Promote Positive To Empower Your Brand (And Change The World)

Your communication platform can be used to send positive and inspiring messages to consumers. What’s in it for your business? It will be viewed as progressive and memorable.

The results of a U.S. presidential election ripple across the globe, not at least in the world of marketing. Once the industry works out exactly which communications strategy has turned out to be most successful during the campaign, this strategy often becomes a mainstream marketing approach.

Dwight Eisenhower, for example, pioneered the use of television for presidential campaigns, and Barack Obama accelerated the use of social media and its acceptance professionally. This year we have seen the power that data crunching has, with Cambridge Analytica working on the Trump campaign since early voting began.

In the months to come, this will yield some valuable reflections, and most likely present many marketers with the case study that they need to properly start using data insights for their own communications purposes.

However, I believe it is at least equally important we recognise that it’s also time to consider how brand positions can be used to help promote the positive over the negative—not just to help change the world for the better, but to become more visible and worthy of attention to a large audience exhausted by a lengthy election showdown.

Acknowledge The Negative Spiral

The recent political events in the U.S. are not a stand-alone phenomenon, but part of something occurring across the western hemisphere, including here, in Denmark, and in the U.K, as seen in the Brexit referendum result.

Brands need to be aware of how to deal with a rising confrontational polarisation of opinion, cultures, and countries, which are both negative and positive. The power of emotion over the rational is, in effect, fuelled by frustration and fear of what the near future may bring.

Luckily, we have a platform of communication and attention that gives us an opportunity to send a message that makes a positive difference. Whether you think it is more of a responsibility than an opportunity is up to you, but taking action will create win-win situations for both your brand and, as presumptuous as it may sound, the world in general.

Brands Voicing The Positive

There are some wonderful examples of brands using their marketing platform to push the positive in parallel with promoting their product.

Danish real estate chain home just finished its inaugural homePrisen (home awards), where people were asked to nominate whatever makes them proud of in their local communities to win cash prices and national recognition.

Another Danish brand, the mobile services company Call me, uses its TV spots not to just promote their services, but to continuously ask people to be polite and proper when speaking to each other. Even if you do not understand Danish, you can get the gist of their message by taking a look at their videos on YouTube, such as this one called “Watch Your Language—It Costs Nothing.”

These are not usually considered as typical examples of corporate social responsibility (CSR), but they are examples of brands showing great care, responsibility, and willingness to use their position to help nudge people’s mindsets towards more positive and constructive thinking and actions.

Furthermore, such campaigns are often driven by the personal values of brand stakeholders rather than just a marketing idea.

It is very easy to get caught up in a negative spiral and its rhetoric. When done by politicians, it green-lights a certain level of animosity on social media that is picked up and amplified further. I am among those who believe mainstream press has lost its way, only repeating and amplifying the negative and sensationalist for a quick spike of likes, views, shares, and comments, rather than adding a much-needed perspective.

All attention is considered good attention, and it can be a very tough position to actively take a stand against. Yet, even as I would applaud any brand for doing this, you do not have to. There are other ways, you will just have to find the one that is right for you.

Become Influential, Progressive, And Memorable

For a brand to enjoy the benefits of being involved in doing something good, there needs to be an understanding that nowadays CSR is more about empowering the individual to make a difference than making certain that everybody knows that you have donated funds to a good cause. This is something addressed previously on CMO.com in Karma Is The Key To Great CSR.

Now imagine that you use your position and attention as a brand to promote positive thinking and actions. Basically, it is the same thing. As you inspire and enable people to become better, their conception of your brand becomes that of being influential, progressive, … and memorable.

Your move.