PPB October 2019

BRANDABLE American Airlines Soars ForThe Greater Good To allow international professionals working for nonprofits to attend a Salt Lake City-based conference, American Airlines offered free travel. American Airlines boosted its brand perception in August by providing transportation to select attendees of the United Nations Civil Society Conference. The conference, which was held in Salt Lake City, Utah, and outside the UN’s New York City headquarters for the first time in the conference’s 68-year history, brings together some 3,000 individuals representing more than 700 civil society organizations from more than 100 countries to discuss, in recent years, climate change, human rights, disarmament, global health, sustainability and volunteerism. The conference’s new location has posed financial challenges for smaller nonprofits that may not have the budget to send staff, especially overseas. To ease financial concerns, American Airlines offered to support CHOICE Humanitarian, an international organization based in West Jordan, Utah, with the goal to eliminate extreme poverty. The airline provided roundtrip flights for CHOICE Humanitarian staff located in each country where the nonprofit operates, including Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal and Peru. The flights enabled some of CHOICE’s international team members to attend the conference. With the cost of roundtrip flights alleviated, CHOICE was able to provide staff with additional training and professional development prior to the conference. MARKET SHARE Consumers Trust Social Influencers’ Product Promos Social media influencers across platforms are trusted for their advice, feedback and promotion of products, brands and services. There’s no doubt that branded merch has spiked in fashion coolness over recent years, thanks to none other than social media. Individuals, brands and passion- projects-turned-businesses are using social media to promote their work or presence, from podcasters to top bloggers and social media influencers. In turn, fans, followers and customers alike are flocking to hip merch as a way to support their favorite brands, to represent a social media-fueled movement or simply to make a fashion statement. Online retailer Bonfire, for example, sells select merchandise designed by social media influencers. Options include a t-shirt with a floral graphic behind the words, “Live Well,” designed by Christina Capron, who has a fitness-focused Instagram account with 887,000 followers; and a raglan shirt that reads “Get Closer To Your Food; Off Grid With Doug And Stacey On YouTube,” designed by a husband-and-wife team, who have an organic food and all-natural living page with 30,000 followers. An ever-popular product that has surfaced on nearly all major celebrities’ pages are various tea detoxes, or “teatoxes,” like Fit Tea, Lyfe Tea and Skinny Mint, with celebrities receiving anywhere from $3,000 to $250,000 per post, depending on their following, according to Business Insider . But this is nowhere near the extent of the power of branded merch. Up-and-coming podcasts, like those in the true crime genre, are turning to branded merch—and advertising it via social media—for heightened exposure. Podcasts in this genre, such as True Crime All The Time , offer merch for listeners, including shirts, pants, blankets, 76 | OCTOBER 2019 | THINK