Should you use awareness days in your PR and marketing? The Dos and Don’ts

As is common every June, many brands have taken to centering their marketing strategies around Pride month - an event held to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community. 

While there’s no denying that using awareness days or months as part of PR and marketing can be incredibly beneficial for brands - using them only as a marketing tool rather than a genuine attempt to raise awareness for important causes can have huge ramifications for brand image, credibility and honourability. 

There are ethical steps organisations must take to ensure that awareness days are not just part of a marketing ploy but are intertwined in a company-wide CSR initiative.   

What are the benefits of using awareness days in PR and marketing?

The first reason marketing and awareness days go hand in hand really is in the name: marketing campaigns can raise a lot of awareness for vital causes, conditions and charitable organisations. When brands promote a certain issue, they can highlight it among whole new audiences, educate on lesser-known topics, and in some circumstances, raise money for others.

In doing this, organisations are able to show off their company values, ethos and care for the wider community (often positively improving brand image by associating themselves with important causes). 

Brands can be very successful in doing this too as key audiences, journalists, as well as their readers, want to see what organisations are doing to help. As evidence of this, from our research, we found that awareness days play a large part in increasing demand for news stories on certain topics, dramatically increasing the potential for brands to gain media coverage. 

For example, on International Women’s Day (March 8th 2021), Gender-related stories in the HR media rose by 614% (up from an average of 0.7 gender-related stories on a typical weekday). As well as this, during LGBT+ History Month in February, LGBTQ+ stories rose by 467% (up from an average of 3 LGBTQ+ related stories a month, based on findings from January to the end of March). 

In response to these increased opportunities, many organisations are keen to show off their support for certain causes.

When used in PR and marketing, why can awareness days be problematic?

As mentioned previously there can be several issues when awareness days aren’t aligned appropriately. Using awareness days in marketing is problematic, if:

1. Brands use the attention and hype surrounding awareness days purely for self-promotional purposes, undermining the attention that should be given to worthy causes and detracting from the real issues at hand.

2. Brands are bandwagoning. In other words, they see that other organisations are supporting these causes and feel that they must also show their commitment - but in doing so, they often lack substance behind it. Notably, bandwagoning is wrong when the support is shallow and doesn’t change an organisation’s real actions, intentions or commitments to an issue.

3. Brands support causes in some ways (e.g donating money to an organisation like UK Black Pride) but their actions are problematic in others (e.g. not promoting minority representation among employees), suggesting the organisation is not broadly committed to a certain cause.

How can brands ethically support awareness days as part of their PR and Marketing?

1. Make the promotion about the cause - not you

Getting the balance right and ensuring you are primarily highlighting the awareness day, charity or event (before highlighting yourself) is key.

Doing this ensures that 1) you genuinely help the cause and 2) your efforts are believable and leave a positive impression (which will do a whole lot more for your brand image and reputation than a shallow approach).

2. Don’t just promote to outside audiences - promote internally too

Audiences, more than ever, are concerned with the inner workings of organisations - how they treat their staff, what values they promote and what stances they hold on certain societal and political events.

If brands fail to internally promote the causes they externally support, then audiences will see through these half-hearted efforts. If organisations don’t internally embrace awareness days and what they stand for, then it’s clear that their external promotions are purely a marketing ploy.

For example, to ensure internal support is encouraged and embraced, organisations could provide education or training to employees on relevant topics, ensure they have diverse team members that represent the causes they claim to support, donate to connected charities or ensure they give employees time off to volunteer for these causes.

3. Do these things outside of the awareness/day month

Beyond this, organisations must ensure they are continually promoting these causes (internally and externally) outside of the awareness day or month. 

Those who only take advantage of the possibility for increased attention during these awareness periods, once again, don’t demonstrate broad support for the cause. 

Awareness events are intended to bring about long-lasting change or sustained education on certain topics and brands who truly want to support them will help them throughout the long-term journey and not just in high-profile periods.

For more information on how to strengthen your PR strategy and brand image, feel free to get in touch.