How Giving Back Increases Brand Loyalty
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Christmas is only one week away. As we get carried away in the craziness of the holiday season, I would encourage everyone to remember what the holiday is all about. Christmas isn’t so much about getting, but about giving. We can ask ourselves, “How can I give back?”
Key Takeaways
Here are the key takeaways from this episode:
- We should give back, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it can also build brand loyalty, increase our sales, and motivate our employees as they feel a sense of purpose.
The Spirit of Giving
When we were young, Christmas was probably about the excitement of the gifts that we were going to receive. However, I would guess that for each of us, there came a time when Christmas became about giving.
I can remember the meaning of Christmas changing for me when I was about 12 years old. I was a boy scout and for my Eagle Scout project, we picked three families that were in need and we raised money for them. We ran a drive to collect aluminum cans and newspapers to recycle for money to donate to the families in need.
As a young boy, I remember how that transformed what Christmas meant to me. I don’t remember anything that I received that Christmas, but I vividly remember many of those gifts we gave and how I felt being able to be part of a project like that.
As businesses, how do we give back? How do we create a Christmas season focused not on what we receive, but what we can give? How do we make Christmas truly meaningful for ourselves, our employees, and the community?
Businesses Giving Back
I want to start off by sharing a few stories of organizations and how they’ve given back. I hope this might get the wheels turning and give you some ideas of how your organization can give back.
There’s a company called Dippin Daisies that sells apparel, footwear, and accessories. When the pandemic hit, the swimwear retailer repurposed some of its factories to produce and donate more than 5,000 masks to those in the medical field. Not only that, but when a customer bought a mask, they donated one to a first responder (Source: NetSuite.com).
TOMS shoes ran a “buy one, give one” campaign where they give away one pair of shoes to someone in need for every pair of shoes that someone buys. This is a great way to focus on giving and use it to also drive the business.
When COVID-19 hit, Harold’s BBQ, a diner in Arkansas, helped serve more than 2,500 sack lunches to truckers from US, Canada, and Mexico passing by the restaurant. When they started to run out of supplies, they turned to Facebook for help and asked the community for donations to help support their cause.
“They can only eat out of their refrigerator and cooler for so long,” Massey said in an interview with the local TV station. “I said, ‘I’ve got to get them a hot sandwich. But, I just didn’t have supplies.’” The business owner was flooded with food and financial donations afterwards (Source: Liquid Capital Blog).
Another example of giving back is Chewy, a business that sells dog’s supplies. During the holidays last year, Chewy matched customer purchase amounts for Giving Tuesday and donated up to $2 million in supplies to animal welfare organizations in need (Source: USA Today).
Notice how they focused on animal welfare organizations. Why is that so important? Their ideal customers are extremely passionate about dogs, so they focused their donations to animals. By doing this, they likely gained customer loyalty.
Finally, the last example I want to give you is Minted. During the holidays last year, for any aprons purchased, 100% of the proceeds supported Every Mother Counts, an organization that helps with maternity care. (Source: USA Today).
How to Give Back
We should give back, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it can also build brand loyalty, increase our sales, and motivate our employees as they feel a sense of purpose.
For example, because of TOMS “buy one, give one” campaign, they likely had many more customers choosing to buy from them. As TOMS generates more money, they can do more good. This is the concept of social entrepreneurship. The funds that come from our businesses can actually enable a much greater change for good in our communities.
As businesses, we should feel a sense of responsibility for our communities and for our world. Our businesses only exist because of our communities, and we should make sure we take care of them. So, how do we do this?
I recommend that we start off by finding the passion statements of our customers. If you don’t know how to find the highest level passion statements of your ideal customers, you can go download my free ebook at PassionMarketing.com.
Once you know those passions, find causes, initiatives, and projects that can support those passions. Sometimes it’s a really good idea to find organizations that are already doing a lot of the legwork, and then we can partner with them. Most times they can do things a lot better than us and at a bigger scale.
I know there are some people listening to this that want to give back, but they won’t be in a spot financially to do so. And that’s very understandable. We are still going through COVID-19 and I know that’s affected a lot of our organizations. If we can’t give back financially, I encourage us to find a way to empower our community to give back or support our employees in other ways.
What can we do? What good can we do for the causes that we and our ideal customers care about? I would challenge your today to focus this week on finding some way that you can give back a little bit more.
Next Steps
- Get a free ebook about passion marketing, and learn how to become a top priority of your ideal customers at PassionMarketing.com.
- Subscribe to Monetization Nation on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, our Facebook Group, and on your favorite podcast platform.
