Target: Working Collaboratively for Sustainable Impact
By Vicki Wray, Author, Communicating Social Impact
Target has a legacy of giving 5 percent of its profit, but for a long time it was not telling a collective story or using that story to help advance the business. In past years, messaging had targeted a variety of social impact programs and partners with fragmented media buys and limited reach. According to the Target marketing team, the net result was that, despite these efforts, few Target guests really knew what Target stands for or realized the positive impact the company was having in the community. While prior campaigns had briefly raised awareness, there was no sustainable impact.
With a desire to improve on that by both the community relations and the brand marketing teams, the decision was made to work collaboratively and leverage a unified approach to all messaging and prioritization. The marketing objective was to drive awareness of the legacy of giving and demonstrate positive impact in the community. The communications strategy centered on “Around for Good,” and focused on three areas: around for schools, around for communities, and around for the earth. Providing this focus helped the team clarify what proof points would be needed to build the Target story. Further, it was decided that the proof points would touch the heart, not the head.
At the same time, the CSR team was exploring shared value and looking at multiple places across the business where shared initiatives could be created. The two efforts coalesced with the “Buy one, give one” campaign that provided financial, reputational, and social benefits, and aligned with Around for Good. In fact, the genesis for this campaign was the business need for Target to differentiate itself from other retailers of school supplies. This was accomplished by promising to donate one school supply item to a student in need for every branded school supply purchased, up to $25 million in supplies that would potentially benefit nearly two million children.
Like all great communication programs, this one had a lot of “tentacles” targeting influencers, guests, and Target team members, who, with this initiative, had a way to drive sales while at the same time doing good. The partnership with marketing, from strategy through execution, provided access to campaign dollars for something with a social benefit that had previously been allocated for brand marketing campaigns.
“Marketing and CSR have a healthy tension, but the most important thing for both of us is what matters to our guests” says Nathan Shore, senior group manager of brand marketing. “Our guests are the starting point for everything we do at Target, so when guests tell us community involvement is an important story to tell, we know this is not only a story we want to tell, this is a story we must tell. And that is something Marketing and CSR can best do by working together.”
The advantages for the CSR communicators in working with brand marketing are clear: more resources with which to tell their story and greater impact from having a cohesive, overarching narrative. The marketing team benefits from the passion and knowledge of the CSR team, which is on the frontline, making good work happen. And the business benefits from having provided another requested dimension to guest experiences at Target.
About Communicating Social Impact
This case study is taken from Communicating Social Impact, the report of a 12-company research working group convened by The Conference Board that examined how leading organizations have effectively integrated promising communications practices into their corporate social responsibility and social impact work. Available free, the report is one of a range of publications on social impact measurement that The Conference Board has published in the past 12 months. The other publications, including Framing Social Impact Measurement, are available to members here.
About the author:
Vicki Wray
Author
Communicating Social Impact
Vicki Wray is a communications consultant, helping leaders at all levels of an organization engage employees and drive change in support of business goals. She brings over 20 years of employee communications experience to bear on such challenges as executive communications, strategic organizational communications, crisis communications, CSR communications, and large-scale change initiatives, including mergers, acquisitions, and restructurings, in addition to annual reports. You can contact Vicki at [email protected].
