How Life Became Good
The creation of Life is good is a real American success story. In 1989, the Jacobs brothers, Bert and John, bought a van to use as the base of operations for their t-shirt business, and as a crash pad when out on the road. They would occasionally stop back at their Boston apartment, where they had their latest design ideas tacked to the walls. They encouraged guests to add comments.
When “Jake,” John’s doodle of a cartoonish character with a wide grin, made it to the wall, he created quite a stir. Someone wrote next to him, “This guy has life figured out.” That eventually distilled into: “Life is good.”
Jake, a nickname for Jacobs, resulted from a conversation the brothers had about how the media focuses on the negative.
“The question became, Could we create some hero whose power was his optimism?” says Bert.
The two printed 48 shirts featuring Jake and the words “Life is good” and took them to a street fair, where they sold out in 45 minutes.
“This was far and away crazier than anything we’d ever seen. Not only were they selling like mad, but it was very clear to us that the people who were buying them had very little in common with each other,” says Bert. “It hit us like a ton of bricks that we were on to something.”
Jam with Jake
Simplicity, humility, and humor are not only the guiding principles at Life is good, but also at its meetings—called Jake Jams. Held quarterly for all 249 employees, Jake Jams are designed to be both informative and fun. Music, Frisbees, and paddleball competitions are de rigueur.
More serious topics are covered in monthly “DR” gatherings of the company’s top 25 leaders. DR stands for dead reckoning, a nautical term for the process of calculating one’s current position.
Bert Jacobs and his brother John got their start selling t-shirts from the back of a van. Today, Boston-based “Life is good” does $100 million in annual sales. And the company built those sales with a marketing strategy based on corporate social responsibility (CSR) events.
“Consumers can build an organization up or tear it down based on whether they believe that organization is good or bad,” says Bert, who now serves as the company’s CEO: “chief executive optimist.”
“We live in a society where image is everything. People want to be associated with brands that are doing good things,” says Alan Ranzer, managing partner of Impact 4 Good, an East Hanover, NJ-based teambuilding program provider that specializes in community service activities.
Ranzer notes that a 2011 Cone/Echo Global Corporate Responsibility Study indicated that 93 percent of Americans think about corporate citizenship when making purchasing decisions. “Doing good for others and doing good as a business are definitely connected.”
Changing the Marketing Model
For most of the 1990s and early 2000s, Life is good enjoyed steady sales with an apparel line of shirts and baseball caps featuring a whimsical cartoon named Jake and the tag line, “Life is good.” In 2000, the Jacobs brothers had some advertising money set aside when they saw something that changed their game plan completely: a televised interview with an 11-year-old girl named Lindsey, who suffered from cancer. Her prognosis was not good—eight months to live. On her head during the interview was a Life is good cap. The interviewer asked her how she could wear that hat as she faced such a grim fate. Her response: “Before I was sick, I took everything for granted.”
That interview changed the brothers’ mindset. “The lesson we learned from her is that the people who face the most difficulty or adversity in their lives are the ones who embrace the message of ‘Life is good’ the most,” says Bert.
The money earmarked for a traditional ad campaign instead went to an event to raise money and awareness for children with life-threatening illnesses. The first Life is good Pumpkin Festival in 2003 combined fundraising with a rally to break the world record for the most carved and lit pumpkins in one place at one time.
“I can’t say we knew where we were going with this or if it would help the business,” says Bert. “It has, but I didn’t know that at the time. Nobody did. We did it because it seemed to make sense and—selfishly—it felt good to us.”
By 2006, the Life is good Kids Foundation was up and running. All funds go to its Life is good Playmakers arm, which offers training and support for childcare providers who work with kids who have experienced the traumas of poverty, violence, and illness. Its mantra: “Life can hurt. Play can heal.” At present, 2,500 certified Playmakers work with over 130,000 children.
The company has completely integrated its social mission into its business plan. “We do not make any decisions for the business without considering how we might be able to grow the social side,” notes Bert. “We are one organization, one brand that makes clothing and helps kids.”
And as the company’s CSR activities have grown, so has the bottom line. In the year that Life is good held its first Pumpkin Festival, annual sales were $38 million. Annual sales in 2011 reached $100 million. And while the company initially held a number of small festivals around the country, it now focuses on a single major festival in the Boston area.
“That focus has allowed us to grow it into one of the premier outdoor music festivals in the country,” explains Jim Laughlin, director of communications for the Life is good Kids Foundation. Which, in turn, helps with fundraising efforts. “We have a fundraising goal each year. Last year our goal was to raise $1 million for the Playmakers, which we met. The final total was $1.1 million.”
Keeping It Real
“Authenticity is the key to successfully integrating a CSR program into a sales or marketing strategy,” says Paul Klein, founder of Impakt Corp., a Toronto-based advisory services firm that helps large corporations increase business value through positive social change. Klein points to the ubiquitous pink ribbon that many companies use in CSR-based marketing strategies as an example of a common mistake. If a clear connection cannot be drawn between the organization and the fight to end breast cancer, the company should choose to align itself with a different cause that makes sense for its product or mission.
“A lot of companies just jump on that bandwagon with no regard as to whether their products are appropriate to be aligned with breast cancer initiatives. If it’s just an afterthought, it’s not going to gain a company much traction in the marketplace,” Klein explains.
Caesars Entertainment avoided this pitfall by looking at what the organization was doing internally before integrating a CSR component into its marketing events.
Caesars runs roughly 1,000 annual internal CSR events around the country. So when Amy Allen, director of marketing for Caesars, was looking to incorporate a CSR activity into the company’s Las Vegas Educational Experience, a twice-yearly marketing event to connect with potential meeting clients, she looked no further than St. Jude’s Ranch for Children, a nonprofit, nonsectarian home for abused, abandoned, and neglected children just outside of Las Vegas, in Boulder City, NV. Caesars employees had participated in a variety of programs with the ranch for a number of years.
“During one [Las Vegas Educational Experience] event, our planner clients joined our employees to repaint the interiors of the cottages where the St. Jude’s kids live with their foster families, and they helped with landscaping,” says Allen. “With almost 400 volunteers at the landscaping project, the group filled eight dumpsters with waste, planted 100 new plants, and laid 14 tons of rock.”
During another program, the St. Jude’s administration said it was in need of new holiday decorations for its annual Night of Lights event, which brings people out from all over Las Vegas Valley and serves as its key fundraising event for the year.
“We went and purchased all-new holiday decorations and brought in 300 event attendees and team members to deck out its 40-acre campus,” says Allen. “It was magical.”
For Caesars, including these activities in their marketing events presents opportunities not only to showcase a unique teambuilding option, but also to demonstrate to potential clients the company’s commitment to a community-oriented culture.
“We are now living in a world where the public is quite savvy and often has a healthy skepticism about ‘cause-related marketing.’ When brands market their social work just so they can grow sales, people often see through it,” says Laughlin. “Charitable work can be a healthy point of difference to grow a business, but the organization has to be sincere about it and view it as a long-term commitment.”
Klein believes that the strategies that Life is good and Caesars Entertainment employ offer a greater chance of success than short campaigns. “The longer-term value is in ongoing program approaches that deliver on a few fronts,” he says. “They are valuable from a business point of view, they deliver some measurable social change, and they are visible.”
Connecting the Dots
Life is good conducts customer perception surveys to connect the dots between its CSR events and business goals. “The vast majority of our customers tell us they are aware of our work for children and that it matters to them,” says Laughlin.
Similarly, Caesars receives overwhelmingly positive feedback from the potential clients it brings to St. Jude. “Just when I thought I could not be wowed any more, I took a bus out to St. Jude’s Ranch and discovered that dozens of Caesars employees had given up their Saturdays to join us in manual labor to improve the landscaping at this wonderful children’s housing complex,” says Chris Cox, executive director of Print Suppliers Group, based in Calabasas, CA. That kind of emotional connection can only help when it comes to booking future business.
Neither Life is good nor Caesars goes beyond surveys to measure the impact of its customer-facing CSR events. But Carol Cone, global vice chairman for Edelman Business and Social Purpose, the cause-marketing arm of global public relations firm Edelman, says it can be done. “In order to prove the success of a CSR program from a business standpoint, you take a baseline without the cause and then with the cause and look at the data,” she explains. “The challenge is that the results of most cause-marketing initiatives are not made public.”
For Bert Jacobs, his experience in building a company and charity side by side should be enough proof of how much business sense CSR events make.
“Capitalism doesn’t have to be the bad guy,” he says. “Having a cause that’s meaningful to you, focusing on it, and harnessing your brand and all its touchpoints raises awareness for the cause and your brand. Smart consumers, in turn, will believe in you and buy your products.”