Reputation Alert – Does Your Brand Kill Polar Bears?

Marketers cannot assume that true costs will not be seen or considered in the purchasing decision.

What is the true cost of your company’s product? Behind the simple economic analysis of materials, labor, marketing and distribution lurks the more complicated question of your brand’s social and environmental impact. Does your brand kill polar bears, and if so how does that fact impact your reputation?

Stephanie Jue, a business, government and society lecturer at McCombs School of Business, says cost economics is just the starting point for determining the societal impact of your product.

“Consider a $1.25 bottle of water,” she says. “What the consumer wants is the water inside, but it has to be in the bottle. We assume the price includes all of the costs of the water and creating the bottle, but consumers don’t pay the full cost of eliminating the plastic and eventually discarding the plastic when it can no longer be recycled.”

If consumers remain oblivious to the added cost there is likely no impact on brand reputation (convenient, portable water is good!), but in today’s information rich world, consumers tend to wise up. Social advocates make sure of it.

Witness the gradual demonization of bottled water as an example of what can happen when true costs are not just revealed, but turned into a cause célèbre.

Is the brand impact a factor of cuteness?

Cute enough for you to care?

How much consumers care about social and environmental impact, speaking from a pure brand perspective, may depend on the “cuteness” of the declared victim.

Jue notes that society is very worried about saving polar bears, for example, which seem to have minimal direct impact on the average person. Endangered honeybees, on the other hand, responsible for pollinating one third of the food crops in the U.S., receive much less concern.

Consumer Brand Choices – Perceptions Trump Logic

“We are ruled by our emotions first, and then we build justifications for our response.”

Originally published in Texas Enterprise.

Let’s consider a popular consumer brand choice you’ve likely thought about. Is the iPhone or the Android better for you? At the time this was written there were more than 97 million results on Google for that question, with lots of data points to consider. Which platform has the most advanced multitasking capacity? Which has better applications? You likely have a list of logical reasons in your head why one or the other is the best choice.

You may be disappointed to know two researchers at The University of Texas at Austin suspect those rational reasons may have little to do with your decision.

The fundamental question is whether consumers make their choices based on logical comparisons of performance, or are they emotional creatures who gravitate to products that appeal to their senses, feelings or moods?

Marketing professor Raj Raghunathan and Ph.D. student Szu-Chi Huang of the McCombs School of Business point to their research study that shows comparative features are important, but mostly as justification after a buyer makes a consumer brand choice based on emotional response.

The Case of the Attractive Chicken and the Unattractive Chicken

In one phase of their study, Raghunathan and Huang showed participants two photos. One was a nice looking, plump chicken. The other was a chicken that looked thin and sickly. Participants were told that the plump chicken was a natural chicken, and the thin chicken was genetically engineered.

The researchers informed half of the participants that natural chickens were healthy but less tasty, and genetically engineered chickens were tasty, but less healthy. The other half were told the opposite.

Ethical Behavior Unwrapped by New Video Series

Jack Abramoff went to jail to learn the importance of business ethics. You can just watch a video.

In 2000, I was running a small brand consulting firm when I landed a choice piece of business in Houston. The client was a promising startup in the new sector of online energy trading, Altra Energy. At the time there was an 800-pound gorilla in the market, Enron Online, and we all knew that beating them at their own game would be challenging. This TV commercial at the time perfectly expressed Enron’s presumed dominance in the energy trading world.

Unbeknownst to this lowly Don Quixote, as Altra and I polished our spears for battle, a self-inflicted disease was already killing the beast from within. On August 22, 2001, Enron Vice President Sherron Watkins delivered a letter to chief executive Ken Lay sharing her concerns that the company might be an “elaborate hoax.” The ugly train wreck that followed has become a case study on unethical business conduct, and Enron became an exclamation point for the call to do a better job teaching ethics and corporate social responsibility in our schools.

Ethics Unwrapped: Beyond Business Ethics

Fast forward a dozen years and McCombs School of Business has just launched Ethics Unwrapped, a charmingly effective free video teaching tool designed to stimulate thought and discussion about ethics and corporate social responsibility in university and high school classrooms. Director Cara Biasucci says she hopes the series will make teaching ethics more attractive to professors.

Social Media Grab Bag for Higher Education Communicators

“Social media is an a la carte approach. Shop away,”

Here are some handy social media tips from the experts at The University of Texas at Austin. Courtesy of Drew Carls, the university’s digital content coordinator. Drew oversees social media assets including the UT Austin Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Six Tips for a Perfectly Timed Facebook Post

To ensure your Facebook posts reach the most people, timing is everything. Here are some tips for getting it right.

Want a Better Social Media Strategy? Try Stealing One

Social media marketers should “steal from the best” when developing their strategies, Amy Kauffman writes. That means shopping around, keeping a close eye on what your rivals are doing and copying the best elements of their strategies. “Social media is an a la carte approach. Shop away,” Kauffman writes.

Five Steps to Getting to Know Your Own Brand

Implementing a solid social media strategy requires developing a deep understanding of what your brand stands for and where it’s going, Amy Kauffman writes.

Will a Crisis at Work Enhance Your Personal Brand?

“Don’t take jobs where the guys before you have done great. Instead, follow losers.”

Four-and-a-half months into my job as director of communications at McCombs School of Business I began a journey that taught me one of the great lessons in leadership.

I received a visit from a noticeably nervous colleague from the computer services department. “We’ve been hacked,” he stammered.

As my mind began to wrap around the import of that statement he proceeded to lay out a worst case scenario for tens of thousands of potentially compromised social security numbers from alumni, students and staff. I immediately called my small team together and told them our communication skills were about to take on new importance for the next few months.

It was only in the aftermath of that crisis communications response that I was able to account for the personal career positives that followed. Yes, after months of 80 hour work weeks, scrambling to set up specialized communication tools, phone banks and mailings (while personally apologizing to perturbed alumni for hours each day) I actually recognized a silver lining in that miserable cloud. It turns out my personal brand within the university was burnished, not tarnished, by the experience.

Lessons in Leadership — Embrace Crisis

John Daly, a highly popular executive coach and communications professor at The University of Texas at Austin, encourages professional audiences to embrace crisis as your opportunity to shine.