Social Brands: Cause Based Brands

Social (or Cause Based) Brands represent a third stage of capitalism that combines market based behavior and modern corporate branding techniques with cause marketing. This article and slide presentation represents an overview and introduction to a more lengthy proposal calling for the creation of a licensing platform for social or cause based brands that is similar to the licensing schemes utilized by major corporations, celebrity endorsers, professional and university athletics.

World Social Brand Market: Part TwoGoogle Presentation

Some Steps:

Make this directory available for licensing and distribution to consumer product manufacturers, retailers, designers, licensing agents, and online advertisers.

Utilize aftermarket services that are available to provide brand protection and a full range of on-demand licensing services - from logos, stitches, to hangtags and holograms.

As a second, complementary system, use iconic descriptors to provide a legible system of identifiers indicating product conformity to environmental, health, and labor standards.

Background:

I am aware of several submissions made to Google that suggest expanded use of social signs by using "Click for a Cause" campaigns that create revenue streams to for charitable programs. Delivering a licensable directory of social signs to product manufacturers, retailers, and designers would enlarge distribution and provide for an accelerated adoption by consumers and businesses alike. The result is more funds for causes. Specialty retail stores (similar to stores that sell nothing but licensed sports apparel) could ultimately emerge that would exclusively carry cause related licensed products.

The same licensing platform used to present generic cause related icons or logos could be shared by charitable organizations, most of whom do not currently have licensing programs. Charitable organizations are relative latecomers to licensing. The American Red Cross, our most popular and recognizable charity, only recently established a program (2006).

A seismic shift is occurring. Consumers are increasingly attuned to social conditions and the causes that address them. Consumption today is a part of establishing human identity and communicating values to others. Product licensing forms a prominent and highly visible layer of this communication system. I believe that social causes represented as trademarked brand symbols constitute powerful incentives for consumers to take action and a more socially constructive alternative to licensing celebrities, Disney characters, athletic teams and sports figures. Positive values are communicated at every level.

Cause Marketing:

Combine this consumer judo with ecological consumption and we have the beginnings of a rupture: A real possibility to reach a detente in the all this useless Keeping up with the Joneses. Detente is an apt metaphor. Rest assured our current paradigm is leading to a mutually assured destruction.

But our situation is far from hopeless.

Social signifiers are a natural and positive outcome of what has occurred within the "classical" economics of value: a revolution in value itself. This revolution in value has increasingly divorced the market prices of goods from their traditional components such as labor, supply and demand, and capital. A new structural element, signification, in which a more popular term "brand" is encompassed, has entered the equation as a powerful new force.

Building on the high profile success of using social signifiers (brand symbols) for the purposes of cause related marketing, our task is to create an extensive and expandable directory of trademarked logos that correspond to social needs. Social causes are myriad, diverse and deeply personal. A complete library or directory will allow for greater choice and flexibility for both consumers and businesses alike.

Current cause marketing campaigns, to date, however noble, have not been self sustaining. They frequently have been one offs that are too dependent on donors, fund raising events and celebrity spokespersons. These inefficiencies are not lost on potential donors themselves; too much money is spent raising money, which makes collecting donations all the more difficult.

Social issues have never been more challenging and urgent: they deserve their own marketplace. Consumers and producers deserve more choice in the causes they choose to support, particularly in view of the available choices that are otherwise available to them. A platform is needed to support the vast needs and desires of producers consumers for cause related marketing and product branding. The creation of a complete catalog and directory of iconic signs could vastly enlarge this marketplace. It would be the first of its kind.

A Periodic Table of Needs

Social needs are without bounds and may be described in various ways. My proposal is to describe them symbolically as brand symbols (trademarked logos) and put them into a structured and ordered system that would share a visual, organizational, thematic and numerical relationship to The Periodic Table of the Elements. I suggest this to provide both a reference point and a crucial analogy: social needs are not random but basic, elemental. They should be treated accordingly: just like the elements, the right mix is a key to stability. Neglect, in contrast, is a recipe for social unrest and destruction.

According to management theorists, Brand Symbols are the containers that hold brand equity. They are powerful icons that create and store meaning. They enable us to instantly recognize and recall an array of associations and connections that can attract and retain our affection.

Children can learn them before they can read and write.

Unfortunately, branding for most universities has more to do with promoting the athletic departments than education, resulting in a misdirection of identity and intent as to the purpose of higher education. A panoply of education signifiers would attempt a new direction, emphasizing the primary purpose of school and focusing on providing awareness, visibility and scholarships to academic standouts rather than athletes. Athletes already receive an inordinate amount of encouragement and attention from the media when compared with scholars. As professionals, they receive inordinate pay. In the past 30 to 40 years, this pay has become radically divorced from the mean incomes of better educated workers in traditional fields.

Every college and university should be prompted to develop brand symbols to better identify their strengths in education. Why is it that athletic departments get so much attention and resources, blurring the identity and visability of higher education? The media is only partly to blame. Educators themselves must bear some responsibility, having left marketing the brands of higher educaction almost entirely to coaches, althetic directors and sports teams.

For the environment, our most critical concern, the basic elements that are key to our survival need better signification and representation in order to protect and ensure our basic survival. Here is where our current economic regime is most abject and impoverished. Cigarette companies , for example, may destroy health and damage the air we breathe yet have commercial value. The products are packaged and sold in a way to create brand value. Air and water, in contrast, as they occur naturally, have none.

I believe clean air and clean water may be reduced to basic, iconic signifiers for licensing and distribution around the world. With the growing concern for our immediate environment, revenue generated from such a regime could be enormous and sustainable for generations to come. Air, Water, Endangered Species, Wetlands, Rain Forests are all potentially massive and powerful (and hopefully enduring!) brands to be leveraged in the marketplace. Even more, basic environmental signifiers could serve as a consumer centric regulatory regime, signifying products and services that comply with specific, consumer driven environmental standards. Logos are more easily readable and may refer to a larger body information and meaning than simple text.

Our current system has performed miracles in the creation of wealth while it has fared less well in the equitable distribution of it, failing critically over the past generation as trends toward income equality reversed themselves. However, our current economic system is most impoverished in creating wealth in an environment of long term sustainability. How does a growth economy rationally incorporate serious conservation? This is the Achilles heal of our system. Sustainable affluence rests upon the preservation of natural resources and a climate system that supports biodiversity.

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