Brand Vampires and BP

Thursday I came back from some training in LA, and I pleasantly got a chance to meet up with one of my friends I met a while back. His name is Jay and he's in charge of marketing at Toms' Shoes (http://www.toms.com/). It's actually a really amazing org, that's built around the notion that whenever you buy a pair of their shoes, they donate a pair of shoes to someone in need. So while knocking back a beer or two, he told me how companies will call him up looking to partner with Toms without having any real sense of what the partnership should be about or how it should work. During our chat, I mentioned that sometimes companies are really just brand vampires looking to suck good halo from socially conscious organizations, while others are a really good fit. So after we parted I began to think about it a little more and figured that there has to be an easy way to quickly separate these brand vampires from other brands that were just brothers from other mothers.

To that end, I've created the matrix below, to help nonprofits and socially conscious organizations to evaluate how to handle a potential partnership with another brand.














Along the bottom is the estimation of how aligned the value and personality of the brands, along the side is how aligned the mission and the product are. If your mission fits with their product then you're in the high mission and product alignment zone, if your values and personality matches with their values and personality you're in the high value and personality alignment zone, and so on. In each box I put a little phrase to capture the essence of the relationship and in parentheses I put how the two org brands should interact ( either equal partners, endorsers, invisible)

1)High mission and product alignment and high value and personality alignment: These are the matches made in heaven, not only should you team up, you should say it "loud and proud". Think when about Feeding America (used to be called America's Second Harvest) and General Mills teamed up to donate a pound of food to each pound the viewers of The Biggest Loser pledge to loose. These brothers from different mothers should team up in an equal partnership.

2) High mission and product and low value and personality alignment: These also normally pretty good matches. An easy example I can think of is when Tom's shoes teamed up with the Red Cross to get shoes to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. Both brands are there to help those in need and by teaming up they were able to provide a bundle of good to those that need it. Often one brand acting as the endorser of another brand is the best way to go (i.e. "The Red Cross with the support of Tom's shoes has delivered. . ." ). Both brands can, and should, be out front.

3) Low mission and product alignment and high value and personality alignment. These can be pretty complex since, the products are so different but as we can see from Product Red, it's very doable. Since the products and the missions are so divergent the best way to tackle these are with a new initiative (like Red) where a bunch of diverse entities come together for a worthy cause to make a change. Anything outside of a new initiative will come off as pretty artificial but the brands should still exist as proud endorsers of this new entity.

4) Low mission and product alignment and low value and personality alignment. Ugh. . . this is like Transylvania, where all the brand vampires live. 9 times out of 10 this is a bad idea, but sometime vampires have deep pockets and the good you can do with that money is worth the risk or outside forces demand the partnership. The thing that pops into my mind for this case is the truth campaign (which is funded by the cigarette industry). The partnership should be a new initiative (with a new brand) and both the nonprofit and the for-profit should remain as invisible as possible. The for-profit would do it for the good of internal moral (or because they are forced to) and the nonprofit should do it because of the impact that can be created. In the perfect world, the viewer would never know who pays the bills (which is part of what made it so hard for me to come up with a good example).

These aren't hard and fast rules but they'll definitely help you navigate some complex situations.



Also, I guess I should talk about BP since I promised in the headline I would. I actually find it really interesting that I'm hearing a lot of talk about the BP ads and how messed up it is that BP made those ads. Something that I'm actually not hearing a lot of is what people think they would have done if they were BP's head of marketing. So, being the forthright kind of guy that I am, I figured I'd stick my neck out and say what I'd do if I were in charge of BP's marketing. So what would I do? I'd quit. That guy (or gal) is fucked six ways to Sunday. Any ads that you put out will be construed as a waste of money and an attempt at spin, if you don't put out ads, you'll be seen as not communicating. So you, Mr or Ms Marketing exec, are up shits' creek (as my pappy used to say). Get a new job. In a few years, everyone will be back to their sweet, sweet oil dependency and BP will have rebranded itself and all will go back to normal, but you, Mr/Ms CMO, are screwed. Get over it. your company screwed the pooch and you're going to get boned. that's life sometimes. BP should keep making ads, should give constant and eternal 'mia culpas' and spend as much dough as possible to clean up this mess, but this is too big even for smart marketing to smooth over.