Learning as a Cause Marketer

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-related marketing campaigns are, indeed, how successful you are; your income; 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 do know)!

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.

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. Since I don’t have a business degree I feel like this reading has gone a long way in advancing my understanding of business. 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 or gain some new insight.
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 hundreds of examples of cause-related marketing campaigns.
I read Seth Godin’s and Guy Kawasaki’s blogs along with the reliably hilarious Fakesteve.com.

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. There’s still a big whole in my education about Asian history which I must soon remedy.
Most of what I’ve learned on this count I picked up from coursework produced by The Teaching Company and The Modern Scholar, both of which I can recommend. Both offer taped courses, meaning I can 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 universities in North America and Europe are putting hundreds of thousands of hours of lectures and podcasts online. Check iTunes and individual universities for specific subjects.

Cause-Related Marketing

There are a handful of professional seminars and conferences that address the issues of cause-related marketing and offer training. In the United States the most prominent is the IEG Sponsorship Conference, but rising with a bullet is David Hessekiel’s Cause Marketing Forum. In the UK, the granddaddy is Business in the Community's Annual Conference.
There are few books at Amazon on cause-related 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, and Robin Hood Marketing, by Katya Andresen.
I actively read a handful of blogs from Katya Andresen, Joe Waters and Cone, Inc., on cause-related marketing, plus others on nonprofit issues.
While you can get online and offline certificates in various aspects of nonprofit management, still missing is any kind of certificate or other advanced education in cause-related marketing. In my opinion this glaring deficit needs to be addressed.

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. Increasingly, I’m seeing handheld games and programs that are explicitly meant to help adults learn or otherwise give their gray-matter a workout.

But you don’t necessarily 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!

Batting Your Eyelashes at Prescription Drug Cause Marketing

I’m a little chary about making sweeping pronouncements, but I believe I've just seen the first cause marketing promotion in the U.S. involving a prescription drug. The drug is from Allergan and it’s called Latisse , “the first and only FDA-approved prescription treatment for inadequate or not enough eyelashes.” The medical name for this condition is hypotrichosis. Latisse is lifestyle drug the way Viagra or Propecia are. That is, no one’s going to die (except, perhaps, of embarrassment) if their erectile dysfunction or male pattern baldness or thin eyelashes go untreated. Which means the positioning for a product like Latisse is a little tricky. Allergan could have gone with the sexy route as with Viagra or Cialis and showed lovely women batting their new longer, thicker, darker eyelashes. But I’ll bet that approach didn’t test well with women. (I’m reminded of a joke about the Cialis ads from a comedian whose name I can’t recall. He said, “Hey if my erection lasts longer than ...

Cause Marketing: The All Packaging Edition

One way to activate a cause marketing campaign when the sponsor sells a physical product is on the packaging. I started my career in cause marketing on the charity side and I can tell you that back in the day we were thrilled to get a logo on pack of a consumer packaged good (CPG) or even just a mention. Since then, there’s been a welcome evolution of what sponsors are willing and able to do with their packaging in order to activate their cause sponsorships. That said, even today some sponsors don’t seem to have gotten the memo that when it comes to explaining your cause campaign, more really is more, even on something as small as a can or bottle. The savviest sponsors realize that their only guaranteed means of reaching actual customers with a cause marketing message is by putting it on packaging. And the reach and frequency of the media on packaging for certain high-volume CPG items is almost certainly greater than radio, print or outdoor advertising, and, in many cases, TV. More to ...

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...

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