people saying, “This is a design problem.” What they were getting at was that designers weren’t really thinking about end-of-life. They were thinking about launch and upfront instead of long term, which is just as important. Otherwise you have a lot of unused stuff that’s sitting up there burning pixels. In terms of how those kinds of exercises can positively impact consumers, I think another component is
making sure you do good sustainability work and tell that story in a compelling way. Otherwise, things like climate change and recycling are concepts that don’t immediately hit people up front in terms of their impact. When you’re telling that story in a compelling way, it’s going to help people clearly understand why you’re doing it, why it’s the right thing to do and why your company is focused on it. That is really the best way to engage the consumer. More and more people coming into the consumer market are looking for that kind of stuff. They want to buy in to a brand or a company making good decisions for the future.
Q
Do you predict that more brands will begin to use these techniques over time?
A
One of the reasons we built Ecograder was because, back in 2011 when we started talking to our customers and even other web designers about this, we kind of got glazed-over pinwheel eyes. People didn’t understand what we were talking about. There was a huge education hurdle there. That was seven or eight years ago and since then, we’ve seen communities popping up. There are Slack groups about climate tests. Fast Company, Wired and other organizations have written stories about the rise of green UX. We’ve seen this burgeoning community growing globally, but I would say it’s far from the majority. The only way to make a good, positive impact is at scale, so I would like to see most web designers and developers doing this as opposed to a minority. m AUGUST 2019 | MARKETING NEWS
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Marketing Department, Tenure Track Positions KELLOGG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY HAS ONE OR MORE FULL-TIME TENURE TRACK POSITIONS OPEN in the Marketing Department at the rank of Assistant Professor or above for academic year 2020-2021. The position requires being responsible for conducting advanced research in chosen areas of expertise and interest; supervising doctoral candidates; teaching basic and advanced courses in marketing at the Master’s Degree level; contributing to the research and teaching of other faculty members. Candidates must have a Ph.D. or D.B.A. in marketing or related fields (e.g., economics, management, psychology, sociology, statistics, cognitive sciences, etc.) in hand or expected by employment start date. Selection criteria include potential for (or record of) superior research, adaptability and creative interests in application to marketing problems, excellent teaching ability, and strong recommendations. Applications should include a complete curriculum vita, copies of research papers and three letters of recommendation. Applicants in the process of completing a doctoral degree should include an approved dissertation proposal or a research paper that represents progress in the dissertation. In order to ensure interview consideration at the Summer Marketing Educators’ Conference in Chicago, IL, applications must be received by June 24, 2019. Please apply at https://facultyrecruiting.northwestern.edu/apply/NDc4 where all required and relevant materials can be uploaded. Please direct questions to the Recruitment Coordinator, at recruit-mktg@kellogg.northwestern.edu. Northwestern University is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action Employer of all protected classes, including veterans and individuals with disabilities. Women, racial and ethnic minorities, individuals with disabilities, and veterans are encouraged to apply. Hiring is contingent upon eligibility to work in the United States.
Michigan State University, Broad College of Business, Department of Marketing is seeking applications for an
advanced assistant professor (tenure-system) position with primary responsibilities in research, teaching, and engaging in service activities for the academic discipline department. We prefer candidates with research and teaching expertise in the Sales domain but will consider all areas of marketing. A doctorate in marketing is required as are accomplishments in research and teaching at an AACSB accredited university. The position will start in August 2020.
To be considered for this position, please submit materials through the MSU Jobs website: http://careers.msu.edu/cw/en-us/listing/. (Posting #585632) To be eligible for full consideration, all application materials should be received by August 1, 2019, but the position will remain open until filled. Contact Ahmet Kirca, Chair of the Search Committee kirca@broad.msu.edu, for additional information.
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POSITIONS OPEN FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT SENIOR FINANCIAL ANALYST — BUICK & GMC INCENTIVES, GENERAL MOTORS, DETROIT, MI. Monitor & analyze monthly retail sales incentive expenses & dvlp & recommend monthly sales incentive programs for Buick & GMC psgr vehicles in relation to monthly vehicle deliveries & retail market share for U.S. retail vehicle market using Excel, & related internal/external data services tools. Collaborate w/ Retail Planning, & analyze monthly impact of new retail incentives programs for following month. Analyze & compare costed incentives for next month vs budget & discretionary spend allocated from consolidation finance team. Update month to date blueline incentive spend for Buick & GMC brands on wkly basis for senior leadership. Provide performance guidance to consolidations team on favorable/ unfavorable retail incentives programs for current mo. Provide costing guidance in writing & in wkly briefings to Retail Incentives Director & U.S. SS&M CFO on retail incentive mid-mo. plus up proposals provided by retail planning team for Buick/ GMC. Master, Bus Admin, Economics, or Accntng. 24 mos exp as Financial Analyst or Economist, monitoring & analyzing monthly retail sales incentive expenses & dvlpg
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GLOBAL MARKETING MANAGEMENT MANAGER – GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT & GET-HELP/ SELF-SERVE, GENERAL MOTORS, DETROIT, MI. Plan & control global Knowledge Mgmt & Digital Engagement Intelligence strategies, & lead/supervise GCCX Get-Help/Self-Serve & Knowledge Mgmt team to dvlp content, manage platforms & support U.S. & global Customer & Dealer Contact Centers & OnStar & Connected Services. Define strategies, analyze customer touchpoints, & approve integration of customer education & support initiatives across U.S./ global digital engagement platforms incldg web, chat, Social Media, & mobile apps channels. Develop strategic framework, & assure customer & dealer digital engagement, get-help & self-serve capabilities & new service offerings incldg chatbots to positively impact customer exp, generate operational efficiencies, & reduce contact center volumes across GM vehicle brands incldg OnStar/Maven/
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Cruise) & regions (NA, SA, Asia Pacific, China, Europe, & Middle East). Collaboratively define & execute knowledge roadmap addressing current/ future business needs while aligned to contact center & Social Media support business syss solutions. Bachelor, Bus Admin, Marketing, Communications, or related. 36 mos exp as Social Media Mgr, Customer Relationship Management Mgr, Marketing Mgr, or related, dvlpg strategic framework, & assuring customer & dealer digital engagement capabilities & new service offerings incldg chatbots to positively impact customer experience, generate operational efficiencies across vehicle brands & global region, & collaboratively define
& execute Knowledge or Social Media roadmap that addresses current/future business needs, or related. Mail resume to Ref#434, GM Global Mobility, 300 Renaissance Center, MC:482C32-C66, Detroit, MI 48265.
MARKETING MANAGEMENT ONSTAR GO-CHANNEL MARKETING MANAGER, GENERAL MOTORS, DETROIT, MI. Dvlp, identify, & improve revenue producing relationships for psgr vehicle embedded infotainment Marketplace in vehicle OnStar & GCCX application, w/ natl Channel Partners (CP) such as U.S. restaurant, petroleum, & retail merchants, & media partners for connected car ecosys.
Assure integration of GM services & products incldg accessories, cert. CCA/ financial services, & loyalty programs, & establish & grow relationships w/ new CPs, media agencies & technology partners. Dvlp customer exp, placement, screen display options, content, work flows & pipeline plans for Marketplace customer interactions, using Excel & Salesforce CRM tools. Work w/ Driver Workload Team to avoid driver distractions. Collaborate w/ GCCX mgmt & Channel Marketing Mgr to dvlp ecosys strategy & create revenue producing Go-ToMarket Joint Plans for each assigned Partner. Work w/ Partners to meet &/or exceed OnStar Go revenue targets. Represent entire range of OnStar platform products
& services to assigned CPs, focusing on solutions & product sets including CP vertical market. Review market research of user expectations, satisfaction about current content, customer exp. Bachelor, Bus. Admin, Management, Administration, or Marketing. 12 mos exp as Bus. Devt. Mgr, CP Mgr, Vehicle Infotainment Bus. Dev Mgr, Bus. Devt. & Alliance Mgr, or related, dvlpg or improving revenue producing relationships for psgr vehicle embedded infotainment sys application, w/ natl or regional partner restaurant, petroleum, & retail merchants for connected car ecosystem. Mail resume to Ref#2897, GM Global Mobility, 300 Renaissance Center, MC:482-C32-C66, Detroit, MI 48265.
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career advancement
IN-HOUSE AGENCIES
THE TOP CHALLENGES IN-HOUSE CREATIVE TEAMS FACE IN 2019 Challenges were scored on a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 being the most challenging Speed at which creative teams are expected to work
5.44
Volume of demand for creative work
5.35
Being a strategic contributor to meeting organizational goals
4.36
Communicating with clients and meeting expectations
3.86
Increasing variety of marketing channels that need creative
3.79
New technologies that change the way teams work
2.79
Retaining and supporting creative staff
2.42
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Source: 2019 In-House Creative Management Report by inMotionNow and InSource
3 Insights Marketing and Creative Leaders Need to Build Successful In-House Agencies An active, strategic partnership between marketing and creative teams is crucial to their prosperity BY ALEX WITHERS
awithers@inmotionnow.com
C
MOs have increasingly responded to the need for high-quality creative content efficiency by building in-house creative agencies. Studies by Forrester Research, the Association of National Advertisers and The Creative Group, as well as countless anecdotes reported in the trade media, suggest that the trend continues. This makes sense for several reasons. First, in-housing creative teams will naturally help them better align with their colleagues across the hall in marketing.
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marketing teams must develop a strategic relationship. Earlier this year, my organization, in partnership with InSource, an association for in-house creatives, published an annual report exploring the state of in-house creative management. We polled more than 550 creative and marketing professionals, including detailed openended commentary and interviewed a handful of key leaders in the creative and marketing trenches. The results revealed challenges and opportunities for marketing leaders as they build out in-house creative expertise.
Second, the co-location will provide more opportunities for high-touch collaboration. Finally, in-house creatives who are dedicated to a single brand will develop intimate knowledge of the brand. But any leader who has planned or supported a major organizational transformation knows that change requires active management. Bringing creative in-house may promise greater efficiency, but organizations can’t just bolt on a creative team and expect miracles. In order to reap those benefits, creative and
Treat In-House Creatives as Strategic Partners, Not Service Providers Some of the most surprising findings homed in on confidence in management: Both creative and marketing leaders received marginal grades while creative teams reported low morale. Just 64% of respondents said their creative leadership is effective and even fewer (54%) said their marketing leadership is effective. Less than half (45%) said morale on the creative team is high. The notion that one third (or more) of a team lacks confidence in their leadership is jarring. When we traced the issue through the data to the comments and commentary, the likely causes emerged: culture and a lack of true partnership. “As in-house creative services departments mature and become more embedded within their organizations, more is asked of them on an almost daily basis,” says Andy Brenits, president of InSource’s Board of Directors. “However, as the needs of the company become increasingly urgent, we need to remind our marketing partners that the name of the department is creative services, not creative servants.” Brent Chiu-Watson, senior director of product management at Adobe, also emphasized the importance of partnership. Creative working hand in hand with marketing is what really drives effectiveness. “Both parties need to share an interest
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IN-HOUSE AGENCIES
in performance analysis and be open to surprising insights,” he says. “When the teams find insights, learn, adapt and iterate together, you see real business impact.” For organizations struggling with this, a unifying common denominator may be mutual respect, according to Timm Chiusano, a vice president of production and creative services at Kernel, created by Spectrum Reach. He suggests putting the squabbles between creative and marketing into perspective by underscoring the common goals that both work toward, and the privilege of doing such work.
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Implement Best Practices and Streamline the Collaborative Process The survey revealed several opportunities to improve process and collaboration. Consider the following statistics derived from respondents: • 60% said their creative team uses best practices. • 51% said collaboration with marketing is effective. • 46% said creatives don’t get enough information to begin a project. • 72% said obtaining the necessary information to get started on a project is the single largest task that soaks up time that could be better spent being creative. • 79% said they rarely or never receive feedback on the performance of their creative. In reviewing the data and speaking to creatives and marketing leaders, it’s clear that some processes have been lost during the transition to in-house. In other words, when marketing teams relied more heavily on outside creative agencies, those agencies imposed many of these
processes because they were essential for efficient agency operations and healthy margin. The lesson is that processes and best practices don’t become less important just because you’ve brought the team in-house. The upside is that some process improvements can have an immediate impact on productivity and morale. A proper creative brief should be an obvious target. “Many marketing professionals have never learned to develop a proper creative brief,” says Joe Carmon, a senior creative specialist at VSP, a vision care health insurance company. “Instead, their training ends after producing meaningful marketing briefs and communication plans.” If a creative brief even exists—and it’s clear from the data it often does not—it becomes a check-the-box-style exercise devoid of audience definition, storytelling or emotion. “Emotion gives insight into the story of a defined audience, which tells us how brands can connect, drive results and foster loyalty,” Carmon says. “To make this transition, creative leaders must frame what the creative brief means to their marketing partners and internal customers.” He recommends standardizing the creative brief and boiling it down to three pages or fewer. The brevity naturally facilitates constructive and critical thinking about audience and message.
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Create Space for Creativity The top challenges for in-house creatives were the velocity or speed at which marketing needs work completed and the volume of work. This is consistent with findings from the previous year.
The survey findings and commentary all point toward parity between the creative and marketing teams as the unifying foundation of success.
career advancement
However, nearly half (48%) say they spend about one day a week or more on non-creative work—that’s up 14% from last year. In addition, one-fifth (22%) indicated they spend 10 hours a week or more chasing down information, feedback and approvals—up 6% from last year. Marketing continues to ask creative teams for more creativity under tighter deadlines—while also reducing the amount of time to be creative. How do you create space for your creatives? For Cassidee Owens, creative services manager for the Denver Broncos, it comes down to time-tracking. By tracking time, her team has developed a better understanding of how long creative projects take and it uses the data in resource planning. “This helps stakeholders see the big picture of all the work that’s happening in creative,” she says. “It also lets us better prioritize projects and even experiment with how we divide and conquer creative tasks. For example, the time tally might show a new logo takes one person a week or more to complete, but if we put three people to work on it, we can get it done in a couple of days.” The Makings of a Successful In-House Creative Agency Where should marketing and creative leaders begin? The survey findings and commentary all point toward parity between the creative and marketing teams as the unifying foundation of success. This means healthy communication and mutual respect for each other’s expertise, according to Adobe’s ChiuWatson. “It takes a partnership between the creative and marketing teams to really increase the effectiveness of creative,” he says in the report. “A mutual interest in understanding creative effectiveness begins to provide better insight through dialogue. Both marketing and creative grow new respect for the other discipline and all of a sudden, you start having interesting conversations and can take action based on data.” m AUGUST 2019 | MARKETING NEWS
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advertisers’index
ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Quick source for contacting the suppliers in the August 2019 issue of Marketing News. 2019 AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education Conference ......................... p. 35 URL: a ma.marketing/highered2019
AMA’s Marketing Resource Directory .................................................................. p. 67 URL: marketingresourcedirectory.ama.org
Advanced School of Marketing Research ............................................... p. 66 URL: a ma.marketing/ASMR19
AMA Marketing Week ................................ back cover URL: ama.marketing/mw2019
AMA Digital Marketing Bootcamp . ....................................... inside back cover URL: a ma.marketing/AustinBootcamp
Collegis Education .......................................... p. 26-29 URL: CollegisEducation.com Marketing News ...................................................... p. 63 Email: sales@ama.org URL: http://www.ama.org/mediakit
AMA Foundation Awards — 2019 Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Research Award / AMA Social Impact Scholarship / AMA Diversity Leadership Scholarship / 2019 Collegiate Chapter Awards ............................................... pp. 18-21 Calls for Nominations currently open: URL: a ma.marketing/HEMY19 ama.marketing/Anderson19
SIS International Research ..................................... p. 9 URL: http://www.sisinternational.com
AMA Marketing Management Bootcamp . ............................................................... p. 33 URL: a ma.marketing/BostonBootcamp
Thank You to the 2019 AMA Summer Academic Conference Sponsors ........................... p. 11 URL: ama.marketing/AMASummer19
Salesforce ........................................ inside front cover URL: salesforce.com/AMA
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And now a word from …
SMOKEY THE BEAR What’s the most difficult part of your job? Texting with bear paws. Someday they’ll invent a bear paw-sized keyboard. A bear can dream, right? Also, there’s no Wi-Fi in the forest, but that doesn’t really matter. I always have a better connection to what truly matters there: reminding people about their responsibility to be safe around fire and the unique ways that unplanned fires start each day. You’re a bear of few—albeit iconic—words. What else do you like to talk about? I could talk about wildfire prevention all day. And I do! No surprise then that I’ve been saying, “Only you can prevent wildfires,” for so long. Next to Santa’s, “Ho, Ho, Ho,” I think I hold the record for talking about the same topic for the longest time—imagine what a great dinner guest I’d be. Are you friends with any other celebrity bears?
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Congratulations on celebrating your 75th birthday this year (Aug. 9)! What’s been your favorite part of the festivities?
As the face of wildfire prevention for 75 years, how has your communication style evolved to promote fire safety?
The best part about celebrating this big birthday year has been seeing how many people care about preventing wildfires. It’s great to see so many people stepping up to remind their friends that, “Only you can prevent wildfires.” I’m over the moon (just don’t say I’m over the hill). Oh, and the cake! Who doesn’t love a good, candle-free birthday cake?
When you’ve been around for as long as I have, people might think you’re a bit old school. But, believe me, you can teach an old bear new tricks! I used to think a tweet was just an excited message from my pal, Woodsy Owl. Now, I have more than 400,000 social media friends on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram who help me spread my wildfire prevention message every day. Remember, I’m just a bear standing in front of humans asking them to help him prevent wildfires. #OnlyYou … can follow me @SmokeyBear on Facebook and Instagram (@Smokey_Bear on Twitter).
He may not be 100% ursine, but Stephen Col-BEAR is a good friend and lover of the outdoors. We’re such good buds that he even stepped in to help tell millions of Americans about why wildfire prevention is so important. If there’s ever a direct way to my heart and holiday card list, that’s surely it.
STATS Organization The Ad Council, National Association of State Foresters, USDA Forest Service. Date of birth Aug. 9, 1944 Height (on hind legs) Just tall enough to spot a potential firestart from miles away. They should say “eyes like a bear” instead of a hawk. Uniform I swear by my good ol’ dungarees, SMOKEY belt buckle and hat. A bucket and shovel are the best accessories for safely putting out a fire. Residence I call all our wildlands and national forests home. Favorite treat S’mores made from a campfire that’s in a pit at least 15 feet from tent walls, shrubs, trees or other flammable objects, after the fire’s extinguished properly (drown, stir, drown, repeat). Yum, yum, yum.
How many hats and shovels have you gone through in your lifetime?
In my lifetime, I have gone through far too many shovels to count—they make putting out campfires a cinch! And as for my hat, well, we all know it’s my favorite accessory, so it’s safe to say I’ve always had a few spares. I’ve even loaned out a few. It’s okay, Pharrell, you can keep it. —JULIAN ZENG
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