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A recent advertisement for Dove starts with a blonde girl about 5 or 6 years old. She playfully moves away from the camera. “Let’s sit down and I’ll read you a book,” she said. The image fades onto a white title page: “The Story of Mary”.
What follows is a montage of Mary’s life, at first happy and carefree, but – once she is given a cell phone – quickly becoming distressing. The ad feels more like a short film or public service announcement than a direct argument for buying soap. The selfies are interspersed with footage of handwritten notes about overeating and influencers demonstrating waist cinchers. The montage ends with a teenage Mary looking directly into the camera in tears; the next shot is an arm stuck with an IV tube, signaling that she has an eating disorder.
“The cost of toxic beauty content is higher than we think,” reads a title card with the Dove logo. The video ends with a call to visit Dove.com to support the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that would require social media platforms to limit teens’ access to harmful content.
The advert was praised for highlighting the link between social media and eating disorders and providing parents with an opportunity to talk to their children about the subject. It is also part of a long series of (to times controversial) Dove advertisements that focus on the effect of the beauty industry on self-perception and self-esteem. By exploiting women’s insecurities, Dove attempts to position himself as a “hero” capable of solving not only personal hygiene problems, but also psychological problems. The truth is a company can’t do that and hasn’t done it here. (A petition for an imperfect The bill simply won’t do much other than easily get signatories on the website where Dove sells its products.) Instead, ads like this are pointless: they tap into the real emotion but do little to bring about real change, while filling corporate eyes. coffers. Using these tactics for mental health is particularly perilous, and it’s easy for brands to cause real harm.
Such promotion is known as cause marketing, a strategy in which brands connect to social issues. I first wrote about cause marketing over a decade ago in my book Compassion, Inc. I discovered that after 9/11, connecting brands to causes became imperative. First, the ads were intended to demonstrate patriotism, such as Kmart’s full-page ad depicting an American flag in the New York Times. Pretty quickly, the promotion shifted to vaguely consumer-related appeals for philanthropy, like Home Depot asking consumers to take their tax cut to their stores and donate it to the United Way once there. Although cause marketing has been around since the 1970s, the combination of the desire to do something – anything – and the exponential growth of the Internet and social media has allowed this strategy to take hold.
At the same time, institutions such as religion, family, and lifelong employment were losing the weight of identity markers they once were. American companies have filled the void with brands like Starbucks, Apple, and Prius, which have become the building blocks of personal identity. Because brands say something about the buyer, consumers easily gravitate toward those that are rooted in social values – and even come to expect that from them.
This expectation of a connection with the brand is particularly important for Generation Z consumers, who are now in their late teens and 20s and establishing brand loyalty. Research shows that Generation Z like when brands are clear about their values, and this seems especially true when it comes to mental health. Youth marketing company YPulse found that 71 percent of Gen Z consumers like companies to incorporate mental health into their marketing.
The problem is that many companies have looked at these numbers and chosen to play a role rather than create real impact. The biggest mistakes brands make when doing this are inserting themselves into social conversations where they have no status or producing hypocritical ads, like Amazon calling its employees heroes during COVID only to try to derail organizing efforts to combat workplace abuse.
While examples of brands getting it wrong abound, it doesn’t have to be. If done more intentionally, purpose marketing, today’s term for cause marketing, can be great: for causes, for consumers, and for brands. The way forward is to focus on impact: what is the social issue the brand is facing? in a unique position to solve? This is where success lies.
To do better, brands need to connect a cause to their core competencies. Food manufacturers are most successful when they can help reduce food insecurity, like Panera by donating bread to local food banks. Transparency and consistency are equally important. MAC Cosmetics makes an annual donation to HIV/AIDS charities by selling a special lipstick. The campaign has been running since 1994 and all money made from the sale of the lipstick – not just the profits or a percentage – is donated to charity.
Long-term commitment is essential when the cause in question is mental health, a subject that doesn’t easily get wrapped up in marketing tape. Burger King learned this the hard way in 2019, after launching the “Real Meals” campaign in collaboration with Mental Health America. The fast food giant has created a series of different “ambience” meals (clearly a pun on McDonald’s Happy Meal), including a “Blue Meal” and a “Yaaas Meal.” He produced a YouTube video with the slogan “No one is happy all the time. And that’s okay. It seemed like Burger King was more interested in taking on a competitor than authentically engaging with the mental health crisis.
Mental health doesn’t have a clear product pair, like Panera and food donations. So, companies that responsibly make mental health their goal do so as part of a commitment to their customers. To embody this commitment, they must visibly and consistently provide information about mental health services, support existing organizations with donations and volunteers, and integrate their commitment into their brand identity.
A perhaps surprising example here is TOMS shoes. Most people probably think of TOMS as a buy one, give one company. This strategy has proven controversial. The company’s top-down approach to donating its shoes (rather than working with local organizations) has made consumers feel good about their purchase, but it Did little to resolve underlying problems (while making harmful assumptions about poverty). Learn from your mistakes, today TOMS donates a third of its profits to one of three initiatives: mental health, improving access to opportunities, and ending gun violence. The company does not do the charitable work itself. Instead, it provides grants to grassroots groups through which changes can be made at the local level, and TOMS makes long-term commitments to these partners.
Other brands are rethinking how their own approach to consumers can exacerbate mental health issues. Lush, for example, moved away from Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok in 2021 and continues to stay off these platforms. “The serious effects of social media on mental health are being ignored by these platforms,” the company said in a statement. Instead of product photos, the brand’s Instagram page hosts a collage that says, “Be somewhere else.”
Ultimately, the most successful companies are those that have mental health support built into their DNA, like Madhappy or Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty. One percent of all profits from the sale of Madhappy clothing are donated to the Madhappy Foundation, which provides grants to organizations seeking or providing mental health resources. Likewise, Gomez is well known for her mental health activism, and her company’s Rare Impact Fund hopes to raise $100 million over 10 years to expand access to mental health services.
Brands interested in mental health are better off being alternative, even if revenue is what motivates participation. The corporate world is arguably more powerful than nation states and certainly more powerful than nonprofits, and it will be difficult to get things done without it. Today, in fact, brands have every interest in doing better: New research shows that consumers not only want brands to be committed to values, but also to know the difference between genuine support and performative allyship. Profit-driven or not, getting businesses to authentically commit to tackling mental health stigma is a trickle. positive.
If you or someone you know has an eating disorder, NEDA Helpline is available online, or by text or by phone at 1-800-931-2237.
If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, you can call or text 988 to reach out Suicide and crisis lifeline.
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