Purpose-Driven Marketing
Purpose-Driven Marketing
4 minute read · Issue Number 105 · January 28th, 2022
This week, a good friend at MKTG Sports shared with me their latest public report – DECODING – which is packed with fascinating insights around marketing, sponsorships, and fan engagement in sports.
Specifically, it covers fans’ expectations from sponsors, attitudes and behaviors derived from the pandemic, live events vs. online, and more. (You can download the full report for free here)
While I encourage you to read it all, I want to also dive deeper here into the one chapter that caught my eye the most – purpose-driven marketing.
From Traditional Marketing to Purpose-Driven Activations
Marketing is the process of positioning a brand in the consumers’ minds to create associations that leads them to spend money on their products/services and build feelings of attachment and loyalty to them.
This process has countless names and forms in sports – athlete endorsements, broadcast advertisements, event activations, logos in uniforms, etc.
However, with the recent rise of findings and research related to consumer behavior – brands figured that to create more engagement with fans, they had to come up with more promising marketing strategies.
“What do fans value?” – was the question in the heads of brand managers, and “how can we support it?”
This is how purpose-driven marketing started and quickly became a priority for brands in the last few years.
The core idea is to align the brand’s values with something bigger than itself and support diverse causes through their different marketing campaigns.
What types of causes?
Anything from social justice, environment, financial inequality, gender equality, and others.
In fact, fans are more likely to notice and support brands when their marketing efforts show they are purpose-oriented:
So does this mean brands will sell more if they say they support a cause?
Of course not.
Purpose-driven anything follows the “Show me, don’t tell me” principle.
Consumers want to see what actions back your support to the cause. How have you integrated such support into your daily operations and business model? What impact have you created? What numbers & statistics back that?
Essentially, it turns the tables around – instead of having brands create content of cause support, it forces brands to support a cause actively AND create content while doing it.
There are many reasons why purpose-driven marketing has proven effective, but it will only work if it’s authentic. And the benefits are tangible:
Fans will be more engaged, loyal and supportive, are more likely to purchase from your brand, and will speak greatly about your brand.
🔗 Learn more about purpose-driven marketing:
Halftime Snacks Episode with John Balkam – Building Better Sponsorship Partnerships or check out the transcript of the conversation here.
ESG: Puma – The projects, strategy, and actions Puma is doing to improve the environment, social and internal governance.
🎙 Halftime Snacks Podcast
Using Software to Improve Online Fitness Experiences
Dariuš is a young man, but he’s already CRUSHING IT at the intersection of fitness and technology. He’s the co-founder and CEO of FittyAI.
FittyAI provides a virtual trainer that gives real-time feedback to the user on his training which fitness platforms can integrate into multiple online fitness platforms.
We talked about connected fitness, technology in health and wellness, FittyAI, the fitness market, and more.
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