What comes to mind when you read the following words: “Likeable, witty, honest, trustworthy, passionate about excellence, smart, stylish, open-minded, and well-respected, with good morals and a lot of heart?
Your favorite teacher? Your best coach? Maybe your ideal mate?
Lesli Rotenberg hopes that the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) springs to mind. As PBS’s senior vice president of brand management and promotion, Rotenberg builds the PBS brand around these human personality traits.
“Consumers likewise think about nonprofits in terms of personality traits,” reports researcher Gregory M. Rose of the University of Washington, Tacoma. With lead author Beverly T. Venable of Columbus State University, Victoria D. Bush of the University of Mississippi, and Faye W. Gilbert of Georgia College and State University, Rose recently published findings about nonprofits’ brand personalities in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (vol. 33, no. 3). By leveraging their distinctive brand personalities, nonprofits such as hospitals, schools, and workforce training programs can better distinguish themselves from their for-profit competition, their research suggests.
Using focus groups, interviews, and surveys, the authors first demonstrated that while people use many words to describe nonprofits, most of these words can be collapsed into four basic personality traits: integrity, nurturance, sophistication, and ruggedness. For instance, PBS’s attributes of “honest,” “trustworthy,” and “with good morals” fall under the “integrity” rubric, while “smart” and “stylish” are aspects of the “sophistication” trait.
The researchers then showed that people not only use these four dimensions to describe a wide variety of nonprofits, they also use them to distinguish between nonprofits. For example, research participants viewed PBS as high in integrity and sophistication – just as Rotenberg would want them to do. They viewed Greenpeace, in contrast, as being more rugged (tough, outdoorsy), and the March of Dimes as being more nurturing (compassionate, caring, loving).
Two of nonprofits’ personality traits – integrity and nurturance – are unique to the sector. (Sophistication and ruggedness have already been shown to describe consumer brands.) These traits reflect nonprofits’ unique qualities and functions: Because nonprofit work is often intangible, donors and clients have to be able to trust in organizations’ integrity and reliability. And because nonprofits usually deliver social benefits, donors often perceive them to be nurturing.
By showcasing integrity and nurturance, nonprofits like PBS may successfully differentiate themselves from their commercial counterparts. Rotenberg describes a focus group exercise that revealed the power of PBS’s integrity: “We asked people, ‘If these networks died, what would you write on their gravestones?’ Their epitaphs revealed that they are much more emotionally attached to PBS than they are to the other networks. People rely on us. They trust us. And they expect a lot more from us.”
Read more stories by Alana Conner Snibbe.