Brands and Their Healthy Living Messages and Actions

When a brand chooses a social purpose to support, it’s critical for business leaders to consider affiliations and commitments that fit well with their own organizational values. The approaches and partnerships Healthy Living Marketing has noticed recently with several food companies show the strategies many brands are using – with varying credibility – to help a further a healthy mission while also reinforcing the social message the brand wants to convey.

Triscuit Crackers and Home Farming

The cracker brand Triscuit is currently sponsoring a home farming initiative,presumablybecause of the new popularity of the activity, and has incorporated the effort into its packaging and product. Specially marked boxes of Triscuit include a bag of basil and dill seeds. The website provided on the box gives instructions for how to plant and grow those seeds as well as general resources for home farming, including community forums, harvesting schedules, a crop guide, and expert advice. This campaign aims to support Triscuit’s branding that the product goes “from farm to bakery to your table.”

It often doesn’t tell the full story for a brand to simply champion a cause or purpose, even if the product and cause are related. After all, the company that produces Triscuit, Kraft Foods, has received significant criticism for the manufacture and marketing of many heavily-processed foods in its portfolio. Moreover, it’s questionable how well their home farming campaign truly fits their values, given that nowhere can we find that Triscuit sources from local or small-scale farms. Still, the campaign shows that Kraft is becoming more and more aware that people want to eat healthier and that they are more concerned with the source of their food. Perhaps Triscuit’s home farming promotion will be a start in the right direction toward putting the message into practice for the brand.

Silk Soymilk – A Legacy Of Social Commitment

Meanwhile, Silk Soymilk, a brand within Dean Foods, is reinforcing its longstanding image as a healthy and environmentally friendly brand by running a new promotion called GreenCaps, for the cartons’ own green caps. The promotion highlights two causes that Silk has long championed – wind energy and Farm Aid. Customers of Silk are asked to visit a website to input their carton’s UPC and then choose between the two social causes, and by doing so are entered in a sweepstakes to win prizes including a Smart vehicle and a $25,000 gift card to make green home improvements. By highlighting these two causes, the brand both raises awareness about the importance of both wind energy and family farms, and reinforces Silk Soymilk’s commitment to environmentally friendly manufacturing processes and a natural, sustainable product.

In Silk Soymilk’s case, these messages are backed up by good practices. In order to offset its energy usage, since 2003 the company has purchased Renewable Energy Certificates from an environmental energy company that develops wind energy. Silk also uses only soybeans that are produced from socially responsible and sustainable sources, according to the brand’s website. When considering these practices, Silk’s chosen causes fit very well to both enhance and reinforce the image of the brand, and are perfectly aligned to the values of the brand and parent company.

If you would like to learn more about creative collaboration possibilities that include an enduring and distinctive social purpose for your company, please contact Healthy Living Marketing at (301) 378-0384.

Tags: brand awareness, brand marketing, cause action, social message, social purpose