Alberta Business Marketing

Over the past decade, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a key element in judging an organization’s performance and influencing perception of same. However, many organizations are not sure how to deploy and/or position CSR as part of their brand.

Prevailing questions include: How do companies select the right CSR partners to work with? What criteria form the basis of the determination? Who leads CSR and what role do employees play? With an obvious commitment to ‘greening’ in today’s business environment, CSR is a means to showcase an organization’s environmental practices. Moreover, CSR can provide the basis for an organization to engage in social programs that help it define the social fabric of its business and true commitment to the local communities in which it operates, while meaningfully engaging employees.

Below, DL Leslie, Director of Branding and Media Relations for Siemens Canada, responds to a series of questions from his colleagues on CMA’s Branding and Strategic Planning Council about what CSR means to Siemens.

How do you define (CSR) Corporate Social Responsibility?
At Siemens we define CSR as a company’s commitment to doing business in an ethical and sustainable manner and enhancing and extending the lives (and the planet) of a current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to do the same. CSR involves philanthropy, community investment and ‘walking the talk’ when it comes to our three company values; responsible, excellent, innovative. We believe in helping others to help themselves - providing a hand up and a hand out. We also view CSR as a major contributor to our brand value and awareness.

How is CSR integrated with your business, brand, and/or culture?
Our aim is to make CSR a part of our company culture and a part of how Siemens does business in a sustainable way. We support humanitarian and environmental causes both at home and internationally through disaster relief efforts, because it’s the right thing to do - and because we believe it can be as good for business as it is for employee morale and for the communities in which we operate.

In regards to being good for business, to quote our CEO, “Pushing sustainability to the forefront within a company is to make sure that sustainability is not a trade-off to growth or profit or other expectations. It’s really what drives profitable growth. We do this as part of our corporate social responsibility, but also because it’s what drives a profitable business.”

Do you have dedicated/annual resources (people and budgets) to execute programs?
Yes, Siemens has an annual dedicated CSR budget and a full-time head within the Communications & Strategy team responsible for developing, executing and growing our Caring Hands [internal brand] program, along with the Caring Hands Employee Committee (CHEC), a group of volunteer employees across Canada. The goal is to increase the budget year over year, incorporating estimates of investments to execute new initiatives. In addition to the dedicated CSR budget, Siemens also contributes financial support, via matching programs, such as employee donations, for both planned initiatives and unplanned events, such as disaster relief.

Do you use CSR as a tool to engage your employees?
Absolutely. Our Caring Hands CSR programs are led by the CHEC members and really driven by employees, as they are the ones who support the 50/50 draws, volunteer for Earth Day clean-ups and donate hundreds of toys and non-perishable food items throughout the year. We find small incentive prizes are a great way to increase participation and encourage friendly competition. My experience has definitely been that CSR activities have a positive impact on employee morale and make them proud to work for Siemens. The other most effective way to engage employees is to simply recognize them for their great efforts. On a corporate level we also design and distribute ‘tool kits’ (posters, banners, literature, etc.) to help our CHEC members in their local offices run the programs. In doing this we find that the events are not only consistent from location to location, but participation is higher, because there is less work to be done by individuals. The tool kits have been very well received.

How do you determine (evaluate/criteria) the right organization (cause) to partner with?
We look at a number of factors – first we examine their standards of business (compliance), reputation, and donation efficiency (e.g. overhead costs, investment in research to extend or enhance life, etc.). We also look at where our investment can make the biggest difference to a cause that doesn’t receive large share of the limelight. Another key element in helping us determine if we will support/work with an organization is to look at their vision and values and see if we share similar goals and language – it is important to us to realize alignment. Our current charity of record is Cystic Fibrosis Canada and we’re very proud of the 15 year partnership we have with them – it’s a long term relationship that’s build on a shared vision of extending and enhancing life in Canada. But we also work with a number of local charities in various locations, because it makes sense for regional purposes. The key is to be consistent via alignment with shared vision and values.

How do you evaluate the impact of your programs/activities?
We look at both quantitative measures (e.g. # of locations/employees participating, funds raised) and qualitative ones (verbal feedback, social media buzz, etc.) and always aim to exceed previous year’s results. We include the topic of CSR in our annual employee communication survey and compare results year-over-year. Consistent measurement for CSR is difficult, so it’s something we are constantly looking at improving and finding new ways of doing. This includes social media properties, not only as communication tools, but as measurement tools too.

We’re extremely lucky to have an engaged executive team that believes in and sees the value of CSR. Our CEO, CFO and VPs actively participate in everything from fundraisers to park clean-ups and have even made breakfast for the entire corporate headquarters as part of a holiday giving campaign. Our CEO ‘gets’ CSR and the value it brings to the local community, our employees, the bottom line and especially the brand.

What tools do you use to communicate your CSR activities (both internal and external)?
Internally, we use intranet, an e-newsletter and in-house magazine (Dialogue), as well as professionally designed posters, internal meetings and presentations. Externally, we use press releases, Facebook, Twitter, speaking engagements, corporate collateral materials, etc.

Do you have policies and procedures in place that support employee volunteering programs as part of your CSR strategy?
Yes, we have a policy and procedure in place, along with sponsorships, and donations. We use an on-line tool called ‘SpoDom’ to enter every program/opportunity in for approval. This also allows for easy tracking and recording (measurement year-over-year). We are now establishing new guidelines for volunteering - specific to the number of hours, time off, etc.

We’re currently running a contest called the Greatest Community Supporter contest to recognize employees who volunteer or fundraise in their spare time outside of work - we’re offering three top prizes of a $10,000 donation. The winners will be announced at our annual business conference in December 2011. Our winners will be in attendance and they’ll receive the “Presidents Award” (plus the $10K to the registered charity of choice). One of our priorities for this coming year is to implement employee volunteering during work hours and building relationships with various organizations to support this type of program.

Can you share any examples of what you would describe as best-case practices in terms of your CSR programs and strategy?
A good example is Hope for Holidays 2010 - a fundraising and toy drive campaign to assist local communities in the holiday timeframe. Twenty-three Siemens Canada locations from six provinces took part in this hugely successful program that raised $12,000 in cash, 1,350 toys, 40 boxes of food and 484 hats and pairs of mittens to assist 10 Salvation Army chapters and 17 additional independent humanitarian organizations across the country. With regards to disaster relief, as an example, our employees (with corporate matching) raised just shy of a quarter of a million for Haiti, Pakistan and Japan.

Tags: corporate social responsibility, Ethics / Legal, Integration
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When I go to a bookstore, there are three sections that I look through. It doesn’t matter to me what is on display near the front of the store or what is on sale. I will never notice them.

When I go grocery shopping, I try to get in and out as quickly as possible. I plan a route through the store to minimize the time required, and if I can’t find something I need I would rather leave without it then ask the 17-year old clerk where I could find the pumpkin puree and be forced to retrace my steps.

Does this sound similar to the way that you shop? Probably NOT.

It turns out that most people will have their own way of shopping, which will often vary depending on the product category. This presents a great challenge to retail brands. Shops want to make their in-store experience as pleasant as possible, but what is pleasant for one customer could be misery for another.

How can brands deal with this conundrum? Here are some ideas that you could try.

• Provide multiple paths of discovering products while shopping: Amazon provides a great example. Amongst the home page merchandising, category browsing, keyword searches, recommended products and listmania, there is a way to find new books that will suit the needs of most shoppers. The increasing role of mobile in retail will give brands even more opportunities to cater to different needs.
• Create personas: Developing multiple groups of different personas based on similar attributes is a technique pioneered in politics but can easily be applied to retail brands. Be sure to go beyond simple demographic data and include emotional and interest-based attributes to create these personas. When you have key groups for your brand, make sure that you are meeting their needs.
• Determine the most valuable customer groups: Brands can’t be all things to all people, but luckily not all customers are created equal. Don’t lose sleep if you sacrifice the needs of low value customers as long as you are hitting the mark for the most important ones.
• Train staff for flexibility: Even with extensive planning and careful design of your in-store experience, you must remain flexible to meet the diverse needs of your customers. While you can’t change the physical layout of your store every day, you can train your staff to recognize and adapt to different types of shopping behavior.
• Do one thing really well: Some retail brands have done a great job creating a very clear expectation of the experience you will have in their store. When I go to Walmart, will the staff adapt and respond to my unique needs? No. Do I expect them to? Definitely not. A clearly defined retail brand will convey clear expectations to customers. Just be sure that you can deliver on those expectations.

This list is not exhaustive and not all suggestions should be tried together. What works for Amazon won’t work for Walmart and vice versa. The most important thing you can do is to keep your retail experience true to your brand.

Ben Wise

Tags: Customer Experience, Integration, Strategy
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The reality in most organizations is that most market research is commissioned by the marketing department, giving them special access to rich data on customers, competitors and the category. Yet the insights gleaned from this research has implications outside of just the marketing department, making the sharing of this information an important role for marketers.

This had never occurred to me until I had a conversation with a friend who is one of the top sales reps at his company. We were discussing his company’s brand and I asked what they did to track the satisfaction of their customers. Although the company was religious in sending out csat surveys, I was shocked to discover that my friend had never seen the results.

While marketers are often responsible for developing the brand strategy, this is an unfortunate example of ignoring the rest of the business system in the development and execution of that strategy.

A few ways that this customer data could be used outside of marketing:
• Sales reps could learn about the biggest pain points so they could proactively address them on sales calls
• Operations could learn about – and fix! - an aspect of product delivery that customers don’t like
• Design could adjust the product delivery to make it more intuitive for their customers

But if market research data isn’t shared by marketing then your business will be prevented from reaching their full potential. With first access to market research data comes great responsibility. In addition to promoting the brand externally, marketing must promote customers internally so that the rest of the people in the business system can help build the company’s brand as well.

Here are some simple ways to improve sharing:
• Hold cross-functional meetings to review research results when they are available, and better yet, include these groups in the survey development process
• Create a wiki for different groups to share and collaborate based on research
• Post research result presentations on the corporate intranet

Sharing shouldn’t be that difficult. A shame that it doesn’t happen more often.

Ben Wise

Tags: Branding, Integration, Research
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I, like many of you readers, work for a communication agency. Formerly known as an advertising agency. I was ruminating recently about the mountainous inflection point I felt we were in the midst of as communicators. Here is the story:

Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time there was advertising. ‘Advertising’ agencies created television ads, ads for newspapers and magazines and ads to run on the radio. Structured advertising agencies had different departments producing these advertisements, presenting them to a client and ‘putting them on the air’.

Around twenty years ago came the internet and hence ‘the digital space’. It lingered in its formative stage, mainly driving the emergence of e-commerce, for about a decade. Only about ten years ago, ‘advertising’ agencies decided that the internet could be a canvas for advertising. So advertising agencies started developing web sites and digital banner ads. They’d build these websites and banner ads and then ‘put them up’.

Maybe around five years ago, social media came to be. Suddenly all kinds of conversations were being had in the ‘digital space’; shared information was circulating among people without advertising agencies or their clients having anything to do with it.

And then mobile devices came to be which sped up all this communicating and commerce-related activity in the digital space to a lightning fast pace.

A Reality Check

Today, people everywhere - colleagues and friends, moms and dads, students, artists, technology gurus, teachers, policemen, investment bankers and academics – ‘live’ the internet. They access Google dozens of time every day and get their daily news updates online. Photos are shared and commented on via Facebook, Flickr or Instagram. Vacations are researched, planned and paid for online. Moms right now are circulating blog postings about some new organic pasta on the market. Grandparents are Skyping with their grandkids from continent to continent every day. Youtube is an entertainment channel for just about every single person I know, including my 67 year old father. New bands are born every day on MySpace. My mom lives by her iPhone as does my Dad; my niece and my daughter both carry their Nintendo DSi in one hand and their iPads in the other. This is not a minority report tech future; this is today, everyday, for more and more people as part of daily life.

When we step away from the language in communication circles about ‘the digital space’, ‘the social space’, ‘the mobile space’, this is the reality.

And so, The Inflection Point:

For all the decades past, we communication agencies and clients have considered traditional media to be king and digital media to be secondary, not even at queen status, but more so a court jester. I could go on separately about why: it’s cheaper to produce digital media so it doesn’t get as much attention as traditional media which is incredibly expensive still. And we don’t have good impact metrics yet around digital media to PROVE how much it is contributing to communications and brand health in the minds of our audiences.

But this has changed. Now, today, traditional media and digital media sit at the same table. They have rapidly come to be equals. And we communications agencies and clients are waking up to that reality. Brands are being built exclusively in the digital space in many cases. And among the new generation of consumers, traditional media may indeed be falling by the wayside.

Insert panic here.

If you accept that the above is true, because it is - now, today, traditional media and digital media sit at the same table - then what? Communications that happen in the digital, social and mobile space do not function like traditional media. You do not ‘put them on the air’ or ‘put them up’. They are ongoing, immediate and dynamic by their very nature. And this simple reality radically impacts everything.

We have to think about communications today as an eco-system: interconnected, always-on, living, and constantly evolving.

Impact 1: We can no longer think of communications development as projects that follow a straight path, each one in a separate lane, being developed in parallel. We need new ways of working: fluid, connected, nurturing. We need to ‘carry’ communications, constantly. This has radical implications for the mindset and consequently the processes of developing communications, evaluating communications, and maintaining communications.

Impact 2: This acknowledgement that communications is now an eco-system, requires by definition that the people charged with managing those communications understand ‘systems’ and this is not a common capability. Understanding systems means having an incredible ability to see the big picture – how everything is working together – productively, seamlessly, responsively. And yet it also means having an ability to go deep into any singular ‘node’ within the system to maximize its individual role in the system. This is complex thinking.

Impact 3: Communications producers – writers, art directors, technologists, etc… – need to truly work together to create. Which means they need to understand each other’s craft, in order to truly be able to integrate and build off of each other. This is not a skillset that has been nurtured or taught either through the education system or inside agencies historically.

Journey through the Inflection Point:

There is a mountain to climb to be able to really traverse this inflection point. It may seem straightforward, but it is anything but. It requires:

a) The acceptance that the digital space is seated at the table right next to the traditional media space and that the need to adjust to it is urgent.
b) The acknowledgement that communications today are not about ‘putting it on the air’ or ‘putting it up’; communications today are about creating and managing eco-systems of activity.
c) A change in communications agency processes and client review, ‘purchase’ and maintain processes.
d) An upgrading of communication producers skill sets – to foster a better cross-discipline understanding.

Insert easy button.

I, for one, believe that if brands want to continue to have a place in people’s lives in the future, traversing this inflection point is a must-do. Adjust or be left behind seems to me to be the harsh reality. But more optimistically, this required shift in communications could get us to a much better place on so many levels. This shift will get us communications that matter to people; by default that means brands that are engaging in ways that matter to people. And ladder that further to a place where communications (and brands) can be positive contributing forces in the world. This is free market dynamics at work. Best to acknowledge and understand what people want, and deliver it, because it’s those who will survive.

Heidi McCulloch

Tags: Branding, Digital, Integration, Strategy
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Many media agencies in Canada are struggling with the increased asks of their clients to plan media around the “path to purchase,” rather than through established consumption habits.

AC Nielsen has published some very intriguing data on how mining the differences between the generation gaps can provide specific insight that can be applied to everything from ad planning to promotional assortment: This could be the next generation (no pun intended) of shopper marketing.

How a 60 year old and a 20 year old prepare for -and execute- their retail shopping trip is quite different, however they still may buy the exact same soda, soup, and sandwich bread once they get to the store. Their interactions with the brands to get there may be different, but the end goal of the individual marketing activity remains the same: to help people make better purchase decisions along the way.

The brands that people love, the shoppers that buy them, and the retailers that provide the environment (either physical or virtual) to sell them are all beginning to embrace the opportunities that generational analytics can provide.

Brands
With the growing focus many brands have on activating the path to purchase, there has been an enormous amount of consideration put on the common traits shared by their target shoppers. We are seeing a tremendous amount of innovation in things like packaging in this respect. Some products targeting the 55+ set are changing theirs to specifically address vision impairment, so their products show up more easily on shelf. Other products are putting QR codes or augmented reality markers on their products in order to allow a completely different level of interaction and engagement with the brand at retail. Some brand media plans are being reconstructed to better align with shopping habits, with focus moving from TV to retailer web, from outdoor to on-shelf communication, going where the generational target can have their purchase consideration most affected.

Shoppers
The faster marketers can adapt to the shopping habits of their targets, the better they will be able to optimize the messaging that will generate awareness and purchase intent. It is curious to note that even though shoppers of the “greatest generation” are the ones who most rate shopping as a ‘chore’, they are also the most likely to spend time walking the entire store – leaving them open to incremental signage and opportunities for impulse purchase. On the flip side, Millennials – who shop the least of any segment- actually love shopping, but research first so as not to spend as much time on the actual store floor. They key with them is pre-shop activities via SEO, social, WOM, and electronic couponing. The fundamental truth to engaging shoppers is the understanding that the act of shopping is not just a behavior, but also a generational mindset.

Retailers
You can read articles over and over regarding the impending arrival of US mega retailer Target and what they will do to the general merchandise landscape in Canada. The Nielsen article rightfully describes how Target has created a niche by catering to the Gen X and Millennial segments through trippy advertising, with fully designed shopper marketing executions and promotion of “now” celeb tie-ins like Todd Oldham and Giada De Laurentiis. Those of you who have made the trip past our southern border to pay them a visit may find the advertising and shopper executions around Loblaws new Everyday Essentials lineup rings a little familiar. Loblaw however, has done some fantastic work merging their segmentation research and shopper marketing executions on the grocery side, parlaying it into four massively supported Insiders Report executions around their core generational constituencies (Back to School, Summer BBQ, Holiday Entertaining, and Health and Wellness). Both the retailer and manufacturer communities are taking notice. It’s also notable that retailers like Shoppers Drug Mart are adopting a generational shopper approach for their promotional planning, where diverse tactics like social media, solution-set orientation, loyalty programming, and seniors days are being employed (and integrated) to cater to the interests of their shopper continuum from 18-68 years and beyond.

The Nielson article reference is for US data… Feel free to share any great examples of generational marketing delivering innovative shopper experiences in Canada!

Jason Dubroy

Tags: Customer Experience, Integration, Research, Strategy
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