You Gotta Have Heart: Building Brands by Improving Families’ Lives

Companies with ideals of improving people’s lives at the center of all they do outperform the market by a huge margin.

Brands targeting families should ensure that all their communication and media choices make parents’ and caregivers’ lives easier rather than harder. This includes delivering messages that parents and caregivers want to reinforce with their children and advertising in entertainment environments that do the same.

These are some of the key insights shared by former Procter & Gamble Global Marketing Officer Jim Stengel earlier today in an exclusive webinar with members of the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) Alliance for Family Entertainment (AFE). The pioneering marketer, now adjunct professor of marketing at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and president and CEO of The Jim Stengel Company, focused on core themes from his book, Grow:How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies and how they apply to AFE companies.

The webinar was hosted by Stephen Quinn, AFE chairman and EVP, chief marketing officer at Walmart. Stengel’s remarks also included findings from one of his projects, an unprecedented global analysis of 50,000 brands over a 10-year period that looked at what drives strong long-term business results. He cited successes by blue chip brands such as Dove, Pampers, and IBM — all AFE members — whose bond with their consumers is based on their ability to improve their lives and those of their families.

Stengel told the group, whose members collectively control one out of every three advertising dollars on U.S. network television, brands with core ideals in one of five specific human values tend to outperform their rivals. These values include eliciting joy, enabling connection, inspiring exploration, evoking pride, and impacting society.

“When advertisers discover an ideal in one of these five fields of fundamental human values, it results in a bond between the brand and the consumer that is critical to protect,” said Stengel. “For brands with a core target of families, this bond can be broken not only by what messages the brand communicates but also where the brand chooses to communicate. So it is vital that family brands advertise in programming that is appropriate.”

“Jim’s insight goes hand in hand with what we see repeatedly in AFE research,” added Stephen Quinn. “There is an incremental value in recall and brand connection when family brands advertise in what parents and caregivers consider to be family appropriate programming. It is critical that we move media dollars against the right family content for our brands.”

“This insight continues to support the AFE’s mission,” said Bob Liodice, president and CEO of the Association of National Advertisers. “ANA members with family brands are committed to change the current media landscape and ultimately offer consumers more family programming options.”