Robin Hood Marketing, Colombia Style
- Thu, July 29 2010
- Filed under: Marketing essentials
Left: Director of Marketing Catalina MejÃa and Right: Executive Director Ãngela Escallón Emiliani of Conexion Colombia.
I’m at the Conexion Colombia nonprofit conference in Bogota, where I spoke on Robin Hood Marketing and online outreach - and where I got to hear from a Colombian marketing guru as well as a panel of corporate marketing executives. I want to share some of what I learned in one post today, another tomorrow. What was most clear was this: Good marketing principles are the same, anywhere in the world.
Gabriel Perez, professor of marketing at the University of Los Andes, and someone who has marketed everything from Chiclets to cars, had these universal insights to offer:
1. Old school. Perez said marketing used to work like this: A company would think it had an offering that was so important, people would come looking for it - and buy it. Unfortunately, this is how I think much of nonprofit marketing still operates - we have a great cause, so we expect people to know about it - and give.
2. Modern marketing. For-profit marketers have realized this isn’t enough. The point of marketing isn’t to offer what we think is best - it’s to listen to consumers, understand their needs, and innovate to meet those needs. Marketing in this way permeates an entire organization, because it fuels product development, not just promotion. This is what great companies do - and what nonprofits need to do. What do your donors want? What do your beneficiaries feel? How can you structure all you do to meet their needs better?
Comments
Another post. we’re all grateful for. Again, thankyou for taking your time to write such useful and thoughtful posts.
“Find a starving market” - definitely listen to what the consumers want unless you really want to be a non-profit business!
this is really interesting i wonder how to implement that method in our business at home
This is a very hard concept for cause marketers to wrap their heads around, because the “clients” they are serving are not necessarily the donors. However, two examples of this that have worked well are…
Zoos that ask people to adopt animals, and therefore structure the adoption program to cater to what they believe zoo members are likely to want.
Organizations asking people to sponsor orphans in villages far away, who craft programs designed to appeal to what a sponsor might feel and might want.