Walking the line on social values has become a high-wire act for brands, with missteps leading to boycotts and sales slumps, a challenge recently highlighted by controversies that impacted major brands like Bud Light and Target.
Chad Hickey believes the answer is not to retreat from values but to embrace them as a core business driver, tapping into a growing wave of “conscious consumerism,” where shoppers increasingly direct their spending toward companies that mirror their own principles.
In this video interview with Beet.TV’s Lisa Granatstein, Hickey, CEO of Givsly, said connecting advertising to community support can forge a deeper connection with consumers and, ultimately, drive performance. “Kindness is the strategy to get to the KPI, which should always be outcomes or sales,” he said.
Moving beyond ‘purpose’
Givsly is a business-to-business platform providing a mechanism for professionals to connect over business meetings with a charitable twist.
Through their service, advertising inventory and corporates’ social responsibility objectives are aligned, enabling the transaction of media space to support various nonprofit causes.
While many advertisers have embraced purpose-led marketing, Hickey advocates for a shift in terminology toward “values-based marketing.” He contended that terms like “purpose,” “CSR,” and “ESG” have accumulated negative connotations or lack a clear link to business results. “They’ve really gotten a bad rap, or it’s not as tangible in how this actually drives sales,” he said.
Research from firms like PwC shows a significant majority of consumers are willing to stop buying from companies that treat employees, the environment, or their community poorly. “There’s this trend of conscious consumerism where people are voting with their wallets,” Hickey explained.
This behavior, he argued, is not limited to one side of the political spectrum. “Look at what’s happened with Target. Look at what’s happened with Bud Light. And it is on both sides,” Hickey said. “A lot of people sometimes think this is a liberal woke thing that is happening. But when you really think about what happened with Bud Light, that was a conservative movement. Both sides are doing it.”
Performance without sacrifice
A common concern for marketers is that embracing humanity-focused campaigns might mean sacrificing performance metrics. Hickey argued that the two goals are not mutually exclusive and can, in fact, reinforce each other. He maintained that authentically showcasing a brand’s values resonates with consumers and directly impacts the bottom line.
“You don’t have to sacrifice one or the other,” he stated. Citing his company’s own campaign data, he said the approach yields tangible results. “We are actually finding that brand awareness goes up, video completions go up, that in-store visitation for QSRs are going up to 30% with our campaigns, and it’s all because those brands are taking these strategies.”
Ultimately, kindness should not be seen as the final objective but as the method to achieve it, according to Hickey. The core key performance indicator should remain tied to business outcomes. “I don’t think that kindness or values is the core KPI,” he clarified. “I think it is the strategy that gets you to better performance of whatever your KPI is.”
You’re watching “Rethinking the Rules of Engagement: Kindness & Transparency in Advertising, a Beet.TV Leadership Series, presented by WunderKIND Ads.” For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
