Cause Marketing, Altruism, and Social Justice

As a copywriter in the marketing and advertising industry, I experience a tension between marketing objectives and social issues whenever the topic of cause marketing is breached. I’m sure many in the business world feel this tension too. 

Cause marketing can best be defined as a form of marketing done by a for-profit company that simultaneously wants to increase profits and to give something back to society by standing up for a cause. Businesses increasingly want to take their corporate social responsibility and so you’ll often see an activist message included in its marketing strategy for instance.

Increasingly companies become aware of their responsibility toward society and their role in fostering healthy communities in which people thrive instead of merely functioning as the bull’s eye for marketing strategies. But how do you communicate about the cause you support without being perceived as facetious or even hypocritical? After all, every bit of communication comes down to being marketing, done toward the end of gaining market share and increasing profit.

Tension or not, let’s address this topic. When I started my company, Zekyr Copywriting, I thought it provided a clean start to do business in such a way as to allow me to not only consider my own wallet but also be aware of the needs of others. There are issues in society that require a call for justice and why not be concerned and involved?

My question is this: can cause marketing and social responsibility go together? Can you engage in funding a just cause and at the same time use that activity in your marketing as a way to grow your business? In short, is it possible to combine profit-making and responsible action in one activity?

The Tension Of Profit Versus Responsibility

The tension is real. Businesses are out there to make profit. They exist for that sole purpose. In the West the free market principle has taken over from a religion-based ethic to provide the guiding principles for how one is to live one’s life and how societies are organized. 

Let’s be honest about it, the free market has become so dominant that almost all of reality has been reduced to the quasi moral binary of “profit is good, loss is evil.” This principle has been so ingrained that for a long time businesses couldn’t care less if ecological systems were damaged and people exploited.

Things are changing though and across the board we see companies that say: “We want to be morally responsible for what we do.” Whether it is the food sector, car manufacturing, energy industry, fashion… you name it, companies really want to contribute to a better living environment.

The Novel Idea Of The Golden Rule

A new idea is emerging that takes the wellbeing of the self or one’s business as a measuring rod for how to treat others. The rule sounds a bit like “If you treat others well, it is basically good for you.” The bottomline is simple: doing good will eventually reward the giver. This new idea is, of course, old. Very old. There once was a longhaired dude who went by the initials of JC who said it: “do unto others… etc.” And there were others.

While many generations before ours discarded this tenet as religious gobbledygook, we now start realizing that it has little to do with religion but everything with healthy community.

So, businesses are more interested in carrying responsibility. How should they go about it? While I don’t offer guiding steps in this blog post, I will offer two principles that will help entrepreneurs to reflect on themselves and their social responsibility. These principles are authenticity and exocentricity.

The First Principle Of Authenticity.

Forgive my proclivity for big words, but they nicely function as shorthand for greater concepts that can be explored ad infinitum (and with great “profit”). Besides, “authenticity” is manageable, isn’t it?

Yes, you can use your involvement in the community, whether that is funding a project or taking a stance on an issue, as part of your marketing. But it has to be authentic. There’s two things that I should say about that. The first is a marketing argument. Your audience has a nose for authenticity as well as hypocrisy. If you are merely posturing, your marketing audience will know it and you will lose because your audience hates hypocrisy even more than you do.

It is a bit sad, however, if in an article on cause marketing and social responsibility we are only using marketing arguments to check the viability of cause marketing. Such pragmatism would be, well, rather inauthentic, don’t you think?

Authenticity is what drives effective cause marketing. It has to come from self, i.e. the “authos.” The market will accept your marketing about something good you’re doing for the community only if it is true to your company’s identity. And if your identity isn’t there yet, then go and change it first, as hard as that may be. 

Whatever cause you are supporting, it needs to be true to your convictions. Same goes for any donation or gift pattern; it has to be true to the values of your business. Such giving should not come as an afterthought but as a necessary outcome of what matters to you. It’s not simply a tax deductible figure in the books but a positive contribution toward something that you believe in. And this leads to the second principle: exocentricity.

The Second Principle Of Exocentricity

What is it about identity that is so important for your audience in order to accept your cause marketing as valid? Well, I we established already, your cause marketing should not simply be an expression of your desire to gain market share and generate conversions. It should reflect that it is important for you because it is you. 

When you do that people will be more willing to trust your brand, not simply because you stand for something but rather because you stand for something that is located outside the circle of the self, the authos. The weird principle that drives this says that the more you are focused authentically on something that lies outside of you, something that is beyond the immediate circle of self-interest, the more you become a true you.

If the identity of your company merely says “I love me, myself, and I” you may be able to sell brands that enhance people’s outward sense of value. But ultimately there is a limited range of goods and services for which this works. However, if your identity says “I care about the wellbeing of . . .” then your identity gains extra weight.

The market will say: “Look, here’s a company that genuinely cares about something beyond its own interests. It will probably also have a genuine objective in mind in its communications toward me.”

This is exocentricity, a movement away from the self. It has a completely opposite orientation than most fundamental principles of marketing you know, but it works. And that is because altruism has in the end always been a better way to live together with others in community. 

And the funny thing is that, though you may approach exocentricity with a purely pragmatic attitude, in the end it will only work when you have internalized it. When it is no longer pragmatic but intrinsic (i.e. internalized). When your identity has formed around the realization that caring for others is simply the best way to go about the world, the world starts paying attention for real.

Happy cause marketing!