Only one kind of branding matters, and that’s the customer experience.
I love ad agencies and individual marketers that preach the ultimate importance of visual and personal branding, respectively. They’re wasting their time.
You can manufacture as much messaging as you want, but if your brand promise doesn’t meet the customer experience then your efforts will fail. Fast.
At last week’s Cause Marketing Forum, The Great Breast Cancer Debate panel at the 2012 Cause Marketing Forum featured Margo Lucero of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Susan G. Komen for the Cure seen a 20% decrease in corporate sponsorships over the past year, but blames the economy rather than the very public fiasco it experienced when it pulled funding from Planned Parenthood.
Lucero’s statement met an audible gasp from the Cause Marketing Forum audience.
Read More »Komen Arrogant In Denial
The first chapter of Welcome to the Fifth Estate discusses social media empowered people that act independently of traditional media, government and corporate structures. Last Saturday night on WOR Radio’s The Business of Giving show I had the pleasure of discussing this tension with host Denver Frederick. From Syrian bloggers fighting the Assad regime to the anti-Komen Planned Parenthood social media fury in the United States, people continue to fight power structures with social media.
Average citizens feel a need to circumvent established media as well as traditional government and corporate structures with online tools. Their information needs are unfulfilled and voices are not being heard. So people activate themselves online to demand change and action, or to form new innovative ways of resolving their problems.
by Estrella Rosenberg & Geoff Livingston If the last two marathon weeks of cause-related conferences are any indication, competition isn’t just something the for profit sector is thinking about – the cause community is too. How do we compete for… Read More »Cause Competitiveness: Keep Your Eye On The Prize
A Book of Five Rings, written by Miyamoto Musashi in 1645, is one of the world’s classic sources of strategy. Its influence extends beyond military schools to the entire Japanese business culture, and has made its way into Western culture,… Read More »Strategy Lessons: The Water Book
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Cause Marketing View more presentations from Geoff Livingston. The above presentation was delivered to the Cause Marketing Forum last Tuesday, February 15. It focused on lessons learned integrating social media into cause… Read More »The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Online Cause Marketing
Two weeks ago Network for Good‘s Kate Olsen and I hosted a U-Stream chat to field questions and answer on our eGuide about Cause Marketing via Social Media. Well, we had some video broadcast issues with U-Stream, but managed to… Read More »Questions & Answers on Cause Marketing via Social Media
So many organizations feel like they need bring causes into their marketing, and similarly, need to add social media to the mix. It’s a bit of a checklist game, and thus the quick drive to add a contest with online… Read More »Return Cause Marketing to the Heart of Your Strategy
