AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION
NONPROFIT ISSUE
WHAT’S YOUR CAUSE, WHO’S YOUR PARTNER?
AMA.ORG
MARCH 2019
MAKE THEM THINK BEFORE THEY CHOOSE
CREATING ACCESSIBLE WEBSITES
MARCH 2019 NO.
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ANSWERS IN ACTION
PHOTO: JAMIE RAMSAY
AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION
• Snapshot • Core Concepts • Ethical Marketing
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SCHOLARLY INSIGHTS • Lauren Grewal, Jillian Hmurovic, Cait Lamberton and Rebecca Walker Reczek
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EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS • Lisa Guillot • Michael Krauss • J. Walker Smith
50-53 CAREER ADVANCEMENT
• Pro Bono • Educators
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#OFFICEGOALS
Think Before You Pick
Anna Banks brings years of corporate experience to her role as CMO at the nonprofit Fair Trade USA. In this latest role, she’s challenged to find a way to make average consumers care about the welfare of farmers who work thousands of miles away.
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O nline but Inaccessible
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There are 56.7 million people in the U.S. with disabilities, but brands ignore many of them by failing to provide accessible web experiences.
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
The Imperative to Do Good
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ccess. Fair trade. Pro bono. Nonprofit. Cause. There are countless ways for marketers to do good in the world. This issue covers a few of them. Marketers are, in many ways, the most powerful customer advocates in an organization. Managing editor Sarah Steimer explores how you can make your website fully accessible—simultaneously working for consumer rights and gaining brand loyalty. “The internet was supposed to be the great equalizer, a place where any person—regardless of race, sex, color or creed—could have access to a wealth of knowledge,” Steimer writes. “But as technology advanced and the competition grew, online gatekeepers—marketers included— were smitten with the opportunity to make their websites more dynamic and exciting. They’ve chased after the latest design trends and taken back-end shortcuts to push out more content at a faster pace. But as organizations barreled forward, they unintentionally left a swath of consumers behind: people with disabilities.” There are myriad ways to get consumers to make the right choice when faced with many options. Staff writer Hal Conick spoke with the CMO of Fair Trade USA about the best ways to
educate consumers on the impact of their choices. “In Fair Trade USA’s marketing collateral, it tries to strike a balance of being informative without shaming consumers, allowing shoppers to make informed decisions about whether they want to spend more money for a good cause,” Conick writes. The power of marketing demands great responsibility. How are you helping the world around you? MOLLY SOAT Editor in Chief @MollySoat
CONTRIBUTORS
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JAMIE RAMSAY
LISA GUILLOT
Jamie Ramsay is a freelance photographer and director of photography for the Chicago Reader. She has photographed for Crate & Barrel and published work with Time Out Chicago, Smithsonian Magazine, Refinery29 and the Chicago Reader. Ramsay worked with dogs and cats for an Ozzie Award-winning layout for Marketing News. She splits her time between photography and handcrafting leather bags in Chicago.
Lisa Guillot is a transformational leadership coach, brand strategist and founder of Be Bright Lisa. She coaches executives, entrepreneurs and teams within organizations. Lisa speaks about creative leadership and purpose.
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MARCH 2019
VOL. 53 | NO. 3 AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION
Bill Cron Chairperson of the AMA Board 2018-2019 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 Hal Conick, Staff Writer hconick@ama.org Bill Murphy, Lead 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 Joseph Petit, Recruitment Advertising Specialist joseph.petit@communitybrands.com (727) 497-6565 x3706 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. 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 $220. Annual subscription rates: $35 members, $145 nonmembers and $190 libraries, corporations and institutions. International rates vary by country. Nonmembers: Order online at amaorders.com, call 1-800-633-4931 or e-mail amasubs@ ebsco.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). 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.
LETTER FROM THE CEO
The Solutions Aggregator
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his month marks the culmination of many months of work for us here at the AMA as we release a new version of AMA.org, along with a new Salesforce CRM platform designed to improve our members’ lives. The AMA vision is to create a community that marketers feel is essential to their lifelong journey of personal transformation and gives them the employable skills needed to achieve the independence every human craves. Whether it’s financial, social, professional or personal, we all want to be free to pursue our best selves. The more we know about our customers, the more we can design an experience that supports their ambitions. By responsibly managing customer data, we can enhance their experience, not to barrage customers with heatseeking emails aimed at selling. The AMA community of the future is one where solutions are sought, not sold. Over time, those solutions will be personalized to each member’s unique needs. When I’m asked what people can expect from the new site, I say that you might as well pick your answer from a kaleidoscope, because that’s how complex and unique every user experience will ultimately become. At the outset, we want to remove friction, save time and connect marketers with each other to make solutions available when they’re needed. Early on, the personalization may not feel as pronounced as the absence of
friction. It will take time to build the former. This release—version 1.0—is not the end. It is the beginning of enabling the AMA to deliver the vision we’ve promised the marketing community, a vision in which marketers are the stars. The new platforms will empower our community to flourish in this network-based world. The AMA continues to strive to be the solutions aggregator for marketers who choose to pursue personal growth, employability, promotability, recognition and reward.
RUSS KLEIN CEO
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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Report Finds Most Effective Nonprofit Communications Come from a Supportive Team
38% of nonprofits ranked their communications as very or extremely effective, up from 36% last year. 53% said they were somewhat effective. 8% said they were only slightly or not at all effective.
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onprofits rank their overall communications effectiveness as 3.3 out of 5, according to the ninth edition of the “Nonprofit Communications Trends Report” from the Nonprofit Marketing Guide. The report found the top three priority goals for nonprofit communicators in 2018 were engaging the community, brand-building and reputation management and raising awareness of the issues. “The conventional wisdom is that fewer goals and strategies lead to more effectiveness,” says Kivi Leroux Miller, founder and CEO of Nonprofit Marketing Guide. “But the practical reality is that nonprofit communicators have many goals and strategies. What sets apart the most effective organizations are team member expertise and a supportive culture that sees marketing and communications as a strategic function, rather than a long list of tactical to-dos.” The survey found the greatest barrier to effective nonprofit communications is a lack of support from the rest of the organization. “For example, do your coworkers cooperate in the creation of an editorial calendar, follow established content creation and review processes and meet deadlines?” Miller says. “The most effective organizations say ‘yes’ more often to those questions and the less effective ones say ‘no.’” Miller says that the most successful nonprofits are working on three communications areas: 1. Building staff expertise to mastery level on specific marketing strategies and skills. 2. Implementing clear communications processes and procedures (e.g., editorial calendars and standard workflows). 3. Creating an organizational culture that values strategic communications work, including excellent working relationships between communications staff and executives.
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MORE EFFECTIVE
38%
Nonprofit Marketing Guide asked nonprofits to rank their overall communications effectiveness on a 5-star scale, from 1 star (not at all effective) to 5 stars (extremely effective). The average was 3.3 stars, or between somewhat and very effective. This is the same overall ranking as the last two years.
LESS EFFECTIVE
61%
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Significant Differences in Essential Goals Between More- and Less-Effective Nonprofits % OF MORE-EFFECTIVE NONPROFITS SAYING THE GOAL IS ESSENTIAL % OF LESS-EFFECTIVE NONPROFITS SAYING THE GOAL IS ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE
GOAL ENGAGING OUR COMMUNITY 33%
16%
17% SUPPORTING MAJOR GIFT FUNDRAISING 24%
10%
13%
11% RAISING AWARENESS OF ISSUES 19%
For five years, survey participants were asked to rate their confidence in their overall job skills. These ratings have remained fairly consistent from year to year.
9%
10% SUPPORTING EVENT FUNDRAISING 22%
8%
14%
About 10% say they have a lot to learn. This year, slightly more people identified themselves as very capable and confident, with the remaining saying they are comfortable, but want to keep getting better.
SUPPORTING FUNDRAISING FOR SMALL-TO-MEDIUM GIFTS 18%
8%
10%
Priority Goals for Nonprofit Communicators in 2018 HIGH/ESSENTIAL
LOW/MEDIUM
NOT IN 2018/NEVER
Engaging our community Brand building and reputation management Raising awareness of our issues Recruiting and engaging program participants Supporting event fundraising (galas, walks, etc.) Supporting small-to-medium donor fundraising Supporting major donor fundraising Communicating internally with our staff or board Recruiting and engaging volunteers Advocating for our positions Building our membership Positioning our staff as thought leaders 0
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
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80%
Nearly of middle market companies reported that their revenue has increased over the past year.
Revenue Rises in Middle Market, but Growth Drops Confidence and revenue were high among middle market executives, but growth was down from the previous quarter
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early 80% of middle market companies reported that their revenue has increased over the past year, the highest percentage ever, according to the 4Q 2018 Middle Market Indicator by the National Center for the Middle Market. Even so, the rate of growth is
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down quarter to quarter, from 8.6% in the third quarter to 7.9% in the fourth quarter. This decline is driven by upper middle market companies in sectors such as services and finance. “The retail trade and construction industries report notable increases in the rate of revenue growth this
quarter, and manufacturing continues to report strong growth,” the report authors write. “Despite the overall drop, revenue growth is higher than one year ago and remains a full point above the MMI average revenue growth rate of 6.9%.” In 2019, 60% of middle market companies expect that their revenue will continue to grow. On average, middle market executives expect to grow at 5.9% this year. Most (89%) middle market leaders also feel confident about their own local economies in 2019, but their confidence in the global economy fell from 80% in the third quarter to 73% in the fourth quarter. Confidence in the national economy stayed above 85% throughout 2018. Despite all the changes, NCMM reports that all confidence metrics it measures—local, national, global—when taken together “remain well above the averages recorded by the MMI over the past seven years.” Thomas Stewart, executive director of the NCMM, says that confidence in the middle market is always similarly weighted—local economy is most important, then national economy, then global. “This is because middle market companies are deeply rooted in local economies; they know them best,” Stewart says. “They are more confident, perhaps the same way a person walks more confidently in a neighborhood he knows than in one he visits less often.” One problem area for the middle market may be employment growth. While growth remained solid (55%) across 2018, the rate of growth has declined for the past two quarters, NCMM reports. In the third quarter, growth was 6.4%; it fell to 5.4% by the end of 2018. “While the data suggest that the rate of employment growth may have peaked for the time being, middle market companies are still hiring: Only one in 10 firms reports a decrease in
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headcount compared to last year,” the report says. Despite this, expectations for growth have fallen—43% of firms say they will increase their workforce in 2019. Companies project that employment will grow 3.8% in the next 12 months, down from 4.6% in the third-quarter of 2018. Larger middle-market companies have higher expectations; they expect a 5% growth in employment in 2019. In response to an NCMM question about short- and long-term concerns, middle market leaders say that they’re most concerned with maintaining growth over the next 12 months— many executives wonder how they can attract and retain the best employees. In the next three months, middle market executives worry most about costs associated with imports,
exports and tariffs. “There are several issues with the global economy: slowing growth in China, Brexit anxiety and—clearly— trade war issues,” Stewart says. “You can see in the last [Middle Market Index] that we put a spotlight on tariffs and their impact. Tariffs and uncertainty about the future direction of trade policy would both reduce global confidence.” While middle market confidence is down, with challenges that appear “more diverse and more daunting,” middle market executives still want to invest in innovation, open new markets and build new facilities. If these middle market executives are seeing warning signals in the economy, NCMM says that they aren’t yet slowing down. —HAL CONICK
43%
of middle market firms say they will increase their workforce in 2019.
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The Case for Sharing Data: Consumers, Quality and Better Brand Decisions
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ata are vital for brands that need consumer input for making important decisions about marketing and product development. People benefit from data-based decisions made by individuals, organizations and computer systems. In recent years, this benefit has become more apparent as the adoption of AI has increased the utility of data. But current policies related to data are socially inefficient and fail to respect the privacy of consumers. In general, data today are owned and controlled by companies. It is often unclear to consumers when and where their data are being captured or used. Consumers are compensated poorly and must trust the companies using their data to keep them private. But companies only care about privacy to the extent that it has an effect on their business. Stanford University researchers Charles I. Jones and Christopher Tonetti observe that data are non-rival. Unlike most goods, data are not depleted through use and there are large social gains for sharing data. A single dataset can be used simultaneously by any number of individuals, companies or AI-based systems without reducing the amount of data available to anyone else. But companies are generally incentivized to hoard data they own. Prorietary data are the basis of many business models and a competitive advantage. As a result, data that could be used by many at a low social cost are used by one and society is made poorer.
In general, data today are owned and controlled by companies. It is often unclear to consumers when and where their data are being captured or used. Consumer Control If we can implement policies and systems that allow consumers to retain control of their data, we can bring about an optimal data economy. Consumers will appropriately weigh privacy concerns of their data against the financial gains of sharing that data. We can increase the rate of sharing further if we guarantee anonymous data sharing. The value of data is also blurred when contained within the walls of a corporation, which has the primary objective is leverage, blend, package and resell the data. Industries
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including advertising and market research have evolved to where a race-to-the-bottom compensation model for consumers has emerged. A market researcher may pay $5 or $10 for access to a consumer’s attitudes or opinions and the actual consumer may only earn 20 to 40 cents for their time and data.
Data Quality Data quality is a topic of concern across industries. For example, AI learns to optimize processes and outcomes from data. If bad data are going in, then the outcomes from this technology suffer. As brands and marketers require more data from consumers, it’s important to support an ecosystem that facilitates the best possible set of motivations to achieve high-quality data. The consumer’s best interests and user experience for sharing are too often ignored. Facilitating an ecosystem of consumer-first approaches by design, transparency, accountability and trust — while compensating users fairly — sets the fundamentals for achieving goals. While many companies may throw around terms such as privacy and transparency, shifting control and privacy to the consumer requires a series of trade-offs that eliminates certain conveniences and advantages that many companies benefit from today.
How Blockchain Can Help Blockchain technology provides a basis to ensure that data are widely available as a force for good in society by shifting control of that data to consumers. The right protocol can facilitate the network and infrastructure to form a marketplace. On one side of the market are individuals who contribute data via tasks or by providing access to existing data. On the other side are data buyers, such as research organizations and advertisers. Between them are software and a public blockchain that allow buyers to interact with individuals in a way that protects the privacy of the individual, incentivizes accuracy, enforces a fair compensation model and provides transparency of data use and payment. As brands and marketers become reliant on datadriven decisions, we must acknowledge that traditional forms of data collection and access will no longer suffice. Consumers are demanding greater control over all aspects of their online lives, and their data are no different. We must take a different approach to garner quality data as the foundation for important business decisions—and to keep ahead on consumer privacy and control. —PAUL NETO
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SNAPSHOT
RIP Medical Debt Allows Supporters to Start Campaigns, Forgives Millions in Debt RIP Medical Debt has received national TV exposure from its unique proposition: It buys and forgives U.S. medical debt. In late 2018, a smaller campaign driven by two supporters became the nonprofit’s most successful. BY HAL CONICK | STAFF WRITER
hconick@ama.org Goal
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or every $100 in donations New York-based nonprofit RIP Medical Debt receives, it’s able to forgive $10,000 in medical debt. The nonprofit uses data to localize campaigns and find the debt most in need of forgiveness. Since RIP Medical Debt was founded in 2014, it claims to have eliminated $500
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million in medical debt. Audiences are captivated by RIP Medical Debt’s proposition because of just how many U.S. citizens are crippled by medical debt. A study by the Urban Institute found that the total medical debt owed by U.S. citizens is $1 trillion. Another study by NerdWallet Health finds that almost 2 million new people
file for bankruptcy due to unpaid medical bills each year, while the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finds that 20% of Americans have at least one medical debt collection item in their credit reports. “It’s something that unless you are sick or dealing with the issue of debt, it’s easy to think that people do it themselves, that they overextend themselves,” says Daniel Lempert, an account executive at DVM Communications, who has run the PR and communications campaigns for RIP Medical Debt since 2017. “But when it comes to medical debt, no one chooses to get sick. That’s a huge part of the messaging.” The nonprofit’s captivating proposition has led to plenty of media coverage. Lempert says that the novelty of RIP Medical Debt means the stories are often picked up by TV news stations and local newspapers. Sometimes, RIP Medical Debt’s campaigns go viral—it has been featured on NBC’s “Nightly News with Lester Holt” and HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver. These shows are opportunities to spread awareness of RIP Medical Debt and ensure that when people receive yellow envelopes in the mail saying that their debt has been paid off, they know that it’s not a scam. “A lot of people assume that it’s just too good to be true, that there really isn’t anyone on their side, which is understandable,” Lempert says. One recent local campaign, driven by two women in Ithaca, New York, has been one of the most powerful in RIP Medical Debt’s young history. The campaign started small, but contributed mightily to RIP Medical Debt’s goal of empowering donors to forgive billions in medical debt. Action RIP Medical Debt often partners with TV news stations that will pay off debt in its coverage area, then do a story on those whose debt they paid. In the case of RIP’s appearance on John Oliver’s HBO show, Oliver wanted to outdo Oprah Winfrey’s 2004 TV record of giving away $7 million—he donated enough money to
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forgive $15 million worth of medical debt. But sometimes a local campaign driven by supporters outside network television becomes an even bigger story. In summer 2018, two New York residents—retired chemist Judith Jones and psychoanalyst Carolyn Kenyon—decided to raise money for RIP Medical Debt to create awareness for the New York Health Act, legislation that promises healthcare coverage for every New York resident. Jones and Kenyon’s campaign was laudable but not unique to RIP Medical debt; there are many similar campaigns driven by supporters, most starting on the nonprofit’s website. Lempert says that anyone can donate to RIP Medical Debt, but some people—Jones and Kenyon among them—create their own local campaigns by filling out a form or sending an inquiry through the nonprofit’s website. Jones and Kenyon told RIP Medical Debt what upstate New York counties to include in their campaign. The nonprofit told the women they’d need to raise a minimum of $12,500 to trigger a donation that would cover the debt in the area. RIP Medical Debt then gave the two women a URL to a Qgiv page—a website used by nonprofits to accept online donations. The money raised by Jones and Kenyon was bundled into RIP Medical Debt’s next bulk-debt purchase. Within weeks, the nonprofit told Jones and Kenyon that the yellow envelopes would soon be in the mailboxes of people in their communities. “When it came time to contacting local press, I was happy to source contacts [Jones and Kenyon] couldn’t get their hands on,” Lempert says. “This wasn’t specifically a media campaign, but when there is interest from the organizer, I’m happy to buoy their efforts. And in this case, it was great because the story was really powerful and they are both really interesting individuals.” The story was also politically timely, as candidates frequently discussed the New York Health Act during the state’s midterm election. Local publications picked the story up, as did The New York Times. “It created this great ripple effect,”
Lempert says, an effect that continued well after the story ran in The New York Times. Result Campaigns by RIP Medical Debt supporters like Jones and Kenyon are akin to “playing with house money,” Lempert says. If the story breaks big, great—if not, the money is still donated, the medical debt paid. In this case, the story broke big. First, the debt: The $12,500 raised by Jones and Kenyon was used to forgive $1.5 million worth of total debt for
COMPANY
RIP Medical Debt FOUNDED
2014 HEADQUARTERS
New York City CAMPAIGN TIMELINE
New Yorkers Judith Jones and Carolyn Kenyon started raising money in the summer of 2018; The New York Times reported on the story in December 2018. CAMPAIGN RESULTS
RIP raised $12,500 and forgave $1.5 million of medical debt in upstate New York; The New York Times story was shared 8,500 times from the newspaper’s Facebook post; RIP received $200,000 in media value and 80 requests for new campaigns since December 2018, twice the number they had received in the previous 12 months.
answers in action
1,300 upstate New Yorkers. Then, their campaign led to a December 2018 piece in The New York Times, a newspaper with more than 3 million paid digital subscribers. On the Times’ Facebook post of the article alone, the story was shared 8,500 times; it also received 38,000 reactions and 600 comments. RIP Medical Debt values the media exposure from The New York Times story at about $200,000, which Lempert says could relieve $20 million in medical debt. In addition to the media exposure, Scott Patton, director of development at RIP Medical Debt, says that the number of new campaigns—those similar to the campaign created by Jones and Kenyon— has been “staggering.” In early January, about a month and a half after the Times article ran, he says that the nonprofit was coordinating nearly 80 requests for new campaigns. This is twice as many requests for new campaigns as RIP Medical Debt had received in the previous 12 months. Lempert and others working with RIP Medical Debt never truly know what campaigns will go viral, but he believes that there are peaks and valleys to media exposure. “It’s fine to have this explosion of coverage and then to let things calm down a little bit,” he says. “Then, we can do good, important internal work and look at what the next innovation is.” One thing RIP Medical Debt is working on next, Lempert says, is how to further customize debt relief so they can relieve debt for a specific illness just as they can for a specific geographical location. But even without the innovation, untold campaign dollars will be driven by The New York Times story, leading to millions of dollars of relieved medical debt. By offering a simple, almost passive way to allow supporters to start their own local campaigns, RIP Medical Debt has activated its supporters to become its most active fundraisers. The stories of donors have spread and inspired others to start their own campaigns. “I haven’t worked on an account like this where there was so much user-generated interest from people in the community,” Lempert says. m
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CORE CONCEPTS
How Brands and Nonprofits Can Work Together on a Cause Consumers want brands that support great causes and nonprofits want access to the vast budgets of brands. Cause marketing can create partnerships where everyone benefits. BY HAL CONICK | STAFF WRITER
hconick@ama.org,
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rands that support a cause can see powerful results. In January, Gillette released an ad rallying against “toxic masculinity”—namely bullying and sexual harassment—that drew both praise and calls for boycott. Whether consumers loved or hated Gillette’s ad, it drew 65.4 million views on digital platforms within the first two weeks. Procter & Gamble Vice Chairman-CFO Jon Moeller told investors that Gillette has been “pleased with the level of consumption;” large viewing numbers seemed to translate to sales. But was Gillette’s ad truly cause marketing—an attempt to use its brand to bring attention and change to a social issue—or was it simply a public relations gimmick? The ad certainly had potential to help a cause beyond a donation, says
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Cody Damon, co-founder of social impact and nonprofit marketing agency Media Cause, but Gillette didn’t give viewers a next action. Instead, the ad sent people to a landing page that featured an application for nonprofits to receive a $1 million donation from Gillette. The Boys and Girls Clubs of America will be the first nonprofit to receive the donation. “It’s a great message that was pulled off and executed well—it created a conversation,” Damon says. “But when we get to that landing page that Gillette was sending people to from the ad, there’s not a lot to do. That’s where organizations that are more focused on community and keeping folks engaged do a better job.” This, Damon says, is where a greater focus on what comes next for consumers
in Gillette’s cause marketing campaign could have continued the conversation by creating a next action. When brands pair with causes or nonprofits, the effects can be tremendous—just think about Gap’s (Red) campaign, which has raised more than $10 million for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, or Patagonia Clothing suing the federal government in defense of two Utah national monuments. These campaigns were certainly cause marketing, but they didn’t seem forced and both drove toward change by making consumers care. For brands that care about an issue, cause marketing can attract loyal customers, drive sales and make a difference in society. Consumers want more brands that care, according to Edelman’s 2018 Earned Brand study, which found that 64% of consumers will choose, switch, avoid or boycott a brand based on its stand on societal issues. Brands have taken note and spent more on cause marketing: The IEG Sponsorship Report says that spending on cause sponsorship will reach $2.23 billion in 2019, up 4.6% from 2018. For brands and nonprofits to successfully run a cause campaign, they’ll need to do more than just donate money. Here are five ways to think about cause marketing that can help brands and nonprofits work together on a campaign that can make a difference. Change, Not Just PR Brands often fall short of taking the next step. Joe Waters, a cause marketing consultant and author of the Selfish Giving blog, says that the Gillette ad is a good example of the challenges brands face in cause marketing. Gillette committed to donating $3 million to causes, but it’s a $6 billion company; is their intention to initiate change or is it simply good PR? Gillette hasn’t taken a next step toward working with a nonprofit with its toxic masculinity campaign, save for its promised donations to three nonprofits over the next three years. Nike faces the same issue with its Colin Kaepernick
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CORE CONCEPTS
campaign; Kaepernick framed his in-game protests as criticisms of police brutality in the U.S., but Nike hasn’t partnered with any nonprofits addressing this issue, save for a quiet donation to Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights charity, as reported by The Associated Press. In donating instead of pushing for an actionable step for consumers, Damon says that both companies are losing an opportunity to activate people who were moved by the messaging. “The challenge for them then becomes are they going to stick with it?” Damon says. “Does this end now because they had a good campaign that got a lot of attention? Or do they come back and say, ‘Not only are we putting financial resources behind this, we’re making this a part of who we are?’” Brands Must Find a Genuine Cause Waters often asks his clients, “What do you really care about?” If a company doesn’t truly care about a cause it’s investing in, he says that the campaign won’t get traction. Some companies try to find what their customers care about and use that issue as their cause, Waters says, but he believes that the cause needs to come from within the company. This could mean a cause the CEO and C-suite greatly support, or it could be doing what GameStop did: surveying employees to find out what they care about, then backing that cause. “They have a great relationship with Autism Speaks,” Waters says. “What was great about that is employees who have autistic family members stepped up and became ambassadors for the program nationwide. That really encouraged the rank and file to get involved.” Don’t bother getting involved with a cause you don’t care about, Damon says. Customers are smart enough to figure out when a company doesn’t truly care about the cause it’s pushing. But they also notice when corporations aren’t doing anything. “Consumers want to hold you accountable and we want you to have a stand on something,” Damon says.
NPOs and Brands Must Find a Common Cause Nonprofits don’t have the same resources as brands, nor do they know who to reach out to at a brand for a collaborative campaign. Waters says that NPOs need to know what they’re looking for in a partner. “What ends up happening is the nonprofit will take whatever they can get,” Damon says. “They just want the opportunity to partner with the big brand, particularly because they believe that that’s the solution; if we could just get in front of more people, it’d help what we’re trying to do. But if they were better aligned with what they were both trying to do, they could be better matched.” For nonprofits, a good partnership often means more money and bigger marketing channels from the brands they’re working with. “Corporations are influencers,” Waters says. “They have a solid, engaged audience behind them. And by aligning that audience with the cause, it can really elevate what the nonprofit does.” Brands must look for nonprofits that already have an audience, Waters says. Brands now see cause marketing partnerships as new marketing channels. If brands can have a great strategy while also winning over a new audience through partnering with an effective nonprofit, the campaign will be wellaligned and likely set up a big marketing win. One example Waters gave was the involvement of veteran service organization Team Rubicon with the MLB during the World Series. Team Rubicon is a small organization; by partnering with the MLB during its biggest moment of the year—there were 14.3 million viewers during the 2018 World Series—it was able to raise more money and awareness. This partnership worked well, Waters says, because Team Rubicon has a growing reputation and already does a good job marketing itself, but it also worked because troops are a loyal audience for brands. “Veterans really turn out to the brands,”
answers in action
Waters says, “They say, ‘I’m going to support that brand because they support me.’” Keep Standards High Through each cause marketing partnership, brands and nonprofits must hold their partners and themselves to high standards. Care for their cause must be integrated throughout the company. Waters mentions that Gillette still charges more money for women’s razors than men’s razors, even after their campaign asked men to do better by women in society. Waters also says that brands’ words ring hollow when they get involved in cause marketing without addressing their own issues. “When people get into cause marketing, one thing that they have to realize is there’s going to be accountability from consumers on a lot of different levels,” Waters says. “You can’t just institute one program. You have to say, ‘We’re going to look at our supply chain and see how we can become more sustainable. We’re going to see whether we’re paying employees a fair wage.’” Damon says that cause marketing is a moving target, something that companies will have to measure like any other marketing campaign. Brands can’t just hope for the best—they must listen to consumers and change when necessary. Find Inspiration Brands can also look to the examples of organizations who have been successful with cause marketing. Patagonia is the pack leader, donating its $10 million tax return to causes. Patagonia also ran the “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign, where it tried to raise awareness of the effects of consumerism on the environment and offered to repair or recycle old jackets rather than sell new ones. “They’re the ideal,” Waters says. “No company gets there overnight, but companies have to know that this is part of a process. If we don’t see them evolving in that process, we’re going to recognize this is just spin and we’re not going to give you the credit you’re looking for.” m
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ETHICAL MARKETING
Ethical Nonprofit Marketers Tell Stories with Empathy Nonprofits exist to solve problems. But using a problem-thensolution formula oversimplifies nonprofit storytelling, and it fails to show the full scope of the lives touched. BY SARAH STEIMER | MANAGING EDITOR
ssteimer@ama.org
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onprofit marketers know that stories can compel donors, but it can be a tricky endeavor to procure those stories. Nonprofit beneficiaries may feel less driven to talk about one of the most challenging periods of their life. They may feel embarrassed or as though they’re being defined by their experience. “Some ethical concerns are the same as with any other marketing efforts, such as always ensuring you have permission from someone to utilize their image,” says Rick Cohen, chief communications officer and COO of the National Council of Nonprofits. “Nonprofits have an added layer of sensitivity in that some of the people who utilize their services would prefer that others not know.” Finding someone comfortable with sharing their story can be difficult enough, and many marketers may breathe a sigh of relief when they find a willing subject: The hard part is over. But to tell a story that will empower the person or community and motivate the audience, marketers need go beyond the problemthen-solution formula. “You can’t tell a story about a whole person unless you ask about the whole person,” says Kate Marple, director of communications at the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership. Marple says that she began thinking differently about nonprofit storytelling about four years ago, when her best friend agreed to speak at a nonprofit’s fundraising gala. Leading up to the event,
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the nonprofit organization proposed edits that removed personal parts of her friend’s speech. “She had been asked to share something deeply personal, but to fit her experience into a predetermined narrative created by the organization and its goals,” Marple recalls. “I witnessed how that made her feel, and the strength
she demonstrated in pushing back to maintain control of her narrative and ensure her perspective was included. It drove home for me this need to truly partner with people if we are going to ask them to share their stories.” Always Seek Stories, Not Just When You Need Them Nonprofit marketers reach for stories before a major campaign, while planning an event or when a reporter requests a comment. But only seeking these stories when needed can force them into narrow boxes. “When the need for a story is urgent, it can put pressure on both a client and on a staff member, and eliminate the chance for more thoughtful conversations where that person is not only in control of their narrative, but also in shaping the larger message,” Marple says. When looking for a story at the last minute, marketers
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answers in action
ETHICAL MARKETING
may only seek out anecdotes that have the happiest ending, versus searching for someone in the best position to tell their story, a teller who would likely benefit from doing so. The person should guide the storytelling, not the other way around. Marple recommends that nonprofits create a culture inside the organization where clients and community members served by the organization collaborate to determine what stories should be told. “I think our job is not just to ask people for their stories, but to ask for their guidance in what stories to tell and how and where to tell them,” she says. Nonprofits should actively and regularly build a speaker’s bureau, an ongoing narrative project or have a regular opportunity to submit stories. “It’s important to engage with people who are not in active crisis and those who are no longer using an organization’s services so that there is less of a chance someone will feel obligated to share if they don’t want to,” Marple says. Don’t Reduce a Person to Their Problem, and Don’t Make the Nonprofit a Hero Overcoming a challenge may be an unforgettable experience. It may even define a certain period of a person’s life. But it doesn’t tell their entire story. “If you’re interviewing someone, it’s important to ask not just about what happened to them, but about who they are, about their family, about what they’re proud of,” Marple says. “Before a story introduces a problem, it should introduce a person.” Focusing on a person’s problem can unintentionally victimize them.
Oftentimes, the nonprofit gets involved in the issue after a person or community has already been trying to right a wrong. An over-simplified story can paint the organization as the hero, making the nonprofit bigger than the person’s story. Marple gives the example of a mother who blew the whistle on management about lead paint in her building. She had been trying for months to get her city involved before the nonprofit stepped in. “Focusing on mom’s advocacy in the story still acknowledges the problem,” Marple says, “but it conveys the bigger problem of substandard housing and shows that mom was the one trying to do something about it, not only for her family, but for others. An organization’s work should be mentioned, but never in a way that evokes a savior image.” Showing a fuller picture, one that starts before and continues after the nonprofit’s involvement, humanizes the subject beyond their challenge. Marple herself encountered the issue in her work as a documentary playwright. “As part of my theater work, I started telling stories about my own experiences with childhood illness and as a queer person,” she says. “I began to ask myself if I would want to share those stories in the context of a nonprofit campaign focused on health care or LGBTQIA+ rights.” Marple says that her biggest fears about sharing her story were that she would be reduced to one thing or she would be used for someone else’s agenda. “I came up with some criteria I’d want followed if someone were asking for my story, and it’s what I now follow if I’m asking someone to share theirs in a nonprofit context.” This includes framing the story through that person’s perspective, giving them
When we tell stories that more fully depict who someone is alongside the story of what happened, it is easier for people hearing it to recognize themselves or their families in that story. 20
complete control over how it’s shared, aiming for informed consent and allowing them to review the final product before publishing. Cohen echos the need for giving final permission to the subjects. “Nonprofits that work with sensitive populations will usually have policies in place that go a little further in not just asking permission to use an image or story,” Cohen says, “but also give those people the chance to see exactly how those stories are being told and where before granting permission.” Empathy Is Greater Than Sympathy Marple published a guide on empathetic, partnered storytelling, called “Who Tells the Story?” In the guide, she writes that sympathy leads to charity, while empathy leads to change. She says that a story focused solely on a person’s problem or the details of their circumstance causes the audience to feel sympathy or pity. Research shows that sympathy can elicit donations, but pity also runs the risk of putting distance between donors and beneficiaries. “When stories are overly focused on circumstances, it’s easier for those hearing the story to feel like, ‘That’s not me,’ or ‘That could never happen to me,’” Marple says. “But when we tell stories that more fully depict who someone is—what kind of parent they are, what they find joy in, the incredible advocacy they do for themselves and their community—alongside the story of what happened, it is easier for people hearing it to recognize themselves or their families in that story, in that person and in that community.” Focusing on the trials of a person or community may elicit donations, but it may also fail to connect donor with cause in a more foundational way. If a donor can see themselves in the affected person or can see that there are relatable layers to their story, the story creates a connection. Those connections may be the difference between getting a one-time donation and creating a lifelong supporter. m
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scholarly insights
CONSUMER PERCEPTIONS
Why Consumers Won’t Buy Ugly Produce The world is full of unattractive fruits and vegetables: lumpy, misshapen or discolored carrots, apples and strawberries that are fresh and healthy. This produce tastes the same as its cosmetically blessed cousins, so why won’t consumers buy it? BY LAUREN GREWAL, JILLIAN HMUROVIC, CAIT LAMBERTON AND REBECCA WALKER RECZEK
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new study in the Journal of Marketing examines why consumers avoid unattractive but edible fruits and vegetables, and how to overcome this issue. We found a surprising underlying cause: Buying unattractive produce negatively impacts consumers’ views of themselves, causing a drop in self-
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perceptions. This thorny challenge has multiple consequences. Farmers leave as much as 30% of their produce in the field because it isn’t aesthetically pleasing enough to pick and sell. Grocery retailers who operate on razor-thin margins trash as much as $15.4 billion of edible fruits and vegetables each year.
Restaurants also discard unpleasing produce. All of this food waste occurs at a time when agricultural sustainability is more important than ever. Retailers typically take one of two approaches to selling ugly produce: positively marketing the imperfections or slashing prices by 30% to 50%. Take, for example, Intermarche’s “Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables” campaign, Asada’s “Imperfect Produce” and Giant Eagle’s “Produce with Personality.” While clever, retailers are unsure if these strategies are effective or sustainable enough to consistently sell produce. Motivating consumers to buy ugly fruits and vegetables could help maximize use of important resources while decreasing food waste and shortages. Our team interviewed grocery store owners in Sweden to assess their perceptions and strategies for managing the sale
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of unattractive produce. Each store was individually owned and operated, meaning that the study participants controlled their purchasing and merchandising decisions. Our team rated grocers’ attitudes, finding that: • Consumers avoid unattractive produce nearly all the time: 4.34 on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 6 (all the time). • Consumer attitudes towards ugly fruits and vegetables increase store waste (3.91 on the same scale) and lost sales (2.86 on a scale of 1—not at all—to 5—a great deal). Consumer aversion to unattractive produce impacts grocers’ business in the following ways: • About 34% of store owners throw out substandard fruits and vegetables; another 34% discount it significantly. To sell ugly produce, grocers offer a 45% discount on average. • Other strategies include blending unattractive produce in with attractive produce (21%) and repurposing it for other uses in the store so that it is not sold whole (11%). • None of the store owners surveyed used advertising or digital displays to encourage the purchase of unattractive produce. However, these grocers acknowledged a lack of confidence—1.93 on a scale of 1 (not at all confident) to 5 (a great deal confident) about their marketing and sales strategies. This research demonstrates that consumers devalue unattractive produce because of altered selfperception, which increases negative self-image and decreases their willingness to buy it when more attractive options are available. Consumers have the same response when they imagine themselves
consuming ugly fruits and vegetables. Fortunately, there is an easy fix: Boost consumers’ self-esteem. Our research indicates that: • Providing in-store advertising with targeted messaging (e.g., “You are fantastic! Pick ugly produce!”) increases shoppers’ willingness to buy unattractive produce by 22.4%. • Retailers who use self-esteemboosting ads can drive 12.6% more revenue (discounting ugly fruit by 30%) or 6.5% more revenue (at a 50% discount) than when they run generic ads with only product information. Grocers can use this research to drive sales of ugly produce while decreasing discounts and increasing sales. When used systematically, targeted advertising could help increase consumer acceptance of ugly fruits and vegetables and reduce food waste in farmers’ fields and stores. Society also benefits through agricultural and sales practices that are more sustainable and feed more people. m LAUREN GREWAL is assistant professor of business administration
scholarly insights
21% of store
owners blend unattractive produce in with other produce.
11% repurpose it
for other uses in the store so that it is not sold whole.
in the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.
JILLIAN HMUROVIC is a doctoral candidate in marketing in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh.
CAIT LAMBERTON is associate professor of business administration and Fryrear Faculty Fellow in the marketing and business economics department at the Joseph M. Katz School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh.
REBECCA WALKER RECZEK is the Dr. H. Lee “Buck” Mathews professor of marketing in the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University.
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executive insights
LEADERSHIP
Stop the Self-Sabotage and Be Your Best Self How to get out of a self-wallowing, nerve-racked funk before you meet your audience
BY LISA GUILLOT
lisa@bebrightlisa.com
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ou’re scheduled to speak at a big event and a voice in your head says, “What if I go blank? What if I look like a fool in front of everyone? I don’t know why they invited me, I shouldn’t be here.” You have approximately 70,000 thoughts a day, 90% are which are repeats, according to UCLA researchers. Imagine repeating, “I shouldn’t be here,” 63,000 times. It’s no wonder you’re feeling like an imposter. This event is a big deal, but you’re a big deal, too. The organizers invited you because you are the bee’s knees, an expert with incredible insights to share—despite your inner voice telling you otherwise. That voice in your head has many names in the leadership world: it’s your inner critic, gremlin or lizard brain. I call my inner critic “Timid Lady Gaga.” By simply calling her an ironic, unrealistic name, I’m able to tame the self-limiting claims Timid Lady Gaga makes in an effort to make me small. As a transformational leadership coach, I’ve had client conversations about this exact thing. I’ve heard:
These are high-achieving, creative leaders at the top of their game. They appear to have it all together. I’ve had my own coach talk me off the ledge of self-doubt and I want to share
my go-to approaches to get out of a selfwallowing, nerve-racked funk for your big event. But first, a story. One day before I was set to host a personal branding workshop in Chicago, I finally admitted to myself that I could not power through a sore throat and massive headache. I was supposed to host 15 creative marketing professionals who were ready to light up the world with their voices, but I was barely able to speak. I needed a quick fix; instead, I received a bronchitis diagnosis and a bag of antibiotics from the immediate care unit. Have you ever come down with a cold, gotten a horrible night’s sleep or had an unbearable stomach cramp right before a big event or a tough conversation with
“My mindset and lack of confidence are affecting my work in so many ways.” “I’m just feeling stuck and unsure. I want to move forward with direction and purpose, but I can’t decide what to do—how to put one foot in front of the other.”
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LEADERSHIP
your boss? Mindset self-sabotage, anyone? Regardless of my circumstances, I was going to show up. Leadership is showing up as your best self against all odds. This may sound trite in the face of the current trend to be authentic in leadership. But to be a successful, relatable leader and create a strong personal brand, you need to practice intention in how you show up. In 2017, I sat in the audience and soaked in every word Michelle Obama said during her first public appearance after leaving the White House. Her practice of authenticity is beautifully simplistic: “Authenticity means Michelle Obama is the same Michelle Obama you see here and with my girlfriends, walking the dog, being first lady,” she said. “It is the same person, and it’s a lot easier because I don’t have to pretend.” If being authentic were easy, then why would anyone need a leadership coach? We’d all be pure reflections of our highest and best authentic selves—and that’s not the case, at least not all the time. But there are ways to generate authenticity, to shift your mindset so the voice in your head stops screaming, “Get out before they discover the real me!” Create a Relationship with Your Body Showing up for our work with our minds alert and creative means taking care of ourselves. I know business owners who have ended up in the hospital with pneumonia from exhaustion. My bronchitis was the result of overwhelm and stress, of not listening to my body. Notice when your body is asking for rest, exercise or simply a glass of water. Self-love is at the heart of my coaching practice, it is where confidence lives and self-expression is generated. I’m not talking about self-care (I, too, roll my eyes at #selfcaresunday), so here’s another way to look at generating a relationship between your mind and body: Self-care is simply an action to practice self-love. Selflove is the intention. Let’s make this real: How would you
executive insights
Let’s make this real: How would you treat yourself if you were your best client? What would business look like if you were your biggest asset? treat yourself if you were your best client? What would business look like if you were your biggest asset? Most of my clients have fully booked schedules and meditation is not on their radar. Instead, we craft ways to practice self-love that work for them. Consider that self-care may be listening to extremely loud house music for three minutes, drinking tea or doing 10 burpees. Whatever is going to bring you out of the self-sabotage mindset and into the present right away. Keep a list of self-care practices on your phone. Use these as a mind-body workout to create a larger capacity for energy, selflove and intention to crush your big goals. Dress the Part As a leader, your reputation precedes you. It’s not fun to think that people are talking about you when you are not there, but it’s the truth. Generating your best self and expressing your intention are crucial. This is the core of personal branding. If I were to look at you, what would I think is your personal brand? How does it shine through your leadership and how you show up? What would you change about your schedule, your look, your mindset and presence to reflect your intention? Let’s be honest, we make a judgment when someone walks into a room, especially a speaker or a leader: Does this person reflect someone I want in my life? It’s an easy decision when your intention is clear and in alignment with how you show up. Show up with a mindset of intention and dress for your personal brand. This is especially true at an event. People want to get to know you; your positive attitude
and energizing presence are a quick insight into your personal brand and leadership style. Train Your Mindset I could have brought all the internal funk I created to host my personal branding workshop. I could have powered through. Instead, I paused and realigned with my intention for the event: to teach brave, creative leaders how to light up the world. Before any event, I purposefully create time to clear my head. I take out a piece of paper and free-form write all the ways I could screw up. I play my victim card to the nines. “I should cancel, who wants to listen to a leadership coach who can’t even take care of herself? I’m dizzy and sweating, this is going to be awful.” Then I pause and recognize that this story is my Timid Lady Gaga trying to convince me to play small. I take a deep breath and write my intention. I quickly meditate on that and dance to “Glorious” by Macklemore to increase my blood flow. Pick a place—I choose the bathroom—and practice what works for you. Training your mindset is a daily— sometimes moment-to-moment— practice. Your inner critic zaps your energy and sucks away your power. If there was a power leak in your house, you would fix it. Why not fix the voice that is limiting your greatness? m LISA GUILLOT is a transformational leadership coach, brand strategist and founder of Be Bright Lisa. She coaches executives, entrepreneurs and teams within organizations. Lisa speaks about creative leadership and purpose.
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AT C-LEVEL
Vulnerability and Leadership A new book from Brené Brown suggests vulnerability is at the core of daring leadership
BY MICHAEL KRAUSS
michael.krauss@mkt-strat.com
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re leaders allowed to show vulnerability and weakness? Or is it best to always present an armored posture on behalf of the enterprise? In her latest book, Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts., author Brené Brown suggests the key to successful leadership is a willingness to share vulnerability, which builds trust while letting us lead during disruptive and challenging times. From digital technology disruption to globalization and geopolitical disruption, leadership isn’t getting any easier. With that as context, Brown asks, “What, if anything, about the way people are leading today needs to change in order for our leaders to be successful in a complex, rapidly changing environment where we’re faced with seemingly intractable challenges and an insatiable demand for innovation?” Brown’s answer is powerful: “We need braver leaders and more courageous cultures.” The book’s thesis emanates in part from the perspective of Theodore Roosevelt, who said, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again… who at the best
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knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” In Dare to Lead, Brown articulates this challenge in today’s marketplace and provides a well-defined roadmap for what individuals can do to become braver leaders in disruptive times. Brown’s book isn’t only for executives. Brown defines a leader as “anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.” At some point of our lives or another, that is a role each of us undertakes. Brown establishes three principles that are at the core of daring leadership: 1. You can’t access your courage without rumbling with your vulnerability. 2. Self-awareness and self-love matter; who we are is how we lead. 3. Courage is contagious. To scale daring leadership and build courage in teams and organizations, we have to cultivate a culture in which brave work, tough conversations and whole hearts are the expectations, a culture where armor is not necessary or rewarded. Reading Dare to Lead, I was reminded of my training in brand management and an encounter I had when I was CMO of a publicly traded technology company. The rules I was taught as the CMO and chief brand officer were simple and highly armored: Keep on message, keep your CEO focused, keep the armor up,
never show weakness, repeat the core message at least three times, don’t digress and—certainly—don’t appear vulnerable. Yet my CEO was more effective when he broke the rules and demonstrated vulnerability and spoke candidly. On one occasion, he opened an on-the-record interview with a leading technology writer by divulging he’d been fired from a previous job and what he’d learned from the experience. While I bit my tongue and wondered, “Why did he go there?” his candor built trust with the reporter and led to a long-term editorial relationship and very positive media coverage. My CEO was a daring leader who was willing to engage on human terms. He knew he wasn’t perfect and he assumed a world of abundance. He always sought to learn, was kind and was willing to take risks. Brown’s book is full of examples comparing daring leadership with more traditional armored (or defensive) leadership. A few examples from her book include these armored leadership approaches compared with daring leadership examples: • Driving perfectionism and fostering fear of failure vs. modeling and encouraging healthy striving, empathy and self-compassion. • Working from scarcity and squandering opportunities for joy and recognition vs. practicing gratitude and celebrating milestones and victories. • Propagating the false dichotomy of victim or viking, crush or be crushed vs. practicing integration—strong back, soft front, wild heart. • Being a knower and being right vs. being a learner and getting it right. • Hiding behind cynicism vs. modeling clarity, kindness and hope. • Using criticism as self-protection vs. making contributions and taking risks. Brown takes a research-based and scientific approach in writing Dare to Lead. She offers customized frameworks, lists and tools that emerging, established
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AT C-LEVEL
executive insights
Building on leadership lessons throughout history, Brown provides her own guidance to advance the field of leadership in a way that is relevant, contemporary and accessible.
and even faltering leaders can immediately employ. There is an important discussion of psychological concepts, such as shame and how shame can get in the way and impede leadership. There’s a wonderful examination of our human nature and how we often imagine the worst-case scenarios when stressed, along with the damage it can do to our ability to lead. These illustrations are powerful and insightful and make Dare to Lead a more effective book. Building on leadership lessons throughout history, Brown
provides her own guidance to advance the field of leadership in a way that is relevant, contemporary and accessible. As you read Dare to Lead, you will find many common-sense points that you can immediately put into practice. If you’re the type of CMO I once was, who thought that my CEO shouldn’t show vulnerability, you may start to question some of the old rules of armored leadership. m MICHAEL KRAUSS is president of Market Strategy Group based in Chicago.
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executive insights
PREDICTIVE SKILLS
Marketers Are Facing a Crisis of Precision Predictive skills require a willingness to weed out entrenched cognitive biases and established decision-making processes built into corporate culture
BY J. WALKER SMITH
jwalker.smith@kantarfutures.com
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arketing is in the midst of a precision crisis. The new world facing marketers has been described in many ways, each accurate in its own way, but none speaks to the fundamental shift now roiling marketing. Pundits preach second-order consequences of a deeper transformation at the very foundation of marketing. That
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transformation is one of precision. The most over-used quote in marketing is the variously attributed statement to the effect that half of all marketing or advertising is wasted, we just don’t know which half. It’s a tired, old saw but it captures the very essence of marketing. This is the existential kernel of marketing, or the basic reality that has shaped how
marketing is conceptualized, designed and executed. Simply put, marketing has been built on a presumption of imprecision. Perhaps nothing illustrates this presumption better than the media model introduced in 1961 by the Advertising Research Foundation, developed to sort and organize various metrics for evaluating ad buys. It was depicted graphically as a left-to-right winnowing down of an audience, not the upsidedown pyramid of consumer decisionmaking that it was turned into later. Either way, it represented marketing as a process of management through imprecision. The basic idea behind any purchase funnel or consumer journey map is that marketers don’t know precisely who will respond—or even how—but if marketing can get in front of a large-enough group of consumers, sufficient numbers will make a purchase. Factors such as reach become critical in navigating
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PREDICTIVE SKILLS
this imprecision. For example, if past experience or research establishes that 10% of consumers reached will buy, then marketing has to reach enough consumers such that 10% adds up to sales or profit targets. In this way, imprecision can be turned into success. One critical nuance is that the historic imprecision at the heart of marketing is that of individual consumers, not aggregate groups of consumers. Marketers have known with precision that, say, 10% of a group will buy if reached. What marketers have not known is precisely what individual consumers will be part of the 10% who buy. But it is the lack of individual precision that creates the cost and time inefficiencies. Certainly, marketers have been looking for ways of operating that are better than intentionally over-spending to ensure a critical mass. But precision has been elusive and the traditional infrastructure of big agencies, big media and big budgets built to cope with imprecision has endured. In the past decade, a sea change in precision has thrown marketing into crisis. Data, digital, algorithms and AI have unlocked the ability to study and engage with individual consumers in personalized and predictive ways. It’s not a revolution in data or digital per se, nor merely a handoff of execution to algorithms and AI. All of these things are critical and all play a part. But what’s fundamentally different is the precision at which data, digital, algorithms and AI now enable marketers to operate. Having access to greater precision doesn’t automatically lead to better marketing. Lots of modeling continues to show superior returns for TV advertising over digitally directed ads. But these findings are misleading. The biggest impact of precision is less in placement and more in personalization. Getting in front of the most-likely buyers, and only those buyers, is most effective when it is done to deliver products and services customized for individuals. Predictive personalization is the power unleashed by precision.
Bad predictions create sizable inefficiencies that people must pay for and endure. No one wants to waste money on a product they won’t like or use. Better prediction can eliminate, or at least minimize, these sorts of unproductive inefficiencies. There is a lot to be said for serendipity and discovery, but not when they create improvident inefficiencies. Fewer inefficiencies will have a dramatic impact on people’s lives. Many marketers might feel that predictive personalization is old news, but such prediction is in its infancy. Entire categories are on the verge of being wholly upended by predictive personalization, including foods, beverages, financial services, media, entertainment, retail, travel and insurance. In a recent interview with Strategy+Business magazine, Piyush Gupta, CEO of DBS Bank of Singapore, explained that the business model of insurance is one of “socialization of risk,” which is to say it is rooted in imprecision. Actuaries know that a certain percentage of people will suffer some kind of loss, but the precise individuals who will be affected can’t be predicted. Insurance business models are built around this imprecision; insurance enables a group of people to protect against individual uncertainty by pooling premiums to cover the few of them who wind up suffering a loss. However, as Gupta notes, if those specific individuals could be predicted, there would be no need to socialize risk. Once better predictive models are commonplace, “kaput…goes the insurance industry,” says Gupta, or at least insurance as we know it today. This is exactly what is happening in marketing. Old models built around imprecision are being toppled by data, digital, algorithms and AI. New models built on better prediction are taking their place. The organizational imperative for future success is to nurture and invest in predictive skills. Skills with data, digital, algorithms and AI are a necessary part of that, but only part of it. Unfortunately, too
executive insights
many companies feel that once they have mastered data, digital, algorithms and AI, they have what they need in place. But they’re just getting started. Predictive skills also require new metrics, different infrastructure for execution and logistics, a commitment to rapid learning and continuous change, a deeper understanding of probabilistic thinking, comfort with acting and reacting under uncertainty, and a willingness to weed out entrenched cognitive biases built into corporate culture and established decision-making processes. Most importantly, brands and businesses must ask different questions. Companies should not ask how to make existing models work better in the new world of precision. Instead, companies should ask what new models better fit a world of precision. For example, don’t ask how to make shopping better, ask how to eliminate shopping altogether by knowing precisely what people want. That’s what Amazon Dash Replenishment Service is trying to do. Don’t ask how to better act on what consumers say they want, ask how to better anticipate and predict what consumers want. That’s what the recommendation engines of Spotify and Netflix are trying to do. Don’t ask how to better sell consumers on a product’s features and attributes, ask how to deliver a product or service with a more precise fit to the features and attributes of individual shoppers and consumers. That’s the kind of personalization that many of the new fast-growth start-up brands are bringing to the beauty products category. Precision will continue to create a crisis as long as marketers are unwilling to move outside the comfort zone of imprecision. The only way forward is to fully embrace the new imperatives of prediction and precision. 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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MAKE THEM THINK BEFORE THEY CHOOSE
Anna Banks brings years of corporate experience to her role as CMO at the nonprofit Fair Trade USA. In her latest role, she’s searching for a way to make average consumers care about farmers who work thousands of miles away.
BY HAL CONICK PHOTOS BY JAMIE RAMSAY ART DIRECTION BY VINCE CERASANI
IN STORES ACROSS T H E U . S ., S H O P P E R S B U Y C E R TA I N ITEMS WITHOUT MUCH THOUGHT Chocolate bars and cups of coffee are picked up, purchased and consumed within moments. But the story of these items began months before and miles away in conditions unfathomable to most Americans. That unfathomable world—one rocked by disease, poverty and unfair labor practices— is Anna Banks’ main marketing tool as CMO of Fair Trade USA. Banks, who has worked as a corporate marketer for 20 years, moved into the nonprofit world in May 2018 and must now figure out how the stories of faraway farmers can rouse U.S. consumers to pay more in the name of ending global poverty. Banks has acres of imagery to work with. Fair Trade USA works with nearly 1 million farmers across the world to reach better terms with their trading partners, including workers’ rights and a set higher-than-market price for 32
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products like coffee and cocoa. The money then goes back to the communities where the goods were produced, giving workers options for how to spend the money. Fair Trade USA reports that it has created $551 million of value to producers since 1998. But Banks faces a problem: U.S. citizens don’t often think about the implications of how products such as sugar, seafood and coffee are sourced. Buying these products is easy; thinking about the story of where they came from and how they got here can feel extremely unpleasant. Focusing solely on that unpleasant feeling risks shaming customers and losing sales. This makes public awareness of fair trade difficult, says Katie Schneider, interim senior communications manager of Fair Trade USA. Fair Trade USA’s marketing collateral tries to strike a balance of being informative without shaming consumers, allowing people to make informed decisions about whether they want to spend more money for a good cause. Schneider says that simple messaging—“Fair trade helps keep kids in schools,” for example—works best to increase purchase intent when placed next to Fair Trade products on shelves.
really my space. They start to think about the database that we have in-house—how can we move those people from just having given up their email name to being willing to give us $20 toward fair trade?
How many small donors do you have? Our database is well over 100,000 consumers and we are looking for new strategies continually on how to activate more of them as donors.
What drew you to working at Fair Trade USA?
What are your marketing objectives at Fair Trade USA? There are three major buckets that we focus on. One is driving awareness of fair trade itself: what is it, how it works, what the issues are that we’re trying to address as a platform. The second is purchase intent. We have discovered through research that the main barrier people have around buying fair trade products is that they don’t know how to find them. A lot of the work we do is around connecting people with products relevant to the purchase incidence. That may be tied to cultural calendars— chocolate on Valentine’s Day, a gift on Mother’s Day—and making the products easy to connect with people. The third bucket is around advocacy; that one proves to be more challenging, but also more interesting. It’s moving people up the continuum in their relationship with fair trade, going from “OK, I’ve heard about it” to “I care about it” to “I bought something” to “I’m willing to advocate.” Advocacy can take a variety of different forms. An example may be asking the store manager of my local grocery store, “How come you don’t carry fair trade seafood?” or even hosting a party at your house where you ask everybody to bring fair trade products. Advocacy is something that shows a higher level of engagement; we’re trying to find those people and then give them the tools to express their passion about fair trade. Within that third bucket is also donations—we’re a not-for-profit, so we’re always looking for ways to activate small donors. There’s a development team within Fair Trade, but marketing winds up partnering with them, especially around small donors. Development also goes after institutions and foundations, which isn’t
I was at Walmart and then I left and worked on my own independent consulting firm, where I focused on working with small social impact companies. I was working with a small angel-investing group and many of the companies that came to me were looking for angel funding. I would consult with them and got really enamored with the idea of taking all that I learned over so many years—I had 25-plus years of working with Fortune 500 companies at this point—and applying those concepts to young entrepreneurs who are just getting started and trying to think about their marketing strategies. Much of what I learned at Walmart became applicable to these entrepreneurial ventures that are so centered around use of various metrics, like online acquisition or conversion or the main sales channel via e-commerce. Walmart does it on a completely different scale, but many of the concepts are directly applicable to these smaller businesses—many just didn’t know about them and had never thought about them. The ability to apply my marketing skill set to them and see the impact was really satisfying. I had just reached a point in my career where I knew I wanted to take what I had learned and give back to other environments. Not-for-profit has always been something on the side for me—I’ve been on several not-for-profit boards and done lots of volunteering. Now, this is phase two of my career; I’m taking everything I learned in a corporate environment and applying it to causes for good. Fair Trade runs its marketing department very much like a traditional marketing firm—we have all the same traditional functions, like a campaign calendar, a PR team, a social media channel. It runs like a traditional kind of marketing organization. But our goals are completely different: We’re trying to alleviate global poverty. That combination of taking my existing skill sets but applying them to a higher mission was attractive. MARCH 2019 | MARKETING NEWS
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Is alleviating global poverty the mission of Fair Trade USA? Fair Trade is focused on the global inequality of farmers and workers around the globe. We partner with brands to certify their supply chains against human rights issues and that allows us to help them make sure that they are doing things like paying people for every hour that they work, that workers are getting time off, that there’s maternity leave and that the health and safety codes are up to speed. There’s also a whole variety of worker safety and environmental standards that are part of the Fair Trade Certification process.
Anna Banks
The important angle beyond that is what we call the Fair Trade difference, which is the Community Development Fund. Brands that participate in fair trade agree to pay incremental income to the workers who are in the fair trade program, so those dollars are based on the production of either the farm or the factory—it might be a percentage of [the free on board price] for apparel, it might be a per-pound premium depending on if it is something like coffee or cocoa. Then, that money goes directly back to the workers—not to the management, the farm or the factory. The workers themselves elect a committee that determines how that money will be spent so they can be sure it’s spent in a way that’s valuable for that community. It could turn into a daycare center, it could turn into a hospital, it could
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turn into a whole variety of things that the community designated that’s most useful for them. That’s incremental income that wouldn’t come back to the community otherwise.
That seems like it’d be especially helpful for coffee farmers, who have had a rough time the past few years. Do coffee farmers have the biggest problems of any industry that you work with? Coffee is one of the most visible and its scale is high. There’s another aspect that applies in particular to coffee and cocoa, and that’s the minimum price per-pound that’s paid for these products. The price of coffee per-pound right now is $1.05, which is below the sustainable amount for coffee farmers. In other words, they’re going to lose money selling a pound of coffee. The Fair Trade minimum price is $1.40 for coffee, so any brand buying their coffee on Fair Trade terms is actually paying that $1.40 back to the farmer. That’s a significant incremental income going back to that farmer. That said, that’s still challenging for coffee farmers to sustain their farms, but the Fair Trade price is still higher than the market right now. Other commodities that are having challenges include cocoa, which is in a similar situation with a price per pound that’s often way below what it costs a farmer to create the raw product, which eventually becomes the premium products sold and marked up in the supermarket. There are issues in so many other categories we work in. For example, in seafood, human trafficking is a huge issue, so we also certify seafood. Sugar plantations are another example; worker conditions and worker hours are a problem. There’s a disease that sugar plantation workers get because sugar is harvested at an intense pace for multiple hours on end and the workers go for long stretches without water to the point where they start to have kidney failure. It’s a dire situation for many of the sugar workers. Fair trade can be a way to encourage better conditions and put some standards in place around the treatment of workers in those commodities.
Do consumers have any inkling of these issues? Most people I speak with don’t think much about chocolate or coffee beyond the register. That’s one of the biggest challenges for me: Trying to figure out how to make people care. We don’t think deeply about any of these products. How often do you think about the amount of sugar you pick up off the shelf? Or the coffee that you picked up from Starbucks? Getting people to care is one of the challenges, but also balancing that we don’t want to guilt-trip people. Nobody wants to feel bad about what they bought. We need to balance edginess with enthusiasm and making people feel good about
their purchases as opposed to making them feel bad. In marketing, that’s a real challenge—making people aware of the issues but not making them feel like, Ugh, that sounds too hard, too yucky, I want to turn away from that. Figuring out that balance is something that we to do with all our campaigns. On Valentine’s Day, for example, we’ll talk about chocolate and issues around how awesome chocolate is, but also how it has been at the center of the challenges for cocoa farmers. We look to frame the issues in the time periods that they’re relevant when people are buying them and we try to elevate the issues. When someone is thinking about chocolate, let’s talk about how the chocolate actually gets to you: What was its journey to you? Let’s get a look at the people who were behind what you just bought. That becomes the opportunity to tell the story; storytelling is a big piece of what we do. We’re always looking to promote in a variety of channels— social or video or partners or celebrities or events. We’re also looking into doing in-person events. We try to pull as many levers as possible to get that story out there.
FA I R T R A D E -Since 1998, producers saw $551 million of benefits through Fair Trade Certified products, per Fair Trade USA. -$380 million of the money came through Community Development Funds. -$172 million came as a result of the Fair Trade Minimum Price. -Fair Trade USA says awareness of the Fair Trade Certified seal was at 67% in 2016, up 8% from 2015 and double the awareness of 2008.
What’s the most effective platform to promote fair trade stories?
-As of 2016, 963 products were Fair Trade USA Certified.
Being new to marketing at Fair Trade, I’m still working on that. My direct marketing-slash-digital tracking background is hungry to accurately trace back what was able to move the needle. But any time you’re not dealing with a direct purchase, it’s hard. A difference at Walmart is that it’s a very closed-loop scenario where you can tell what the impact and response is. It’s very different for a not-forprofit where we’re not directly selling anything but trying to drive awareness and influence purchases. The ability to connect an activity back to a purchase is infinitely harder and we need to engage our brand partners to understand. It’s a continual learning process and work in progress to understand what levers make the most difference. It’s probably not going to be a single lever—it will likely be some combination that makes the most difference.
-In 2016, Fair Trade CPG premiums made $34 million for farmers and workers.
How do you figure out if you’re successful? Do you have a metric like conversions? We don’t track conversations because I can’t tell when somebody makes a sale at retail. But I certainly would partner with a retailer—whether it’s Whole Foods or Kroger or Aldi—to help create point-of-purchase materials to encourage and inform people at that shelf. We do know the shelf is probably one of the most influential places where people are making their decisions We’re looking to study what drives sales more deeply. We have academics approach us all the time—there’s a group at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and a group at Harvard who are interested in researching the impact of messaging in some of the different channels, like adding
-More than 900,000 farmers across 45 countries in Africa, Asia, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean work as part of a Fair Trade USA Certified facility. -60% of consumers are more likely to try products if they know the company is mindful of sustainability, according to the Natural Marketing Institute. -Since 2002, Fair Trade USA brought $13.8 million to cocoa communities, including more than $3 million in 2016. -Since 2005, Fair Trade USA brought $7.3 million to its sugar communities, including approximately $2 million in 2016. -Since 2013, Fair Trade USA brought $1.7 million to its coconut communities, including approximately $300,000 in 2016.
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Coffee farmer in Peru
increased messaging on the item page in the e-commerce site. How does that shift to conversion? Some research has been done around in-store, so going into Madewell and putting messaging at that point, does that change the trajectory of the conversion rate? We have to work with our brand partners in order to get that conversion data because we don’t have direct access to that sales information.
Katie mentioned that simple, informative messaging—“Fair trade keeps kids in school”— works best. The kind of messaging that doesn’t shame consumers but instead lets them know that they can do something good for people in need, that seems powerful. Is playing to virtuous consumers most effective for fair trade? Definitely. The feel-good angle tends to draw people in. The terms spreading around this are “conscious consumer” and
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Tea plucker in Africa
“conscious capitalism.” We have some researchers testing messaging angles and making people feel bad just doesn’t tend to work. We balance making them aware of the issues but then making them feel good about the purchase that they’re making and how they’re positively supporting something good.
So giving the consumer the information and allowing them to make the decision, whether consumers or brand partners? We’re continually testing messages to determine what about us resonates with consumers, because even within that, there are so many different nuances. Do you focus on the school that was built? Do you focus on incremental wages? Where do you land that message? We’re on a continual journey of testing and honing the messaging we think will resonate best with consumers.
Worker on bell pepper farm in Mexico
COFFEE -The price of coffee production is $1.40 per pound, according to a study by Cornell University for Fair Trade USA. -Coffee futures were $3 per pound in 2011, according to Bloomberg. At the end of 2018, coffee futures were $1.02, the lowest they’ve been since 2005. -In the U.S., the 2018 average price for roasted coffee was 3.8-times the price for coffee futures, according to Bloomberg. -Coffee consumption is up 3.6 million bags per year since 2014-15, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. -Starbucks is opening one new store in China every 15 hours, according to Bloomberg. -Global coffee output was up 15.6 million bags from 2017 to 2018, totaling 174.5 million bags.
How do you figure out what works best? We have engagement metrics, we have our own website, our social channels and our email list. We have hard metrics there. When I run giveaways, we know exactly how many people signed up for it, how many people clicked on any sort of digital media and come through to our site. We know what areas of our site they go to and we’re active on multiple social media channels, so we look at our engagement on our social media channels and roll those together in our own customized engagement metrics, which we watch over time to make sure they’re accelerating.
Has Fair Trade USA had a landmark campaign, one that undeniably worked well?
We used to have a model where we did giveaways probably every month. We started to realize that doing giveaways are super resource-intensive and the return wasn’t there. But for the holidays, we went for a different model: What if we don’t do a giveaway every month, but we do one larger giveaway? We partnered with Kroger and West Elm; each of them gave us a $4,000 gift card to give away. Part of the campaign was encouraging people; “Hey, we’ve got this gift bag to buy awesome products that are fair trade and enter yourself in a sweepstakes giveaway and you could win a bedroom makeover from West Elm or a pantry makeover from Kroger.” That campaign is what sent us over the 100,000 mark for our database. Strategically leveraging our partners to help us build our database has been and will continue to be a significant lever for us. We also continue to do influencer programs that work well. We have a campaign of influencers that we mail a box out to on a quarterly basis that’s filled with the relevant, seasonal fair trade products. They’ll share those on their channel. Then, we balance people who are passionate about MARCH 2019 | MARKETING NEWS
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fair trade with those who have enough of a following. When you get to people who have a ton of followers, it can be quite expensive and since we’re a not-for-profit, we’re always balancing the visibility of people with a cost that we incur with them. It’s a balance.
Do you tend toward microinfluencers? I know that they’re very effective, as small follower counts tend to be more engaged. We’re probably a click up; we have some microinfluencers and we have some that are on a slightly larger scale than that. We have a typical food blogger, we have a yoga blogger and fitness blogger who are in our stable. It can be kind of onerous to manage a lot of microinfluencers. I remember that in my Walmart days, we said, “We’re either going to go for one larger person and a tier of smaller influencers or a lot of smaller influencers,” because sometimes the effort to do a lot of small influencers doesn’t give the return; you don’t get enough sharing. Even though you’re balancing that with the credibility—when I hear something from my friend, I’m much more likely to share it versus somebody who’s not personally connected to me.
as well. We haven’t run into any side saying that they don’t stand for what fair trade stands for. It’s hard to be against building daycare centers and hospitals. There are many ways to solve the problems that we are approaching and we’re certainly not trying to say that fair trade is the only way to approach it. In many ways, we are just one step on the continuum of a much bigger sort of global issue. And we’re very aware of that.
What are your goals over the next few years? We just celebrated our 20th anniversary last year, a major milestone. That’s super exciting. Now, we’re looking to the next 20 years—significant growth is part of our goal. One of the goals that we talked about is the ability to deliver $1 million dollars in impact per employee. So that’d be $1 million dollars going back to the communities that we serve for each person who works at Fair Trade USA. As a not-for-profit, we want higher ROI on every dollar spent here and we make sure it gets back to the communities we serve. That’s probably one of the most important goals.
How many people work at Fair Trade USA? Does the marketing team also work to recruit new farms? That doesn’t come through marketing; there’s a whole other side to Fair Trade, which is the business development and supply chain folks. Most of the new farms are initiated by the brands themselves; they come to us and say, “I’d like you to Fair Trade-certify my factory” and that initiates the relationship with that factory. That starts the process of the audit to see where they are in the compliance continuum and then working with them so that they create a plan to move towards becoming certified and becoming compliant with Fair Trade standards.
This seems like an interesting time to be an organization trying to create social change, as some consumers demand organizations take a position and others demur when brands take stands. Has political polarization been an issue for Fair Trade USA at all? We have intentionally not been a political organization. We don’t tend to take political stands; it’s hard to be against giving impoverished people incremental income that they work for. That is a very critical piece of being a marketdriven model. We’re not a charity. And our model endorses democracy. It’s all about the communities voting for where they want to put the incremental dollars into their communities and where they feel it best suits them. That level of empowerment and democratic values are part of it
One-hundred-twenty people. Currently, we are at over $550 million dollars in collective incremental income that have gone back to people around the globe. The other goal would be to get to $1 billion in incremental dollars going back to communities around the world over the next five years.
Fair Trade’s goal is to make more money for the farms and communities you serve and to do that, you need to drive sales of fair trade products. But to buy an item at a higher price, consumers need to care about the people who benefit from their spending. How do you get people to care about these faraway farmers? A more robust content strategy. Journalists are a piece of that, but it’s on us to make sure we are the creating assets that tell the story well, whether it’s writing articles or creating videos and then finding the channel to farm them out. We need to get our content in front of the right folks and get it shared—that’s a critical piece. And we need to lean on our brand partners to be partners. Many of our brand partners have more money for marketing than we do, so their ability to promote their products and put the energy and thought into positioning fair trade products is important, whether that’s at retail, at the shelf or online. If we can work it from both of those angles— content strategy and journalists plus the consumer shopping experience and raising visibility—together, they can move consumers. m MARCH 2019 | MARKETING NEWS
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Online but There are 56.7 million people in the U.S. with disabilities, but brands ignore many of them by failing to provide accessible web experiences By Sarah Steimer
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he internet was supposed to be the great equalizer, a place where any person—regardless of race, sex, color or creed—could access a
wealth of knowledge. But as technology advanced and competition grew, online gatekeepers—marketers included—were smitten with the opportunity to make their websites more dynamic and exciting. They’ve chased after the latest design trends and taken backend shortcuts to push out more content at a faster pace. But as organizations barreled forward, they unintentionally left a swath of consumers behind: people with disabilities. The disabled community makes up about one-fifth of the U.S. population—a staggering number of potential consumers. An inaccessible website is akin to a storefront that lacks a wheelchair ramp: Someone may be interested in shopping with you, but you’ve made it virtually impossible for them to do so—at least independently. For someone with a vision impairment, an inaccessible website may be one that can’t be easily navigated through a screen reader, software that allows users to read displayed text with a speech synthesizer or braille display. A person with auditory impairments may be unable to consume your video or podcast content if you failed to include subtitles or
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a transcription. Flashing graphics on a website or in a social media post could trigger a seizure in a person with epilepsy. Anyone whose mouse has stopped working can perhaps sympathize: If you can’t easily navigate to a link using the tab key, those who rely on assistive technology can’t access that content, either. Marketers don’t always intentionally leave these consumers out of their UX designs. But the issue has gained awareness after a recent spate of lawsuits. Those sued have included everyone from Beyoncé’s production company to Domino’s Pizza to mom-and-pop establishments. The European Union has website accessibility requirements for member states, but the U.S. rules are hazier.
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As jarring as the prospect of redesigning a website may be, there are also simple, immediate steps that marketers can take. The effort—no matter the size— is worth it, as it opens the opportunity to gain new customers who will appreciate and remember the effort.
A Discriminatory Act Failing to make a website accessible for everyone can be discriminatory. For example, if a retailer offers a discount code that is difficult for a person with a vision impairment to see, it implies vision ability determines rate.
“Let’s say color contrast is something that you’re challenged with,” says Mark Shapiro, president of the Bureau of Internet Accessibility, which helps organizations audit and update their websites. “If the ad shows orange text on a yellow background, a lot of people wouldn’t be able to see it at all. Those people wouldn’t see that the discount applies to them. Or an email might be sent out and the discount could be an image and the image might not have any alternate text around it. Somebody getting this image might read 123.jpg where somebody that’s sighted might see 25% off if you type in such-and-such a code.” In 2016, Guillermo Robles, a blind man, filed a lawsuit against Domino’s, claiming the company
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violated the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. According to the complaint, the Domino’s website wasn’t compatible with standard screen reading software, which kept the man from using the pizza builder feature to personalize his order. He argued that Domino’s should bring the digital ordering tools into compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This January, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Domino’s must make its website and mobile app accessible to blind people using screen-reading software. Last year, there was a record number of accessibility-related lawsuits filed. The National Retail Federation said 1,053 lawsuits were filed in federal court in the first six months of 2018, compared with 814 in all of 2017, 262 in 2016 and 57 in 2015. The NRF says that companies pay anywhere between $10,000 and $90,000 to resolve the claims. There’s confusion in how to interpret Title III of the ADA, which prohibits disabilitybased discrimination in “any place of public accommodation.” The law, invented the same year as the World Wide Web, makes no mention of nonphysical locations such as websites. “At one point the Department of Justice attempted to issue guidance for website accessibility. But the guidance was never finalized,” the NRF said in a 2018 post. Web accessibility issues aren’t limited to retail goods and services. Websites with poor accessibility can make filling out forms difficult or impossible. “The career section of corporate websites is something that we end up spending quite a bit of time on because that’s a huge issue on a lot of levels,” Shapiro says. “Now you’re talking about employment law because people who are qualified can’t apply. There’s no way for them to get in contact with people because a lot of companies will push everything toward the web.” The shift toward web-based customer service has also had unintended consequences. Shapiro says one of BoIA’s clients, an airline company, was sued by someone with a visual disability. “Their booking system was not accessible at all for somebody who’s visually impaired,” Shapiro says. “They couldn’t book a ticket. And you can’t [easily] book on the phone and you can’t really go to an office. Online is the way that everyone’s being pushed and they had some real challenges there.” Every digital asset an organization owns has the potential to be either a barrier or an invitation. A B2B client with a disability could be easily navigating a website with every intent to purchase, only to be stopped in their tracks—sale thwarted—because a PDF with the pricing breakdown wasn’t enabled for accessibility.
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The Website Accessibility Guidelines to Know WEB CONTENT ACCESSIBILITY GUIDELINES The WCAG is developed through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) process in cooperation with individuals and organizations around the world. The guidance covers how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. The content refers to natural information such as text, images and sounds, as well as code or markup that defines structure and presentation. The latest update, WCAG 2.1, was published in June 2018. This iteration includes 17 additional success criteria to address mobile accessibility, people with low vision and people with cognitive and learning disabilities. The guidelines now include information on website timeouts, text spacing, responsiveness and supporting both landscape and portrait display orientations. It also includes some guidelines on the use of GIFs: Include sufficient description in the alt text of the GIF and ensure any blinks or flashes are in the seizure-safe threshold.
SECTION 508 In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to require federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. In January 2017, the U.S. Access Board issued a final rule that updated accessibility requirements covered by Section 508, which went into effect in January 2018. The rule updated and reorganized the Section 508 Standards and Section 255 Guidelines, harmonizing the requirements with other guidelines and standards in the U.S. and abroad, including standards issued by the European Commission and the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
TITLE III Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability at businesses that are generally open to the public. It also requires newly constructed or altered places of public accommodation— as well as commercial facilities—to comply with the ADA Standards. In June 2018, 103 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking the DOJ to either issue website accessibility regulations or “state publicly that private legal action under the ADA with respect to websites is unfair and violates basic due process principles.” In a September 2018 letter, the DOJ said it believes that Title III applies to the websites of public accommodations, even in the absence of affirmative regulations. But the DOJ stopped short of endorsing the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as a legal standard in the absence of further regulation.
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When Consumers Miss Out, Marketers Miss Out Tyler McConville, CEO and co-founder of NAV43, a search marketing agency, learned about the challenges of inaccessible websites through friends. A family member of one friend is blind, McConville says, the result of an illness. The woman wanted to purchase a red dress for a gala and she easily searched Google to locate several options. Once she got to the ecommerce sites, however, she found limited descriptions of the dresses, nothing distinguishing one from the next. “She actually gave up,” McConville says. “She had a friend meet with her and then help guide her to get to a store and then bought [her outfit] in the store. She doesn’t shop online anymore because of it.” Most web users are accustomed to ads for products following them around the internet, or custom recommendations based on past purchases; it’s a whole world personalized to their wants and needs. But for people with disabilities, the internet can feel like a place designed against them. McConville’s theory is that most marketers assume devices and browsers are advanced enough to interpret information on the web for users with disabilities. He suspects that the needle will move toward greater accessibility once marketers identify people with disabilities as an important audience. An accessible website can make for a loyal fanbase. A survey by the National Business and Disability Council in 2017 found that 78% of consumers will purchase goods and services from a business that takes steps to ensure easy access for individuals with disabilities at their physical locations. It stands to reason that accessible websites would see a similar effect. A 2016 report from Click-Away Pound found that 71% of disabled customers with access needs will leave a website they find difficult to use, and 82% of customers with access needs would spend more if websites were more accessible. Households with a member who has a disability are also more loyal to brands than other households, according to Nielsen. “Think about the [person’s] network for a minute, because that’s where we see the biggest movements,” says Shawn Pike, vice president of User1st, a web accessibility software solutions company. “The person with a disability is now very loyal to a brand because of the accessibility capabilities they’re implementing on the site, but also their family members are [loyal] as well.” There are also pragmatic benefits to creating
a more-accessible website. Websites with higher accessibility have a better Google ranking. “Google is essentially a visually impaired person viewing your website,” Shapiro says. “What that computer is reading is the same thing that a screen reader would read. A site that is more adaptable to work with Google is actually more accessible.” The same content structure and functionality used to optimize accessibility is the same used for SEO. An accessible website is also typically cleaner on the back end, meaning its load times will improve—another SEO benefit—and the website will also be more accessible to users with bandwidth problems.
Businesses would complain about the cost of building ramps for wheelchair users, and then suddenly, who uses it the most? Delivery people, parents pushing strollers. Ryan Commerson, campaign strategist at Communication Service for the Deaf, says that these ancillary benefits also extend to people without disabilities. “Businesses would complain about the cost of building ramps for wheelchair users, and then suddenly, who uses it the most? Delivery people, parents pushing strollers,” he says. “They use the ramp more than those in wheelchairs.” The converse is also true: What’s designed as a convenience for people without disabilities can also benefit people with disabilities. Captions on videos are one example. “With more people demanding an audio-off NSFW (not safe for work)type of approach so they can watch videos without alerting their colleagues or supervisors, captions are slowly becoming the norm, much to our delight,” Commerson says. But consumers with disabilities are often left to wait for the rest of the population to request the change. “We still have a hard time getting movie theaters to turn on the captions because of the complaints of the ‘regular patrons,’” he says. “[Most] movies now are digital. Turning on the subtitles is as easy as a press of a button, but theaters wouldn’t do it.”
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Who Will Lead the Charge? Lawsuits are a great motivator for change, but the movement needs leaders. McConville says that popular website platforms such as Wordpress, Wix and Squarespace have an opportunity to play a large role in website accessibility. “The majority of the internet is made from these platforms,” McConville says. “If they enforce accessibility through their platforms, you’ll see a larger adoption where the internet becomes more accessible, rather than waiting for a large brand that makes up only a small section of the internet. The large brands will come eventually, but if we’re waiting on them, this could be a very long process.” Wordpress, for example, does offer accessible templates, but in its vast array of user-created options, there are also plenty of inaccessible templates. “People like these [templates]that look crazy, with moving carousels and things that are flashing in and out,” Shapiro says, “They want that look and feel for their website and right out the gate they’re not accessible. You have to evaluate the costs and benefit of certain looks and feels on a website.” The University Libraries at the University of Arizona, in partnership with the school’s Disability Resource Center, is producing content on how to design inclusive marketing. Some of the libraries’ accessibility research and queries have resulted in broad-reaching changes that marketers can take a cue from when evaluating their own tools and platforms. “One of the struggles for libraries is that we use a lot of third-party tools that we have to purchase—subscription databases and ebooks and things like that,” says Rebecca Blakiston, user experience strategist at the U of A libraries. “While we have a lot of local control over our website and have done a really good job of making that as accessible as possible, there are some third-party tools we have less control over.” The libraries have built accessibility into the workflow for purchasing and why they select a particular vendor over another. The Disabilities Resources Center reviewed the libraries’ discovery tools for its main search, finding some issues with accessibility. “They were actually able to go back to the vendor and make recommendations that the vendor then applied, which improved the accessibility for any library using that tool,” Blakiston says. “If we can improve accessibility in one place we might be able to improve it across all the different users.” The more marketers speak up to the software
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developers who design their platforms and tools, the more normal accessibility will become. Some social media influencers have taken up the mantle of improved accessibility, such as Irish writer and broadcaster Sinéad Burke, who includes image descriptions in her posts, or “Queer Eye” star Karamo Brown, who captions his videos. In November 2018, Instagram took steps toward greater accessibility, announcing the addition of automatic alternative text and custom alternative text to help users with screen readers. The option is in the “Advanced Settings” section in the upload flow, and if users add descriptions themselves in the feature, it will help Instagram educate its machine learning systems to identify similar objects in the future. Plus, the technology has benefits for marketers: Brands will be able to search for images based on text to find customers who frequently use their products or see what related items that person uses to target these consumers with special offers.
Steps Toward Accessibility As more awareness of accessibility builds, more companies have helped organizations test and redesign their websites. Pike says that his company fixes the problem of inaccessibility by using technology because “without it, it’s too daunting of a task to really fix without some innovation.” User1st and other companies, such as Shapiro’s BoIA, start with an audit to find how a website may or may not be in compliance with accessibility guidelines. “The holy grail of testability comes from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),” Pike says. “They put out what are called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which is a framework for implementing accessibility onto any web property, whether it’s a web application, a mobile app, etc.” The guidelines include steps that Pike says people with limited technical know-how can implement. Photos should include alternative text, which is particularly important for product photos. Alternative text is used within an HTML code to describe the appearance of an image. Marketers may be more familiar with alternative text—or alt text—as a way to improve image SEO, but these descriptions are also what appear if a photo doesn’t load or if the page is read by a screen reader. Alt text offers more than the simple descriptions from the file name, but aren’t intended to be a series of taggable terms. Think along the lines of “brown dog playing in the leaves,” versus the too-simple “dog” or the tags-heavy “dog puppy autumn fall leaves trees maple october.”
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Another simple practice is the appropriate use of heading tags, or H tags. Web browsers, plugins and assistive technologies use these tags for in-page navigation, which means they won’t properly read a bold font as a new heading if not tagged appropriately. “H1 are the primary things that you should be viewing, H2 are secondary and it goes in order of one through five,” Shapiro says. “A lot of people are using those as design elements where they have 30 primary tags and then they’ll skip Nos. 2, 3, 4 and then just jump to No. 5. It creates a lot of confusion if you are hearing what the web page sounds like instead of visually looking at it.” Shelly Black, an associate marketing specialist at the U of A Libraries, says that it helps to have a list of what accessibility barriers to look for in your daily work. Black also runs the libraries’ social media accounts and on her checklist is a reminder to include captions on videos. For the more advanced accessibility challenges— along the lines of an inaccessible pizza ordering platform—a technology company likely needs to step in. Some flashier elements may need to be scrapped
or reimagined, but more accessibility doesn’t mean a boring website. “A site that is completely accessible doesn’t mean that visually it’s going to be just a plain site, like a text-only site,” Shapiro says. “It can have the exact same look and feel, but it’ll just be a little different when viewing it through a screen reader or accessing it just using your keyboard.” Partnerships can be key to building a more accessible website, whether with a specialized technology company, an accessibility resource or hiring individuals with disabilities. “We were so fortunate as a university to have a partner and collaborator in the Disability Resource Center,” says Kenya Johnson, manager of marketing and communications at U of A Libraries. “They were there for consultation purposes and that’s a real goldmine of information, of expertise right in our own backyard. I would encourage other organizations to identify those resources in their community so that they don’t have to figure it out by themselves.” Consumers with disabilities are asking brands to make their websites more accessible; marketers shouldn’t hesitate to ask for assistance to comply. m
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career advancement
PRO BONO
Pro Bono Work Can Expand Skills, Experience One professional AMA chapter built a pro bono program to provide marketing services for its local nonprofit community BY AMBER MCKENNA
amberelysemckenna@gmail.com
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e all have that one daunting project that seems too timeconsuming, too complicated and too cost-prohibitive, the project you wish you could hand off to someone else. With this in mind, the Portland, Oregon, chapter of the AMA (AMA PDX) created AMA PDX Agency, a program that aims to take those projects off the shoulders of nonprofits’ staff and place them in the hands of skilled marketing professionals. A Partnership with Portland In 2007, AMA PDX started a program called Community Outreach to pair groups of volunteers with nonprofits to provide pro bono marketing work. Last year, the program was rebranded as AMA PDX Agency to better represent
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the professional services provided by this initiative. Teams of volunteers from AMA PDX work with local nonprofits to execute a six-month-long marketing project. Over the past 12 years, the program has completed a variety of marketing work for dozens of nonprofits by using the skills of more than 100 different volunteers. The agency is run by a pair of AMA PDX volunteer board members who oversee the entire process each year. Giving Back with Expertise Past AMA PDX chapter leaders saw a chance to assist other nonprofit organizations the best they knew how: with marketing. The agency partners with Portland-area 501(c)(3) nonprofits
and accepts applications from August to November each year. The final selections are made by a committee of AMA PDX board members. Ideal partner organizations: • Have been established for several years. • Have at least one paid staff member. • Can dedicate 10 to 15 hours per month from January to June to work with volunteer teams. • Can identify a project with measurable results. AMA PDX Agency had their largest pool of applicants ever this project period, with 19 different nonprofit organizations and 30 volunteers applying to be part of the program. The six nonprofits we selected for 2019 include an organization that helps foster families obtain supplies and assistance and an organization that provides affordable resources for creating independently published media and artwork. Partners for a Hunger-Free Oregon, which advocates for systemic change and better access to food, is one of the nonprofits selected for 2019. “As nonprofits, it’s hard to find the time to be innovative, and this program gives us the chance to collaborate and improve our marketing,” says Lizzie Martinez, director of development for Partners for a Hunger-Free Oregon. “It really adds to our capacity.” The project for Partners is centered on creating an outreach strategy to bring brand awareness to a fundraising event that wasn’t meeting attendance and visibility goals. Martinez says that for her organization and other nonprofits, it can be difficult to find the time to be innovative. “From the very first meeting, our (AMA PDX) Agency marketing team was generating ideas we hadn’t even thought of,” Martinez said. “It’s not often we’re able to get that level of marketing expertise.” An Opportunity to Gain Skills, Experience Volunteers assigned to project teams vary greatly in career experience and industry. The projects call for an array
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of skill sets and bring together a unique mix of marketing and marketing-adjacent professionals. The requirements for volunteers are: • Willingness to commit five to 10 hours a month to the project for a six-month period. • Ability to attend in-person meetings in Portland at least once a month. • Experience or a strong interest in marketing. Current AMA PDX Agency co-director Ashlan Glazier-Anderson started out as a program volunteer in 2016. “I first decided to get involved because my work responsibilities were centered on e-commerce,” she says. “The program was a great opportunity to learn and use skills in digital marketing that related more directly with what I wanted to focus on in my career.” Soon after her agency project was complete, Glazier-Anderson was able to use these freshly-honed skills to get a new position at a digital marketing agency. A typical project team consists of the following roles: • Graphic designer • Project manager • Copywriter • Marketing strategist • Digital marketing specialist AMA PDX Agency gives volunteers the opportunity to grow their portfolio and give back to the community. In return, Portland’s nonprofits have a chance to leverage local marketing talent, develop richer volunteer and donor bases and evolve their marketing strategies. “Our volunteers get exposure to a new group of people and can help set them up for success,” Glazier-Anderson says. “We’re able to implement marketing that can benefit an organization for years to come.” Celebrating Community As the program has evolved, AMA PDX Agency is able to do more pro bono marketing work in Portland. Glazier-Anderson and fellow agency co-director Joe Dunn have plans to expand the program capacity to be
career advancement
Advice from AMA PDX for Starting a Pro Bono Agency START SMALL: Our program has become what it is today over many years. Start out small by working with one or two nonprofits. IDENTIFY ESTABLISHED NONPROFITS THAT HAVE WELL-DEFINED MARKETING CHALLENGES: Your volunteers need clear goals and objectives. GIVE YOUR VOLUNTEERS A CHANCE TO PROVE THEIR WORTH: Take the time to get to know prospective volunteers and find out what they want to gain from the process. Empower them to succeed. MAKE TIME TO CHECK IN: Our agency directors have regular checkins with each volunteer. The majority of our current board members and volunteers started in this program. CONSTRUCT A DIVERSE TEAM: The best project teams are made up of people with a variety of career and life experiences. PROJECT TIMELINES ARE KEY: For the sake of all involved, stick to the timeline you set at the start of your project. DON’T BE AFRAID TO BE PICKY: Setting criteria for your nonprofits and volunteers makes it possible for you to enable the best possible outcomes. MAKE OUTREACH PART OF YOUR CORE VALUES: For the first few years, our pro bono program felt separate from the rest of our chapter initiatives. We saw a big difference once we tried to tie it in with our chapter goals. CELEBRATE SUCCESS: Whether it’s one project or six, you’re giving volunteers experience and nonprofits valuable marketing work; be proud of your effort.
able to sustain shorter-term projects in conjunction with the standard six-month timeline. “The problems that the volunteers are working with nonprofits to solve are real-life challenges,” Martinez says. “It’s gratifying to see professionals giving back.” m AMBER MCKENNA is president of AMA PDX and brand marketing manager at Nutraceutical.
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EDUCATORS
Marketing Facilitates Exchange Relationships Michel Wedel discusses his career in marketing and how its study impacts society BY HAL CONICK | STAFF WRITER
hconick@ama.org
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ichel Wedel, the winner of the 2019 AMA-IrwinMcGraw-Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator Award, found his way to marketing via statistics. Wedel is currently the Pepsico Chaired Professor of Consumer Science in the Department of Marketing, Robert H. Smith School of Business, at the University of Maryland. His career has spanned the decades before the internet through today’s Big Data environment.
Q
What initially made you curious about marketing? How has that curiosity changed over time?
A
I ventured into marketing because of my boss, Dr. Theo Ockhuizen, at the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) where I worked in the 1980s as head of a statistics unit. We did research into the effects of nutrition on health, and he wanted me
to do marketing research to determine how people choose the food products that impact their health. A few years and a few publications later, he urged me to do a Ph.D., which I completed at the nearby University of Wageningen while continuing to work at TNO. I was struck by the breadth of questions, data and methodologies in marketing, and was initially most excited about developments in marketing research methodology, including the developments in latent class models, multidimensional scaling, conjoint analysis, models of consideration and choice, and later Bayesian hierarchical models. Over time, I became more and more interested in assessing the effectiveness of visual marketing using eye- and face-tracking technology and in the customization and adaptive personalization of marketing effort.
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What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in the practice of marketing since you first started studying?
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No doubt those are the changes in technology, analytics and data. When I became a full professor at the University of Groningen in 1991, there was no internet. Cordless phones were just becoming more common, the 486 computer was at the cutting edge of computing technology and scanner panel data that tracked household purchases over time were a novelty. Now, through online and mobile applications, companies routinely capture digital information on how consumers feel, act and interact around products and services and how they respond to marketing efforts. Mostly because of the work at business schools, the development of analytical techniques has kept pace and allowed such data to be used to build and maintain customer relationships, offer value to customers, enhance their experiences, personalize the marketing mix and automate marketing processes in real time. New forms of
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marketing have emerged, including recommendation systems, geofencing, search marketing and retargeting. Innovations in technology, including artificial intelligence, robotics, natural user interfaces, cognitive systems, virtual and augmented reality and the Internet of Things, are having a major impact on marketing and marketplaces. We are currently in the process of editing a special issue of the Journal of Marketing around these issues.
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Does academic work affect marketing practice as much as it should?
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We generally don’t know enough about how academic work affects practice, as it does so in many ways. Moreover, business schools around the world send hundreds of thousands of well-trained students into practice who apply the theories, frameworks, methods and insights that we have developed and taught them. The impact of this on business practice can’t be underestimated. Second, a majority of the publications in AMA journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research and JM use data that researchers have obtained from companies. In most cases these academics are working on current problems that companies face and the journals are doing an ever better job in disseminating academic research among companies, policy makers and the public. Third, there are ample examples of companies that were founded based on academic work and many more companies have close formal ties to universities or individual academics. In some cases, marketing academia focuses on assessing the impact and validity of developments in practice. In other cases, academics are co-investigators and rely on data and problems provided by companies, then work with these companies to develop implementable solutions. And
career advancement
in an increasing number of marketing areas, academics are leading the development of new concepts and methods. This doesn’t mean that more can’t be done, of course — and we certainly should.
Q
What should smart marketers prepare for now that may help them over the next decade?
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In the emerging Big Data environment, marketers will be working increasingly at the intersection of fields such as statistics, computer science, economics, psychology, management and marketing in a world where one-size-fits-all solutions are neither desirable nor likely to be effective. At the same time, marketing processes and decisions are increasingly becoming automated. The challenge for marketers is to ground these automated processes in substantive knowledge and managerial oversight. In the near future, marketers need to be familiar with developments in technology and analytics, have a skill set that is both broad and deep and possess people and management skills to oversee and manage teams. Life-long learning will therefore become imperative to keep up and business schools will need to redesign their curricula to tailor to those needs.
Business schools around the world send hundreds of thousands of welltrained students into practice who apply the theories, frameworks, methods and insights that we have developed and taught them. The impact of this on business practice can’t be underestimated.
Q
What do you think is marketing’s purpose in the world?
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Marketing facilitates exchange relationships and uses insights into customer needs to make those more efficient, effective and valuable. It is pervasive throughout global economies and aims to create value for companies and welfare for consumers, thereby contributing to economic growth and the well-being of people across the world. m
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ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Quick source for contacting the suppliers in the March 2019 issue of Marketing News. 2019 AMA Fellows .................................................. p. 19 URL: a ma.marketing/fellows19 2019 AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education Conference ............. back cover URL: a ma.marketing/highered2019 AMA Foundation Outstanding Academic Marketing Awards / 2018 Rick Sweeney Chapter Volunteer of the Year Award ........................................... pp. 10-13 Calls for Nominations currently open: ttp://ama.marketing/4U4019 URL: h http://ama.marketing/Lavidge19 http://ama.marketing/HEMY AMA Bootcamp — Digital Marketing ......................................... inside front cover URL: a ma.marketing/bootcamp19
AMA Bootcamp — Marketing Management . .................................. inside back cover URL: ama.marketing/bootcamp19 AMA Professional Certified Marketer® Content Marketing Program . ................................................................... p. 21 URL: ama.marketing/PCM-CM AMA White Papers ................................................. p. 54 URL: http://www.ama.org/whitepaper AMA’s Marketing Resource Directory .................................................................... p. 7 URL: marketingresourcedirectory.ama.org HOW Marketing Live ................................................ p. 9 URL: howdesignlive.com Marketing News ...................................................... p. 55 Email: sales@ama.org URL: mediakit.ama.org
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#OfficeGoals A peek inside the marketers’ offices that make us drool
desired an open workspace that satisfied their simple office requirements while simultaneously providing space for socializing. The modest 2,738-squarefoot office space is located on the fourth floor of a six-story, mixed-used building in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. The aesthetic is minimal—simple workstations set within a semi-raw space defined by polished concrete floors, unpainted steel bracing and columns, exposed metal ceiling—and intended to celebrate the architectural expression of the space itself. In addition to workstations, the office includes two conference spaces, as well as a special entertainment area that is raised two steps above the workstation level. The resulting spatial compression created by the slightly tighter floor-to-ceiling height creates a cozy setting for relaxing. Wood flooring, in contrast to the polished concrete floor in the working portion of the office, further differentiates the entertainment area, which includes a kitchen and bar and casual seating area. An outdoor patio accessed through sliding doors affords territorial views to the neighborhood and a place to enjoy the temperate Seattle climate. Graham Baba Architects (interior architecture)
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PHOTOS: RAFAEL SOLDI
TECTONIC, a digital experience design studio,
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