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Yoplait’s Branding Win/Fail – The Final Analysis

by Tinu

This post is the last of a series that examines the effects of a recent charity campaign by Yoplait on their overall brand. You can read the rest of the series here, and here. And here too.

The Scenario

Let’s say I’m a rep from Yoplait. I’ve read all the stuff I wrote in this series and I realize that although the campaign is going okay, it could be going better. In fact, maybe I’m the Vice President of Marketing at Dannon, and I’m wondering how I could turn this into a slam dunk and get a bonus or a raise.

So I start combing the internet for reactions.

I run into this blog and ask the writer their opinion, to see if I want to pay them to consult with us on branding and marketing.

Here’s the response I would get, if I were that person.

The Plan

First, I have to say that in this series of article, I downplayed how happy I was to hear that Dannon was doing this. I summarized what could have been a 1000 word response into two words “super win”. More companies should display this kind of awareness.

However, I also have to say again that from a branding and marketing perspective, it’s barely average. It’s not exactly negative, it won’t stop me from buying things from Dannon, especially Yoplait.

Honestly you’d have to tell me I was eating pureed pork to get me to stop buying yogurt in general, and there’s only one other brand of yogurt that I like, Activia, and you make that too.

Though sometimes we’ll get the generic from the store because Dannon doesn’t have one of those jumbo sizes my sister gets when trying to save money on our grocery bill, at least not at our supermarket. What’s up with that?

Having said that, I do feel some distance from Dannon and Yoplait, in light of the fact that the effort to prevent breast cancer doens’t have respect for my busy life. I’m scheduling my trips to the bathroom and you’re telling me to go to the post office with my lids.

On the one hand, yes, I would feel an incredible amount of guilt with the thought that more lives could have been saved if I could get up off my butt and go to the post office in the few hours a week of downtime I have.

On the other, you’re going to make a minimum donation even if I don’t eat your yogurt. Which takes me back from a slightly negative perception of you to slightly more positive than neutral. Still, I’d have liked to be included.

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Yoplait’s Wins vs Yoplait’s Fails

by Tinu

This post is part of a series examining the effects of a recent charity campaign by Yoplait on their overall brand. You can read earlier installments here, and here.

yoplait-cyberversion-lid

When we were last together, we were talking about translating my Yoplait experience as a consumer to a study of Yoplait from a branding perspective.

First, is Yoplait trying to achieve higher visibility through this breast cancer donation? Or are they just trying to do something good?

Before I answer – the reason we’re even asking this question is because of a common cop-out answer made by smaller companies. I know I’m guilty of it. It goes something like this: “Yeah, I know we probably screwed that whole branding/marketing/ publicity/website promotion up, but we weren’t trying to promote ourselves. We just wanted to do some good.”

To which I answer, doing good is great. But if you kill the effectiveness of your brand in the process, that affects the believability of all your other marketing efforts including marketing. If customers don’t believe, they don’t buy. If they don’t buy, you can’t do good.

But let’s answer the question anyway. Was the breast cancer awareness raising about doing good, or looking good?

I’d guess both.

I know some people look at a company that is doing charitable work and think,they’re just doing for the tax break, and they’re just telling us for extra brownie points, and I’m not falling for it.

And, if this were 1980, I’d agree with them.

But once I became a business owner for the first time in 1996, I started to see things differently. For me the process went, “I bet I could encourage other companies to band together and do non-profit work if I told people I was doing it.”

Companies are run, and owned by people. Making consumers aware of that is part of what branding is about.

To continue with my personal experience of this… Since my audience is almost exclusively B2B, I started having Non-Profit Sundays in one of my blogs, hoping to influence other businesses.

In this weekly series, I’d talk about low-cost and no-cost ways that micro-businesses can do good works. (I did this for years until I got sick the last time, and haven’t picked it back up on any of my blogs just yet.)

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