Five Musts to Transform a Brand by Activating Social Purposes

In today’s world, companies around the world are focusing their efforts in creating positive impact towards society and their environment, in this sense, they have migrated their attention from the development of commercial tactics to strategies that involve the essence of their consumers and their current problems: most of the time through emotional links that are oriented to achieve a change in societies behaviour.  

According to Jim Stengel, CEO of 'The Jim Stengel Company', organisation that works with companies based on ideals, marketing with social purpose looks to “define what a company does, beyond making money, and how to improve your clients lives”. In order to understand a little bit more, Juan Alonso Torres, Non-Alcoholic Beverages Director in ABInBev, shares the parameters brands have to take into account to have campaigns with positive social impact:  

1. Be true to purpose 

Each brand has to maintain their essence and identity present at all moments. Being true to the purpose is the first step to get the consumers trust and establish what we are really looking for. For example, Pony Malta is a brand that looks to connect kids and teens so that they can bring out their best version of themselves. Everything that the brand does, one way or another, has to breathe that ambitious objective that has a greater end (who wouldn´t want that teens brought out the best out of them?). That greater end is a trigger for creativity. 

2. Enemies of purpose 

After having a clear purpose and a big ideal for which the brand will fight for, we have to understand which are the big barriers that may prevent us from succeeding. Having Pony Malta once more as our example, if we want teens to connect and bring out the best in them, anything that prevents that is an enemy and we should identify it. This could be isolation, lack of resources for a good education or a bad relationship with their parents, among others. Just as there are ambitious purposes, there is also huge enemies which the brand can´t fight with, but the important thing is to identify these enemies and then choose our battles with some of them. 

3. Relevant social realities 

Having identified the enemies of the purpose, we can connect easily these problems with the social realities that are relevant in the moment. For example, if a big enemy is social isolation, we come up with several problems like bullying, teen loneliness, child abuse, etc. In order to choose the social problem that we’ll address we have to take into account how it fits with our brand and how much could we help to solve it: Can the brand talk about it? Can we improve those social indicators? An example of this is the campaign #BeatTheBullying, an initiative that we launched in order to reduce bullying indicators in Colombia, in a modern tone and with a positive perspective very related with Pony Malta essence. 

4. Real change in consumer behaviour 

It should be the main goal of every social initiative. It is not only important to expose the problem but also to present solutions in order to start improving or to show a change in the mindset of the consumers who join the initiative. A very nice example is the campaign “She Speaks”, framed in the gender equality territory, which evidenced the lack of knowledge girls have about important women referents and that became viral on Tik Tok. The result was more than 500 thousand girls posting words of feminine empowerment through this platform and changing the speech they were having towards society. 

5. Consistency 

Continuity in the communication is a key element for the brand to make a positive and relevant impact and to maintain the perception that you want in the head of your consumers. If we are going to fight against bullying, for example, it can't be done in one shot because with one action we won't be able to obtain the relevant results in the long-term and if our intention is to really obtain a social change, we should look for persistence in the purpose. 

In conclusion, the directive comments that, in order to perform these kind of campaigns with social purpose, it´s necessary to know the reality in which we live in, as this is where ideas come from. “A lot of times, being in contact with reality, you can identify in a clear way the problem and how can it connect with your brand, and where it also becomes human”.