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Last-Mile Branding and Marketing for Nonprofits

Focussing on the “last mile” could be doubly important for a nonprofit.  What for a for profit business is a customer who takes the product or service, and pays money, is separated in a charity.  Your customer is effectively split in two: funders who donate and the beneficiaries of the charitable work who receive the services.  

The motivations and actions of both are critical to success.  Almost by definition they are not purely rational.  Target beneficiaries likely have take-up challenges like the Canadian CLB program.  This could be still more difficult when the nonprofit’s goal is to influence policy and public opinion.  They do not usually have a budget for advertising, and so they have to address the wants and needs of influencers that can spread the word.  Interestingly, some of these will themselves be acting altruistically, but others not.  Politicians, newspapers/websites, 

and even business can all be targets of nonprofits seeking to change behavior, and these may have purely economic motives.  Or the same complex motives of a business’ customers.

And funders almost by definition are not acting in an economic manner — they are “being human.”  Finding ways to get the last mile are still very applicable, like the retail store experience, and competition with other nonprofits for donations. 

What does the charity fundraiser event look like: in a sophisticated location or on-the-ground where charitable work is done? What about the fundraising mailer or email-ask?

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Celebrity Endorsement of Soda

The number of celebrities endorsing sugar (and high-fructose corn syrup) sodas massively outnumbers those who have taken highly public roles against these products.   As the food writer for the New York Times observed: 

“Beyoncé Knowles would presumably refuse to take part in an ad campaign that showed her carrying a semiautomatic rifle. But she’s eager, evidently, to have the Pepsi logo painted on her lips and have a limited-edition Pepsi can bearing her likeness.”

The scientific data regarding the bad public health effects of these products can no longer seriously be challenged.  Yet in a culture steeped, for nearly s century, in the culture of soda products and the images they convey, essentially the only ways to combat this are non-profits and the occasional (and incredibly unpopular) laws to tax these beverages.

Most celebrities will appear at events (movies, TV, plays, concerts) where soda is being shown – they have very little opportunity (maybe even less than the Indian “lightening” products to take the other side.  Because hypocrisy will immediately damage the celebrity’s own brand.  So better for them, even at massive cost to public health of their fans, to tie their own brand to the brands of soda makers.

Maybe, just maybe, there is some change – but perhaps only to celebrities changing from endorsements supporting soda, to advertisements for alternative products.  But can we expect major, broad-based celebrity campaigns against soda, like tobacco, anytime soon?  It will be a good test.

Beyonce ad before:

Beyonce ad now

[yes-thisisross-blog]

Celebrity Endorsement of Soda

The number of celebrities endorsing sugar (and high-fructose corn syrup) sodas massively outnumbers those who have taken highly public roles against these products.   As the food writer for the New York Times observed: 

“Beyoncé Knowles would presumably refuse to take part in an ad campaign that showed her carrying a semiautomatic rifle. But she’s eager, evidently, to have the Pepsi logo painted on her lips and have a limited-edition Pepsi can bearing her likeness.”

The scientific data regarding the bad public health effects of these products can no longer seriously be challenged.  Yet in a culture steeped, for nearly s century, in the culture of soda products and the images they convey, essentially the only ways to combat this are non-profits and the occasional (and incredibly unpopular) laws to tax these beverages.

Most celebrities will appear at events (movies, TV, plays, concerts) where soda is being shown – they have very little opportunity (maybe even less than the Indian “lightening” products to take the other side.  Because hypocrisy will immediately damage the celebrity’s own brand.  So better for them, even at massive cost to public health of their fans, to tie their own brand to the brands of soda makers.

Maybe, just maybe, there is some change – but perhaps only to celebrities changing from endorsements supporting soda, to advertisements for alternative products.  But can we expect major, broad-based celebrity campaigns against soda, like tobacco, anytime soon?  It will be a good test.

Beyonce ad before:

Beyonce ad now

[yes-thisisross-blog]

Celebrity Endorsement of Soda

The number of celebrities endorsing sugar (and high-fructose corn syrup) sodas massively outnumbers those who have taken highly public roles against these products.   As the food writer for the New York Times observed: 

“Beyoncé Knowles would presumably refuse to take part in an ad campaign that showed her carrying a semiautomatic rifle. But she’s eager, evidently, to have the Pepsi logo painted on her lips and have a limited-edition Pepsi can bearing her likeness.”

The scientific data regarding the bad public health effects of these products can no longer seriously be challenged.  Yet in a culture steeped, for nearly s century, in the culture of soda products and the images they convey, essentially the only ways to combat this are non-profits and the occasional (and incredibly unpopular) laws to tax these beverages.

Most celebrities will appear at events (movies, TV, plays, concerts) where soda is being shown -- they have very little opportunity (maybe even less than the Indian “lightening” products to take the other side.  Because hypocrisy will immediately damage the celebrity’s own brand.  So better for them, even at massive cost to public health of their fans, to tie their own brand to the brands of soda makers.

Maybe, just maybe, there is some change -- but perhaps only to celebrities changing from endorsements supporting soda, to advertisements for alternative products.  But can we expect major, broad-based celebrity campaigns against soda, like tobacco, anytime soon?  It will be a good test.

Beyonce ad before:

Beyonce ad now

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Online behavior could threaten Americans’ retirement

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Does the “Intel Inside” success story offer lessons for Big Auto as they develop and “roll-out” (pun intended) electric cars?

In 1991, Intel launched its “Intel Inside” brand.  Marrying that top-notch branding with Intel’s intention to remain the leader in silicon chip development has led Intel to be the #11 most valuable brand in the world, according to the Interbranch Best Global Brands Report 2018.

Auto brands are right there too.  4 of the top 20 brands are auto (Toyota (#6), Mercedes (#8), BMW (#13), Honda (#20)), along with 5 more in the top 50.  But it’s not just ranking: Intel may have charted a path in the branding of PC chip development that has lessons for those brand-conscious automakers as they move into and compete the realm of electric cars.

The well-known “Moore’s Law” (chip speeds double every two years) has created a very short product cycle for the semiconductor industry, based on rapid technological innovation.  But PCs don’t wear out every two years.  This type of existing-product-quality v. innovation cycle caught up to Intel in the late 1980s.  Customers were content with an existing product (the 286 chip), and were buying very few of an entire life-cycle of the current chip (the 386).  Each cycle involves billion of dollars of investment, that could get almost entirely lost.  Maybe worse, a two-year window of satisfied, complacent customers could come to define the brand (downward) if a competitor rolls out something new in the middle.

If the brand is cutting edge technology at all times, then the company needs customers to be actually buying those cutting edge products at all times.  Just having the best tech doesn’t hold a candle to consistently selling the best tech.

So what did Intel do?  The simple view is that they developed their own B2C brand even though they are a B2B company. They worked with OEM computer makers to avoid branding conflicts in the value chain.

Now the big automakers, for the first time in a long time, face a period of likely rapid technological development with short life cycles.  That challenge is the quick development in stages of mass-market electric cars that rival conventional cars: first hybrids, now plug-in hybrids, and no-doubt soon fully electric regular-sized cars and SUVs (setting aside Tesla’s now-luxury positioning plus attempt to jump in one leap to a fully mass-market all-electric car).  

Honda’s 2018 Clarity Accord-sized Plug-in Hybrid.

The smaller-sized Audi e-Tron

Like Intel’s 286 processor customer, a car buyer who purchases a plug-in hybrid that works for commuting could feel that they don’t need another electric car for 5-10 years.  And that could leave room for a technology-leader today to lose the advantage of a brand seen as cutting edge.

2012 Toyota Prius Hybrid

Thus automakers probably want to find a way to get consumers (electric car buyers) to want a new product in a much shorter time than the actual product lasts.  Certainly ads and other branding tools matter.  Just as certainly it would be a change from the current types of ads that car manufacturers run.  But as as surely, integrating with actual operations matters.  For auto, this is both on the technology side -- having whole new products to roll out fully redesigned products faster than the current 4-6 years (according to Autotrader.com).  And for auto there is another big component of operations -- the auto finance part of the business, because a car is such a big-ticket item.  So as an example, if a carmaker is trying to do what Intel did, promoting new computer purchases in every short cycle, the carmaker might want to consider making short term leases more attractive than buying the car.  This could be a long-term view combining strategy, operations and branding.

In-development Mercedes Plug-in Hybrid.

Another possible lesson: perhaps the OEM’s want to initiate a program like “Intel Inside” with a leading, cutting-edge maker of electric car batteries.  That presents value-chain problems, but just like Intel managed that potential competition down the chain to its OEMs, maybe big auto could manage that up-the-chain to a supplier of the critical component of electric cars -- the battery.  

In any event, there is no doubt that Intel developed a wildly successful strategy to couple a new brand with its technology leader strategy.  It had to continue to link them at every phase of company operations, and doing so reinforced both the brand and operations.

Big auto might learn a lesson now that they face what looks like an eerily similar situation to the early leaps in PC chip technology.