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Smirnoff owner Diageo will halt all advertising on major social media platforms indefinitely from 1 July as the group strives to promote inclusion and diversity.

Diageo owns the worlds biggest vodka brand, Smirnoff

In a statement on the firms official Diageo News Twitter account on Saturday (27 June), the group said it will pause all paid advertising globally on major social media accounts from Wednesday (1 July). The group didnt specify which social media platforms would be included or the length of the advertising pause.

The firm added: We will continue to discuss with media partners how they will deal with unacceptable content.

Diageo, producer of brands such as Johnnie Walker and Captain Morgan rum, said in the statement that the firm strives to promote inclusion and diversity including through our marketing campaigns.

In April 2020, the group released an update on how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the company. Diageo withdrew its guidance on net sales and operating profit for fiscal 2020 and said it had stopped advertising and promotional (A&P) spend. The firm will tightly manage working capital and postpone flexible capital expenditure projects.

The Johnnie Walker owner is among some of the worlds biggest consumer goods companies to pull its advertising on social media in recent weeks, including Coca-Cola and Unilever.

Earlier this month, a group of six organisations called on Facebook advertisers to pause their spending on the network during the month of July. The group of organisations included the Anti-Defamation League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Sleeping Giants, Color of Change, Free Press and Common Sense. The six firms asked companies to act against hate and disinformation being spread on Facebook through its campaign, Stop Hate for Profit.

The move to stop advertising comes just weeks after Diageo pledged US$20 million to help black communities and businesses in the US that have been impacted by the coronavirus crisis. The Diageo Community Fund is part of the groups continued efforts to support under-represented groups and communities, particularly those in the hospitality sector.

In November 2017, Diageo stopped all of its Youtube advertising after discovering adverts from some of the worlds biggest brands were being shown on videos featuring inappropriate footage of children.

As part of The Spirits Businesss 2020 Brand Champions report, we looked at the best-performing spirits brands on social media.

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Diageo to stop advertising on social media - The Spirits Business

Showing people how their peers feel about diversity in their community can make their actions more inclusive, make members of marginalized groups feel more like they belong, and even help close racial achievement gaps in education, according to a new study.

Drawing on strategies that have worked in anti-smoking, safe-sex and energy-saving campaigns, University of WisconsinMadison researchers decided to try to change behavior by showing people that positive feelings about diversity are the norm.

In any other domain of public health saving for retirement, sustainability, eating healthy its the key thing to communicate: Its the right thing to do, your peers do it, and your peers would actually approve of you doing it as well, says Markus Brauer, the UWMadison psychology professor whose lab designed the pro-diversity intervention.

Its an effect thats reflected in attitudes about ongoing protests over Black people killed by police officers. Exposed to larger crowds, more frequent news coverage and the opinions of friends and neighbors, more people have expressed support for Black Lives Matter groups and activities.

People are heavily influenced by finding out what their peers have done, Brauer says. But in the diversity domain, we havent been trying this.

The researchers, who published their findings today in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, conducted extensive focus groups with UWMadison students.

A 5-minute video and posters like this one designed by UWMadison researchers describing peers support for diversity were enough to makes students feelings about members of other groups and diversity in general more positive. Courtesy of Markus Brauer

We asked them students of color and white students, students of the LGBT+ community: What actually is it that decreases your sense of belonging? What are the kinds of behaviors that hurt your feelings, that make you feel excluded? Brauer says. And then please tell us, what are the behaviors that would make you feel welcome?

The non-white students felt like they were kept at a distance from white students not included in class groups or projects, not included in activities, not invited to participate in simple interactions.

When we asked about what decreased their sense of belonging, they didnt complain so much about racial slurs or explicit forms of discrimination, says Brauer. It was the distance, the lack of interest, the lack of caring that affected them.

Brauer, graduate student Mitchell Campbell, and Sohad Murrar, a former graduate student of Brauers who is now a psychology professor at Governors State University in Illinois, used what they learned to choose their messages.

We used a social marketing approach, where we identify a target audience, we decide what our target behavior is, and then we show people how their peers support that behavior, Brauer says.

They designed a relatively simple poster, covered in students faces and reporting actual survey results that 93 percent of students say they embrace diversity and welcome people from all backgrounds into our UWMadison community, and that 84 percent of them agreed to be pictured on the poster. They also produced a five-minute video, which described the pro-diversity opinions reported by large majorities in other campus surveys and showed real students answering questions about tolerance and inclusion.

In a series of experiments over several years, hundreds of students were exposed passively to the posters in brief encounters in study waiting rooms or hung day after day on the walls of their classrooms. In other experiments, the video was shown to an entire class during their first meeting. Control groups came and went from waiting rooms and classroom with no posters, or watched videos about cranberry production, or other alternatives to the study materials.

UWMadison researchers produced this video featuring students and experts talking about the positive impact of a diverse campus. Students who watched the video on their first day of class were more tolerant of other groups and more supportive of diversity even months later, and course sections that saw the video improved on historical achievement gaps between white and non-white students. Courtesy of Markus Brauer

Then the researchers surveyed subjects to assess their attitudes about appreciation for diversity, attitudes toward people of color, intergroup anxiety, their peers behaviors and other measures.

When we measured 10 or 12 weeks later, the students who were exposed to the interventions report more positive attitudes towards members of other groups and stronger endorsement of diversity, Brauer says.

Markus Brauer

The differences for students from marginalized groups went further.

The students belonging to marginalized groups tell us that they have an enhanced sense of belonging. They are less anxious in interactions with students from other ethnic groups. They tell us that theyre less and less the target of discrimination, Brauer says. They evaluate the classroom climate more positively, and feel that they are treated more respectfully by their classmates.

The researchers tested the effectiveness of their diversity intervention in a series of UWMadison courses in which white students have historically received better grades than their non-white peers. In course sections that viewed the 5-minute video during their first meeting classes including more than 300 students the privileged and marginalized students grades were equal in the end.

We know the marginalized students experience discrimination; we know their feelings are valid. But we know, too, from the campus climate surveys and our own extensive surveys, that their fellow students report real appreciation for diversity, and tell us that they want to be inclusive, Brauer says. They stay socially distant, though, because they worry about putting themselves out there. Our experience is that this intervention is changing those perceptions and experiences, and possibly the behavior, of both groups.

It may be the first result of its kind for such a long-running study with so many participants, and the researchers are hopeful that future work will help better reveal whether students actually change the way they treat each other.

Promoting inclusion and dismantling systemic racism is one of the most important issues of our times. And yet, it turns out that many pro-diversity initiatives are not being evaluated, says Brauer, whose work was supported in part by funding from the office of UWMadisons vice provost and chief diversity officer. We really need evidence-based practices, but for a long time weve had no idea whether the things we do in the diversity domain actually have a beneficial effect. Were hoping to change that.

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Showing pro-diversity feelings are the norm makes individuals more tolerant - University of Wisconsin-Madison

More to see. More to do. More to explore.

Flossmoor is stressing those attributes in a marketing campaign designed to attract potential homeowners to the community. The campaign, which has been discussed for the past two years, officially kicked off June 16.

The campaign aims to, get Flossmoor on peoples radar if theyve never heard of it before, separate Flossmoor from Homewood-Flossmoor to those who may be aware already, and reach audiences that have an appreciation of culture, diversity, inclusion, community pride and the arts, according to a village news release.

Last year, the village approached Tiny Bold Creative, a branding and graphic design studio in Chicago, to help develop the campaign. With Tiny Bolds help, the message and branding for the campaign was completed by a small team of village staff as well as Juan Woodbury, a village resident and executive vice president of Leo Burnett.

The target audience of the campaign is a family looking for a permanent home. Marketing materials and advertisements will encourage home-seekers to come to the village for its schools, beautiful architecture and easy access to the city. Therefore, campaign advertisements hope to give off a feeling that is warm and welcoming and evokes a place youll want to call home, the news release states.

Advertisements will be seen in Chicago Magazine, Crains Chicago Business and on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. Advertisements will also appear on Metra line platforms but the village expects to get the most value from social media and other digital ads until Metra ridership resumes to normal, according to a village document.

Tiny Bold is creating an evergreen brochure for the campaign and a website -- discoverflossmoor.com which will be completed over the next few months. So far, a landing page for discoverflossmoor.com can be found on the village website, containing information for prospective residents.

My favorite thing [about the campaign] is that we have a good product to sell, said Trustee Jim Mitros, who also contributed to the campaign. You dont have to embellish anything about Flossmoor. Its easy to talk about, its easy to put together a campaign thats truthful about our community.

We love this community and we want only the best for it. And I think that was the catalyst of [the campaign] and we want to share that with other people.

The campaigns effectiveness will be measured by a decrease in the number of days a home is on the market, closing the gap between a homes list and sale price, a reduction in home vacancies, lower foreclosure rates, and an increase in home sales between $300,000 and $500,000.

The initial budget for the campaign is $13,000 with $6,000 dedicated to the Metra platform ads and $7,500 to digital and social media advertising. The Metra budget allows the village to set ads at four different stations for up to three months, but the village will start with two Metra ads to assess their effectiveness.

Were going to constantly be monitoring this and looking for better ways of getting our name out there, Mitros said.

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Flossmoor marketing campaign to advertise on Metra, print and social media - The Homewood-Flossmoor Chronicle

A crisis reveals as much as it devastates. Retailers that were struggling before the coronavirus outbreak are now crumbling. Not well positioned to pivot going into the crisis, J.C. Penney, with more than 800 stores and nearly 85,000 employees, recently filed for bankruptcy, joining Neiman Marcus and J. Crew in the running list of retail casualties in the last two months. Other retailers have been forced to pivot quickly, and some have done so successfully, like Target, which reported a 141% first-quarter increase in digital comparable sales, albeit at a significant cost. Walmart also appears to be well positioned and saw a comparable sales increase of 10%, including a 74% jump in online sales.

However, in March, overall U.S. retail sales, including online transactions, suffered an 8.7% drop. That was the largest monthly decline on record since 1992, when the data was first made available by the Census Bureau until April, when almost 630,000 outlets were forced to close, plunging sales by another 16.4%.

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In China, where businesses are further ahead in reopening than in the United States and other countries in which peak outbreaks occurred later in the year, wearing a mask and having ones temperature checked when entering a mall or supermarket are compulsory. As retail resumes in phases in portions of the U.S., its expected that measures to promote physical distancing and prevent virus transmission will remain in place for months to come. All these create friction, which will decrease foot traffic for another few months. No silver lining is in sight. The decline is likely to continue, if not accelerate.

And yet, a mortal blow to retail has not been felt universally. Some companies are thriving amid the darkest of months.

Consider Peacebird, a billion-dollar fashion retailer with seven brands and 4,600 brick-and-mortar stores. Its a Chinese brand with a growing reputation for resilience. The company achieved revenue of more than 10 million yuan ($1.41 million) during the first three weeks of the Chinese New Year starting Jan. 25, the period when the coronavirus outbreak ravaged Wuhan and triggered the complete lockdown of the sprawling capital of Hubei Province. During the subsequent month of February, Peacebird continued to ship a total of 490,000 online orders while fulfilling 2 million transactions via its retail network.

Yet Peacebird is hardly alone. Cabbeen Fashion, a leading Chinese menswear designer brand, managed to top 2 million daily sales via WeChat Mini Programs during the first week of February, leveraging Chinas largest social media app without resorting to pricing discounts. Multibrand jeweler Ideal similarly fast-tracked its New Retail initiative to navigate the crisis. It turned the companys sales associates into livestream broadcasters on social media, each managing their own virtual store.

Then you have Forest Cabin, a cosmetics company that decided to go online with full force, promoting products through multiple livestreaming platforms and several social media apps. After its sales plunged by more than 90% during the Lunar New Year holiday as half of its physical stores were forced to close, the company made a stunning recovery during a two-hour livestreaming session on Valentines Day in which the founder appeared. That move alone brought in some 60,000 visitors and sold over 400,000 bottles of the companys flagship camellia oil. During the week of International Womens Day, from March 1 to 8, the company reported a fivefold jump in online sales.

The resilience of these companies is due to one simple fact: They have transformed their traditional business models rapidly by leveraging a plethora of digital practices. And this transformation is hardly unique to China: It is what players must undertake in the economy of the pandemic to survive.

Some retailers do more online. The U.K. retailer John Lewis is setting up an online hub giving advice to new parents and providing well-being services. Walmart and Target are doubling their efforts in curbside pickup, a service where customers order things online, drive to the store, and wait while a worker loads everything into their trunk. Perhaps most drastic of all is Nike, which managed to post 5% in revenue growth during the quarter that ended Feb. 29 even though over 5,000 of its stores in China, a key growth market, were forced to close during January. With the help of livestreaming, Nikes online sales in China increased by more than 30%. The brand launched the Air Max March Party on March 26, which was broadcast online on Alibabas Tmall. It attracted some 2.7 million viewers and 24 million likes, which translated into more than 5 million yuan (about $705,000) in sales in a mere three and a half hours. As a result, Nikes sales revenue for the greater China region dipped only 5% in the first quarter of 2020, a figure that even Apple couldnt match.

How do incumbents achieve such resilience? Here are five lessons for every traditional retailer:

1. Accelerate operations through multichannel marketing. Speed matters as retailers switch their operations from an offline or mixed model to online-only sales. Peacebird chairman Zhang Jiangping responded by going all in on e-commerce, and he personally drove the transition. He issued a notification to all sales agents giving them the authority to post content on social media channels while representing Peacebird. Then, in a milestone occasion on Jan. 28, the fourth day of the Chinese New Year, retail director Andre Gao hosted Peacebirds first livestream session. His session, which over 100,000 people joined, inspired and excited many sales agents at the company. Thousands of in-store sales managers were motivated to become online sales agents.

Note that such digital-first pivots are not exclusive to Chinese companies. U.S. kitchen and housewares retailer Williams-Sonoma is doing the same thing. Although a lot of its digital tools were already in place, during the lockdown, the company quickly added services such as virtual design chats with experts, an ask-the-expert chat, and enhanced virtual design options. Despite closing its over 600 stores, the group posted an increase in comparable sales of 2.6%.

Meanwhile, department store Intime launched live commerce when the virus closed its 65 stores. All sales agents, working from home, interacted with customers via Taobao Live the livestreaming platform run by Alibaba and reached as many new clients in a three-hour period as they would have in six months inside an actual store. Its a future that Bloomberg dubs the next frontier of shopping. Thats why Swedish home-goods retailer Ikea also took to a livestreaming session in March to promote the launch of its new Tmall store.

In light of these examples, business leaders should reframe their current thinking of multichannel approaches to retail and embrace livestreaming as an important arena to create direct, real-time engagement.

2. Retrain for revamps. While many traditional retailers are busy laying off or furloughing hundreds of salespeople, some are opting for skill upgrades. Jeweler Ideal proactively transformed its sales associates into online influencers, or, as they are known in China, key opinion leaders (KOLs). To help employees less experienced with social media marketing and live presenting, the company expanded its online corporate university to include special curricula on such topics. Later on, jewelry expert and KOL broadcaster Ming Zhang was recruited to train Ideals employees to further upgrade their broadcasting skills. Regardless of their role and position, employees could have immediate access to online training, and hundreds have since become effective presenters. Companies can and should take steps to retrain employees across different positions.

3. Empower teams. At Peacebird, the executive team has dramatically increased the autonomy of its front-line sales teams. Teams can decide, for instance, which marketing format to use from livestreaming, to friend-circle promotion, to group-buying tactics. The company also tracked the success and conversion rates of different formats and shared this information through the online sales network, empowering employees to use collective data and knowledge.

Meanwhile, the company also launched a virtual chatbot, an online sales service system, and, finally, a set of standard operating practices, along with a scoring and measurement system for customer-facing employees. The system tracks conversion rates to identify the online sales practices that result in the highest actual sales. Such focused activities helped activate sales teams, provide needed resources, and offer quick feedback loops.

4. Fuel offline traffic. Physical department stores and shopping malls in the U.S. have long struggled to compete with online players. However, physical stores can be an important asset to connect with customers when coupled with technology or, more precisely, brick-and-mortar stores remain an important asset to connect with customers despite the arrival of e-commerce. The amount of space needed may have decreased, but the need remains nonetheless: This is where human interaction takes place. Coupled with technology, brands can provide a seamless experience. In fact, online success may fuel offline foot traffic to brick-and-mortar stores. During the first week of March, as China began to ease traffic restrictions, Forest Cabin saw its online sales rise by 400%, matched by another 140% jump offline. Our offline layout will remain unchanged because of digitalization, but we will focus more on the integration of online and offline sales and customer engagement channels, said founder and CEO Sun Laichun. In the future, it is imperative that different channels are optimized and integrated.

5. Virtualize the back-end supply chain. Amid the closing of physical stores during quarantine, retailers can gain agility by investing in virtualizing their back-end inventory systems. For example, Peacebird shared real-time sales data with suppliers and franchisees, who, in turn, integrated it into various enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to generate aggregated data analytics. Transitioning from a push to a pull strategy, Peacebird lets demand determine when and how it should ramp up production.

To quickly meet the needs of this new strategy, the company leveraged its existing cloud-based warehouse management system (WMS). The scalability of a cloud-based supply chain proved crucial: Over 65% of its total offline sales were shipped through its cloud-based WMS across 3,000 chain stores, which amount to nearly 10 times the total in 2019.

Finally, production is organized as a network of factories, some of them but not all owned by Peacebird. The companys own factories have the highest flexibility and complete the design-to-production cycle within a week. Meanwhile, the partner factories supply the company with more conventional economies of scale but with longer turnarounds.

Business leaders should consider rethinking how their back-end supply chain could be more responsive to demand by leveraging existing cloud solutions. Thats how efficiency and flexibility can both be achieved.

The coronavirus has been devastating for many companies, turning countless shopping malls into retail wastelands. Yet the pockets of success also illustrate a path to forge ahead, despite the most challenging conditions, highlighting the wisdom of the saying, no crisis should go to waste.

Mark J. Greeven is a professor of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School in Switzerland and the author of Pioneers, Hidden Champions, Changemakers, and Underdogs (MIT Press, 2019). Howard Yu is the author of Leap: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied (PublicAffairs, 2018), Lego Professor of Management and Innovation at the IMD Business School in Switzerland, and director of IMDs Advanced Management Program. Jialu Shan is a research fellow at the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, a joint initiative of the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) and Cisco.

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Why Some Retailers Are Thriving Amid Disruption - MIT Sloan

With employees working from home, and entire, multi-million dollar organizations being run remotely, businesses are more reliant on their tech infrastructure than they've ever been in the past.

That's seen some significant shifts in business approaches, with new tools being adopted, and new frameworks being established to facilitate what could become a permanent, and significant, workplace shift.

Those trends are largely reflected in the evolving tech conversation on LinkedIn, which has published a new report on the key topics and trends gaining traction across the tech sector.

Among the key points of discussion are live-streaming, collaboration tools, social media marketing and advice on how tech providers should communicate with their customers during the pandemic.

There's a heap of interesting insight here - you can read LinkedIn's full report here or check out the infographic below.

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LinkedIn Publishes New Data on How the Tech Conversation is Evolving During COVID-19 [Infographic] - Social Media Today