Cause Marketing

Everybody has their wish list for President Barack Obama. This has been true of U.S. presidents since at least the time of President Andrew Jackson 180 years ago when people would walk up to the ‘People’s House’ as Jackson called it knock on the door and petition the great populist directly. Speaking as a cause marketer, here’s my wish list for President Obama, expressed in an open letter.   Dear President Obama: You have much to do in the opening days of your administration. But I hope you’ll carve out a little bit of your prodigious energy to think for a moment about a cause marketing, which I define as: “a relationship that bridges cause and commerce in ways that benefit both parties.” Like many others, I have wishes and hopes for your administration. As a cause marketer, three stand out. 1). Please make cause marketing donations tax deductible. Doing so would almost certainly boost consumer spending. This has been proposed by Professors Anup Malani and M. Todd Hende...

Today is the first Federal election in the United States since 2008. I encourage all my American readers to exercise their franchise and vote. It's too soon to say how the election will fair for the two major parties in the United States, but this much is clear; come Wednesday the President will yet be Barack Obama. So on this first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, here’s my cause marketing wish list for President Obama and the new Congress, expressed in an open letter and originally posted on Feb 5, 2009. Dear President Obama: You have much to do in the opening days of your administration. But I hope you’ll carve out a little bit of your prodigious energy to think for a moment about a cause marketing, which I define as: “a relationship that bridges cause and commerce in ways that benefit both parties.” Like many others, I have wishes and hopes for your administration. As a cause marketer, three stand out. 1). Please make cause marketing donations tax deductible. Doing s...

Years ago I read a book by a man who had been the public defender in the bad old days of Soviet Russia. There were horrors aplenty, all worthy of a Kafka novel. One of the things that has stuck with me ever since was his belief that he wasn’t defending his clients against just the Soviet apparatchik. He also had to defend against the expectations of jurors who ‘knew’ what the government wanted; even when there was no communication from any level of the Nomenklatura. Such kangaroo courts didn’t require any direct intervention from Soviet officials at all, he wrote. That is during a trial jurors didn’t need to get something like a telegram from the Politiburo to know how to rule. They convicted defendants based on what they thought the Politburo and the Party would want them to do. These memories came back to me over the weekend when I learned that Internal Revenue Service (IRS) officials in the Cincinnati offices in charge on non-profit were giving unwarranted scrutiny to applicatio...

This post is endorsed by 'President Barack Obama,' 'Oprah Winfrey,' 'Hillary Clinton,' 'Coldplay' and other high-ranking search terms in Google. The hope-filled inauguration of President Barack Obama yesterday morning means that 2009 is still dewy enough that we can talk about New Year’s resolutions. Professionally I set a series of goals each year including sales and profitability goals. I’ve also set a grand total of one professional New Year’s resolution. I resolve to spend more time evangelizing the advantages and benefits of cause marketing.  In the past I have contented myself to talk about the many positives of cause marketing with clients and on this blog. The blog is easy to find if you know the word ‘cause marketing.’ But not that many people know the expression or the ideas behind it. Google’s keyword search tool says that in December 2008 the search volume for the term cause marketing was 14,800 with another 4,400 for the search ter...

CITGO, the oil refiner and gasoline marketer faces a number of brand challenges. Is there a place here for cause marketing? The average gas price in the United States is currently $3.88 a gallon, according to a report in yesterday’s USA Today , with at least half a dozen states reporting $4 a gallon gas. Unlike our compatriots in Europe, Americans are entirely unaccustomed to high gasoline prices. It’s no exaggeration to say that President Obama’s chances of reelection in 2012 hinge, in part, on how high fuel prices stay. Pundits suggest that if gas prices nationwide in November 2011 are above $4, President Obama’s chances aren’t good. CITGO has been owned in its entirety since 1990 by Petroleos de Venezuela, the Venezuelan state-owned petroleum company. CITGO, therefore, is effectively controlled by Hugo Chavez, the autocratic president of Venezuela who has no love for the United States, and who has expressed his feelings about the USA frequently and venomously. Moreover, CITGO has be...

Selling cause marketing sponsorships… like selling radio or television airtime… means selling the intangible. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have inventory. Races have space on t-shirts and signs, telethons and radiothons have airtime, packaged goods products have packaging. Keep brainstorming and other cause marketing inventory will become plain. I advised a friend, a New York Times best-selling author with his own charity, to auction off the rights to name a character in one of his upcoming books. Shortly before I left Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals I was working on adding a kind of behind-the-scenes tour to my sponsors who achieved certain fundraising levels; never underestimate the degree to which people love to pull back the curtain on how “Oz” manages his acts of magic. A really fun kind of alternate cause marketing inventory came across my desk recently. In Raleigh, North Carolina Terramor Homes does a BBQ in support of the Duke Children’s Hospital Radiothon. The BBQ in...

Saturday May 9, is the nationwide Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive in the United States. If you’re Stateside, before you read anything else in this post be sure and put together a bag of non-perishable food items. Then get it out at your mailbox before your mail carrier gets there May 9. Start on paragraph two when you get back You back? Good. I hope you included lots of high protein items. If not, go find an unopened jar of peanut butter (in a plastic jar, please) and add it to the bag, then come back and start with the third paragraph. With that out of the way let’s talk about what word of mouth guru Andy Sernovitz calls “ The Chocolate Problem .” Nobody, Sernovitz points out, has ever emailed a friend and wrote in the subject line, “Have you ever tried this stuff called chocolate? It’s amazing!” Whether you like or dislike it, everyone knows about chocolate. And this campaign from Cambell’s , the US Postal Service and the National Association of Letter Carriers has a bad case of the ...

Today, Monday, April 22 is the 43rd Earth Day in the United States, a day that was originally conceived as a kind of environmental ‘teach-in.’ But I think it’s fair to say that most Americans understood those first few Earth Days not as a ‘teach-in’ but as a reminder to clean up litter. America made great strides against litter. It has also made great strides against air pollution, and water pollution. The country still has litter and air and water pollution. But air pollution in particular is now better than it was in, say, December 1970, when the Environmental Protection Agency was founded. National carbon monoxide emissions are not quite a third of what they were in 1970. Ammonia emissions are lower now than then, so are nitrogen oxides, particulates, sulfur dioxides, and volatile organic compounds. Both surface water and groundwater are cleaner than they were in 1970 thanks to the Clean Water Acts and the Safe Drinking Water Act. All this notwithstanding the fact that the U.S. popu...