Skip to main content

HUGO Fragrances ‘One Fragrance, One Tree’ Cause Marketing Campaign

In a world where much of the air stinks, HUGO fragrances wants to help.

When you buy specially-marked packages of HUGO Element (on the left) or HUGO Man fragrances, HUGO will pay for the planting of one or more than a dozen species of trees in the Amazon rainforest.

The campaign is meant to mitigate pollution in the earth’s atmosphere, rainforest deforestation, and rising CO2 levels.

The campaign is in support of the Pur Project, a kind of collective led by social entrepreneur Tristan Lecomte. Pur members plant tree seeds, nurture them in nurseries, and transplant them to one of three plantations in tropical Peru or Bolivia. The labor required puts locals to work in both countries.

The packages of HUGO Elements and Man are coded such that you can enter an access number and see exactly where your tree is planted on Google Maps!

Cool!

I like this campaign a lot. It makes good use of the ‘buy one, give one’ (BOGO) paradigm that is so compelling.The cause itself is solution-based. That is, it’s not a bunch of lawyers suing people for environmental change. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that).

The cause is strategically appropriate for the people who buy and wear HUGO fragrances, and you can see…at least in a non-specific way…what your donation has done. I also appreciate that a number of species are being planted, thus keeping Pur’s plantations from being monoculture.

It would be nice... and probably dull... if there was a way of tracking how much CO2 your tree was removing from the atmosphere. But as I understand plant science, most trees don’t come into their own as CO2 removers until they are quite mature.

At the risk of being curmudgeonly, I was a little put off by the electronic club music that provided the music bed for the slideshow that explains the campaign.

I know I’m not HUGO’s target market, but another 30-seconds of that track and I would have had to take an ice pick to my eardrums.

All in all, a really cool campaign.


(In the interest of full-disclosure, my company, Alden Keene, provided some counsel on this campaign to Proctor and Gamble, which licenses, manufactures and distributes HUGO fragrances.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Batting Your Eyelashes at Prescription Drug Cause Marketing

I’m a little chary about making sweeping pronouncements, but I believe I've just seen the first cause marketing promotion in the U.S. involving a prescription drug. The drug is from Allergan and it’s called Latisse , “the first and only FDA-approved prescription treatment for inadequate or not enough eyelashes.” The medical name for this condition is hypotrichosis. Latisse is lifestyle drug the way Viagra or Propecia are. That is, no one’s going to die (except, perhaps, of embarrassment) if their erectile dysfunction or male pattern baldness or thin eyelashes go untreated. Which means the positioning for a product like Latisse is a little tricky. Allergan could have gone with the sexy route as with Viagra or Cialis and showed lovely women batting their new longer, thicker, darker eyelashes. But I’ll bet that approach didn’t test well with women. (I’m reminded of a joke about the Cialis ads from a comedian whose name I can’t recall. He said, “Hey if my erection lasts longer than

Cause Marketing: The All Packaging Edition

One way to activate a cause marketing campaign when the sponsor sells a physical product is on the packaging. I started my career in cause marketing on the charity side and I can tell you that back in the day we were thrilled to get a logo on pack of a consumer packaged good (CPG) or even just a mention. Since then, there’s been a welcome evolution of what sponsors are willing and able to do with their packaging in order to activate their cause sponsorships. That said, even today some sponsors don’t seem to have gotten the memo that when it comes to explaining your cause campaign, more really is more, even on something as small as a can or bottle. The savviest sponsors realize that their only guaranteed means of reaching actual customers with a cause marketing message is by putting it on packaging. And the reach and frequency of the media on packaging for certain high-volume CPG items is almost certainly greater than radio, print or outdoor advertising, and, in many cases, TV. More to

Cause-Related Marketing with Customer Receipts

Walgreens and JDRF Right now at Walgreens…the giant pharmacy and retail store chain with more than 5,800 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico… they’re selling $1 paper icons for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). This is an annual campaign and I bought one to gauge how it’s changed over the years. (Short list… they don’t do the shoe as a die cut anymore; the paper icon is now an 8¾ x 4¼ rectangle. Another interesting change; one side is now in Spanish). The icon has a bar code and Jacob, the clerk, scanned it and handed me a receipt as we finished the transaction. At the bottom was an 800-number keyed to a customer satisfaction survey. Dial the number, answer some questions and you’re entered into a drawing for $10,000 between now and the end of September 2007. I don’t know what their response rate is, but the $10,000 amount suggests that it’s pretty low. Taco Bell’s survey gives out $1,000 per week. At a regional seafood restaurant they give me a code that garner