When is a Celebrity Not Enough for a Cause Campaign?

Brooke Shields’ face graced this ad for Allergan’s prescription eyelash-grower called Latisse in dozens of magazines for the better part of 18 months. Allergan still lists her as a celebrity supporter on the Latisse website, even though actress Claire Danes has superseded Brooke in the recent print ads I’ve seen.

Latisse sponsors the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

I first profiled this campaign back in July 2009, when I saw it in Real Simple magazine, meaning the creative was available at least in time for that ad.

Since everything else is in the creative is basically the same except for some typography, why on earth would Allergan not use Brooke in this ad that ran in the September-October 2009 issue of Bride’s Magazine, but would use her ad in the November-December 2009 issue of Bride’s?

One obvious possibility is that Bride’s Magazine, which publishes 6-times a year, has a longer lead time than Real Simple, which publishes monthly.

But I doubt it.

It could be that Allergan is testing Brooke against the young bride to see which one pulled better. But if that were the case, you’d expect the phone number listed to be different.

I suspect however, that for soon-to-be-brides, there might be times when a sister-bride is a bigger ‘celebrity’ than Brooke Shields.

What do you think?


Happy New Year!

Buy Groupon for $15, Donate $30 to Save the Children

Unless you’re clueless to the world of tech and marketing… like, say, a headhunter in New Guinea… or utterly distracted, like jailed Russian oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky…you’ve probably heard of Groupon (and the reported $6 billion buyout offer from Google the company turned down!).

Groupon is a deal-a-day website promoting local businesses to 35 million members in hundreds of cities in nine countries in North America, South America and Europe. One of Groupon’s most common approaches is to negotiate the sales of merchandise or services for half their listed price.

But the Groupon from Wednesday, Dec. 29 in Greenville, South Carolina offered a different sort of half-off promotion. When you donate $15 to Save the Children, $30 will go to the respected international aid charity.

How does that work?

The only way it could work is if one or more people provide the matching funds, and the Groupon site confirms this:

“All donations made via this Groupon support Save the Children's Global Action Fund and are matched up to $225,000 by a small group of private donors, many of whom are former children themselves.”

As of this writing the Groupon had attracted 1392 buyers with about 24 hours left on the offer, which is certainly respectable, but well short of the 15,000 buyers that $225,000 could match.

Every fundraiser knows that matches work, and this is a version of a matching campaign that I’d be interested to see other charities try.

That said, I do wonder if bringing the idea of ‘saving’ on charitable donations isn’t ultimately counterproductive to Save the Children and any other charity that tries it.

Who’s Got Shaq's Back in This Cause Ad?

Shaquille O’Neal, NBA legend, rap artist and pitchman for Comcast showed up in his guise as ‘Shaq-A-Clause’ in this pre-Christmas circular from Toys ‘R’ Us benefiting Toys for Tots.

The press release quoted Shaq saying: “My parents always encouraged me to give back to those less fortunate, and ever since I made it to the NBA, I’ve been visiting Toys“R”Us stores during the holiday season to buy gifts for kids in need.”

There’s a Facebook component, special appearances by O’Neal at Toys ‘R’ Us stores, online videos, a microsite, support from Shaq’s own website and a $250,000 seed donation from Toys ‘R’ Us.

Still something’s missing and it's called a copy editor. The second line of copy reads: “Cash donactions accepted through Christmas Eve.”

Come on people, someone needs to get Shaq's back!

Cause Marketing the Ballet

Most ballet companies in the United States balance their books each year based in large measure on how well their performances of The Nutcracker go each December.

And for that they owe no small debt of gratitude to Willam Christiansen, who founded the San Francisco Ballet in 1933 and the forerunner of Ballet West in Salt Lake City in 1963. Christensen was also the first American to choreograph and mount a full-length version of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker in the United States, although the great Russian choreographer George Balanchine had choreographed it in Europe years before.

So a ballet company would certainly welcome a little extra publicity during The Nutcracker season.

At least that’s one way to read this ad from a local Audi dealer that began its run in the Salt Lake City newspapers before Christmas and featured Ballet West’s Principal Ballerina Christiana Bennett and Soloist Haley Henderson Smith in costume.

The copy at the bottom of the ad tells us that Strong Audi is the “official vehicle supplier of Ballet West.” Ballet West’s website says that Strong’s sponsorship clocks in between $25,000 and $49,999. If Strong Audi’s sponsorship is in-kind, that’s one car.

Two pieces of background that are important to the discussion: Salt Lake City is an awfully small market to be supporting a ballet company of the quality of Ballet West. And, although they have terrific dance resumes, Bennett and Smith are not widely known in the market except among ballet cognoscenti.

Still, if Strong Audi paid no more than $49,999 they got Bennett and Smith and their employer, Ballet West, for a bargain. These kinds of ads are very common with professional sports teams. But I can all but guarantee that you can’t get two of the best players on a professional sports team in one of the major sports in the United States… baseball, basketball, football… for a sponsorship of just $49,999.

Strong Audi might respond that Ballet West dancers don’t deliver the same promotional punch that two NBA players would, for example. Probably true. But if I were Ballet West, while I would certainly ask for more money, I would settle for a real promotion.

Don’t just put my pretty ballerinas in your ad, I would say, promote The Nutcracker. Help me put butts in the seats. Help me sell season tickets. Help me introduce ballet to the next generation. Help me find new donors.

For instance, on December 30 and 31, Ballet West is doing a comic version of The Nutcracker called “The Nutty Nutcracker.” The choreography is basically the same as the regular Nutcracker, it’s just played for laughs.

Imagine, then, a promotion that would take place at Strong Audi’s showroom. Ballet West would perform several abbreviated numbers from The Nutty Nutcracker. TV stations would be invited. A donation would be made to Ballet West anytime someone takes a test drive of some qualifying Strong Audi. During the promotion, if someone makes a donation to Ballet West, Strong Audi would match up to a certain amount. And anyone who buys a Strong Audi during the promotion would get season tickets to the next Ballet West season.

Done right and to scale, such a promotion would be worth more to Ballet West than $25,000 to $49,000.

Push and Pull in Cause Marketing

In the early days of the practice the cause marketing you were most likely to see involved consumer packaged goods with donations predicated on coupon redemption.

Cause marketing has gone 100 different directions in the since and CPG promotions no longer dominate the cause marketing landscape. Nonetheless I see at least four lessons for today’s cause marketers from Procter & Gamble’s current CPG promotion at the left for Special Olympics.

The first is longevity. P&G and Special Olympics have a 28-year relationship. I have no inside knowledge of this partnership, but I’d bet that in those three decades there’s been dozens of personnel changes. I’ll bet there’s been strong personal relationships and weak ones and plenty that fell in between. I’ll bet either party has thought about walking away from the partnership. What P&G and Special Olympics have is something like a long and happy marriage that is stronger in part because there’s been some push and pull between the partners.

The second lesson is related and it has to do with familiarity. Procter & Gamble genuinely understands Special Olympics. Year-in year-out the Special Olympics FSI naturally features the Special Olympians. But this one also has a ‘Thanks Mom,’ theme that recognizes that before anybody else hugs one of the Special Olympians moms have played their own heroic part. Partners that have only been together for a few years probably don’t know enough about each other to take this approach.

The third lesson is that P&G doesn’t go cheap on the production elements of the promotion. If you look closely at the FSI it becomes plain that all the photographs were taken for the promotion. There’s not a stock photo in sight. The result is a visual authenticity missing from a lot of cause marketing advertising these days.

The fourth lesson… and probably the most important… is that while P&G is using the FSI to push product through the channel, they also enlist their retailer partners to pull from their end. At left is a Shopco circular in the same newspaper. All the items on this page are also in P&G FSI and the copy and photographs on this page refer back to the P&G FSI.

Better still, aside from the picture of the FSI cover, none of the pictures are also in the brandSAVER FSI. In other words, P&G provided Shopko with other pictures from the FSI photo shoot, allowing it bask in the light of the halo provided by Special Olympics.

Merry Christmas From Alden Keene and the Cause Marketing Blog

The long-standing Christmas Eve tradition at the cause marketing blog is to show the video of the prior year’s appearance of Darlene Love singing 'Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)' on the Late Show with David Letterman. You can see Love’s 2009 appearance below.

Love first recorded ‘Baby’ in 1963 and she is still going strong at age 72 (according to Wikipedia). Watch the video and you’ll wonder how Love could possibly be 72.

But surely there’s a rocking good Christmas song that’s less 30 years old (‘We Are the World’ doesn’t count because, God bless 'em, Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson didn't write an actual rock song).

The good news is I found a Christmas song that actually rocks and is less than 30 years old. That is to say, I remembered this great song from rocker Billy Squier which he performed on MTV in December 1981 (when I was 7 months old). Look closely for MTV’s original VJ’s: Martha Quinn, Nina Blackwood, JJ Jackson, Mark Goodman, and Alan Hunter.


With Squier’s ‘Christmas is the Time to Say I Love You’ I make an addition to the Cause Marketing Blog Christmas tradition.

Enjoy and Merry Christmas!

Basic Improvements To a Promising Paper Icon Campaign

Yesterday, December 22, 2010, I bought this paper icon at a local chain of 31 stores called Fresh Market, which is owned by a large grocery co-op headquartered in Utah, called Associated Foods. Sales of the icon benefits the hungry, women's shelters, military families, and community centers... based on what the individual store decides.

Paper icon campaigns and their new-age descendents have been with us for two decades now and it seems that everybody thinks they know how to do them. I see a lot of these kinds of campaigns (and buy every new one I see). The Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database now has dozens of examples.

My analysis of the paper icons in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database is that only those who have been doing paper icon campaigns for a long time are any good.

In the spirit of improving this campaign, which I think shows promise, here’s what I suggest:

1. Scratch the other charity options and just go with food banks. Fresh Market is a store. It feeds people. The connection to food banks is clear and unmistakable. Stick with that. Then use the backside... which is currently blank...to explain the campaign in 25 words or less. That would have helped the clerk, too, when I asked her what the campaign was about. There were posters in the store where I bought it that explained the campaign. But curiously they were positioned so that only the people leaving the store could read them. That’s unhelpful. There wasn’t much presence at the cashier stands, either. Fresh Market also could have put a prerecorded announcement or two on it’s in-store ‘radio station.’
2. So that the campaign requires less explanation, shape the icon not like a Christmas tree ornament, but like a plate of food or something similar that designates hungry people being fed. The ornament is designed well enough, but it’s apropos only of the holiday, not the benefit of buying it.
3. The icons came in three price points: the white one above priced at $1; a pink one priced at $5; a green version priced at $10. For the $5 and $10 versions consider adding value with a bounce-back coupon extension. (The icon above is backed by green so that it would show up).
   
4. At the point of purchase use the receipt to help capture names and contact info. Imagine getting a free download of a song or an app, some free or deeply discounted grocery item when people register on a site listed on the receipt. Obviously the data is yours to keep. No one, to my knowledge, is doing this.
   
5. Incent the cashiers to sell the paper icon. Create contests. Track results. Pit cashier against cashier, manager against manager, store against store. Offer recognition and prizes to the top performers.
6. Give it a social media aspect, especially on Facebook. Offer incentives for people who friend the campaign’s Facebook page. You could also have some fun with a QR code printed on the icon. I’ve never seen that either.
   

There you go; six ideas to take the campaign from ordinary to extraordinary.

Radiothons As Fundraisers

Nine local stations in my market are conducting a two-day radiothon benefiting the State’s largest homeless shelter... called the Road Home... yesterday and today. Their fundraising goal is $250,000.

This pales in comparison to the big dogs of radiothons, Children’s Miracle Network and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which generate tens of millions of dollars. But it’s an admirable effort nonetheless, none the least of which because it involves stations from two separate ownership groups and multiple radio formats!

After getting killed in the early days of the Great Recession the Radio Advertising Bureau reports that radio has grown in 2010, although more so at the national than local level. Still, how do you do ask a local radio station to do a radiothon at a time when stations can't afford to turn down even one ad?

Here’s how: most stations do change the way they format their programming during the radiothon, but the time spent talking about the cause comes out of the music rather than the ad ‘budget.’

So a sports talk radio station talks about the college football bowl games, the NBA and the NFL, but it also talks about the shelter. The hosts of the easy listening station that otherwise plays nothing but Christmas music this time of year, break in a little more often and play less music, but all the ads remain intact. A delicate balance has to be struck, but by this means radiothon stations don’t lose in any ad revenue.

One of the things the Road Home radiothon could do but doesn’t (so far as I can tell) is program ‘success stories.’ The Road Home is pretty progressive shelter and they work very hard at quickly getting people out of the Shelter and into permanent housing.

No doubt they’ve had success at this. They could do pre-produced ‘packages’ that tell the stories of people who are in a better place after their stay at the Shelter. They could do live interviews with Shelter alumni. They could certainly put out a fact sheet for on-air talent that explains not just the needs, which are considerable, but the triumphs.

Otherwise the Road Home risks ‘donor fatigue.’

One thing I appreciate about the Road Home radiothon is the way they pit the stations against each other in informal competition to see who can generate the most donations. That’s smart.
The Road Home also… astutely, I believe… encourages not just cash donations, but donations of clothing, bedding and the like as well as volunteer hours. Statistics demonstrate that volunteers are more generous donors than people who donate only money.

Late Season Cause Marketing from CouponMountain.com Benefiting Toys for Tots

Now through December 31, 2010 when you ‘Like’ Coupon Mountain on their Facebook page, the company will donate $1 to Toys for Tots, up to $50,000.

CouponMountain.com specializes in delivering discount offers to subscribers and visitors.

I confess that I don’t entirely understand the company’s business model, but I assume it’s based on referral fees and sponsored listings. But I think it’s safe to assume that the more people that subscribe and use the service, via the website or through Facebook, the better for CouponMountain.com. So the approach, which rewards sign-ups (which would include Facebook ‘Likes’) is not surprising.

But it may come too late in the Holiday Season to be as effective a cause marketing promotion as it could be.

You, my faith reader are sophisticated as to the things of the world. You know that Toys for Tots can make good use of donations whether they come in December or in July.

However, for the less worldly-wise Toys for Tots screams Christmas gifts. So a promotion that starts on Dec. 1 and runs through the end of the month almost seems like it’s too late to get Christmas gifts in the hands of needy children.

It’s my view that CouponMountain.com should have started this promotion in early to mid November to run through the third week in December, give or take. CouponMountain.com could say that they donate to Toys for Tots on a rolling basis and that if people ‘Like’ them even as late as Dec. 21, that still can translate into toys for needy kids in time for Christmas.

Finally, I was going to suggest a ‘thrifty celebrity’ component as an add-on. Something like: “join me in getting some great deals and help bring joy to kids this Christmas through Toys for Tots.”

But aside from Jack Benny (see above), who’s been dead for 36 years and Minnie Pearl, who’s been dead for 14 years, I can’t think of any celebrities renowned for their thrift. So scratch that idea.

Asymmetric Sponsorship in Cause Marketing

Donate a gently-worn coat at a drop-off box at one of more than 450 Burlington Coat Factory stores in 45 states and Puerto Rico and you’ll get a coupon for 10 percent off your total purchase at the store. The charity partner is One Warm Coat.

The campaign began October 29, 2010 and runs through January 17, 2011. This is the campaign’s fourth year with Burlington and the media sponsor ABC’s morning show Good Morning America. In 2009-2010 the drive generated 220,000 coats, an average of almost 500 per store and 24 percent more than the year before.

Judging from the coverage Good Morning America lavishes on this promotion it’s plain that ABC loves this promotion. In fact, if you’ve donated or received a donated coat, Good Morning America’s producers want to hear from you.

Maybe you saw Heisman Winner Cam Newton donating a coat on a recent Good Morning America or the stars of “Wicked” or the stars of “Billy Elliott,”or the cast of “Next to Normal,” or the X-Games Champions Sarah Burke and Simon Dumont. I could go on.

But does Burlington love this campaign?

Oh, Burlington’s website features the coat drive very prominently. However, this Burlington Coat Factory circular at the left from November 25, 2010 tells a different story. The full page is 11.5” wide and nearly 22” tall. But the little snipe at the top describing the promotion is just 6.5” wide times 1.1” tall. The logo for the campaign is all of six-tenths of an inch square.

Now to be fair this circular might have dropped in 400 newspapers on November 25. It could be that this snipe or one like it has run in 400 newspapers every Sunday since the campaign started back in October. I don’t know about that, although I do know that it has not run in my local newspaper every week for the last eight weeks.

I asked if Burlington loved this campaign, and the answer is almost certainly yes. Burlington is nearly getting a free-ride out of their sponsorship. Good Morning America is driving traffic to Burlington stores, apparently without requiring Burlington to pay for TV advertising.

Burlington’s contribution is to provide the drop-off boxes, the 10 percent coupon, and this snipe whenever they run a circular in the newspaper.

(They don’t, however, process the donated coats. That’s handled by local benefiting charities.)

This promotion asymmetrically benefits Burlington. Good for Burlington. But it does make me wonder if the media sponsor, ABC, is OK with that.

Unconnected Cause Marketing

Two cause marketing ads in two separate publications both promote the Make-A-Wish Foundation and are both dated November 29, 2010, and yet other than the logo and the benefiting organization, they are strangely unconnected.

The Make-A-Wish ad appeared in People magazine, promoting Darren, one of their wish kids, along with the organization’s seasonal awareness and fundraising effort called Season of Wishes.

The other is from the inside back two pages of a Macy’s circular promoting the retailer’s ‘Believe’ campaign, which I greatly admire for its breadth and depth. As I’ve confessed before, I’m a sucker for these big involved campaigns because having worked on a few of them, I know what it takes to get them just right.

It’s probably too much to ask Macy’s to coordinate its circulars or other media with Make-A-Wish, but the ad for Make-A-Wish in People… whether they paid for it or not… is commercial advertising. That is, they controlled the content and its placement.

So in a magazine ad like this, why didn’t Make-A-Wish draw a strand of connection at the bottom? Something like: “Look for the Believe campaign, benefiting Make-A-Wish, online and in Macy’s stores now.”

But why would Make-A-Wish want to? After all, nobody expects Coke to use its ads to do much more than share the logo and its slogan de jour. The polar bear ads that run for Coke in the winter don’t refer to the promotions Coke does with NASCAR earlier in the year, for example.

The difference is that while Make-A-Wish is a top-10 brand among its nonprofit peers in terms of brand image, Coke consistently ranks as the number one brand in the world, undergirded by a humungous advertising and promotional budget and nearly 125-years of advertising history.

Make-A-Wish doesn’t have Coke’s advertising budget. But it does have Macy’s spending millions promoting Believe and Make-A-Wish. To my way of thinking, Make-A-Wish simply can’t afford not to reinforce a promotion like Macy’s Believe on those occasions when the nonprofit does advertise.

It’s Not a Good Sign When Your Cause Marketing Campaign Requires Three Graphics to Explain It

From November 26, 2010 through December 25, 2010 when Southwest Airline passengers check in at the Airport using Facebook Places and their web-enabled device, Southwest will donate $1 to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, up to $300,000.

That’s pretty straightforward. And yet the webpage that describes the how-to of the promotion requires the three graphics at the left to walk you through it.

The first graphic explains that you must open Facebook Places with your mobile device and click “Check In.”

There’s a little more to the second graphic:

“Select the Place where you are from the Nearby Places list,” it says. “If you don’t see the Place name, type the name of the Place where you are into the ‘Search Nearby Places’ box.”

“You can also toggle the left-right arrows on the right of the search box to display lists of other Nearby Places.”

The third explanatory graphic is probably the raison d’etre of this promotion:

“Write an optional description of what you are doing at the Place where you are checking in. You can also tag your friends at the Place where you are.”

“Click the ‘Check In’ button again to share your visit.”

For people that check in through Facebook Places and leave descriptions, Southwest gets a very deep sense of the particulars of its passengers’ travel. Depending on the passenger it could be a nice basket of quantitative and qualitative market research along with all the other data that Facebook gives up on its users, multiplied by as much as 300,000 people. All for not much more than $300,000; a real bargain!

Anybody with a mobile-enabled device probably only has to do this once before they get it. But this campaign isn’t about the second time, it’s about the first.

The challenge is, complexity is the enemy of good cause marketing.

Subaru’s wonderfully effective Share the Love cause marketing promotion, featured in yesterday’s post, can be explained in 20 words.

If Facebook Places ever becomes commonplace, this cause marketing promotion might not require more than 20 words of explanation either. But Facebook Places isn’t there yet, and Southwest knows it. These three graphics make that abundantly clear.

Until then, Southwest is asking an awful lot of this cause marketing campaign.

Cause Marketing Saves Subaru Money and Generates $5 million for 5 Charities

Subaru of America is running third annual end-of-year cause marketing campaign called ‘Share the Love,’ which has helped the brand grow through the recession, increase its market share and decrease its incentive costs, all while generating substantial donations to five respected charities.

The campaign is wonderfully simple. Buy or lease a new Subaru before Jan 3, 2011 and Suburu will donate $250 up to $5 million total to the ASPCA, Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America, Habitat for Humanity, Meals on Wheels, and the Ocean Conservancy.

The owner/leaser determines which charity gets the money. Subaru even allows you to split the money between the charities in percentages you decide. In the event certain new owners don’t express a preference the $250 is donated equally among all five charities. In campaigns like this that benefit multiple charities, I've often advocated the ability to split the donation.

Subaru also gets kudos on its website for pointing people to ways they can help the five charities in addition to buying or leasing a new Subaru.

In the wake of the first successful Share the Love campaign in December 2008, Tim Mahoney, SVP and chief marketing officer of Subaru told the 2009 Chicago Auto Show that the campaign actually saved Subaru money.

“We funded this out of our incentive budget,” Mahoney said. “Our incentive costs actually went down in December (2008), year over year. So it was a way of taking the resources we have and spreading them to organizations that could use it. And at the end of the day we raised a lot of money. A lot of money. Which makes me very happy and proud to be associated with it.”

That first effort generated $4.6 million for ASPCA, Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America, Habitat for Humanity, Meals on Wheels, and the National Wildlife Foundation. The National Wildlife Foundation was subsequently replaced by the Ocean Conservancy.

Subaru has now donated close to $10 million.

While car sales have been growing in 2010. In 2008 industry saw declines of 18% and Subaru was the only full-line brand to actually grow, Mahoney told the Chicago Auto Show. Thanks in part to that first Share the Love event in 2008, Subaru’s market share approached 2%, their highest level ever and the brand surpassed Buick, Cadillac and Volvo in sales.

The ads in 2008 were derived directly from the kinds of bumper stickers that Subaru owners display. The 2010 ads are a couple of steps away from that, but you can still see the connections. They both say that Subaru owners care.

This is a strong campaign from Subaru that is appropriate, well-wrought, and is plainly working for the company and the charities. Bravo Subaru of America!

Can This Headline Save Cause Marketing?

Because of the voluminous Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database I see hundreds of cause marketing campaigns a month, and one of the trends in writing headlines for cause marketing ads is to use a question.

Here’s two from the database for illustrative purposes, but I’ve seen similar headlines for the RED campaign and in dozens of other campaigns.

For more than a year you almost couldn’t avoid this ad from Ford Warriors in Pink, which benefits Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The ad spent more time in more women’s magazines than did pictures of Angelina Jolie. It reads: “Will a T-Shirt Help Cure Breast Cancer”?

The second example comes from Glad’s campaign for Cookies for Kids Cancer. It reads: “Can Lives be Changed With a Bake Sale”?

Now normally, I’d say a question is a poor way to write a headline. A question makes it too simple for the reader to check out. It’s too easy to read “will a T-shirt help cure breast cancer?” and answer it with a ‘no’ and move on.

But could there be method to all these questions?

I think there is.

Both campaigns threaten to trivialize cancer and the people who fight it. Of course cookies don’t cure cancer. This is what thinkbeforeyoupink has been railing against for years.

But add a question to the idea and the dynamic changes a little. Can a T-shirt help cure cancer? Not really. But if all of us rally against the scourge of cancer with bake sales, and races, and merchandise sales, we can make headway against it.

And in fact, we have. When my dad died of cancer in 1974, we scarcely said the word cancer in polite company. When John Wayne died of cancer in 1979 you couldn’t have filled the Rose Bowl with the number of cancer survivors in any given year. Nowadays there’s something like 10 million cancer survivors in the United States, including my mother-in-law. Forms of cancer that were once death sentences like leukemia are very treatable today. Cancer hasn’t submitted to human ingenuity, but it has been humbled by it.

Can we cure cancer? That remains to be seen. But can we raise awareness? Can you and I help with the funding of cancer research by buying trifling things like T-shirts and cookies?

What do you think?

Cause Marketing to Real Men

Can you cause market to real men? Do guys who wear plaid shirts and drive trucks to work respond to garden variety transactional cause marketing?

I know all the cause marketing surveys are scrupulous about including a 50:50 mix of women to men. And there’s no way to get to 88 percent approval ratings unless a good number of the men in the survey are saying that cause marketing works for them, too.

But let’s be honest, there’s no bottle cap campaigns from the beer companies for prostate cancer, even though the numbers of women diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States each year is almost exactly the same as the number of men diagnosed with prostate cancer.

For most of my time in cause marketing I’ve assumed that women are more responsive than men to cause marketing appeals. And the 2010 Cone Cause Evolution Study bears that out, sort of. Cone finds moms much more responsive to cause marketing than the population as a whole. More than the population as a whole, moms are more likely to switch brands, more likely to try a new brand, and more willing to buy a more expensive brand, if those brands are associated with a cause they care about.

Then I came across Bugle, the official organ of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, a wildlife conservation group like Ducks Unlimited.

Guys that hunt elk…and Sarah Palin notwithstanding, hunting is notably more male than female… are a butch bunch. They drive up into the mountains and camp. They don’t shower. They spend plenty of time around the campfire. Their beards get scruffy. They don’t shower. They drink a lot of beer and tell tall stories. They don’t shower. They stalk their prey. They call the elk (called ‘bugling’). They don’t shower. They shoot at the elk with a pretty substantial rifle. And if they hit it they have to field dress the beast and haul it out. A bull elk can weigh more than 700 pounds, so that’s no small feat. Most hunters eat their kill, too.

So I was a little surprised to find not one but two cause marketing campaigns advertised in the most recent issue of Bugle.

The first comes from Budweiser. Budweiser wholesalers raise money for Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and other conservation groups, which is matched by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

The second is a straightforward transactional cause marketing effort from Weaver Optics. Buy one of their rifle scopes and portion of the proceeds benefits the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.

I suspect that to the degree that either effort is successful it’s because the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation generates a lot of affinity... not so different in it's own way from the affinity that builds between racers and Susan G. Komen during Cure Race for the Cure events. RMEF members actually get out in the field to do the hard work of habitat conservation and remediation, much of which is pick and shovel work.

Even real men love the things they serve. And that affinity is something cause marketers can appeal to.

Twitterific Cause Marketing

Austin-based HelpAttack! wants to help you use your Twitter superpowers for good.

Sign up and pledge a certain amount per Tweet for a month to the charity of your choice. At the end of 30-days HelpAttack! tallies your Tweets and sends you a bill. Donations are processed and fulfilled through Network for Good.

HelpAttack! has nearly 6,000 charities already in place. It’s a simple matter to add yours if it isn’t already on the list. At this writing, the average pledge per Tweet is $0.28 and the average monthly pledge is about $28.

The idea for HelpAttack! germinated with Sarah Vela, the CEO who posed the classic entrepreneur’s question, what if?

“The idea came to me during last year’s Movember pledge drive,” she says. “There was a lot of activity online in the form of passionate participants asking for support from their friends. I wondered, what if all that activity were the actual donation? What if the act of being online was generating dollars for Movember? What if every Tweet were worth, say, a penny?”

Vela has been involved in social media, podcasting and content strategy for nonprofits and health care companies for more than a decade. Cofounder David J. Neff, the COO, won the American Marketing Association’s Social Media Marketer of the Year in 2009. Ehren Foss, the third cofounder and CTO, is the founder of Prelude Interactive, a web development firm, and a graduate of MIT.

HelpAttack!, a for-profit company targeting Gens-X and Y, employs the classic ‘freemium’ model. The Twitter app is totally free. The company is already producing customized pages with specialized reporting for nonprofits for a fee. HelpAttack! is actively selling to corporations as well.

“Our customers are the nonprofits and corporations that want to take advantage of our platform to reach out to and sustain relationships with younger adult donors through fund raising drives, cause marketing, matching donations, employee fund drives, and the like,” says Vela. “For a one-time fee of $25 and an ongoing payment of 4% from their donations, nonprofits will be able to have their own landing page, a link to direct people to for pledges, and the ability to download donor reports,” she says.

Facebook is next and after that HelpAttack! has its eye on the Internet as a whole.

“You will see us on Facebook within the next couple of months,” she says, “and then we have plans to extend beyond even social networks to the internet at large. If you can count it, you can pledge it. Imagine pledging RSS feeds, Home Runs, calories burned, miles or workouts logged, etc. The site itself will have a more interactive quality in terms of both community aspects and game mechanics.”

I’m not sure if HelpAttack! has its branding right, but Vela, Neff and Foss have developed an interesting niche with plenty of open field on front of them, and I wish them every success.

Copy and Paste Cause Marketing

Like the look and feel of a webpage? Well copyright laws notwithstanding, nothing could be easier to steal. Open the webpage’s source code and there it all is.

From a distance it looks like Dannon Yogurt’s newish label campaign benefiting the National Breast Cancer Foundation opened the source code to Yoplait’s longstanding effort for Susan G. Komen for the Cure and just copied and pasted.

Both benefit breast cancer charities. The donation amount… $0.10 is the same. The pink ribbons on each are similar, as are the labels in question. The only real difference is that Dannon is redeemed via an online method and Yoplait requires you to mail the labels to a physical address.

It seems like a defensive measure on Dannon’s part. In one fell swoop, Dannon made Yoplait’s cause marketing effort slightly generic. Of course, that’s a two-edged sword because it made Dannon’s yogurt cause marketing slightly generic, too.

To continue the source code metaphor, there are webpage designers who take source code whole cloth from another website and paste it into their own, (sometimes for fraudulent purposes). But a webpage that copies the look of CNN.com, say, is a pale imitation, because CNN.com is more than the sum of its source code.

I’ve often written in this space suggesting that you my readers ought to “steal this idea” whatever the idea is.

What I mean is, take this idea that comes from Kroger or Microsoft or General Mills and figure out how it could work in your industry or with your charity, and then improve upon it. When most webpage developers look at another webpage’s source code it’s to see how that page is put together and then come up with something that is rather different, and hopefully better.

That’s not so dissimilar than artists like Roy Lichtenstein or Jasper Johns studying Dali’s ‘Persistence of Memory’ and coming to Pop Art. Dali and Johns and Lichtenstein all painted on canvas. But their sensibilities were not the same. And what we ended up with are two different kinds of art, even though you can see the thread that connects Johns and Lichtenstein and the other Pop Artists to Dali.

General Mills is a good example of this for cause marketing. It’s likely that when General Mills developed its Boxtops campaign that it borrowed heavily from Campbell’s much more senior label effort. But while General Mills is in the food business like Campbell’s, it’s not primarily in the soup business, although it has long owned Progresso. General Mills brought its own sensibility to its Boxtops for Education. It streamlined and improved upon Campbell’s approach, which was then a little clunky.

I think the cause marketing world would be richer if Dannon had chosen to be inspired by Yoplait’s label campaign, rather than to try and copy and paste it.

Happy Hanukkah!

Where's Kmart's Cause Marketing? Let Tom Tell You.

The other day I posted the question “Where’s Kmart’s Cause Marketing Effort?” in the Christmas season circulars and Tom Aiello, Division Vice President, Public Relations at Sears Holdings was kind enough to respond.

He also graciously agreed to answer 10 questions I had for him about Kmart’s “Purpose Marketing,” and the company’s notably-long sponsorship of March of Dimes, along with Kmart’s newer sponsorship of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital’s brilliant Thanks and Giving Campaign.

1. Kmart has been a sponsor of March of Dimes for more than a quarter of a century. How has the complexion of that sponsorship changed over time. How is it the same?

“Kmart is dedicated to helping the March of Dimes and this is the 27th year that Kmart will be partnering with the March of Dimes and our 18th year as a national sponsor of the March for Babies walk. Kmart is the March of Dimes longest standing corporate supporter and largest contributor to its mission, and has raised $90 million on behalf of the organization over the past 26 years. In 2009, Kmart associates raised a record $8.3 million through donations from customers as well as friends and family to benefit the four million babies born each year in this country. It is Kmart's mission to continue to help raise donations to help the March of Dimes and the families involved.”

2. You use the expression Purpose Marketing. What does that mean to Kmart? And what does it say that cause marketing doesn't?

“Kmart doesn’t do cause marketing. We tie our business purpose to a higher social purpose, which is the health of babies and children. We couple that purpose with participation from our employees to volunteer for programs such as March of Dimes marches. We also weave that purpose into different elements of our business such as vendors, product, marketing, and corporate.”

3. What would you say is Kmart's signature Purpose Marketing effort?

“During the year, we have many storewide efforts supporting both St. Jude and March of Dimes. Right now, our current effort around the holidays is supporting St. Jude with its Thanks and Giving campaign for the fifth year. Kmart – with the help of its associates and customers – has raised nearly $20 million, making the retailer the leading fundraiser for the Thanks and Giving campaign.”

4. What would your employees say is the best part of Kmart's Purpose Marketing efforts.

“Seeing how giving a little back can really make a difference in a child's life and their family's too. Consistently, employees tell me that these are real issues that touch us and our customers. It’s very inspirational to our associates.”

5. Kmart also supports St Jude Children's Research Hospital. How did that relationship come about?

“Kmart started working with St. Jude five years ago on its annual Thanks and Giving campaign, which ultimately supports the research hospital.”

6. What is Kmart currently doing in support of St. Jude?

“As noted above, Kmart is currently raising donations for the St. Jude Thanks and Giving campaign. This is the fifth consecutive year the Kmart has participated. Earlier this year, St. Jude recognized Kmart as the “Corporate Partner of the Year” for its commitment to helping children live longer and healthier lives.”

7. It used to be that differentiating yourself from competitors was one of the reasons for a company to engage in cause marketing. But right now almost all your national competitors do cause marketing to one degree or another. In your view, does cause marketing still help a major retailer like Kmart stand out?

“As noted above, we don't do cause marketing, rather we look for opportunities to tie our business purpose to a higher social purpose. Kmart engages in efforts to help the families and children in the local communities around our stores. It isn't about perception, rather how we can use our visibility and reach to help those in need.”

8. Kmart and Sears were brought together in the same holding company because of potential synergies. How are there synergies evident between Sears and Kmart in your Purpose Marketing?

“Both Kmart and Sears focus on helping families in need. Kmart benefits St. Jude and March of Dimes to help families with children who need added support. Sears has its own focus, Heroes at Home, that benefits military veterans and their families. One obvious synergy is that drawing upon both Sears and Kmart, we can amplify our volunteerism. For example, in New Orleans on the 5th anniversary of Katrina we had over 175 associates come from the stores to volunteer and help rebuild 50 home in a week.”

9. Where is Kmart going with its Purpose Marketing over the next five and ten years?

“We will continue to support charities and work to help the lives of those around us. Social purpose should become closer to our business purpose, where it might become hard to tell the difference between the two.”

10. How do you measure the results of Kmart's Purpose Marketing?

“The results are primarily measured by how many lives we are able to change by our efforts.”

Strategic vs. Non-Strategic Cause Marketing Relationships

There’s been some chatter recently in the blogosphere and elsewhere about strategic cause marketing. That is, if you’re a sponsor, ensuring that your sponsorship of the cause bears some rational relationship to your business.

The effort on the left from Montblanc, the fountain pen maker, pretty much passes muster. From June 2009 to May 2010 when you bought this special edition pen, called the Meisterstruck Signature for Good Edition, 10 percent of the purchase price went to a UNICEF education programs because “The ability to read and write is a fundamental human right and the most important asset to children.”

(For examples of other Montblanc 'donation pens,' click here. For this campaign, Montblanc set a minimum donation of $1.5 million. And while we're at it, let us now take a moment to praise a campaign that sets a minimum donation, but not a maximum. Huzzahs to Montblanc)!

I would have said that parents who can feed and shelter their children is a child’s most important asset, but I guess that’s because I’m a parent and not high-end fountain pen maker.

Caviling about silly hyperbole in ad copy aside, it’s easy to see the relationship between Mont Blanc and UNICEF’s educational programs.

But there’s plenty of successful cause marketing that goes on between sponsors and charities that share almost no strategic relationship.

This ad for Ford Warriors in Pink, which benefits Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is a good example. In the main, Ford Warriors in Pink sells merchandise, little of it car related. Profits go to Komen. In 16 years, Ford has donated $105 million, a number which may also include Race for the Cure sponsorship dollars.

Critics would say that just because the campaign is successful for Komen doesn’t mean it’s a strategic choice for Ford. By rights, the thinking goes, Ford should be doing cause marketing for environmental organizations. Ford vehicles and the fuel they run on, deplete and pollute the earth’s resources and no matter what else it does Ford to mitigate that it should also do so with its cause marketing efforts.

But Ford supporting the Sierra Club or the Environmental Defense Fund, say, or even the Nature Conservancy, is a veritable minefield for both Ford and any would-be environmental partner. All three of those nonprofit organizations are membership-based and members of the Sierra Club, in particular, fought a bloody battle over cause marketing deals the Club engaged in with The Clorox Company, to cite one.

I sincerely doubt Ford and the Sierra Club could find common ground.

Then there’s the problem of what that cause marketing might look like. Warriors in Pink sells stuff; a lot of apparel but also accessories like scarves, and ties, a totes, along with a sprinkling of keychains and license plate frames. That model would be tainted for many environmental organizations, too.

Likewise you couldn’t exactly do transactional cause marketing either. Try out this thought experiment to see what I mean: “When you buy the 2011 F-150 Nature Conservancy edition Ford will donate an acre of grasslands to the Nature Conservancy…”

I’m not saying creative people couldn’t design something that worked for both parties. What I am saying is that a sponsor’s best choice for a charity cause marketing partner isn’t always necessarily the most strategic choice.

Kroger Uses Cause Marketing with a House Brand

For several years now I’ve been agitating for cause marketing for retailer’s house brands. Now I’ve finally seen one from Kroger benefiting breast cancer research.

Here’s my argument; in recessions house brands do very well. But once the hard times are over, consumers return to the name brands.

But if a cause marketing effort could help a retailer preserve even 5 percent of the customers that switched during the recession, it could potential be worth tens of millions to the bottom line every year.

I originally made my case for house brand cause marketing back in a post on November 18, 2008.

In the declining economy, people in the UK, the US and elsewhere are buying more ‘house brands.’

Of course they are, you say. What could make more sense than to get the same-quality or nearly the same quality for a meaningful savings?

I don’t have a handy chart to demonstrate, but this is what always happens in bad economic times. When the economy dips, sales of cheaper house brands and generics take off. And when the economy recovers consumers go back to the major brands.

For the foreseeable future, price is going to be major driver for the consumer.

Imagine this scenario: a shopper faces two cans of cream of mushroom soup, the store brand and the dominant brand in the US, Campbell's. The store brand has respectable quality and is 26 percent cheaper per ounce.

In a face off like that, Campbell’s market share would erode very seriously sans their incredible market shelf space and decades-old Labels for Education program, in my view.

Now if the store brand started a well thought-of cause marketing campaign of its own, all bets are off.

However, I’ve never seen a store brand in the States undertake transactional cause marketing, even though their margins for house brands are generally better than what they make selling the national brands.

I encourage the big national retailers to try cause marketing with their house brands. Because now, in the sour economy, is the perfect time for the bold stroke. Of course, you’d want to test the concept, the approach and the cause with a limited number of markets and a select group of products.

Get that cause marketing campaign right, and when the economy improves, not all consumers will go back to the national brands.

I’d bet on it.

I bought this case of water in early November 2010. It was prominently stacked near the front door. The case packaging has two breast cancer survivor stories from two different Kroger employees on either side panel. The packaging on the bottles themselves make no mention of the campaign, nor do the end panels of the case.

This campaign from Kroger strikes me as a toe in the water. But it’s super low risk. Because it’s a pink ribbon effort, Kroger doesn’t have to build a relationship (or pay sponsorship fees) to any breast cancer charity. They can just count on the natural affinity built into the pink ribbon and, when everything is said and done, write a check.

Because the packaging on water cases is so big, it enables long-form stories that also serve to honor the courage of Kroger employees. You couldn’t do the same on a can of soup.

My friends, this is another wonderfully ‘stealable’ idea.

Cause Marketing for Hunger Free Families

Feeding America, which generates donations of funds and food for affiliated food banks all over the country, wants you to spread the word to 10 other people about families in hunger in America, and when you do you could win the chance to present a check for $10,000 to your local food bank.

The campaign is called Hunger Free Families and the spokespeople are Laila Ali and Curtis Conway. Curtis is a former NFL wide receiver and current color analyst for NFL radio broadcasts and Laila is a former boxing champion and the daughter of Muhammad Ali, who was something of a boxer himself.

You go to the website, watch the videos, sign up and agree to send an email to 10 people… I choose the preformatted one, but I could have modified the language… to 10 people. This isn’t one of those deals that pulls out all your emails addresses out your Outlook or Yahoo account. That would be spam. I had to copy and paste them in one by one.

After you send out the email, it takes you to a screen that allows you to post to your account on the major social networks; Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Twitter and Yahoo.

Here’s how it went out on Twitter:

Can you TELL 10 people about family hunger in America? I did. http://soc.li/yZu6kyZ #HungerFreeFamilies: http://soc.li/IAWZU2M

The system comes from Convio the nonprofit software company that specializes in this kinds of ‘friends and family’ email and fundraising efforts, especially for charity race-type events.

My favorite part of this is the contest to win the chance to present a check for $10,000 to your local food bank. That’s neat. The impulse to be generous is very strong, especially this time of year. So handing a giant check to a local food bank official and having your picture taken with the local food bank official is rewarding by itself, even if the check isn’t drawn on your account.

Almost any charity could offer a similar privilege in a similar contest.

By the way, a search of the voluminous Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database shows that this is the second cause marketing effort to feature the lovely Laila Ali. Last year at this time she was seen in a campaign for the American Heart Association and sponsored by Subway. Versions of the ad to the left appeared in at least three different magazines. She's also involved with the Black AIDS Institute.

Where’s Kmart’s Cause Marketing Effort?

Sunday’s newspaper was clogged with flyers from most of the major retailers in my market; Macy’s, Walmart, Target, JC Penney, Sears, Kohl’s and Kmart. The first six listed all devoted at least some space in their sales flyers to their respective cause marketing efforts. Conspicuous by its absence was Kmart.

At left is the cause marketing campaign from Sears called Heroes at Home Wish Registry, which offers Sears gift cards to military members and the families registered in the program. Sears is the sponsor and founder of the campaign.

(Macy's campaign benefits Make-A-Wish, Target's benefit's St. Jude; JC Penney's benefits the Salvation Army Angel Tree, and Kohl's benefits Kohl's Cares for Kids).

I show this page from the Sears flyer because Sears Holdings owns the 1,327 or so Kmarts in operation. Indeed, go to either Sears.com or Kmart.com and you’ll see the overlap of the brands. Sears Holdings is publicly held, but controlled by billionaire-financier Eddie Lampert.

I think Kmart is a natural for cause marketing. But truth be told, Kmart’s positioning against its competitors has gotten lost in my mind.

The Kmart closest to my home is a little like a Walmart only the prices are closer to those at Target, only the merchandise at Kmart is less appealing. In my mind Walmart is cheap and Target is chic-cheap. So where does that leave Kmart?

A cause for Kmart would have to have lots of appeal, or be very broadly based. The Sears Heroes at Home campaign is very attractive. But I think the better model for Kmart may be Kohl’s, whose cause effort has generated $150 million for Kohl’s Cares for Kids, mainly by selling smart-looking and well-priced licensed plush toys, books, music, and other merchandise.

Kmart sells a couple of brand lines that probably keep it in business including Martha Stewart, Joe Boxer, and Jaclyn Smith. Given that, a well-branded line of merchandise benefiting a charity might be just the thing for a retailer that has long since lost its mojo.

Which Celeb To Pick for Your Cause Marketing Campaign?

Pop quiz: You have an enviably large promotional budget for your cause marketing campaign and you need a celebrity. Do you choose Marcus Samuelsson, celebrity chef? Or do you choose Harrison Ford, the man who has sold more than $3.6 billion in domestic movie tickets in his career and whose planes are worth more than you’ll make in your lifetime?

The answer is, of course, it depends.

Marcus Samuelsson is co-owner of Acquavit restaurant in New York City, plus several others, and has a wonderfully interesting personal history. He’s originally from Ethiopia, but was adopted along with his older sister by a Swedish couple when he was three years old.

He took an early interest in cooking and trained in Sweden, Switzerland and Austria before coming to the United States at age 21 and promptly establishing a reputation as a chef to be reckoned with. He has a philanthropic bent, a brilliant smile and is married to the lovely model Gate Maya Haile.

By contrast, Harrison Ford is so rich and famous that he can now make treacly movies like Extraordinary Measures.

Choose Ford and you’d get a 1000-watt celebrity, who would rather fly his planes than appear at your events or do any publicity for you.

Choose Samuelsson and you get a 50-watt celebrity who cares about some causes quite personally. Samuelsson is probably busier than Ford, but I’ll be he has more time for Feeding America and UNICEF’s TAP Project than Ford does for Create the Good.

So which celebrity do you choose?

If you can live with someone like Ford doing not much more than bringing his celebrity to your cause marketing efforts through ads, he’s definitely your guy.

But if you need a celebrity who will lend not only his name but his passion to your cause marketing, you probably want someone more like Samuelsson.