Bleeding-Edge Cause Marketing

Help, a company that sells single-symptom remedies to things like headaches and cuts, has teamed up with DKMS Bone Marrow Donor Center to deliver a wonderfully-integrated cause marketing campaign at the bleeding-edge of innovation.

When you buy a package of Help’s brand of adhesive bandages called ‘Help I’ve Cut Myself & I Want to Save a Life’ you get their regular 16 bandages in two sizes. But you also get a kit to collect some of the blood that you’ve just spilt and register with the nonprofit’s bone marrow donor registry. Besides the bandages there are instructions, permissions, and the like.

Help’s remedies are available at most Target and Walgreens stores, and elsewhere.

Registering for such databases is a simple matter of giving a blood sample. But unless your consciousness has been raised to the need for bone marrow donors… probably due to personal experience… chances you haven’t made the effort to do so. Heaven knows I haven’t

But ‘Help I’ve Cut Myself & I Want to Save a Life’ takes out the middleman. There’s no extra trip to the hospital or doctor’s office required. And the collection kit, disguised as a package of adhesive bandages, is idiot-proof.

The blood sample goes to DKMS Bone Marrow Donor Center, a nonprofit founded in Germany, but now with operations in the United States, that adds your name and blood type to its bone marrow registry.

Help’s products stand out in several ways. The packaging, which is standardized across all of Help’s remedies, is made of post-industrial paper pulp and bio-plastics that degrade in compostable environments. The products themselves are single-ingredient meant to treat single conditions. Help I’ve Got a Headache, for instance, is just acetaminophen sans dyes or other components.

Meanwhile, the DKMS Bone Marrow Donor Center came to the United States in 2004 where people with blood cancers are well represented by the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. So the piece of the puzzle that DKMS carved out for itself is registering bone marrow donors. That focus is evident in one of DKMS’s URLs, which is getswabbed.org. Worldwide DKMS’s registry now has some 3 million registered bone marrow donors and has aided in some 29,000 bone marrow and peripheral blood stem cell transplants.

This is bleeding-edge cause marketing by two very focused entities, and another example of cause marketing not meant to raise money.

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