Interview On Cause Marketing With a Trade Magazine Reporter

Last week I did “email interview” on cause-related marketing with Carol Gustafson, a writer for W&E Today, a trade magazine for the western and English equine industry.

She asked me five questions. I’ll post the answers to the first two questions on today’s post, and the remaining on next Tuesday’s post. Carol’s questions are in italics, followed by my answers.

1. With money tight and ad budgets shrinking, why should a business, especially a smaller one, include cause-related marketing in its promotional mix?

Old time marketers used to lament that the average person saw perhaps 250 commercial messages a day. Nowadays, the estimates range from a few hundred to perhaps 3,000! I expect there’s a lot of shock value built into these estimates. But as Seth Godin puts it in his landmark book Permission Marketing, the biggest challenge for marketers today isn’t the number of commercial messages per se.

Instead, it’s the number of messages combined with the fact that most commercials are based on interrupting people doing something they prefer. It’s hard to heat someone up to your commercial message if they’re cool to you because you interrupted their show or game.

Moreover, consumers are fighting back and they have more tools than ever. They’ve long enjoyed the power of the remote. Now they have the Tivo and recordable DVRs and Slingboxes. They zip past your commercial and time-shift your programming.

A whole generation gets their national news from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and their entertainment from YouTube. Online banner ads are dinosaurs. Search marketing can be effective, but if you don’t land on the first page, you might as well be on the last. Local media… TV, radio, newspaper, yellow pages… can still work very well, but with its uncanny ability to measure results, Internet marketing methods steal market share from the lazier local media every quarter.

Marketing today is like New Year’s Eve in Times Square; noisy, crowded, hard to navigate, and full of people reaching for your wallet.

Cause-related marketing is no panacea. But it does offer a number of advantages that help businesses and marketers cut through the commercial clutter.

Well designed and executed cause-related marketing campaigns can push the sales needle.
The practice is well-known… even expected… especially among young people and women [more on this in Tuesday’s post].
Cause-related marketing heighten customer loyalty.
It boosts public image and gives companies a new story to tell to the press and to other key constituencies.
Cause-related marketing helps build employee morale and loyalty.
It helps improve employee profitability, skills and teamwork.
Cause-related marketing can improve employee recruiting and retention and build a pipeline of talent.

2. How should a business go about selecting a cause or charity?

There’s two basic approaches here. The first is called strategic cause-related marketing. If you’re a food company then a strategic fit would be a food bank or hunger charity. If you sell tack and feed, then a strategic fit might be a horse rescue charity. In general, the research suggests that strategic cause-related marketing makes the most sense to customers.

The second approach is to find charities that your internal audiences… employees, management, customers, vendors, boardmembers, etc… respond to or could get passionate about. That’s why you see Target supporting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to name one prominent example, even though they’re not a strategic fit in the usual sense.

Part 2: How Chili's Used Cause-Related Marketing to Raise $8.2 million for St. Jude

[Bloggers Note: In this second half of this post I discuss the nuts and bolts of how Chili's motivates support from its employees and managers and how St. Jude 'activates' support from Chili's. Read the first half here.] How does St. Jude motivate support from Chili’s front line employees and management alike? They call it ‘activation’ and they do so by the following: They share stories of St. Jude patients who were sick and got better thanks to the services they received at the hospital. Two stories in particular are personal for Chili’s staff. A Chili’s bartender in El Dorado Hills, California named Jeff Eagles has a younger brother who was treated at St. Jude. In both 2005 and 2006 Eagles was the campaign’s biggest individual fundraiser. John Griffin, a manager at the Chili’s in Conway, Arkansas had an infant daughter who was treated for retinoblastoma at St. Jude. They drew on the support Doug Brooks… the president and CEO of Brinker International, Chili’s parent co...

Chili’s and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

I was in Chili’s today and I ordered their “Triple-Dipper,” a three appetizer combo. While I waited for the food, I noticed another kind of combo. Chili’s is doing a full-featured cause-related marketing campaign for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. There was a four-sided laminated table tent outlining the campaign on the table. When the waitress brought the drinks she slapped down Chili’s trademark square paper beverage coasters and on them was a call to action for an element of the campaign called ‘Create-A-Pepper,’ a kind of paper icon campaign. The wait staff was all attired in black shirts co-branded with Chili’s and St. Jude. The Create-A-Pepper paper icon could be found in a stack behind the hostess area. The Peppers are outlines of Chili’s iconic logo meant to be colored. I paid $1 for mine, but they would have taken $5, $10, or more. The crayons, too, were co-branded with the ‘Create-A-Pepper’ and St. Jude’s logos. There’s also creatapepper.com, a microsite, but again wi...

Cause-Related Marketing with Customer Receipts

Walgreens and JDRF Right now at Walgreens…the giant pharmacy and retail store chain with more than 5,800 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico… they’re selling $1 paper icons for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). This is an annual campaign and I bought one to gauge how it’s changed over the years. (Short list… they don’t do the shoe as a die cut anymore; the paper icon is now an 8¾ x 4¼ rectangle. Another interesting change; one side is now in Spanish). The icon has a bar code and Jacob, the clerk, scanned it and handed me a receipt as we finished the transaction. At the bottom was an 800-number keyed to a customer satisfaction survey. Dial the number, answer some questions and you’re entered into a drawing for $10,000 between now and the end of September 2007. I don’t know what their response rate is, but the $10,000 amount suggests that it’s pretty low. Taco Bell’s survey gives out $1,000 per week. At a regional seafood restaurant they give me a code that garner...

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