Consumers and Businesses looking for ‘brand allies’ to help them make the world a better place

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Each of us has a short window of time to make a positive impact in our lives. This drives many of us to find creative ways to manage our time and even integrate goals in both our professional and personal lives.

I think I am representative of a growing market of people (as both a consumer and business owner) that seeks to live by principles at work and at home. I’ve always been intuitive about trends and how they evolve from subcultures to mainstream culture, but I needed to explore this one a bit further, so I set out to find some harder research to back up my hunches.

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This led me to, among other things, a report called Brand Virtue as a Competitive Asset, published in the last quarter of 2009 by Context Marketing and Noesis Research. This report surveyed urbanites like myself in several American cities and in a wide age range—a demographic that is often seen by marketers as an incubator for new trends that eventually go mainstream.

One of the more fascinating insights revealed by this report is that people have expectations of how brands and companies should support causes that make the world a better place. It concludes that we are seeking “brand allies” who share what we believe in most. So what qualities does the report say we value most in brands? See the graph below.

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Yet brands that engage their audience on this level don’t just benefit from a better self-image; they also command higher price premiums and are often more profitable than those that don’t. The graph below shows how much more people are willing to pay for brands with a mission.

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To download the complete report, click here.

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