Save Our Tiger Aircel Campaign - Leveraging CSR

"Save our tiger campaign" is one more of the recent campaigns which has generated a lot of buzz . The interest is because it has managed to touch consumers emotionally on the issue of saving our national animal. My interest is more in the CSR angle to the campaign, as it is a campaign by Aircel in partnership with World Wild Life Fund. Actually there have been many more campaigns in the recent past which have tried leveraging social issues to work in favor of their brands, and the Tata Tea Jaago Re Campaign would top the list. Others which come to my immediate memory are, Idea trying to leverage issues like saving trees and 'walk-when-you-talk', Nokia and old mobile...

Though earlier I have been critical of the disproportionate benefit that companies are able to derive out these sort of campaigns, or as put bhat in his post on the issue 'advertising in CSR skin' but now with more and more companies adopting a similar approach, I think one needs to look at the situation more dispassionately. I have made an attempt here,

First and perhaps the primary stake holder in such campaigns would be the company, and though the direct benefits are difficult to pinpoint (which would be true for any ad campaign), but the impact on recall (as in the case of aircel) and awareness would the bare minimal expectations that they would have. For brands with high awareness, they can hope to build a positive brand association , as maybe the case with Tata Tea. Infact Tata Tea has reported growth in the market share across the last few years when the campaign has been running, but then how much of that can be attributed to the Jaago Re Campaign?

And next is the benefit to the cause which they are supporting , be it the tigers or corruption or saving water (HUL had a campaign where they spoke about saving water) . Specifically if one were to look at the save tiger initiative, with many initiatives over the years that have not yielded much results I see so no harm if some wants to make one more attempt, but then saving tigers maybe more of a operational/policy issue than some think linked to increasing consumer awareness . Though the idea would be that increased awareness would mean stronger policies which would help save tigers. But .....

If you look issues like increasing the awareness with regard to voting rights and making it easier for the younger people to register for voting is some thing more concrete.

One thing which is favor of these kind of campaigns is the ease with which these campaigns can be extended on to the Internet, through websites and communities and making it more interactive...

Coming back to the issue of why this sudden interest in linking your brand with a social cause. I think it is driven by the fact that today the traditional ways of differentiating your brand are becoming harder to sustain, and brands are desperately on look out for issues through which they are able to hang of consumers attention.