There are, no exaggeration, hundreds of companies producing food that focuses on health and nutrition. Hundreds. These include big players, small start-ups, and everything in between. There are also innumerable examples of companies which have attempted to make themselves known and accomplish something positive for the world through that effort known as cause marketing. Even this particular combination of a healthy food company attempting to do some good isn’t unique. But just because something has already been done before doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for some innovation, for a surprise twist. And that’s exactly what Kind Healthy Snacks, the New York based health food business, has done.
Let’s see exactly how they’ve done this, courtesy of Stuart Elliot:
Kind’s approach to doing well by doing good is a campaign carrying the theme “Do the Kind Thing,” which plans to donate, in stages, $100,000 to organizations deemed worthy of assistance. The first round, totaling $40,000, is to be announced this week and will be divided among three causes.
Executives at Kind and its agency, Green Team in New York, call the campaign “cause-driven” because the donations are not being determined by the public’s voting for which organizations deserve the money, as is the case with campaigns like the Pepsi Refresh Project, sponsored by PepsiCo. Rather, “Do the Kind thing” asks consumers to perform acts of kindness — deliberately instead of randomly — that are tracked through Kind cards bearing code numbers. A participant in the “Kind Movement” links his or her card and code to a charitable organization or other “redeeming” cause, as the campaign’s rules describe it; performs a kind act for someone else; and then passes the card and code on to that person.
There’s always room for innovation. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Kind has taken up a strategy that, while important and crucial and relevant to its message, has just about been done to death by similar companies. But there’s a tweak here: Kind doesn’t just advocate giving away money, it advocates the active performance of kind actions. This is a subtle yet important difference, as all differences are in a field as crowded as the health food industry now is. You don’t need to invent a concept to effectively market yourself or your business. You just need to stand out.
Is there even such a thing as a non-crowded field of business these days? What are you doing to differentiate yourself from your competitors?
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