Cause Marketing

Here for your listening and viewing pleasure is Darlene Love, singing Christmas (Baby Please Come Home). It is far and away the blues-iest, rocking-est, Christmas song ever! It comes courtesy of wunderkind music producer Phil Spector, his famous Wall of Sound, David Letterman, Paul Shaffer, CBS, and YouTube. Mele Kalikimaka, my friends!

Five or six years ago the term 'co-branding' was one of those hot marketing buzzwords. Nowadays co-branding is so commonplace as to be mundane. The point of co-branding is for brands to combine such that they create notable synergy. There are several kinds of co-branding, including cause marketing itself. This article, from Tiger Woods' previous sponsor , Accenture, names six : Promotional/Sponsorship. This is the category cause marketing falls under. Also Motorola's sponsorship of the National Football League. Ingredient. Betty Crocker brownie mix made with Hershey chocolate, or any of the Jack Daniels' dishes at TGI Fridays . Innovation Based. The Apple-Nike tie-up. Value-Chain , which is meant to bring new experiences to the consumer, not just another flavor. There are three varieties of value-chain co-branding: Product Service. Sea World and Southwest Airlines . Supplier-Retailer. Starbucks wifi service from AT&T. Alliance. Think FTD , or those all...

Tuesday evening, Paul Nelson, a local radio reporter called to ask about how to keep up employee morale during the downturn. ( Here's his finished story .) He'd seen on Slideshare a presentation on the topic I'd given in September to the Utah state convention of the Society for Human Resource Management. Between the presentation and my comments, I'll bet I gave him a half-dozen studies demonstrating that cause marketing can help companies improve employee morale, loyalty, profitability. skills, teamwork, etc. And then he asked me the most natural, obvious question imaginable. Why? Why would working with a charity help a company improve morale? I almost choked. No one has ever asked my why that would be. I'm a pundit so of course I had an answer for him... it's the quote he used in the story... but it wasn't based on any study I could name or even think of. So here's my question to you my faithful readers. Why can cause marketing help with employee moral...

In my ongoing quest to highlight cause marketing efforts large and small , here’s a smaller one. The Skinner family is facing not one, but two liver transplants. Their two children, 2-year-old Claire and 4-year-old Benson both suffer from primary hyperoxaluria, a genetic disorder that causes their livers to produce too much oxalate. Claire’s case is the more acute, requiring her to spend as much as 15 hours a day on dialysis. Claire is already on the transplant list and Benson will almost certainly join her there in the near future. So their friends at Shelf Reliance, a company that sells emergency preparedness supplies, are conducting a cause marketing campaign on behalf of the Skinner kids. When you buy a #10 can of Shelf Reliance brownie mix, they will donate the full purchase price… $14.90… to the Children’s Organ Transplant Association in support of liver transplants for Claire and Benson. The ‘call out’ in this flyer I received isn’t as good as it needs to be, or even fully accur...