The Last Cause-Related Marketing Label Campaign to the School Dance

Nestle Waters North America has a label campaign out called GoLife that benefits schools by providing sports equipment and school trips. But there’s an elephant in the classroom.

If label campaign benefiting schools sounds like familiar ground, you’re right. Campbell’s has been doing one for more than 30 years, and General Mills has been doing their Boxtops for Education campaign for 12 years. General Mills is the larger of the two in no small part because schools can redeem the Boxtops for cash rather than merchandise.

Schools and PTAs/PTOs encourage parents to collect boxtops/labels and assign someone to manage all the collecting, counting and redeeming. In my kids’ school one of the secretaries has this assignment and there are two large barrels in the school office, one for Labels and one for Boxtops.

Before the Internet this was a whole lot more work than it is now. But even still there’s probably not too many school secretaries or PTA/PTO label coordinators who relish this part of their work.

GoLife has been going on (it appears) since 2007 and will run through the end of the 2009 school year. My kids’ school wasn’t registered. And, so far as I can tell, neither were any of the 71 schools within a five mile radius of my zip code.

I don’t know who built GoLife for Nestle of if they put it together internally, but it leaves me with a number of questions.

The points a school can earn is capped at 1 million. Why? Isn’t more labels better?
The campaign has deadlines to enroll schools, register points, and redeem points. The campaign also has a hard end-date. Why not just make the campaign year-round, as with Boxtops for Education and Labels for Education?

The hard end-date makes it seem that Nestle is just testing the waters with GoLife.

As near as I can determine, GoLife requires about the same amount of effort for schools as Labels and Boxtops. I wonder if they actually talked to any school secretaries before they launched this? Who better to help them distinguish their campaign than the people who actually administer it?
Which leads to my next question, why another school label campaign? Boxtops for Education and Labels for Education each have dozens of eligible products. GoLife has basically one. Because of that disparity, GoLife is destined to always be the third option, and the last one in parent’s minds.

Sports equipment makes sense strategically, since Nestle also promotes water as a healthy alternative to juice boxes.

But the elephant in the classroom is this: every school in America has drinking fountains. Every home in America has fresh water coming out of its faucets. With rare exceptions nationwide, the water that comes out of those faucets and fountains is pure and wholesome (even if the taste sometimes leaves something to be desired). Bottling water and shipping it great distances in small plastic bottles when children and adults have ready access to good water is an inherently wasteful enterprise.

Nestle Waters North America promotes that it uses less plastic for their bottles than before, but one way or another much of that plastic ends up in the wastestream. Even the bottles that are recycled require energy to transport, shred and melt them.

As I’ve mentioned before, progressive local governments and groups have begun to ban bottled water at their confabs.

I’d be willing to bet a double-thick milkshake that over the next five years Nestle Waters North America experiences a slow but steady erosion of sales in the U.S. because consumers are waking up to the issue of the wastefulness of bottled water.

I’m all in favor of using cause-related marketing to help companies solve challenging PR issues. But if it’s going to preserve market share Nestle has to do something more holistic than GoLife to counter that perception.

Then there’s the issue of being the third cause-related marketing label campaign to the school dance. Third place isn’t necessarily a bad place to be. But to be successful in third place you have to be really strongly positioned against the competition. I just don’t think Nestle’s done that here.

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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