Past pink

Companies talk a lot about “giving back to the community,” while shareholders are obviously interested in maximizing profits. Advocates of cause marketing - attaching your brand name to a charitable cause - say doing well and doing good can go hand-in-hand. A case in point is the breast cancer awareness campaign, now in its ninth year, organized by Dubai’s Bur Juman shopping center.

Sabina Khandwani, head of PR and marketing at Bur Juman, says charity work such as the company’s “Safe and Sound” campaign makes brands more appealing to customers. “With competition increasing everyday, there is always a need to go the extra mile,” she says. “Customers certainly tend to have a more enduring relationship with organizations that rise above commercial interests to demonstrate real compassion and care and make the effort to deal with real-life issues in an honest, mature and responsible manner.”

And while she agrees that every mention of the ‘Safe and Sound’ campaign is also an indirect advertisement for BurJuman, publicity is not - and certainly cannot be seen to be - an end in itself. “Since Safe and Sound is a Bur Juman initiative, you cannot de-link the campaign from the brand,” he says. “There has to be a thread to connect the effort to the corporate name as it lends it credibility and gives people a point of reference and connectivity.” Khandwani characterizes corporate social responsibility as a way to help businesses manage relationships with influential stakeholders.

The annual nationwide campaign - previously limited to October, breast cancer awareness month, but now running year-round - encompasses a wide and growing list of charity-based activities. Designed to educate women about early breast cancer detection diagnosis and treatment, “Safe and Sound” is arguably the most extensive and comprehensive awareness campaign of its kind in the Middle East.

Launched in 1998, the campaign began largely as an in-mall event involving awareness clinics and the distribution of breast cancer literature. As the project expanded over the years, Bur Juman enlisted the help of companies such as Kodak, Welcare Hospital, Johnson & Johnson, and ENOC/EPPCO filling stations to get the campaign out of the mall and into the local community.

This year’s campaign involved the widest range of activities yet, ranging from a “Pink Walkathon” - where more than 4,000 participants walked 3.6 kilometers for charity - to a fashion show where clothes from the mall’s luxury fashion tenants were modeled by breast cancer survivors. Trained volunteers could also be seen throughout October driving pink cars around the city and distributing brochures and leaflets on the subject.

Bur Juman gives the money raised by the fund-raising initiatives and the sale of charity-ribbons to the Breast Cancer Foundation of the Emirates, which uses it to fund awareness and education programs, community outreach initiatives, and breast screening and treatment services, support service for patients, the Breast Cancer Registry Project, and the Foundation’s research project.

Go beyond

The key to successful branding is going beyond strong commercial relationships, says Khandwani: It is important to also have a meaningful and relevant dialogue with consumers outside the commercial equation. She points out that although Bur Juman is obviously a shopping mall, none of the communications connected with the breast cancer campaign overtly promote or encourage shopping. “Safe and Sound is not a commercial marketing or a branding initiative. Our various other brand campaigns help us to achieve that successfully,” she says.

“Safe and Sound does not bring us any financial returns,” she adds. “It brings us goodwill and respect. We took up the challenge to educate and inform people about breast cancer at a time when there was little being done in this regard. This campaign is funded by us and driven strongly each year to ensure we continue to be a credible platform for information, interaction and trust.”

For marketing execs, one of the upshots of cause marketing is that one needn’t fret over that ever-troublesome marketing equation known as return on investment. “What is of importance here is the result, not the cost,” says Khandwani, who declines to say how much Bur Juman spends on the project each year.

ROI, she says, is judged by the “unyielding support” from consumers - initially from Western and Asian expatriates, but increasingly, over the last few years, from local Emirati women and Arab expatriates as well.

First seen on www.communicate.ae