When you look around lately it’s not hard to believe that, in general, institutions and business are lacking compassion – they don’t project an understanding of what in the world is going on with “the everyday citizen”. I am NOT talking about hands-across-America and that the entire world should become a 501(c). I’m suggestion that if in a time when the vast majority of people poll that those in government, and the “big players” in the economy “don’t get it”, and don’t understand, and could really care less about them… maybe it’s time to rethink how we as marketers use our part of the world to help bring back a little compassion.
Very few things felt better as a child then when our mothers would show compassion when we were sick, sad, or hurt. Even today, when we see companies or people who do “the right thing” or start something that helps people – such a simple concept – it makes us feel just a little bit better. We can’t change the world by passing bills, but we certainly can make small differences by design marketing and PR efforts that pro-actively help our communities while also being effective marketing strategies for clients.
This is a general idea and I’m not going into many specifics – it’s food for thought for marketing managers. Yes, we need to get a good ROI for companies. Yes, companies are created to make profits. But what’s preventing us from making a mental shift towards marketing for good? Or even marketing for “feel good” so that at a minimum we can do our part to increase the number of feel good moments people might have in any given day. What’s stopping us from doing that? How about giving fear marketing messages a little respite for a change? What’s stopping us?
Feel good marketing and creating events or sponsorships that have a positive impact without asking anything in return also, as we all know, has a great impact on customer loyalty. Fear motivations (or any negative motivational factors) do spur quick purchases and often times can get larger ticket sales within a shorter decision time. But negative marketing messages does not foster customer loyalty. For the everyday consumer: the person who likes name brands and labels, but isn’t controlled by them and cannot always afford them, nothing creates long term brand loyalty better than a positive emotion attached to the brand. And a compassionate act, given the situation this country seems to be in right now, has a huge potential of creating positive emotions – that we’ll most likely grasp onto stronger than normal because there seems so few such positive things to go around lately.
For once: don’t give in to negative marketing when times get hard. Be compassionate. Be positive. How we choose to market makes a difference.
