Cause Marketing With Sex Appeal

Actress, supermodel, TV producer, philanthropist, and mother of four Heidi Klum wants you to buy the hoodie off her back to benefit StandUp2Cancer, the telethon and charity.

The hooded sweatshirt retails on the STU2C website for $46.99 and features versions of its logo on front and back. Klum, of course, is lovely and talented and STU2C is an admirable, innovative and hard-pressing cause. STU2C has always struck me as a charity in a hurry, and I like that about them. Cancer has bedeviled the world for too long as far as I'm concerned. The ad at the left is from the August 1, 2011 issue of Sports Illustrated magazine.

But here’s comes the ‘but.’ I’m always little chary when causes use sex to sell.

Certainly other cause marketing campaigns use sex in their campaigns. MAC Cosmetics uses sex very effectively in its ads benefiting the MAC AIDS Fund. But then again, that approach is true to MAC's brand and corporate ethos.

While STU2C commonly uses celebrities like Klum in their ads, this is the most sexually charged ad that I’ve seen from them… and I’ll bet I’ve got 20 different STU2C ads in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database.

Why does it matter?

Here’s why: how does STU2C know whether it’s the sex appeal or the cause that’s working on people?

Now, to be fair, it may be that with this ad STU2C is in fact testing a more sexualized approach to its advertising. But I hope not.

There’s just something too weird about cancer pin-up girls.

Cool Cause Marketing Campaign. But Where's the MacGuffin?

Right now Clif Bar invites you to give up your car for your daily commute and ride a bike instead in a promotion called the 2Mile Challenge. When you do so, and log your bike miles online or by smartphone, Clif enters you in a drawing for a $100,000 donation to be split among three charities dedicated to bike advocacy and/or climate change. The exact donation split will be based on participation rates.

In the promotion Clif maps the $100,000 donation to a goal of replacing 100,000 car trips with bike trips. The 2Mile Challenge maps to the fact that most urban car trips in the United States are less than 2 miles. If just ten percent of urban car trips were made by bike instead of car CO2 emissions would be reduced by 25.4 million tons per year in the U.S.

There’s prizes for participants, game-like sub-challenges from co-sponsors like Outside magazine (seen at the left), mechanisms to invite and involve friends, a Twitter and Facebook component, and fun explanatory videos. In short, Clif hasn’t missed many tricks here.

Although some of the challenges last for less time, the overall 2Mile Challenge promotion runs May 12 to October 31, 2011, or 172 days. As of yesterday, the counter on the website said that there were only 96 days left to avoid 69,187 car trips. In other words, 44% of the promotion has passed, but only 31% of the goal has been reached.

In short, as of right now the calendar is outracing the goal.

I think that’s because for all the things Clif got right with this promotion, it missed one vital thing and that’s a ‘MacGuffin.’

As I’ve written before, Alfred Hitchcock, the legendary filmmaker, used to speak of a movie’s MacGuffin or plot device. “In crook stories it is always the necklace and in spy stories it is always the papers,” he said.

A MacGuffin, therefore, is a mechanical device that impels action. In John Huston’s classic movie The Maltese Falcon, the falcon itself is the MacGuffin.

For Hitchcock, the MacGuffin was often no more than a device, one that he often neglected after the action got going. But I don’t use the term MacGuffin in such a fleeting way. When I use the word I mean, what in your cause marketing campaign will make the target audience act?

At first blush you might say that the cause or perhaps the offer is the MacGuffin. In the aftermath of the Haiti Earthquake, for instance, cause marketing campaigns sprouted up spontaneously and they worked. The cause was the MacGuffin.

The same could probably be said of several breast cancer charities and one or two environmental charities; the cause by itself impels action.

But not every charity that warrants a cause marketing campaign has enough punch, by itself, to impel action.

I think that’s the case here. The 2Mile Challenge charities, while no doubt respectable and upstanding, just don’t have enough clout, in and of themselves, to really make people want to act.

For its part Clif should have recognized this and added its own MacGuffin.

Charmed Cause Marketing

Just as “the rich are different than us,” so too are teenagers.

How so? In their hearts and souls they aspire to make the world a better place. A study conducted earlier this year for the Christian aid charity World Vision found 13-17 year-olds were more likely than adults to say that helping others is more important than ever (90%), more likely to wish they could help others (88%) and more likely to do something active to support good causes (71%).

Notwithstanding the videos that appear on YouTube showing teens beating each other up at KFC or shooting each other at Taco Bell, like never before this aspirational desire to make the world a better place is baked into the zeitgeist of today’s teens.

Here's a case study:

In 2008 siblings Paige Cahue, Gage Cahue, and Tristan Garber… of Indianapolis… developed charms that fit through the eyelets of shoes. After a couple of months of prototyping they ordered a box of charms shaped like a pizza from a manufacturer and started selling them to everyone they knew in Indianapolis. And since they were all teenagers, they sold their Rivetz Charms at recess, at football games and other school functions.

Nowadays you can buy the Rivetz shaped like bugs, skulls, crosses, hearts, flowers, sports, ice cream cones, even Garfield. They’re available online for less than $5 or in a handful of retail stores in Indiana and Illinois.

Young entrepreneurship is a cool story by itself, but emblematic of their generation, the Cahue/Garber kids added a cause marketing element to their catalog of charms.

You can get Rivetz with pink ribbons, yellow ribbons (signifying support for the troops), and a puzzle piece (Autism Speaks' logo). These charms are awareness raisers, not fundraisers. But Rivetz will also help you build a school, church, or charity fundraiser built around sales of charms customized to your cause or school mascot.

The quote about the rich being different comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story Rich Boy. When Ernest Hemmingway, Fitzgerald’s contemporary, read Rich Boy his rejoinder was, yes, “The rich are different than us… they have more money.”

If I could paraphrase Hemmingway I would say, yes “teens are different than us… they have better hearts.”

Calling Out a Faux Cause Marketing Pinkwasher

One of the infuriating things about the pink ribbon, emblematic of the fight against breast cancer, is that no one owns it in the United States. Consequently you get really silly things like pink sex toys and pink-labeled watermelon and pick pocketknives and more insidious stuff like these collectible ornaments that were advertised in Sunday's Courier Journal newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky that are a clear and unambiguous case of pinkwashing.

Shouldn’t we just get rid of the mess and the chaos and just assign ownership of the pink ribbon to one charity and be done with it, much the way the trademark to the pink ribbon in Canada is owned by the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation?

In a word, no.

Here’s why:

It’s very clear to me that the pink ribbon brand is much bigger because no one entity owns it than it would be if one entity did.

Consider the case of the Android operating system which is in more smart phones than Apple’s OS or RIM’s OS, mostly because Google gives licenses away for free. As a result you can get an Android phone from all the handset makers except Apple and RIM.

But what would happen if Apple or RIM or Google had a smart phone monopoly? Plainly fewer people would have smart phones and they’d be much more expensive.

For the pink ribbon, the test of this supposition comes from Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Komen owns several trademarks of its version of the pink ribbon. Now Komen is a very powerful brand, but which version of the pink ribbon do you see more often, Komen’s, which cants to the right and looks like a person running, or the one where the ribbon’s tails descend straight down?

OK, so the pink ribbon brand is bigger because it’s open source, but what’s the payoff for me or for the population in general?

Imagine for a second that we could go back in time to the Susan G. Komen organization in the 1980s… when the pink ribbon was first being used to signify the fight against breast cancer… and make a very persuasive case to Nancy Brinker to trademark the pink ribbon.

When you got back to 2011, I think you’d find that Komen was a smaller breast cancer charity. And, I think you’d find that fewer Federal research dollars were being spent on breast cancer research.

So we gotta grin and bear faux cause marketing like this which offers no money to any cause and blatantly misleads us with its pink ribbon.

Given that, the only satisfaction in cases like this comes from calling out pinkwashers like the Bradford Exchange.

Tip of the Hat to Kate B. in Louisville for the lead!

Pioneers Needed

Today my adopted state of Utah celebrates Pioneer Day. It’s a founder’s day that commemorates the day an initial band of 151 settlers from the east landed in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake.

It’s a state holiday that we celebrate like a second ‘Fourth of July’ with pancake breakfasts, parades, BBQs, and fireworks after dark.

From July 24, 1847, when the vanguard party arrived, until the time when the rails were linked by the transcontinental railroad in 1869, about 70,000 people made the trek westward. They rode in wagons, pushed handcarts and walked, driven by religious faith and fervor. And while the American West was settled by tens of thousands who made their way along the Oregon or Sante Fe Trails, only the Utah Pioneers built fords and ferries and roads, and planted grain for the Pioneers behind them. A few hundred served a stint in the US Army. A handful were at Sutter’s Mill, California when gold was discovered.

But unlike Nevada, California and Colorado, the settlement of Utah wasn’t motivated by the lust for precious metals. And unlike my home state of Arizona, the settlement of Utah was marked by mutual cooperation, not rugged individualism; the Utah Pioneers were obsessive planners and usually successful as a result.

But there were notable and tragic failures. In 1856 two companies of handcarts with about 1,000 people total left too late in the season from Iowa. An early snowstorm struck the companies on the plains in Wyoming and almost 20 percent died from starvation or exposure.

Wallace Stegner, the fine historian and Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist, wrote this about the ill-fated Martin and Willie Handcart companies:

“Perhaps their suffering seems less dramatic because the handcart pioneers bore it meekly, praising God, instead of fighting for life with the ferocity of animals and eating their dead to keep their own life beating, as both the Fremont and Donner parties did. . . . But if courage and endurance make a story, if humankindness and helpfulness and brotherly love in the midst of raw horror are worth recording, this half-forgotten episode of the Mormon migration is one of the great tales of the West and of America.”

The Valley they were coming to was a forbidding place. Mountain men and Catholic priests who'd seen it told them the Valley couldn’t be settled. Local legend holds that when the Pioneers arrived there were no trees in the Valley itself, although I doubt that. The Salt Lake Valley is about the same longitude as New York City, but about 4500 feet higher in elevation. The high altitude and the northerly longitude means that the growing season is relatively short. This last year we had at least some snow in October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May and June. As a result, my tomato crop is pretty spotty this season.

Because the Valley is on the eastern end of Great Basin and in the rain shadow cast by the Sierras, the Valley of the Great Salt Lake gets less than 10 inches of rain a year. Only the prodigious snowmelt from the mountains to the east of the Salt Lake Valley makes the place habitable. But the snowmelt all naturally flows to the Great Salt Lake, the world’s fourth largest, a shallow sea larger than the state of Rhode Island and too salty for fish.

As a transplant to Utah, I have come admire the hardy and resilient Pioneers. Like Isaac Newton memorably said of others, we “stand on the shoulders of giants.”

So please join me in toasting Pioneers… in Utah and everywhere else. Because even now the world still needs pioneers.

7 Ways to Fire Up You Small Business Cause Marketing Effort

In today’s rocky economy small businesses may have the most to gain from integrating cause marketing into their marketing efforts. As always, I define cause marketing as "a relationship that bridges commerce and cause in a way that benefits both parties."

Cause marketing has been shown to improve sales, brand and increase customer loyalty. It can help a small company stand out from competitors and improve employee recruiting and retention. And it does one or more or all these things while helping a cause. And, as you probably know, in this economy nonprofits in the United State are the thin red, white, and blue line between even greater social distress. For businesses large and small cause marketing is like exercise. It feels good and it’s good for you.

Here then are ‘7 Ways to Fire Up Your Small Business Cause Marketing Effort.’

1. Pick an appropriate cause. Consider not only a cause’s appeal, but its capacity to support your effort. It may be that the best cause marketing fit for your small business is a small charity.
2. Weigh the option of weaving cause marketing into your overall business strategy. General Mills’ Boxtops for Education campaign, which benefits tens of thousands of local schools nationwide, has gone on year-round for a dozen years. It’s a key part of their business model. Galactic Pizza in Minneapolis donates a portion of the proceeds from one of its pizzas to the local food bank. The promotion is printed right there on their menu.
3. Don’t ‘causewash.’ We all know what greenwashing is. That’s when you make false or overstated claims about the greenness of your product, service or company. It's a no-no. So, too, is causewashing. Your customers are savvy. And if they begin to distrust your intentions or the authenticity of your cause marketing campaign, it will backfire on you.
4. Consider doing cause marketing for a small business peer in the developing world using Kiva.org or another microenterprise lender. You know what it’s like to finance the startup and ongoing operations of your small business. So too do millions of existing or budding entrepreneurs in the developing world. With an outfit like Kiva, your business and your customers could pick a fellow entrepreneur in the developing world to support, and then follow their results.
5. Make your cause marketing offer really compelling. When you buy a pair of TOMS Shoes, the company gives away another pair to a child in the developing world. TOMS Shoes does precious little advertising. They don’t have to. Their word of mouth has been so good they’ve gotten more exposure than they could have purchased.
6. 'Activate' your campaign. That is give your cause marketing campaign a fitting amount of promotional support. You don’t necessarily have to spend a lot of money promoting your cause marketing campaign. But you do need to support it. And as every small businessperson knows, time and money are almost interchangeable. You just have to decide which you value most. Let’s say you own a small fly fishing shop and you’re offering $5 to Trout Unlimited when they buy $100 or more worth of gear. You could post that on your blog, website or FaceBook page, put up a sign in front of the register, send out a press release, Tweet it, include it in your newsletter, etc. Remember, one of the benefits of cause marketing is that it gives your business a new story to tell to customers, prospects and the press. Take advantage of that opportunity.
7. Finally, proceed cautiously if your business doesn’t face the consumer. The research is clear. Companies that advertise benefit the most from cause marketing. Now there is such a thing as B2B cause marketing and it can really benefit your B2B business. But to pull that off you probably need some professional help. Feel free to contact me at aldenkeene @ gmail dot com.

The Post Wherein I Take Credit for a Campaign I Wasn’t Consulted On

J.C. Penney announced yesterday a campaign whereby they will ask customers to round-up their change to the nearest dollar and send the money to the retailer’s long-standing efforts on behalf of afterschool programs.

The campaign is called ‘Pennies From Heaven’ and the goal is to generate 100 million pennies, or $1 million. Pennies is also selling a limited-edition change purse for $9.99 designed by Mark-Kate and Ashley Olsen, the twin sisters who were once primarily actors and now are primarily a brand. There’s also a Facebook component, a ringtone, and promotions with Foursquare and Twitter.

As of this writing, the penny counter at http://jcpenneyafterschool.org/ says they’ve generated 130,711,075 pennies. J.C. Penney’s Afterschool Program primarily benefits The Boys and Girls Club of America, the Y, the United Way, FIRST, a science and technology nonprofit, and my old friends at 4-H.

So how do I take credit for any of this?

My post on March 25, 2008 was called, no kidding, ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ Now, parenthetically, neither J.C. Penney nor I coined the expression 'Pennies from Heaven.' Instead, it was the name of the 1936 movie starring Bing Crosby. Bing and the movie made the title song by Johnny Burke and Arthur Johnston a huge hit.

In the post I reviewed several change round-up efforts, including one from Bank of America that wasn’t a cause marketing campaign, but instead an enforced savings effort.

Here’s what I wrote at the time:

“A more sophisticated version might involve a retailer programming a key in a cash register that rounds up the cost of purchase to the next Euro, Renminbi, Yen, Pound, Dollar or Rupee. So if the transaction comes to €22.67 Euros, the cashier would ask if you would like to round up the transaction to an even €23 Euros, with €0.33 Euros going to the cause.”

Later in the same post I wrote:

“The second one is my own brainstorm. But feel free to steal it.”

Little did I suspect that that J.C. Penney would take me so literally.

But no big deal. J.C. Penney can just send me a one penny for every dollar the campaign generates and I’ll call it good.

'Checkout' This New Cause Marketing Study

In its most recent edition, The Checkout, the publishing outlet for research developed by The Integer Group, asked Americans an intriguing cause marketing question: “When choosing between two companies that each benefit a cause and sell the same product, similar in price and quality, which of the following would influence your preference for one brand over another.”

Let’s put some flesh on that. The question asks, in effect, when do you buy Progresso soup and when do buy Campbell’s soup, given that they both benefit education causes? Or when do you buy Yoplait yogurt and when do you buy Dannon yogurt, each of which generates funds for separate breast cancer charities?

No surprise, but ‘Personal Relevance of Cause’ was the top answer for both men and women, polling out around 70 percent (the graph was formatted such that exact percentages are hard to determine). The most surprising answer for me was the second most common answer. About 33 percent of men said that “Donates With Every Purchase” compared to about 38 percent of the overall population and about 44 percent of women who gave that answer.

Men seem to care less about transactional cause marketing than women.

On its website The Integer Group describes itself as “a global discussion about the impact of shopping culture on brand strategy.” The research based on a nationally representative study of 1,200 adults and is conducted by M/A/R/C Research.

The Checkout published the results of three cause marketing questions. The other two were:

“Which of the following types of causes do you find most compelling if you were to buy a brand based on its affiliation with a cause?”

“Which brands of products do you currently buy based on the brand’s affiliation with a cause?”

The top 10 finishers were:

1. Yoplait
2. Anything Affiliated With Breast Cancer
3. (tie) Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Newman’s Own
4. General Mills
5. Yogurt in general
6. (tie) P&G and RED
7. Boxtops for Education
8. (tie) Kellogg’s, Campbell’s and Girl Scouts
9. Dawn
10. Avon

The big winner in that list is General Mills, which is listed three times. General Mills owns the Yoplait brand and is responsible for Boxtops for Education. Dawn’s place on the list was unexpected. The survey was conducted in February, 2011, and it could be that Dawn’s work in the aftermath of the BP oil spill in April, May, June and July of 2010 was still fresh in people’s minds.

The other winner has to be (RED), which has only been around since 2006. No other brand on the list has been doing cause marketing for less than 10 years. Campbell’s Labels for Education has been going on for more than 35 years.

The biggest shocker has to be that ‘yogurt in general’ finished fifth, evidence that the Yoplait halo is big enough for the whole yogurt category. No wonder Dannon mimics Yoplait so closely.

Hip to QR Codes

Since the start of the year I’ve been beating the drum pretty hard for sponsors and causes to utilize QR codes in their cause marketing campaigns. Read previous posts on the topic here, here, here and here.

QR codes are like barcodes, only because they’re in 2D they can hold much more data. You can use QR codes to launch a website or Facebook, display augmented reality, launch a picture or a video, plus many other tactical variations.

Here’s tactical implementation that I just proposed to a prospective client that has a physical storefront: put a QR code on a vinyl cling on the clients windows and doors that would launch a sweepstakes entry form.

Since basically every smartphone with a camera can read QR codes… and their expense is relatively low…adding them to all your cause marketing collateral makes a lot of sense.

The QR code at the left is for me and my company, Alden Keene & Associates, Inc.

Point your smartphone at it and it will launch a profile page on a new website called Hipscan. (When Hipscan followed me on Twitter, my first thought was hip as in the place where your femur connects with your pelvis, not in the sense of being in the know about the latest and greatest things. Shows you how hip I am.) In turn, my brand-spanking-new Hipscan page connects you to my Twitter, my LinkedIn profile and this blog, but not my Facebook page.

All of this is free. Hipscan makes money by selling labels, business cards, T-shirts and the like with your QR code.

Cool!

Cause Marketing Cooperation

There’s many ways to activate cause marketing, but the most common way… and usually the least expensive… is with public relations.

And one story that you must master when 'efforting' women’s magazines is a pretty standard transactional cause marketing pitch; buy our thing and a portion of the proceeds benefits this fine cause. Get the details right and it’ll probably get you coverage.

But it’s the classic case of good news/bad news.

The good news is you’ve got a pretty good chance at getting coverage in women’s magazines like Ladies Home Journal, O, the Oprah Magazine, Allure, Elle, Vogue, Lucky, Shape, Town and Country, and Self. The Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database has cause marketing stories from all of these women’s magazines and more.

The bad news, you’ll almost certainly have to share the coverage with other cause marketing efforts which may be thematically similar to yours, as in the story at the left from the August 2011 Redbook. Magazine editors love, love, love to publish this kind of story.

What do you do?

• Do you hold out for your own story?
• Do you pitch lesser titles?
• Do you skip magazines altogether and target the big mommy blogs, or even TV?

You first job is to try and make your cause marketing story stand out in a way that others can’t or don’t. Barring that, my suggestion is that you own your cause marketing story for what it is (and isn’t). If you can’t imagine a way to truly distinguish your cause marketing narrative, then I suggest as a fallback position that you approach would-be ‘competitors’ and enlist their cooperation in pitching your collective stories together.

In most cases the big PR agencies would balk at this idea. The only exception I can think of is if they’re representing a whole catalog of cause marketing campaigns in house. In such a case they might consider packaging the cause marketing campaigns they represent together, much the way sports agents will package multiple clients together in certain trades.

Here’s why a package deal might be a good idea for multiple cause marketing campaigns. Suppose that in this Redbook story all seven of these campaigns decided to pitch their stories together. On its own your cause marketing campaign probably has a PR budget of approximately 1/7th of what it would be with six other partners. Combined you have seven times the resources you have by yourself.

This approach probably requires that the charities and/or the sponsors contact willing peers and then jointly hire a single agency capable of pulling off a seven-way pitch.

Granted there’s real risks involved. What happens if the magazine’s editors choose stories from only five of the seven partners?

But I think these risks are outweighed by the potential rewards of being able to bring many more resources to bear than one cause marketing campaign could by itself.

Cause Marketing to Raise Awareness

Not all cause-related marketing is about raising money, per se. Sometimes it’s about the charity's messaging.

Pictured are images from a box of Hamburger Helper from the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database that was purchased in 2008. Prominently featured on the front and back of the box is Susan G. Komen’s ‘Pink for the Cure’ campaign.

And while the front makes it clear that General Mills is donating $2 million to Susan G. Komen, it’s not clear that this is a transactional cause marketing campaign. That is, it’s hard to tell if my purchase of this box triggered a donation.

But the back of the box suggests that this is about raising awareness more than raising money.

At the bottom Komen lists “3 ways to help protect yourself.”

1. Get a mammogram.
2. Get a clinical breast exam.
3. Learn how to do a self-examination.

Nothing earth-shattering here. This has been Komen's basic message for coming up on 30 years. But like the saying goes, sometimes it’s better to be reminded of something we already know than to learn something new.

Furthermore, while these recommendations may be old hat for 50-year-old women, every year there’s a new crop of 20-year-olds who may not have heard the message yet.

And a box of Hamburger Helper is a good place to put that message since mom is still the person most likely to prepare the family meal.

How many moms got that message?

I couldn’t find out what kind of unit volume Hamburger Helper does, but in 2008 General Mills’ meals division, which is dominated by Hamburger Helper, did about $1.8 billion a year in sales.

For the sake of argument let’s say that half of that amount or $900 million came from Hamburger Helper sales. Let’s also assume that General Mills makes the same amount of Hamburger Helper every week. At an average retail price of $2.69 per box they would make 334 million packages of Hamburger Helper a year, or 6.4 million units a week.

If they put the S.G. Komen messaging on just one week’s worth of Hamburger Helper boxes, that’s pretty good exposure by itself.

This campaign is head and shoulders better than just the charity’s logo on package. Could General Mills have done more? Probably not on the box itself. Komen got some valuable real estate here.

But nowadays General Mills could easily bridge the printed packaging and the digital world by adding a QR code. The code could point a shoppers smart phone to a Facebook page, a microsite, open a video or picture, send someone to a sweepstakes sign-up page, or even launch some kind augmented reality.

For example, the QR code could have opened up a video that demonstrates how to do the self-exam.

I expect that the ever-sophisticated Komen organization would want to collect contact information, so launching the user’s Facebook account or collecting similar information via a sweepstakes promotion would be ideal.

But do enough Hamburger Helper buyers have smart phones for such an extension to make sense?

I don’t know for sure who buys Hamburger Helper, but a Pew study released last week found that about 1/3 of adults in the U.S. own smart phones but the penetration was even higher among Hispanics, Blacks and people whose household income is north of $75,000.

Cause Marketing About Nothing

In the TV show Seinfeld Jerry and George pitch NBC a sitcom they said was about nothing. Now the Vermont Foodbank is trying to get patrons at Vermont Hannaford Supermarkets to do Nothing about hunger in the state.

The campaign by NAIL, an ad agency in Providence, Rhode Island, is called “Nothing Can End Hunger.” NAIL has already sold the effort to food banks in Ohio and 'Nothing' is due to launch today, Thursday, July 14, 2011 in benefit of the Vermont Foodbank. The video at the left is from the Ohio portion of the campaign’s website, www.Nothing.org.

Here’s how it works, Hannaford stores are selling empty but labeled cans of ‘Nothing’ for $2.99. The cans are slotted, apparently so that one could take it out to solicit donations for the Vermont Foodbank , although the press release was vague on this point. But by itself the $2.99 derived from the sale of the cans of Nothing helps provide 18 meals.

In effect, it's a dressed up paper icon campaign.

It’s all wonderfully clever and the exact kind of campaign that will win awards. The ad, in particular, is genius. I feel sorry for the poor schlubs…who don’t look like actors to me… that ended up in the ad.

The campaign will be successful if they run a ton of ads like this on TV. But let's be honest, this ad won't be seen on TV very often at all. Vermont Foodbank won't have the budget for it. The press release says there's only 14,000 cans of Nothing available. That's $42,000 before expenses. They may be able to pay for a few TV ads and get a handful more freebies from TV stations. Some Vermonters will see the spots online.

But the upshot is that much depends on what the creative looks like inside the Hannaford stores. Word-play like this works great in a 30-second ad. But it takes that full 30 seconds. How does NAIL translate that to an in-store point of purchase display? Will people standing at the checkstand process the word-play at the point of purchase?

I hope someone will send me a sample of what the POP looks like.

Tip of the hat to Kelly S. for pointing out this campaign to me.

Pimping for the National WWII Museum

My father’s brother died in Belgium fighting in the infamous Battle of the Bulge in 1945, one of the 19,000 or so Americans that died . His remains were initially interred in Belgium, but my grandparents requested that his body be brought back home to the United States.

Even though he died decades before I was born I feel great kinship with Uncle Walter. He died childless, so every Memorial Day my family and I lay flowers on his grave and I tell my kids about his heroism.

All told about 16 million American served during WWII and every day about 1,000 veterans die.

To commemorate those who sacrificed so much and to remember America’s role in WWII, historian-author Stephen Ambrose championed the National World War II Museum. The first phase of the Museum opened in New Orleans in 2001. Now the museum is in the midst of a $300 million capital campaign that will enable it to triple in size, and you, my friends can help.

For $200 you can buy a brick to memorialize a grandfather, uncle, aunt, grandmother, friend or loved one who fought or served.

Now a brick campaign is one of the hoariest of fundraisers for a capital campaign. Indeed, when I first glanced over the ad at the right in a recent Time magazine I was surprised that anyone would bother advertising a brick campaign in a national magazine. I thought, what cause could possibly generate enough affinity to warrant advertising a brick campaign to a broad national audience?

It may be that the World War II Museum is the only one.

As a fundraiser and marketer, my only complaint is that the bricks themselves seem so off the shelf. Two-hundred dollars is real money in the current economy. Fundraisers gotta do a little extra if they want people’s support.

For instance, why can’t the bricks display the rank of the person being memorialized; private, staff sergeant, captain, etc., rather than just plain text? For that matter, why not show their branch of service; Army, Army Air Corps, Navy, Marines, Merchant Marines, Coast Guard? Why not offer yellow bricks to those who served in the European Theaters and Red Bricks to those in the Pacific Theaters? Americans have never shied away from waving Old Glory, so where’s the flag option?

I don’t know if the text is routed in or baked in when the brick is made, but either way can it be that hard or expensive for the brick maker to add the flag or the service insignia?

Finally, where’s the expensive granite option? A standard brick is right around 7”x3”. Why isn’t there a customizable granite paver about 14”x12” for perhaps a $2,500 donation?

This caviling aside, please join me in supporting this important museum.

Cause Marketing Bracketology

Here’s a golfing promotion you could run in advance of and in conjunction with your charity tourney this summer. It features tons of celebrities from the worlds of sport, politics, entertainment and golf, a sweepstakes component, and dinner and breakfast with funneyman Will Ferrell.

Here’s how it works: Celebrities are pitted against each other in something like a NCAA Tournament bracket. Then people vote on who they’d like to see advance based on the parings on Facebook or at the website. There’s no seedings to speak of so it’s basically a straight popularity contest. The person who picks the most brackets correctly wins tickets to play at Ferrell's Will Powered Invitational at Pebble Beach October 28-30, 2011. One hundred people will win a runner’s-up prize of a $50 gift card from Golfsmith, so all the eggs are in one basket.

Golfsmith along with Golf Magazine are the major sponsors. The beneficiary is Cancer for College, a scholarship charity for cancer survivors whose relationship with Ferrell I've highlighted in the past.

I haven’t gotten a legal ruling on this, but I think using celebrities in this way falls under ‘fair use,’ although it could be that Golf Magazine got permission to use all 64 names. Even if I’m wrong you could probably easily get permission in your market to use the names of 64 local celebrities. Or you could use corporate names, or even the names of deceased celebrities.

The Will Powered Invitational and Golf Magazine are using this mainly to promote the tourney, but you could almost certainly use this as a fundraiser. For instance, if the brackets were filled with company names, you could ask for a donation to participate in the brackets. A donation of $250 from 64 companies, which is in-reach for even small businesses, would generate an extra $16,000!

Or you could seed the companies based on their donation amount. Perhaps a $1,000 donation gets you a #1 seeding, while a $500 donation gets you a #8 seeding and so on.

In a lot of states, although not mine, you could ask for a fee to submit a bracket. It’s not so different from bingo. Get 500 participants at $10 a bracket sheet and that’s an extra $5,000. At $50 a bracket sheet that’s an extra $25,000 your charity tourney takes in.

For golf lovers, this gets more appealing the better the golf course your tourney is at. I like Will Ferrell plenty, but the greater appeal for me would be the chance to play at the legendary Pebble Beach Course.

Anyone who’s ever put together a charity tournament knows how hard it is getting incremental income after sponsorships, greens fees, and the auction. This promotion offers a fun new way to raise more money for the cause.

Cause Marketing Matchmaking Freebie

One of the things my company, Alden Keene, does is match nonprofits and sponsors, a service clients pay handsomely for.

Here’s a freebie for Ball jars, which sells food preserving jars and equipment, and Grow Appalachia, which teaches the people of rural Kentucky how to grow, cook and preserve their own food.

According to the website, Grow Appalachia, formed under the auspices of Berea College… a nonsectarian Christian college in Berea, Kentucky… has several pressing goals:

• “Basic diet-related health concerns – obesity, diabetes, heart disease."
• "Limited availability of high-quality fresh produce."
• "Generational loss of knowledge of gardening, cooking, and food preservation skills."
• "Widespread economic dependency and lack of autonomy.”

The program has one year under its belt. There were 400 people enrolled, 2,800 people fed, 60 tons of food grown at a cost of $1.25 a pound.

Startup funds for Grow Appalachia came from billionaire John Paul DeJoria, who founded John Paul Mitchell Systems and Patron Tequila, after growing up poor.

Ball, which goes back 125 years, is sponsoring “Can-It-Forward Day” on Saturday, August 13 in conjunction with Canning Across America, an association of food writers, bloggers and cookbook authors. While there are classes and recipes, and Ball is encouraging people to host home canning parties, so far it appears the Day has no particular cause affiliation.

Your first thought might be that Ball, which is a national brand, may be too big for small effort in rural Kentucky. But Grow Appalachia has a name that’s big enough to accommodate growth. Geographically Appalachia is generally considered to include counties in West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, as well as Kentucky.

The name Appalachia has been synonymous with poverty for at least 100 years and Berea College has been at the forefront of efforts to lift the region out of poverty for most of that time. John Paul Dejoria, whose companies have done cause marketing on behalf of feeding efforts in Africa, has donated or pledged $850,000 to Grow Appalachia.

Besides, the canning part of Ball is hardly a giant business. While Ball is a Fortune 500 container company, they license the canning portion of the company to Jarden Home Brands, part of a conglomerate which includes a portfolio of other famous, if faded, home brands like Sunbeam, Mr. Coffee, Crock-Pot, Oster and Rival, among others. Jarden Corporation’s total revenue in 2010 was $6.3 billion.

How might Ball sponsor Grow Appalachia?

I’d suggest a modest donation of cash and a generous donation of canning supplies. Then they should send camera crews to capture and tell the stories of the enrollees of Grow Appalachia. These stories could then serve as the basis for the Can-It-Forward promotion in 2012.

Recession Offers Advertising Opportunity for Nonprofits

You don’t have to look at the official figures from Association of Magazine Media (AMM), the trade group for the magazine industry, to see that magazines remain mired in the recession right now in the United States. And that may mean opportunity for your nonprofit.

While it’s hardly scientific, I’m certain I’ve recently seen plenty of ‘space available’ ads going to nonprofits.

For instance, both the ads at the left, from Heifer International and Save the Children appeared in the 6-27-2011 issue of Time Magazine and the 6-27-2011 issue of Sports Illustrated. Both titles, of course, are owned by Time-Warner.

The official numbers suggest the industry has yet to make up the ground lost during the Great Recession. Both ad pages and revenue were up modestly in 2010 over 2009. But 50,000 more ad pages were sold in 2008... the year the Great Recession started... than in 2010. As a result, the industry had $3 billion less in revenue in 2010 than 2008. Among the hundreds of titles tracked by the AMM, overall circulation in 2010 was down 21 million from 2009 and subscriptions alone were the lowest they've been in more than 10 years.

The advertising opportunity for nonprofits is in what’s called ‘space available advertising.’ Magazines (and newspapers for that matter) have long offered nonprofits free ad space based on availability. That is, if they didn’t sell all their adspace, they’d fill it with an ad from a charity free of charge.

Because of the ongoing recession not many publications are selling all their ad inventory.

There’s a catch, of course. Charities have to provide the ads in multiple formats; the publication won’t do it for you. Moreover, every magazine you target will have different requirements. And, not surprisingly, when the people who design pages look for ads that fit the available space they’re more likely to choose attractive ads over ugly ones. In other words, it’s probably best to leave your ad's design to professionals.

Your ads will need a call to action, but you probably can’t get away with direct ask for donations. But check with the magazine first to see what they will and will not allow. And if you’re a charity in Tallahassee, Florida serving teenage mothers, you’re not likely to get into Time Magazine. Although you might get your ad into the Tallahassee Democrat.

When you prepare your ad, consider adding a line that I saw once in a CARE ad: “Space generously donated by this publication.”

Perception is oftentimes reality in this world and it’s better not to let any of your audiences believe that you paid for adspace that might normally cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Add that little line and your charity looks efficient and the publication looks like a hero.

Cause Marketing: The Offer You Can Refuse

So insidious, wretched, low-down, and invidious are the techniques of cause marketing that they should be banned for use by soft drink companies, argues a staff attorney for the advocacy group The Public Health Advocacy Institute in an article published on the PHAI website titled “Organizations that Care About Health Should Play No Part in the Soft Drink Industry’s Effort to Rehabilitate Its Public Image.”

After citing the many cause marketing successes from Coke and Pepsi, author Cara Wilking concludes: “Organizations that care about health should establish a policy that identifies and distinguishes between traditional business relationships, corporate philanthropy and cause-marketing and should commit to not participate in cause-marketing campaigns that promote products, such as sugary drinks, that pose a public health threat.”

What Ms. Wilking would have us believe is that cause marketing is irresistible. A kind of catnip that we mere mortals can't begin to say no to. Hence, it should be banned whenever the catnip is associated with a product that's bad for us.

Tell that to Sigg Switzerland USA, the U.S. distributor for Sigg bottles, which filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 in May 2011.

The Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database has samples of cause marketing efforts from Sigg as recently as 2009. For instance the ad at the left from Sigg promotes a cause marketing campaign from Sigg meant to build rainwater collection tanks for schoolchildren in Africa in an effort from the Jane Goodall Institute.

Another ad featured Yvon Chouinard, founder of the company Patagonia as well as the environmental organization 1% for the Planet. Buy a Sigg bottle and $5 went to 1% for the Planet.

The reason Sigg Switzerland USA is now bankrupt is because the company repeatedly insisted that the plastics which line its aluminum bottles weren’t made with BPA, a toxin.

Trouble is, they were. Sigg lied and faced numerous lawsuits, including class action lawsuits. People and companies lost trust, notably Chouinard's Patagonia. Sigg bottles, which have always been expensive relative to competitors, went into a death spiral.

So my response to Ms. Wilking is that while cause marketing is effective when done correctly, it’s not a silver bullet or special voodoo. No one loses their sense of free will when they see a cause marketing offer. Done right it will make offers more compelling. But it doesn't make for offers you can't refuse.

Nobody has to drink Coke or Pepsi products, any more than someone has to use a Sigg bottle to drink water from, all the cause marketing in the world notwithstanding.

What to Do With Pesky Leftover Cause Marketing Inventory

Not all cause-branded merchandise sells. So what do you do with the leftover inventory?

The Tuesday Morning store in my neighborhood almost always has pink-ribboned kitchen implements from Kitchen Aid that once benefited Susan G. Komen for the Cure but are now selling at a fraction of the original retail price. Tuesday Morning is a deep discount chain of about 850 stores nationwide in the U.S.

Frankly, as a cause marketer it’s slightly embarrassing, even if there’s a whole host of possible reasons that have nothing to do the cause why the merchandise has been remaindered to discounters like Tuesday Morning. Still, much of the point of cause-branded merchandise is that the appeal of the cause helps move the product.

Back in March 2011 the big UK retailer and veteran cause marketer Marks & Spencer offered up men’s underwear designed by six different British sportsmen and benefiting The Prostate Cancer Charity. The original price of the underwear was £15 for a two-pack. Right now, on the Marks & Spencer website, the underwear has been discounted down to £5 after a stopover at £10 (although it’s not available in all sizes at the £5 price).

A press report says that the promotion has generated £60,000 for the charity. Not bad.

But it’s gotta be a shade embarrassing for the four players whose designs have to be discounted… rugby player Jason Leonard, ‘the Fun Bus,’ pretty boy footballer Jamie Redknapp (who's married to pop princess Louise), bad boy snooker player Jimmy White and the classy footballer Les Ferdinand.

In a case like this where there’s a celebrity component, here’s a thought; hold back some of the promotion for the end. Promotions… cause marketing and otherwise… tend to be front-loaded and rightfully so. You have to develop the momentum to see you through the promotion and the best way to do that is to go as big as you can right from the beginning.

But the celebrity aspect of this promotion affords Marks & Spencer and The Prostate Cancer Charity an extra arrow in the promotional quiver. Imagine offering up some bragging right to the celebrity whose underwear line sells out first. A press release. A billboard. Whatever. Then get creative with any of the celebrities whose competitive pride won’t let them finish sixth.

Imagine, for instance, if right before Marks & Spencer was prepared to start discounting, the ‘Fun Bus’ Jason Leonard, started autographing the boxes of his line of Kelly green-colored underwear. Maybe he signs 200 boxes. I’ve watched American baseball players sign 200 baseballs plus another 200 baseball cards in one sitting, so signing 200 underwear boxes wouldn’t be onerous. But instead of offering them first-come, first-served they go randomly to anybody who has paid the full £15.

Or maybe Jamie Redknapp, who along with his wife Louise represent a kind of beer-budget version of David and Victoria (Posh Spice) Beckham, could be part of some kind sweepstakes for a personal appearance. Again, this element of the promotion would only be triggered when Marks & Spencer’s usual metrics told them to start discounting.

This is a different way of running a retail promotion and more work than what is usually called for. And frankly most retailers would reject it out of hand. Retail promotions typically do not work this way. When merchandise begins to get stale, you discount.

But I’m a marketer not a merchandiser. And I’d love test this out.

Cause Marketing Patriots and Public Servants

In the lead up to Independence Day in the United States, which commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, I spotted a handful of cause marketing wherein the ‘cause’ is a burgeoning new coalition of American servicemen and women, police officers, and firefighters.

I’ve already posted on the Lowe’s/Pepsi nationwide co-branded effort that offered discounts to servicemen and women and their families, along with other benefits. And I’ve posted on studies that demonstrate how Americans right now are responsive to the needs of the members of the military and their families.

Rather than revisit that effort at any length I want to concentrate on two local efforts that highlight this budding trend of lumping together firefighters and police with the military.

In the first the local Toyota Dealers group offers Military, Fire, Police (MFP) a 10% discount off vehicle repair work, up to a maximum discount of $50. The offer was activated via a monthly direct mail piece.

Hoopes Vision offers $1,000 off LASIK vision correction eye surgery to members of the MFP and spouses. The offer was advertised in a monthly magazine of ads, also mailed to homes.

How do we know this is cause marketing rather than just targeted marketing?

Timing. In the wake of Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania it’s possible that that date will become a kind of holiday or rallying point to recognize the efforts and sacrifices of firefighters and police officers nationwide. In the meantime, the celebration of the country’s independence fulfills that role and also allows the inclusion of the country’s military. In short, after 9/11 public servants like firefighter and police officers came to be celebrated as patriots in their own right.

Small number of people being targeted. According to the Utah Department of Workforce Services the State has 4,101 police and sheriffs patrol officers and 2094 firefighters. Add another 1,000 people who serve in supervisory roles and that brings the total to 7,195 people in that State carrying a police or firefighter ID. I couldn’t find a corresponding statistic that told me exactly how many Utahns serve in the armed forces. But nationwide about .0095% of the population serves in either on active duty or in the reserves. While I doubt Utah’s number is as high as it is nationwide, if national averages hold, about twenty-six thousand Utahns are in the military. Therefore in Utah the combination of MFP represents perhaps 1.2 percent of the State’s population.

Easier/cheaper ways to target MFPs. The military, fire and police each have their own way of reaching its members. Hill Air Force Base, the largest military post in the state, has its own newspaper. So does the State’s National Guard contingent. Police and firefighters unions have their own way to publish to members. If Hoopes and the Toyota Dealers group meant only to reach MFPs, there’s more targeted and effective ways to do so.

Instead, with these ads Hoopes and the Toyota Dealers group are demonstrating to both the members of MFP and to the larger public a kind of old-fashioned (and American) patriotism, dressed up for today.

Think about it this way: In the wake of Declaration of Independence, it’s hard to imagine that Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the document, ever had to buy his own drink when stepped into a public house in his home state of Virginia. Heaven knows that after the long and arduous Revolutionary War that General George Washington never did.

So on July 5, let’s raise a toast to them all: Washington, Jefferson, members of the military, firefighters and police officers!

Continuing Education for Cause Marketers

What do you do, as a cause marketer, to keep learning?

How you answer the question of self-education determines things like: how successful your cause marketing campaigns are, indeed, how successful you are; your income and your lifespan. Researchers have even shown a correlation between happiness and education.

It’s almost axiomatic that more you know the more you want to know... and as Socrates pointed out, the more you realize how little you actually do know! If education isn't as often humbling as it it enlightening than you're probably not learning enough.

I hope this will be a conversation rather than a monologue or disquisition, so I invite you to comment on what you do to stay on top of your game as a cause marketer.

Business/General Interest

• I subscribe to and read a number of business magazines so as to understand current issues, trends, economics and the like, as well as several news magazines. I don’t have a business degree so I feel like this reading has gone a long way in advancing my understanding of how business works and doesn’t work. I also read newspapers, but mainly online. I especially admire the reporting in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
• Inspiration can strike almost anywhere, so whenever I’m in a waiting room I make a special point of reading magazines I don’t subscribe to or normally read. Sometimes that means women’s magazines, trade publications, hobbyist and special interest magazines, etc. It’s almost a lead-pipe cinch that when I read these kinds of publications I learn something I didn’t know, gain some new insight, or synthesize what I’m reading with something I already know.
• When I find something that I believe has lasting value, I scan or save it onto an external hard drive. The same hard drive holds many thousands of examples of cause marketing campaigns.
• I read Seth Godin’s and Guy Kawasaki’s blogs and I’ll pop into Techcrunch, and Gawker from time to time. Not because I’m a geek, but because I’m not.

Knowledge of the Wider World

• I’ve all but given up on reading fiction. But in its place I’ve become an inveterate history buff, with a special interest in the ancient world… the Sumerians, Egypt, Greece and Rome, early European history, etc. And, of course, American history, too. There’s still a big whole in my education about Asian history which I must soon remedy. And I still looking to read a good book about the common history of the United States and Canada.
• I’m a big fan of the coursework produced by The Teaching Company and The Modern Scholar. Both offer taped courses, allowing one to learn on the go. If I’m driving alone, I’m more likely to be listening to some of these recordings or to an audiobook than to the radio or a CD.
• I haven’t fully availed myself of it yet, but hundreds of universities in North America and Europe are putting thousands of hours of lectures and podcasts online. Check iTunes and individual universities for specific subjects.
• I’m kind of a sucker for the social science popularizers; Malcolm Gladwell, David Brooks, David Shenk, and others. Currently, I’m reading everything I can find on the topic of expertise studies. And, I'll read almost anything on Ben Franklin (see above) who was an autodidact almost without peer.
  
• I also keep a notebook with me at all times to help me track ideas and thoughts. Like the saying goes, the only way to have great ideas is to have a lot of ideas. My notebook helps me not only track them all… good and bad… but also weed out the stinkers.

Cause Marketing

• There are a handful of professional seminars and conferences that address the issues of cause marketing and offer training. In the United States David Hessekiel’s Cause Marketing Forum has supplanted IEG’s Sponsorship Conference, in part because the IEG treats cause marketing as a subset of sponsorship. In the UK, the granddaddy is Business in the Community's Annual Conference.
• There are a few books at Amazon on cause marketing, but the ultimate book on the practice is still to be written. On my bookshelf is Cause-Related Marketing by Sue Adkins, Marketing from the Heart, by Sue Linial, Brand Spirit, by Hamish Pringle, Robin Hood Marketing, by Katya Andresen, Cause Marketing for Nonprofits, and Breakthrough Nonprofit Branding, both by Jocelyn Daw. I’m excited to soon add Cause Marketing for Dummies by Joe Waters and Joanna McDonald.
• I actively read a handful of blogs from Katya Andresen, Joe Waters and Cone, Inc., on cause marketing, plus others on nonprofit issues.
• While you can get online and offline graduate degrees and certificates in various aspects of nonprofit management, still missing is any kind of certificate or other advanced education in cause marketing. In my opinion this glaring deficit needs to be remedied.

Brain Exercise

You could make a pretty good argument that you can implicitly learn from games like Chess, the Asian game Go, Scrabble, as well as some number of video games and handheld like Brain Age for the Nintendo DS, and shloads of apps for iPhone/iPad, Android, and other platforms, all explicitly meant to help adults learn or otherwise give their gray-matter a workout.

But you may not need anything so external. An elderly aunt of mine kept her mind sharp well into her 90s not just reading the paper, but copy-editing it. She’d literally mark-up the daily paper with a red pen!