Cause Marketing

One of the complaints greens have about cause marketing is that it typically incentivizes and rewards the purchase of more stuff. Stuff that might be useful for a while but eventually ends up in a landfill somewhere. Into this conundrum came Sprint , the mobile service provider, and Samsung , the handset maker. Together they came up with a cause marketing campaign that mitigates some of those usual concerns. From August to Dec 2009, Sprint gave $2 to the Nature Conservancy for the sale of each Samsung Reclaim phone and messaging device. There was a guaranteed minimum donation of $250,000. A press release tells me that the maximum donation was $500,000, which the program achieved. The Reclaim phone currently sells for $49.99, with a Sprint plan. The Nature Conservancy is using the donation for its ‘ Adopt an Acre ’ program. To mitigate green concerns, the phone was made from 80 percent recyclable materials and its packaging was fully recyclable. It was the first phone sold in the U.S. w...

It can’t come to soon for those in Haiti, but cause marketers… including some from smaller entities… are using the power of cause marketing to support relief efforts in the earthquake battered country. What follows is a representative few. But it’s an important list because it demonstrates that you don’t have to be an A-list celebrity, like George Clooney and pals , to do your part. If you see more examples of cause marketing on behalf of Haiti and Haitians I hope you’ll either email me at aldenkeene @ gmail [dot] com or comment below. One of the most prominent examples comes from Zynga, creator of the virtual worlds and games including Farmville, Fishville, Zynga Poker, and Mafia Wars. When you certain buy virtual items from Zynga for use in those games, a donation is made to the U.N’s World Food Programme. The donation to Haiti relief efforts from Zynga users is already north of $1.5 million ! Paper Culture , an online stationary story, is donating “100 percent of all proceeds from i...

In a world where much of the air stinks, HUGO fragrances wants to help. When you buy specially-marked packages of HUGO Element (on the left) or HUGO Man fragrances, HUGO will pay for the planting of one or more than a dozen species of trees in the Amazon rainforest. The campaign is meant to mitigate pollution in the earth’s atmosphere, rainforest deforestation, and rising CO2 levels. The campaign is in support of the Pur Project, a kind of collective led by social entrepreneur Tristan Lecomte. Pur members plant tree seeds, nurture them in nurseries, and transplant them to one of three plantations in tropical Peru or Bolivia. The labor required puts locals to work in both countries. The packages of HUGO Elements and Man are coded such that you can enter an access number and see exactly where your tree is planted on Google Maps! Cool! I like this campaign a lot. It makes good use of the ‘ buy one, give one ’ (BOGO) paradigm that is so compelling.The cause itself is solution-based. Th...

If you're anything like me then you've watched the growth and development of Lance Armstrong's LIVESTRONG brand with a mixture of awe and envy. It started with the iconic yellow rubber bracelets, which since 2004 have generated more than $70 million for the Lance Armstrong Foundation . Over the arc of the bracelet's popularity they have been imitated, parodied and worn by vast array of non-biking celebrities, as well as the hoi polloi. All guided by the legendary marketers at Nike and its long-time agency Weiden+Kennedy . So popular and well-known was the yellow bracelet that there was a long while when it seemed like every fundraising brainstorming session I had with a charity somebody suggested a bracelet campaign, as if lightning could be caught in a bottle a second time. (In that way it's reminiscent of all the meetings I've been in when people suggested that all they needed to really get their pet project off the ground was an appearance on Oprah !) From...

Dear Friends: By now we've all heard of or seen pictures from the deadly earthquake in the beleaguered country of Haiti. Here's a list of charities operating in Haiti or heading there now with relief. I urge you to support one or more of them. The list comes from MSNBC. I'll add one more; a small charity that's been in Haiti for more than 10 years and was founded by the friend of a friend. It's called Healing Hands for Haiti . Action Against Hunger American Red Cross American Jewish World Service AmeriCares CARE Catholic Relief Services Childcare Worldwide Direct Relief International Doctors Without Borders Feed My Starving Children Friends of WFP Haitian Health Foundation Hope for Haiti International Medical Corps International Relief Teams Medical Teams International Meds and Food for Kids Mercy Corps Operation USA Oxfam Partners in Health Samaritan's Purse Save the Children UNICEF World Concern World Vision