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.
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.)
