Dueling Cause-Related Marketing Studies

Four studies have come out this year that aim to measure either directly or obliquely consumer’s attitudes towards cause-related marketing.

All the studies have confidence levels of 95 percent or more. And yet two of them suggest that consumers have jaundiced opinions of cause-related marketing and two find that they’re quite positive on the practice.

How could that be?

The four studies are:

• “Rethinking Corporate Responsibility” from the PR firm Fleishman-Hillard and the National Consumers League, and conducted by Western Wats.


• “Consumer Survey: Media Use, Holiday Trends, Cause-Marketing” commissioned by the American Marketing Association, and conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation.


• “2007 Cone Cause Evolution Survey” from Cone, LLC, an advertising agency, and also conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation.


• The most recent is from Edelman, also a PR firm, in support of the launch of its new consultancy Good Purpose, and called the Goodpurpose Consumer Study.

All the studies were conducted either via telephone or online. The Goodpurpose study, which measured opinion in nine countries, also used face to face interviews in India and China, a survey technique common outside North America.

For the sake of brevity and clarity, I’ll compare the American Marketing Association study against the Cone study. Both were online studies administered by the Opinion Research Corporation.

The American Marketing Association study was more of an omnibus effort, which is reflected in the title. Special emphasis was placed measuring consumer interaction with social networking sites, especially as regards to the holiday season. To show the range of questions asked, respondents were also asked where they turned to for information about the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates.

The cause marketing question asked, “Thinking of buying gifts during the holiday season, would you be more, just as, or less likely to buy a product or service if you knew that a certain amount of the purchase price was being donated directly to a cause or campaign that is important to you?”

Thirty-five percent answered “more likely,” 53 percent answered “just as likely.” In other words, more than 50 percent said it wouldn’t matter one way or another.

The 2007 Cone survey was an update of the survey they’ve been doing for right around 15 years. While the Cone survey asked a number of questions related to corporate social responsibility, their core question… “Would you be likely to switch from one brand to another brand that is about the same in price and quality, if the other brand is associated with a good cause?”… has been scoring north of 80 percent since the 2002 survey. This year 87 percent responded in the affirmative.

I’ve written before about some of the weaknesses of these intent to purchase studies. What consumers do is a better indicator of the cultural Zeitgeist with respect to cause-related marketing than what they say they’ll do in the abstract.

But aside from that, the weakness of the question in the American Marketing Association survey is that it’s so specific to holiday season, it’s hard to extrapolate to the broader universe of cause-related marketing. Moreover the question is premised on the idea of a holiday gift with a cause overlay. I live and breathe cause-related marketing and I’m not certain I could quickly come up with a holiday gift that has a cause overlay.

I’ve said it before, but the clearest indication that cause-related marketing works is that companies continue to employee it and even expand it. General Mills’ Boxtops for Education campaign leaps to mind.

If cause-related marketing wasn’t effective companies wouldn’t use it.

Limited-Edition Cause-Related Marketing

Still selling $15 pink hoodies and $28 cosmetic bags to benefit your charity? That’s so 2006!

Right now AudreyBags.com is selling limited-edition handbags to benefit the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund. Audreybags, like the Trocadero to the left, are made of canvas and feature images of the timeless beauty that is Audrey Hepburn.

Only 36 of each handbag is made. Prices range from $325 to $825. The Trocadero clocks in at $725.

I love Audrey Hepburn. But I can’t imagine paying $725 for a canvas handbag (I don’t carry handbags so I can’t imagine paying even $25 for one). But Audreybags.com isn’t targeting me. They’re targeting high net worth individuals.

If you sell merchandise as a part of your cause-related marketing or fundraising you might strongly consider targeting a similar audience.

Here’s why.

• According to the 2007 World Wealth Report from Merrill Lynch and Capgemini, the number of high net worth individuals… people with net assets of $1 not including their primary residence… increased 8.3 percent over 2005.
• There are now 9.5 million people (!) worldwide who meet this standard.
• The number of ultra-high net worth individuals… those worth at least $30 million not including primary residences… grew by 11.3 percent year over year to 94,970.
• High net worth individuals now hold more than $37.2 trillion in wealth, a gain of 11.4 percent over 2005.
• The wealth is real, driven in part by gains in GDP and market capitalization growth.
• The total wealth of high net worth individuals is expected to grow at an annual rate of 6.8 percent through 2011, rising to $51.6 trillion.

In short, there are plenty of people who can afford an Audreybag.

But will they buy it? That depends on how shrewdly Audreybags.com markets their wares. Can Audreybag reach their audience effectively? Will Audrey Hepburn’s considerable cachet translate into the status that high net worth individuals often crave? Is 36-count limited edition exclusive enough? What will they do with inventory should it not sell? Is the online direct-to-consumer sales channel sufficient by itself?

There are other charities that could pull off something like Audreybag. Perhaps yours is one of them.

Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving in the States, a day when we we watch parades and American football before eating an enormous feast of turkey, 'stuffing,' and mashed potatoes, then chase it down with pumpkin pie.

We Americans grew up with a cherished myth that the first thanksgiving was celebrated when the Native Americans invited the Pilgrims over for a potluck around harvest time.

Every year historians, journalists and other skeptics chip away at the thanksgiving myth. The latest involves a Spanish explorer named Pedro Menendez de Aviles who dined on bean soup with Native Americans in Florida some 56 years before the more famous meal at Plymouth Rock.

In time no doubt we'll learn that Leif Ericson in fact broke bread with Native Americans in Labrador around 1000 AD and that the Basques shared their catch of salted cod with the Natives of New England long before Columbus.

Nonetheless, Americans are pretty much undaunted by these revelations. Here's why: the holiday as we now celebrate it is just so beautiful. Families and friends gather. An enormous meal is prepared. We talk about what it is that we have to be grateful for at the dinner table. We feast. We loosen our belts and take a nap. Then we go home with leftovers in plastic margarine containers.

For my part, I'm grateful to you my readers. Thanks for putting up with my rants. Thanks for disregarding my too frequent errors of spelling, grammar and logic. Thanks for leaving comments. Thanks for suggesting topics. Thanks for practicing cause-related marketing, wherever you are.

And, happy birthday Katie.

Interview On Cause Marketing With a Trade Magazine Reporter, Part II

The second half of an interview with Carol Gustafson, a writer with Western & English Today, a trade magazine to the equine industry.

3. What are the secrets to success? (The ways to make any CRM effort pay dividends for both the charity and the business.)

The secret sauce is planning and execution. In most cases, cause-related marketing is a promotion. And like any promotion it requires resources. But if resources are in short supply, to a degree you can substitute planning and creativity for money.

• Successful campaigns frequently rely on a ‘MacGuffin.’ Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock used the term to describe the mechanical element in movie plot that impelled action. In the case of cause-related marketing, sometimes the cause itself is the MacGuffin… certain breast cancer charities come to mind, for instance. The MacGuffin could be celebrity involvement, a sweepstakes of some sort, or strong media appeal.
• You must figure out a way to grab media attention that is appropriate for the promotion.
• If it makes sense for the cause and your company, you need to strongly consider some sort of event element. Events in cause-related marketing are powerful because they are one of the few media that allow you to effectively transition from awareness and interest, to desire, commitment and action in one fell swoop.

4. You've said that youth are an ideal market for CRM. Why is that?

The Millennials, aka Gen Y, the 76 million kids born from 1982 to 2002 have grown up with something called ‘service learning.’ That is, they get school credit for doing community service. That experience stays with them.

• In a Pew study released in January called “A Portrait of Generation Next” 56 percent of 18-25 year olds say that they “feel empowered to bring about social change,” an increase of eight percentage points over the Gen Xers who were asked the same question in 1990.
• Millennials volunteer more than any of other generation at their age, a reported 50 percent.
• They expect companies to contribute to their communities and in general Generation Y is not characterized by cynicism about life in general or cause-related marketing in particular.
• A September 2007 study commissioned by the American Marketing Association and conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation found that more than 50 percent of Americans were immune to cause-related marketing come-ons. (More on this and other recent studies in a later post.) But when broken out by age, the study found that the age cohort most responsive to cause-related marketing was 18-24 year-olds. Forty-six percent of that age group said that they were “more likely to buy a product or service if a portion of the price were donated to an important cause.” By contrast only 31 percent of those aged 45-64 felt the same way.

5. You've also identified eco-based CRM marketing as an area of growth. What is the potential in that area?

Until Al Gore won an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize in the same year, I would have said that Americans were still perhaps 12 months behind the ‘Green Wave.’ But it’s increasingly evident to me that the wave is cresting right now in America.

• Venture capitalists are bypassing the latest Internet fads to fund startups that manufacture solar panels.
• GE has on tour an energy-efficient railroad locomotive that works like a Toyota Prius, storing energy during braking to use when ascending hills.
• Wal-Mart stores dim their lights and sell organic milk

Right now, I see two broad classes of greens. There are the Americans willing to embrace eco-based cause-related marketing at almost any cost. These are the people who shop at Whole Foods/Wild Oats and pay perhaps a 40 percent premium for doing so.

Behind them is the much larger group who see the sense of saving energy, creating less waste, reducing their carbon ‘footprint,’ etc… so long as the price is right. These are the people who buy CFLs (compact florescent lightbulbs) at Wal-Mart.

They don’t pay as much for a CFL as it would have cost 3 years ago. But still they’re paying several times the cost of an incandescent bulb a little further down the same shelf.

Think about that for a moment. With millions of twisty light bulbs Wal-Mart manages to reshape its image, improve energy efficiency for the country as a whole, and lower the customer’s power bill, all by selling a CFL that has higher price point than the old incandescent bulbs, but a lower price point than their competitor’s CFL. It is, to use Peter Lynch’s term, a “triple bagger!”

Interview On Cause Marketing With a Trade Magazine Reporter

Last week I did “email interview” on cause-related marketing with Carol Gustafson, a writer for W&E Today, a trade magazine for the western and English equine industry.

She asked me five questions. I’ll post the answers to the first two questions on today’s post, and the remaining on next Tuesday’s post. Carol’s questions are in italics, followed by my answers.

1. With money tight and ad budgets shrinking, why should a business, especially a smaller one, include cause-related marketing in its promotional mix?

Old time marketers used to lament that the average person saw perhaps 250 commercial messages a day. Nowadays, the estimates range from a few hundred to perhaps 3,000! I expect there’s a lot of shock value built into these estimates. But as Seth Godin puts it in his landmark book Permission Marketing, the biggest challenge for marketers today isn’t the number of commercial messages per se.

Instead, it’s the number of messages combined with the fact that most commercials are based on interrupting people doing something they prefer. It’s hard to heat someone up to your commercial message if they’re cool to you because you interrupted their show or game.

Moreover, consumers are fighting back and they have more tools than ever. They’ve long enjoyed the power of the remote. Now they have the Tivo and recordable DVRs and Slingboxes. They zip past your commercial and time-shift your programming.

A whole generation gets their national news from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and their entertainment from YouTube. Online banner ads are dinosaurs. Search marketing can be effective, but if you don’t land on the first page, you might as well be on the last. Local media… TV, radio, newspaper, yellow pages… can still work very well, but with its uncanny ability to measure results, Internet marketing methods steal market share from the lazier local media every quarter.

Marketing today is like New Year’s Eve in Times Square; noisy, crowded, hard to navigate, and full of people reaching for your wallet.

Cause-related marketing is no panacea. But it does offer a number of advantages that help businesses and marketers cut through the commercial clutter.

• Well designed and executed cause-related marketing campaigns can push the sales needle.
• The practice is well-known… even expected… especially among young people and women [more on this in Tuesday’s post].
• Cause-related marketing heighten customer loyalty.
• It boosts public image and gives companies a new story to tell to the press and to other key constituencies.
• Cause-related marketing helps build employee morale and loyalty.
• It helps improve employee profitability, skills and teamwork.
• Cause-related marketing can improve employee recruiting and retention and build a pipeline of talent.

2. How should a business go about selecting a cause or charity?

There’s two basic approaches here. The first is called strategic cause-related marketing. If you’re a food company then a strategic fit would be a food bank or hunger charity. If you sell tack and feed, then a strategic fit might be a horse rescue charity. In general, the research suggests that strategic cause-related marketing makes the most sense to customers.

The second approach is to find charities that your internal audiences… employees, management, customers, vendors, boardmembers, etc… respond to or could get passionate about. That’s why you see Target supporting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to name one prominent example, even though they’re not a strategic fit in the usual sense.

Cheap Tricks II: Getting Your Cause Marketing Campaign Noticed in a Crowded Market

Kick Up Your Heels

Last Tuesday’s post talked about showmanship in cause-related marketing.

These days a lot of causes and their sponsors are doing very similar campaigns. Rather like Gene Kelly and Van Johnson doing the same dance steps in their fine film Brigadoon.

So how do you stand out?

As I wrote, Gene Kelly hemmed his trouser cuffs high enough so that you couldn’t miss his socks. Mark Twain and Winston Churchill dutifully prepared and polished their speeches and scripted their public appearances until they sparkled. In a debate once William F. Buckley upstaged the economics giant John Galbraith by hijacking the stage curtain and swaying with puckish nonchalance.

I hope I haven’t misrepresented this. By showmanship I don’t mean “cutting through the clutter,” per se. We all are bombarded by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of commercial messages a day. That’s clutter. One of the appeals of cause-related marketing is that by itself it can help cut through the clutter.

Instead, what I want to highlight are three media choices that can help your cause-related marketing campaign ‘flash a little red sock’ while everyone else contents themselves to show you their plain old pant leg.

For a ‘sale’ (whatever that means to you) to take place a customer typically moves from awareness of your product/service along a continuum to interest, then to desire, commitment and finally action.

For the sake of ease let’s just say that there are six basic tactical media choices available to marketers:

1. Mass media (in its many varieties)


2. Public relations


3. Direct mail


4. Internet


5. Events


6. Personal communications.

Depending on the campaign, the audience and the budget, all may have a role to play. But the most efficient media are those that can move the sales process from interest to action in one fell swoop. While there are always exceptions, mass media can’t do that. Neither can public relations or direct mail.

But certainly the Internet can. So too can events and personal communications.

As you plan your cause-related marketing campaigns work to make the most of these three media.

Do it right, with showmanship, professionalism and panache, and like Gene Kelly it will be your campaign people notice, no matter who else is also dancing.

Cheap Tricks I.I

In what may be a case of over-promising and under-delivering, I'm going to have to postpone the second half of this post until next Tuesday. I've been 'under the weather' as the expression goes and haven't had the chance to finish the second posting.

Instead, as a sort of a bridge, I want to share a letter from Aaron W. a reader in Toronto who asks if his two ads his group has produced serve to "shock people into paying attention."

Referring to Tuesday's post, Aaron asks:

I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether these ads are our "red socks" or
whether we missed the point and we're just bludgeoning people into submission."

View the ads on YouTube here and here.

Aaron is plainly trying to cut through the clutter. Please leave a comment on the ads to say you whether or not you think he's succeeded.

On Tuesday... Part II.

Cheap Tricks I: Getting Your Cause Marketing Campaign Noticed in a Crowded World

I happened to catch a few moments of Gene Kelly and Van Johnson dancing in the 1954 MGM musical Brigadoon on television the other night.

As was typical of Kelly’s choreography, when he and Van Johnson danced together their steps mirrored each other. And Johnson, who was a pretty good hoofer, acquitted himself very well. But still I couldn’t help looking first and most often at the immortal Kelly.

Little wonder, I suppose. Gene Kelly was so talented, famously perfectionist, and a grindingly hard worker who somehow managed to make every step look fluid and easy.

So much so that when the great Latvian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov was considering defecting to the West during the bad old Soviet days, one thing that gave him pause was that all American dancers were as skilled as Kelly or Fred Astaire. Hah! (Baryshnikov once said of Astaire, “His perfection gives us complexes, because he’s too perfect. His perfection is an absurdity that’s hard to face.”)

All that’s a given. Even though Van Johnson was pretty good I had to force myself to watch him. As I did so, it finally came to me why it took effort to notice him there next to Kelly.

Part of the reason my eyes gravitated to Gene Kelly was that he wore his pant legs hemmed quite high (we called them ‘floods’ or ‘highwaters’ when I was a kid). As he danced you could see flashes of red socks peeking through. I couldn’t see any of Van Johnson’s socks, even though red socks were his trademark.

In other words, Gene Kelly was practicing showmanship. Maybe even gamesmanship.

John Wayne practiced showmanship, too. I saw an interview wherein he confessed that he developed his famous rolling walk early in his career… when he wasn’t the featured actor… so that when he was in a scene he wouldn’t be missed, even as a secondary character.

And it’s not just performers who employ the tricks and techniques of showmanship to make them get noticed.

I once watched a debate between William F. Buckley (who launched modern American conservatism) and John Kenneth Galbraith, the eminent liberal economist. The debate took place on the stage of a large symphony hall and featured two podiums set about 10 feet apart. Not far behind them was a massive floor-to-ceiling curtain. Galbraith was 6’9” tall (206 cm) and even in the cheap seats where I was you could see that he towered over Buckley. When Galbraith would score points, Buckley would aimlessly back up to the curtains and position himself between the folds where he would gently sway back and forth, drawing attention his way. It was a rude and brilliant act of stagecraft.

A showman’s greatest technique might be his professionalism or imperturbability. The American writer Mark Twain had intertwining careers as both a writer and a speaker. When he spoke he seemed off-the-cuff. But that was only because his preparations were so exhaustive. Twain would script not only his text, but also his asides and quips, and then rehearse it all until he appeared to be speaking extemporaneously. Winston Churchill, who we think of as a completely unflappable man of the moment, did much the same when he gave speeches.

How does this relate to cause-related marketing?

If you’re a charity, agency or sponsor, look around. No matter how worthy your cause or campaign you’ve got competition. Certainly for money, but also for people’s attention.

Like Gene Kelly and Van Johnson you may be doing the same dance… the same bunch of cause-related marketing steps… that other respectable and worthy causes are doing.

How do you make sure that your campaign stands out?

In Thursday’s post I’ll make some suggestions.

In the meantime I hope you’ll offer your own tips, tools and techniques in the comments below.

Vendor Programs and Cause-Related Marketing

It’s no secret that cause-related marketing is typically aimed at consumers. But that doesn’t mean that the sales relationship from manufacturer to consumer is direct. The Internet notwithstanding, most manufacturers require sales channel partners. Sometimes more than one.

For instance, the delivery of the O-Cedar mop you bought at your neighborhood grocery store was probably enabled not directly by Fredenberg Household Products (which owns O-Cedar), but by a third-party manufacture’s rep, who made sure the product was on the shelf and well displayed and that the annual spring cleaning special pricing is properly executed.

Moreover, in the last 15 years ago in the United States the balance of power shifted from the manufacturers to the retailers. Retailers realized that the 15 feet on shelf space they might give a product… in store that can only carry so many SKUs… is foot-for-foot the most valuable real estate in America. Hence the rise of slotting fees and the like.

So if you’re a manufacturer and one of your principal retailers comes to you and says they’d like your support in a cause-related marketing campaign they probably have you over a barrel. You could say no, of course. But let’s be honest, the only dickering that goes on is over the amount of vigorish the manfacturer will pay.

To be fair there are retailers which have internal policies that preclude them from fundraising from their vendors. I know for a fact that Albertsons had a policy against approaching vendors for donations, although the grocery giant had also made exceptions.

A vendor program is what’s at work with this pink packaging from Sargento Foods, the $500 million Wisconsin cheese maker. Over the signature of Lou Gentine, the company’s CEO, a letter on the back of the packaging says that, “This year in America, over 200,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. So, in partnership with the Kroger Co. family of stores, Sargento and other brands are making a donation to breast cancer awareness to fight this terrible disease.”

Those ain’t exactly the words of a company that’s in the ‘fight’ against breast cancer heart and soul.

What did Sargento get out of their donation and specialty pink packaging? Maybe they got favorable space allocations in Kroger stores, or an appearance in the weekly Kroger flyer. Non-refrigerated items might get a special end-cap. It wouldn’t surprise me if golf foursomes were somehow involved, too.

So you can understand why Sargento isn’t exactly forthcoming about the donation amount, who the money is going to, or exactly how the donated money will aid the fight against breast cancer.