Book Excerpt: Robin Hood Marketing

What This Chapter Says:

• Everything we communicate will get twisted according to the mind it enters.
• As marketers, we have to accept people for who they are and work within their framework.
• The closer we align with our audience's values, the higher our chances of motivating them to take action.
• We're not compromising our mission because we're not changing ourselves any more than we're changing our audience.
• To apply the principles in this chapter: Through research, gather the information that will enable us to tap into our audience's values and motivate them to take action. The goal is to uncover actions that are fun, easy, popular, and rewarding for our audiences.
• We're never done with our research. Uncovering the information we need is not a static, one-time effort. We must track attitudes and actions over time by monitoring how they evolve and forecasting what they will be in the future.

Getting to Know You

To uncover our audiences' wants and values we must do some reconnaissance. Keep in mind that wants and values are distinct from needs. As people who work for good causes, we rightfully spend a lot of time thinking about how to meet certain needs — by providing life-saving help, training, exercise, literacy, vaccinations, and so forth. But we should not confuse what we know people need with what they want or value. The gap between the two is usually big. For example, my two-year-old daughter needs to brush her teeth in the morning so she won't get cavities. But she wants only the simple joy of using another product with Dora the Explorer on it. I need for her to have good oral hygiene, but I value her brushing her teeth without a pitched battle. That's why I willingly paid extra for the Dora toothbrush.

We can't change who our audiences are, but we can change what they do. The trick is to show our audiences a new way to get what they already want. Trying to change our audiences, or any individual person, is a recipe for failure. People of every age are highly resistant to change. In fact, social psychologists like Elliot Aronson and Robert Cialdini have shown that people continually reinforce their existing values by selectively processing new facts and experiences according to their mind-set. Have you ever watched a presidential debate with opinionated friends on opposite ends of the political spectrum? Your friends on each side think their candidate won because they filter out any data that don't support their position or that challenge their identification with their candidate.

People want to preserve their mental framework and the sense of self and autonomy it provides, so they interpret information according to that framework. If information doesn't fit within it, they either ignore the information or assume the source of the information is crazy or can't be trusted. Or if the new information comes from someone the audience truly respects and trusts, they may adjust their beliefs and integrate them into their existing set of values. But those values don't suddenly change.

For example, say I value a sense of safety. I decide I want to buy a security alarm for my house. But then my neighbor, who knows about recent break-ins and alarms that went unheeded, tells me I'd be better off with window locks. I decide to install window locks with my limited money rather than an alarm because I now believe they are a better option. My value, safety, has not changed, but I've changed my belief as to what will make me safe. If my neighbor had told me I was wrong to value safety, I would have ignored him or considered him crazy. I paid attention because he showed me a different way to be safe.

Anything we communicate will get twisted according to the mind it enters. Our ideology is simply not as powerful as our audience's own mental machinations. As marketers, we have to accept people for who they are and work within the framework they have.

I believe that accepting the perspective of our audiences shows respect. Telling people they need to change their values or that their values are wrong is not only ineffective, it is disrespectful. It's certainly no way to start a relationship, and that's ultimately what we want with our audiences. In our haste to be seen by them, we should not forget to see them. Humans have a basic need to be recognized and understood.

By meeting our audiences where they are and communicating from their perspective, we are showing them respect and fulfilling that human need for connection. Meeting our audiences where they are has the added benefit of making our cause attractive to them because the more similar or familiar we seem to people, the more they tend to like us. When we pay attention to our audiences, they pay attention to us. We get the actions we want by caring about what they want.

It's important to reiterate a key point: We are not compromising our mission by telling people what they want to hear. We bring to the table a vision of our goal and a set of capabilities for reaching it. That will not change. But through marketing we recognize the person across the table from us —our audience. We don't market by saying, "Hello, let me tell you about myself." We market by listening to that person's thoughts and wants (which are often surprising) and proving our relevance to that perspective and those desires. We're not changing ourselves any more than we're changing our audience. We are uncovering the values we have in common.

Connecting Causes to Values

Let's take some examples. One of the most famous is the American Legacy Foundation's anti-smoking campaign for youth. The Foundation set out to prevent smoking among young people because it knew that 80 percent of smokers begin using tobacco before they are eighteen years old. Its anti-smoking marketers decided to define their audience as twelve- to seventeen-year-olds, a savvy, jaded, and notoriously fickle audience.

The first step was to venture into the minds of teenagers. That meant starting with the value-based question "What do teenagers want?" rather than the needs-based question "How can we prevent them from smoking?" The campaign organizers thought about teenagers and their desires as they live through the transition that time of life presents. Young people are seeking to assert their independence and individuality, feel a sense of control, gain respect from their peers, and maybe even rebel. Many of them are attracted to smoking as a way to fulfill these fundamental adolescent desires.

So the Foundation began thinking about how it could allow teenagers to maintain control and to rebel in a new way. With the help of an alliance of prominent advertising agencies, the breakthrough "truth" campaign was conceived to provide a different way for teenagers to act on their values. The truth campaign urged teens to protest against a tobacco industry that it said was systematically seeking to manipulate them. The campaign set out to expose Big Tobacco's marketing practices and to highlight the toll tobacco takes in gross-out, extreme ads targeted to appeal to teenagers. By demonizing the tobacco industry, the truth campaign sought to provide teens with appealing new means for asserting themselves.

The campaign involved teens in all its planning and made them the public face of the effort. It organized a youth summit, a bus tour, a protest outside a tobacco company, and a slew of controversial advertisements. The theme was "Ask questions. Seek truth." One of the most memorable truth ads showed twelve hundred teenagers with numbered T-shirts pretending to drop dead in front of the headquarters of a tobacco company (symbolizing the number of people dying every day of smoking-related causes). Another showed teenagers raising an American flag to half-mast to honor those "loyal customers killed" by tobacco each day.

A fake campaign for a product called Shards O'Glass freeze pops satirized tobacco-industry marketing. "At Shards O'Glass, our goal is to be the most responsible, effective, and respected developer of glass shard consumer products intended for adults," says the faux mission statement on the shardsoglass.com Web site. It concedes, "We now agree with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that eating glass freeze pops can be dangerous." In the stilted language of cigarette warnings, it admits that its customers suffer a far greater incidence of "shards-related ailments" than nonusers do. As for addiction, it says that although it can be "very difficult" to break the habit, that fact "should not deter" those who want to try to quit.

This groundbreaking campaign, which has contributed to the lowest rate of high school smoking in nearly three decades, would not have been possible had the American Legacy Foundation focused solely on the need to curb smoking and failed to take into account the adolescent desire to act up. By giving teenagers something they wanted instead of taking something away, the campaign changed their behavior.

Inspiring Teens By Way of Babushkas

I experienced this same phenomenon halfway across the world in Ukraine. A small organization funded by the Institute for Sustainable Communities was working to motivate apathetic teenagers to care about politics, the future of the country, and voting. The group was frustrated because its message wasn't getting through to this tough audience. So it attended a marketing training.

At the session, I asked them what they were telling teenagers. "We're telling them about our organization and how they should care about the future of the country," the twenty-seven-year-old director of the organization said. "If they vote, they can have a brighter future."

He was only 27, but he was already too old to instinctually think like a teenager. Eastern European teenagers aren't that different from American teenagers: they don't focus on the distant future, and they tend to be cynical. Promising a better country or brighter future isn't exciting to them. The organization's director and I talked about what teenagers did value, based on his informal research and work with them. What interested them? What got under their skin? He said his staff and volunteers always talked about Ukrainian teenagers as cynical and somewhat rebellious. Teenagers were especially tired of lecturing from their babushkas (grandmothers). What did the country's babushkas want? "They want things to be the way they used to be in Soviet times, with a good pension system. And they don't like the way young people dress and act. Teenagers don't agree, of course."

He was on to something. During a year and a half of living in Ukraine, I had found that babushkas on the street relished verbally assaulting unsuspecting pedestrians with unsolicited advice. One had lectured me for long minutes on a temperate spring day because she thought my children weren't bundled up in enough layers of clothing. I'm not a teenager, but I knew the feeling of being on the receiving end of a wagging finger. It didn't spur me to action-it made me resentful and rebellious. Just like the truth-campaign masterminds, this organization's director was putting his finger on fundamental adolescent frustrations.

We talked about how to change his marketing approach according to these insights. He ended up making a slight change in his message that made an enormous difference in its meaning. The new approach (in rough translation): "You decide your future, or your babushka will do it for you. Vote on October 31." Because of the work of hundreds of such organizations and an increasingly involved and engaged citizenry, some 80 percent of Ukrainians went to the polls during that historic 2004 election. Plenty of babushkas were at the polls, but so were many young people.

Wake Up and Give to Dobrata

Let's take one more example from the same training in Ukraine. A community foundation named Dobrata was trying to encourage businesspeople to give money to charitable causes. This was not an easy task in a country emerging from decades of Soviet rule and with no history of corporate philanthropy, and when Dobrata staff came to the training, they expressed some disappointment over their efforts to motivate entrepreneurs.

They showed everyone at the training their latest advertisement, which they had aired on local television. It was animated, in black and white, with mournful music playing in the background. A stooped babushka (there is that powerful cultural icon again) enters a pharmacy. She looks up at the shelves and then down at a few stray coins in her pocket. Tears slowly course down her cheeks. She is unable to buy the medicine she needs. A voice-over and accompanying text urge people to help by calling Dobrata.

What happened when the ad ran? Dobrata was flooded with calls from babushkas asking for money to buy medicines. Virtually no one called to donate money. The main problems: lack of a clear audience and an appeal to that audience's values. Businesspeople didn't see the ad as meant for them. It was depressing — everyone in Ukraine knows the collapse of the Soviet Union hit pensioners hardest — but not personally motivating. No one believed a call to Dobrata could resolve this enormous social problem.

After two days of thinking about their audiences and reflecting on their values, Dobrata went back to the drawing board. The next time I saw their staff, they handed me a disk with their new ad. It was a colorful, animated spot to be shown in movie theaters. This was a far better venue than television for reaching their audience because only those who are relatively well-off, like businesspeople, can afford to go to the movies in Ukraine.

In the spot, a businessman is shown slumped over his desk, signing paper after paper handed to him by a secretary. He goes on autopilot, numbly working his way through massive stacks. The picture zooms into his brain, which has the cogs and wheels of a robot. Life has become mechanical and without feeling. Then an alarm clock goes off on his desk and suddenly the scene brightens. The secretary places before him a donation request from Dobrata, and he signs, breaks out of his rut, and regains his human self. A friendly voice-over and call to action (wake up and give to Dobrata) end the spot.

The ad was funny, motivating, and memorable. It clearly spoke to businesspeople by whimsically highlighting the drudgery that comes with any job, especially in a country with lots of red tape. It positioned its "product" — charitable giving — as a way to fulfill a desire to break out of the grind and feel good. Dobrata hit its mark.

With this kind of thinking, we can do the same.