Green Up Your Cause Marketing

One of the complaints greens have about cause marketing is that it typically incentivizes and rewards the purchase of more stuff. Stuff that might be useful for a while but eventually ends up in a landfill somewhere.

Into this conundrum came Sprint, the mobile service provider, and Samsung, the handset maker.

Together they came up with a cause marketing campaign that mitigates some of those usual concerns.

From August to Dec 2009, Sprint gave $2 to the Nature Conservancy for the sale of each Samsung Reclaim phone and messaging device. There was a guaranteed minimum donation of $250,000. A press release tells me that the maximum donation was $500,000, which the program achieved.

The Reclaim phone currently sells for $49.99, with a Sprint plan.

The Nature Conservancy is using the donation for its ‘Adopt an Acre’ program.

To mitigate green concerns, the phone was made from 80 percent recyclable materials and its packaging was fully recyclable. It was the first phone sold in the U.S. whose casing was made partly with bio-plastics.

Cool!

I expect that the Reclaim... with its many messaging features and slide-out keyboard... is targeted at younger users, so the choice of the Nature Conservancy is slightly surprising.

There's plenty to like about the Nature Conservancy, but it's kinda like your dad's environmental charity of choice.

It could certainly be that the Nature Conservancy was just easier to work with than any other alternative. It has that reputation.

As a cause marketer, the Reclaim strikes me as a first step, not a last one. There should also be some kind of cause incentive to reclaim the phone from users when they’re done. After all, it’s a shame when recyclable packaging goes to landfills, but considering the toxins and the reclaimable materials, it’s a tragedy when phones do!

Sprint realizes this and has a goal of achieving 90 percent phone reclamation by 2017.

I humbly submit that cause marketing tactics could help Sprint reach that goal.

Cause Marketing Efforts in Support of Haitian Earthquake Relief

It can’t come to soon for those in Haiti, but cause marketers… including some from smaller entities… are using the power of cause marketing to support relief efforts in the earthquake battered country.

What follows is a representative few. But it’s an important list because it demonstrates that you don’t have to be an A-list celebrity, like George Clooney and pals, to do your part.

If you see more examples of cause marketing on behalf of Haiti and Haitians I hope you’ll either email me at aldenkeene @ gmail [dot] com or comment below.

One of the most prominent examples comes from Zynga, creator of the virtual worlds and games including Farmville, Fishville, Zynga Poker, and Mafia Wars. When you certain buy virtual items from Zynga for use in those games, a donation is made to the U.N’s World Food Programme.

The donation to Haiti relief efforts from Zynga users is already north of $1.5 million!

Paper Culture, an online stationary story, is donating “100 percent of all proceeds from its 2010 Valentine’s Day Cards to Haiti Relief. No word on which charities get the money or how they figure the proceeds.

Replay Photos, which sells framed pictures of collegiate stadiums and other sports-related gift items will donate $10 for every purchase over $40 through January 31 to the American Red Cross for Haiti relief, when you use the codeword Haiti when you checkout.

On Sunday, Jan 24, Bongos Cuban Café in Miami, owned by Gloria and Emelio Estafan hosted an all-star celebrity jam session in support of World Vision’s work in Haiti. The door charge was $100, which included hors d’ouevres and drinks.

Invited guests included Pitbull, Don King, Ted Lucas, Melky Jean, Inner Circle, Marley’s Family, Jagged Edge, Trina, Black Dada, Indio, Flo Rida, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and others.

A celebrity jam session is a fun idea. People love that kind of thing. But the press release I received had no information on how the money was to be split.

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.)

LIVESTRONG Cause Marketing

If you're anything like me then you've watched the growth and development of Lance Armstrong's LIVESTRONG brand with a mixture of awe and envy.

It started with the iconic yellow rubber bracelets, which since 2004 have generated more than $70 million for the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

Over the arc of the bracelet's popularity they have been imitated, parodied and worn by vast array of non-biking celebrities, as well as the hoi polloi.

All guided by the legendary marketers at Nike and its long-time agency Weiden+Kennedy.

So popular and well-known was the yellow bracelet that there was a long while when it seemed like every fundraising brainstorming session I had with a charity somebody suggested a bracelet campaign, as if lightning could be caught in a bottle a second time.

(In that way it's reminiscent of all the meetings I've been in when people suggested that all they needed to really get their pet project off the ground was an appearance on Oprah!)

From the start Nike built LIVESTRONG like another one of its famous brands and for sometime now Nike has been selling LIVESTRONG shoes and Apparel.

The LIVESTRONG campaign is the closest I can recall Nike coming to transactional cause marketing.

Envious as I am, I think Nike has misplayed its hand with this ad, which appeared in the January 2010 issue of Lucky magazine.

What exactly is the headline "We are More than One" supposed to mean?

I assume we are meant to draw some kind of connecting line between the unconquered spirits of cancer survivors, which is what LIVESTRONG is about, and the will it takes to win to Olympic gold medals or throw a no-hitter in baseball, or win seven Tours de France.

In truth, a there's only one athlete in the world who can draw that line and that's Lance Armstrong. No one has won more Tour de France championships than Armstrong, a feat made all the more remarkable considering his well-known 1996 bout with testicular cancer.

That said, all the featured athletes in the ad are survivors of cancer or disease.

But aside from Armstrong, did you know that? I know I had to look it up.

Laurel Wessner, a twin, fought Hodgkin's lymphoma. Jon Lester survived non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and Sanya Richards has a form of vasculitis, an inflammatory disease that affects the blood vessels.

You have to be a pretty close student of sport to know those facts. But if you're not, this ad doesn't make much sense.

People aren't their diseases, I get that. But an ad with this headline merits a sentence that explains not only their athletic prowess, but their heroic battle with disease.

Organizations Helping in Haiti

Dear Friends:

By now we've all heard of or seen pictures from the deadly earthquake in the beleaguered country of Haiti.

Here's a list of charities operating in Haiti or heading there now with relief. I urge you to support one or more of them.

The list comes from MSNBC. I'll add one more; a small charity that's been in Haiti for more than 10 years and was founded by the friend of a friend. It's called Healing Hands for Haiti.

• Action Against Hunger
• American Red Cross
• American Jewish World Service
• AmeriCares
• CARE
• Catholic Relief Services
• Childcare Worldwide
• Direct Relief International
• Doctors Without Borders
• Feed My Starving Children
• Friends of WFP
• Haitian Health Foundation
• Hope for Haiti
• International Medical Corps
• International Relief Teams
• Medical Teams International
• Meds and Food for Kids
• Mercy Corps
• Operation USA
• Oxfam
• Partners in Health
• Samaritan's Purse
• Save the Children
• UNICEF
• World Concern
• World Vision