Does Visibility Marketing Ever Serve a Purpose? Part 2: Frugal/Green Marketing Tip, July 2010

27 Jun, 2010  Clean & Green Club, Frugal and Green Marketing, Frugal Marketing

Last month, we looked at the incredible effectiveness of visibility marketing in advancing social causes. Can it also advance a for-profit business, and do so without buying enormous amounts of expensive advertising? Can small businesses take advantage of this kind of messaging?

I’d give the answer a qualified yes. Branding/visibility campaigns can work for small businesses, especially those with a social and/or environmental message. And now that a branding campaign can drive traffic to a website that reveals the whole story, it’s easier to pull one off than it would have been 20 years ago.

A large-scale but very counterculture example is Ben & Jerry’s. How did B&J’s become one of the two dominant players in the US superpremium ice cream market? It was a company started by two hippies with no business background out of a garage in Vermont, after all.

I suggest that the very reason B&J’s was successful was in its ability to not just be socially and environmentally conscious, and not just make fabulous ice cream, but to tell the twin stories of its commitment to the earth/society and its commitment to a very high quality product. And many of its key tools involved visibility marketing: sponsoring conferences, using its packaging as a billboard for these commitments, and lots of free media coverage.

On a smaller scale, a local fair-trade organic coffee company, Dean’s Beans, has done some wonderful visibility marketing: from bumper stickers that say, “Make Coffee, Not War” to founder Dean Cycon’s numerous personal appearances promoting his book on fair-trade coffee adventures (see my review here), to partnering with local community organizations to make custom-labeled coffee that benefits these charities, to underwriting various public radio programs, Dean’s Beans has focused heavily on marketing by being visible.

So what factors will go into a successful small-business visibility campaign? Here are a few ideas:

  • If you’re branding a company or product name, organization, or slogan, it’s much easier if the name itself conveys the core benefit or goal (remember last month’s example of Save The Mountain? A commercial example would be the bagel-slicing machine, Bagel Biter)
  • Even a more-or-less pure branding campaign can have a USP (Unique Selling Proposition): a reason to do business with you instead of someone else
  • The more senses you can use, the more successful your campaign will be (we’ll talk about this more next month)
  • If you can work in a save-the-world or improve-the-world message, and do so easily, branding will work better for you
  • Remember that paid advertising is only one among many visibility strategies, and that you need a lot of (expensive) insertions to make the investment pay off; consider a range of cheaper tactics, including your own packaging, bumper stickers, media publicity, social media, and many others

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