Cause Marketing

Woman 18-34, Enjoys Scrapbooking, Seeks Marketers Who Can Make Her Care Scrapbooking is now the biggest chunk of the craft and hobby industry in North America, according to the Craft and Hobby Association , with estimated annual sales of $2.44 billion in 2006, a growth rate of 2.4 percent over 2005. The total craft and hobby market size is estimated to be $30 billion. I only just found these figures , but they don’t surprise me. I live with a scrapbooker/ cardmaker. One of my wife’s sisters works for a company that has a substantial (more than 200 SKUs) scrapbook line. My wife and her sister have been to at least a half-dozen scrapbook shows together from Texas on west. The research I saw from the Craft and Hobby Association, doesn’t break out the female-male gender ratio in scrapbooking, but I think it’s fair to say that more women than men scrapbook. The research does show that the age group most likely to scrapbook is 18-34, an attractive demo to nonprofits and to companies alike. ...

With Apologies to Kris Kristofferson Take the ribbon from this ad, shake it loose and let it go, Rubbin’ wrong against my skin. Use it right or just say no. Come and sit down by my side, learn from experience that’s been sad I’m suggestin’ there’s a way, for CRM to not be this bad. You choose to ignore the basic rules, and you should understand God is in the details, don’t let the devil play his hand. This campaign is dead and gone, next time you can get this right Include the cause and the amount, make it clear in people’s sight It matters what you do. CRM should be seen through. It’s not hard to understand. God is in the details, don’t let the devil play his hand. This campaign is dead and gone, next time you can get this right Include the cause and the amount, make it clear in people’s sight.

Lessons from Lord Stanley’s Trophy The Anaheim Ducks of the National Hockey League won the League’s championship on June 6 and with it the right to hold the Stanley Cup for the next year. The Stanley Cup is the most storied trophy in professional sport in North America, dating to 1893. Unlike other trophies it’s permanent. That is, a new trophy is not made for each championship. It’s also the only trophy that is engraved with the names of the players and management from each championship team. How do they manage that without making the trophy jinormous? Well the trophy itself stays the same size; about three-feet tall and 35 pounds. It features a cup at the top with graduated bands or rings below that. Beneath those are five larger bands of the same size. Each of those bands has space for 13 championships. As they fill, the band at the top is removed and displayed at Hockey Hall of Fame and a new blank band is added to the bottom. Using this method, the Stanley Cup trophy could still ...

The 'Ancillary Opportunities' Section of Your Cause-Marketing Proposal At the end of your cause-marketing proposal to sponsors there should be a section called something like “Ancillary Opportunities.” It’s the place where you add the other stuff that came out of brainstorming sessions that you can pull off and which complements the principal part of the promotion. Ancillary means ‘subordinate’ or ‘of secondary importance.’ But don’t think that just because ancillary opportunities are subordinate or secondary that you can leave them out of the proposal. For one thing, you may have spent a lot of time researching the target sponsor and still missed their hot button. Remember Hotmail was the second idea that Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith presented to Silicon Valley venture capitalists Draper Fisher Jurvetson . The ‘Ancillary Opportunity’ section is also a place to showcase your creativity and generate trust. And like the book title says, “ You Don’t Get what You Deserve, You Get W...

Celebrities Are Just Like You and Me, Only They Get to Stay Free at the Mandarin Oriental There are two kinds of celebrities in the world; those that are in the Mandarin Oriental ad campaign running right now and those whose agents are trying to get them in. It’s an image ad campaign for the 17 hotels that are part of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group. In it celebrities including I.M. Pei, Zubin Mehta, Helen Mirren, Elle McPherson, and Dame Edna-Barry Humphries are photographed in settings of their choice and they name their favorite Mandarin property. Dame Edna-Barry Humphries get to name two! Every celebrity appearance carries with it a $10,000 donation to the charity of the celebrity’s choosing. Neeson’s charity is UNICEF and his short profile on the Mandarin website includes a UNICEF logo and link. Most of the other charities are smaller and less prominent than UNICEF. It goes almost without saying that the donation amount is too small to be meaningful. I don’t know how the deal is...

Breaking Up the Band Normally, when it comes to cause-related marketing I would say that longer relationships are better for sponsor and charity. Think Rolling Stones and U2 not Cream or Soft Cell . That’s because cause marketing is a form of co-branding and like any branding endeavor it takes years to for brands to achieve high customer awareness. Frequently changing partners confuses your customers. For instance, I guarantee you that even after more than 10 plus years of deep association, in a test of unaided recall remarkably few people would be able to identify that Subway Sandwiches and the American Heart Association are co-branded partners. I’ve written before that lasting corporate-cause relationships are like marriages that require persistent maintenance. Or like bank accounts whereto you must make frequent deposits to cover the inevitable withdrawals. But there are times when it makes sense to end cause-marketing relationships. For causes it’s probably more so a dollars a...

For years Europeans and the Romans before them presumed that there was no such a thing as a black swan because all the known swans in the Old World and the New were white. As a result, the aphorism “all swans are white” signified something that was obviously true. Finally European explorers sighted a black swan in Australia in 1697 and a pair were captured in 1726. Turns out black swans are quite common in Australia and New Zealand. About that David Hume…the Scottish logician-philosopher who lived 1711 to 1776 …wrote: “No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.” In the hands of logicians like Hume and mathematicians-investors like Nassim Taleb , the author of the recent book on randomness called “The Black Swan,” the possibility of ‘black swans’ is a problem of logical and probability and for Taleb especially, a monumental challenge in generating reliable...

How I Miss the Old Children’s Miracle Network Telethon Children’s Miracle Network , the giant charity that raises money for 175 children’s hospitals in the United States and Canada had its annual telethon this last weekend, such as it is. They don’t call a telethon any more; haven’t called it that for perhaps 15 years. But still I miss it. Of course this is just personal nostalgia. I wrote the old-school Children’s Miracle Network Telethon for five years, and so I was intimately involved with its production. My first CMN Telethon featured Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald and they sang a kick-butt version of the Doobie Brothers’ hit “What a Fool Believes,” which they co-wrote and for which they won a Grammy Award. I don’t know how it looked and sounded to the TV audience, but my mind’s eye will never forget watching them live from the outdoor stage at Disneyland’s Videopolis ! That night we kept a skeleton audience who stayed for a long list of comedy performers do sets right on the...