Followup: Injecting Emotion into Your Cause Marketing

On October 23, I posted about Ulta's Windows of Love campaign for the Breast Cancer Reseaerch Foundation.

Earlier this week Ulta sent out this recap email to supporters.

Thanks to Kate L. for sharing!

Does Cause Marketing Scale?

We see evidence of big cause marketing all the time.

You know, cause marketing so massive… like the Red campaign or Boxtops for Education… that it seems to create its own gravity.

Plainly, when properly designed, cause marketing scales up very well, thank you very much.

But what about the little guys? Does cause marketing scale down as well as up?

Here’s why this is an important question. In the States small businesses… generally companies with 500 or fewer employees… represent 99 percent of all businesses that have employees, and over the last 15 years, small businesses have generated 64 percent of all new jobs.

Small business is also really dynamic. Small businesses rise and fail quickly in round after round of Schumpeter-style ‘creative destruction.’

Likewise, most 501(c)(3) nonprofit charities in the United States are small. There’s only one American Red Cross with its $4 billion budget, but at least 1 million smaller charities.

Is cause marketing only for the top one percent of causes and companies?

The ad above comes in a monthly advertising flyer mailed to my home called Hometown Values. Hometown Values is basically 30+ pages of display ads, overwhelmingly for small businesses and franchises.

Can you spot the cause marketing offer? It’s a little hard to see on a page that is so visually busy.

It’s in that quarter-page ad at the top right. A firm called Hung Up for the Holidays, which installs and removes Christmas lights, will donate ‘5% of all proceeds’ to the Utah Food Bank, the state’s largest.

I won’t pick on the company for the ambiguous language of the cause marketing appeal or the tininess of the Utah Food Bank’s logo.

I’m just glad to see a small company in this economy doing its part and using the power of small-scale cause marketing to support a small charity.

Asymmetry in Cause Marketing

Research shows that when there is asymmetry in cause marketing between the sponsors and the cause, the entity that gains the most from the relationship is the smaller brand.

But there’s an asymmetry continuum of sorts.

For instance, when Yoplait yogurt and Susan G. Komen for the Cure link up, the brands which are arguably equivalent in their respective spheres, the benefits confer symmetrically.

Same when Weight Watchers and Share Our Strength tie in together.

So what happens when l’Oreal hooks up with the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund, as it did earlier this year with a cosmetics bag campaign? Or like Jiffy Lube does in my home state of Utah, when it does a holiday season cause marketing campaign benefiting the Utah Food Bank?

In such cases, the causes benefit disproportionately thanks to their association with the better known brands.

Does the obverse hold true? That is, can a sponsor benefit asymmetrically from an association with a better-known nonprofit brand?

Yes it can. For instance, the retailer Ashley Furniture benefited asymmetrically when it did a campaign for Habitat for Humanity earlier this year.

But that’s not at work here with this campaign from Iams benefiting Home 4 the Holidays pet adoption drive from the Helen Woodward Animal Center. The Woodward Center created the pet adoption drive in 1999. Last year more than 1.2 million pets were adopted in the effort.

Two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank…whose movie Amelia just came out… is the campaign’s spokesperson.

In addition to the Home 4 the Holidays pet adoption drive, the Woodward Center, founded in 1972, teaches personnel from animal shelters around the globe how best to save animal lives. As a result, the Woodward Center has a larger ‘footprint’ than just the 12 acres it sits on in Rancho Santa Fe, California.

Nonetheless, I think it’s fair to say that Iams is the better-known brand than the Woodward Center. In my estimation the Woodward Center benefits asymmetrically in this sponsorship.

So why would Proctor & Gamble, which owns Iams and is a very savvy cause marketer, do this deal?

I expect there are several reasons:

• The Home 4 the Holidays pet adoption drive touches a lot of pet owners. Woodward says it’s more than 3 million. Some portion will be new pet owners. That is, people who haven’t already established their pet food preferences.
• Hillary Swank’s involvement certainly smoothes the way. Remember Swank has as many Oscars as Meryl Streep (if less nominations) and she’s very attractive in addition to being very talented and well-liked.
• Home 4 the Holidays is a classic feel-good and there’s nothing negative about pet adoption.
• Also, because of its non-sectarian approach, Home 4 the Holidays can cross boundaries that other pet adoption drives can’t.
• Finally Home 4 the Holidays is an international effort, and Proctor & Gamble epitomizes the modern multi-national corporation.