May 28, 2008
Oxfam's Promotional Blunders
Oxfam Great Britain came up with a great new tagline as part of a campaign to reshape its image, writes Jeff Brooks on his Donor Power Blog. The tageline — “Get rich quick. Give” is “donor-centered and true,” he writes.
But the rest of its image campaign is a “bizarre travesty” says Mr. Brooks, creative director at Merkle, a marketing company that serves nonprofit groups.
Take the charity’s new “color-saturated color palette” that he says simply makes things hard to read on a Web site.
“Please have mercy on bifocal wearing duffers like myself,” Mr. Brooks writes.
He then describes the charity’s new TV spot (which can be seen on YouTube ) as a “freakish example of abstractionism” wherein “people vomit white stuff at animated conceptual words like ‘injustice’ and this is how the world becomes a better place.”
“What’s the deal?” Mr. Brooks asks. “Oxfam does all kinds of very cool, very specific things to fight hunger and poverty. But when it comes to messaging, the new brand wants to reduce it all to symbolic actions against symbolic problems.”
Mr. Brooks says organization deserves kudos for putting its new image campaign on its Web site with a request for public comments about it. Still, he says, he’d “rather have people talking about what a nonprofit does then how they look.”
What do you think about Oxfam’s new effort to promote itself? What successes and troubles have you faced in trying to use “branding” techniques to attract supporters?
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