Say your company supports a charitable nonprofit. It’s a good cause, and your marketing pieces talk up your involvement. But how do you know if your support is doing any good—either in the community or on the bottom line?
Lauren Holderness is looking for answers. “All of our clients have a CSR [corporate social responsibility] initiative right now,” says Holderness, regional director of the Minneapolis office of Smith-Dahmer Associates, a Michigan-based marketing research firm whose local clients include Andersen Windows and Select Comfort. CSR can comprise anything from writing checks to providing goods to offering the helping hands of employees.
But Holderness says most companies don’t approach CSR in the strategic manner they do other marketing initiatives. Andersen’s support of Habitat for Humanity and Select Comfort’s donation of beds to Ronald McDonald Houses make intuitive brand sense, she says. Now what Smith-Dahmer and Minneapolis branding and design firm HartungKemp want to do is develop a way to help more clients find the best CSR “fit” for their brands. (The collaboration is through the coincidence of both firms having offices in the same building.)
To that end, they’re conducting an Internet survey of thousands of consumers nationwide, asking participants how CSR activities affect the way they feel and act toward companies in general, and whether CSR has influenced their purchasing decisions. Once complete early in 2008, the survey will enable the firms to tweak the CSR development model they’re already using with clients.
HartungKemp’s Mary Kemp says that after initial brainstorming, companies should put together focus groups and surveys to learn which causes might best boost targeted consumers’ view of the brand. But once a CSR program is up and running, can its results as a marketing tool be measured? Kemp cites a story that Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard tells in his book, Let My People Go Surfing.
“[Patagonia’s] catalogs have spreads on different nonprofits that they’re supporting, or that they want you to get involved with,” Kemp says. “And they found that when they increased the number of catalog selling pages—decreasing the number of pages where they did corporate social responsibility–types of messages—their sales went down . . . . They increased the number of CSR pages, their sales went up.”
But CSR “is not just giving to change your reputation,” Kemp says. In the community, too, “you want to see a demonstrable difference made with the money you’re giving.”
