Merry Christmas from Alden Keene and Causemarketing.biz!

Here for your listening and viewing pleasure is Darlene Love, singing Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).

It is far and away the blues-iest, rocking-est, Christmas song ever!

It comes courtesy of wunderkind music producer Phil Spector, his famous Wall of Sound, David Letterman, Paul Shaffer, CBS, and YouTube.

Mele Kalikimaka, my friends!

Co-Branding and Cause Marketing

Five or six years ago the term 'co-branding' was one of those hot marketing buzzwords. Nowadays co-branding is so commonplace as to be mundane. The point of co-branding is for brands to combine such that they create notable synergy.

There are several kinds of co-branding, including cause marketing itself.

This article, from Tiger Woods' previous sponsor, Accenture, names six:

• Promotional/Sponsorship. This is the category cause marketing falls under. Also Motorola's sponsorship of the National Football League.
• Ingredient. Betty Crocker brownie mix made with Hershey chocolate, or any of the Jack Daniels' dishes at TGI Fridays.
• Innovation Based. The Apple-Nike tie-up.

Value-Chain, which is meant to bring new experiences to the consumer, not just another flavor. There are three varieties of value-chain co-branding:

• Product Service. Sea World and Southwest Airlines.
• Supplier-Retailer. Starbucks wifi service from AT&T.
• Alliance. Think FTD, or those alliances between multiple airline carriers.
  

In short, co-branding is common and familiar.

Less common is co-branding between more than two brands. That's because the more brands you add, the more inertia there is to overcome. Co-branding with more than two brands is like a trade between three or more professional sports teams whereby six or eight or ten players change teams. Those deals tend to make the news because everyone understands that they're so hard to put together in a way that satisfies all the parties.

So this promotion from caught my eye. It was in a recent sales flyer from the discount retailer Target. When you buy a Hasbro toy or game from the featured page, Hasbro will make a make a donation of 5 percent of the purchase price to the Salvation Army.

Target's usual national charity of choice is the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. But it has long been a supporter of the Salvation Army. However in 2004 Target quit allowing Sally Ann kettle ringers in front of its stores because it had a strict no-soliciting policy but had made an exception for the Salvation Army.

Since the kettle campaign makes up as much as 70 percent of the Salavation Army's fundraising, losing a major retailer was a blow. Target responded with a multi-element fundraising campaign that includes online support of the Salvation Army's Angel Tree effort.

As a result, I suspect that it was Target which made this deal happen rather than Hasbro or the Salvation Army.

Regardless, I'm glad to see the Salvation Army get the support. It's a charity I have long admired for its effectiveness, efficiency, breadth of services and depth of genuine human
compassion.

If you're looking for a broad-based domestic charity to support this holiday season, I don't believe you could do better than the Salvation Army.

Why Can Cause Marketing Improve Employee Morale?

Tuesday evening, Paul Nelson, a local radio reporter called to ask about how to keep up employee morale during the downturn.

(Here's his finished story.)

He'd seen on Slideshare a presentation on the topic I'd given in September to the Utah state convention of the Society for Human Resource Management.

Between the presentation and my comments, I'll bet I gave him a half-dozen studies demonstrating that cause marketing can help companies improve employee morale, loyalty, profitability. skills, teamwork, etc.

And then he asked me the most natural, obvious question imaginable. Why?

Why would working with a charity help a company improve morale?

I almost choked. No one has ever asked my why that would be.

I'm a pundit so of course I had an answer for him... it's the quote he used in the story... but it wasn't based on any study I could name or even think of.

So here's my question to you my faithful readers.

Why can cause marketing help with employee morale?

Feel free to state your opinion. But if you can cite a source or a study, all the better.

Cause Marketing Two Liver Transplants

In my ongoing quest to highlight cause marketing efforts large and small, here’s a smaller one.

The Skinner family is facing not one, but two liver transplants. Their two children, 2-year-old Claire and 4-year-old Benson both suffer from primary hyperoxaluria, a genetic disorder that causes their livers to produce too much oxalate. Claire’s case is the more acute, requiring her to spend as much as 15 hours a day on dialysis.

Claire is already on the transplant list and Benson will almost certainly join her there in the near future.

So their friends at Shelf Reliance, a company that sells emergency preparedness supplies, are conducting a cause marketing campaign on behalf of the Skinner kids.

When you buy a #10 can of Shelf Reliance brownie mix, they will donate the full purchase price… $14.90… to the Children’s Organ Transplant Association in support of liver transplants for Claire and Benson.

The ‘call out’ in this flyer I received isn’t as good as it needs to be, or even fully accurate. The call out says that ‘100 percent of the proceeds’ benefits the children through the Children’s Organ Transplant Association. Instead 100 percent of the purchase price is donated to COTA.

This ‘proceeds’ language seems to trip up a lot of people, so for the sake of clarity let me reiterate that the proceeds language means a net total after expenses.

COTA helps families fundraise for their children’s organ transplant expenses. One of COTA’s services is that it will set up an account for families to raise funds for their child under COTA’s 501(c)(3) umbrella. That way donors can easily make tax deductible donations.

But whether is the money raised by Shelf Reliance goes to Claire’s and Benson’s accounts or to COTA’s general coffers, we are left to wonder.

Shelf Reliance activates the sponsorship in several other ways besides this flyer. They mention it on their corporate blog and Facebook page.

They’re also running a giveaway promotion wherein one of the ways to enter the contest is to buy the brownie mix or to make a donation directly to COTA.

Short of these two small deficiencies, this is a nice campaign and at $14.90 a pop, a generous one!