Cause Marketing

Back in the 1980s, at the behest of Jerry Welsh, American Express trademarked the term ‘Cause-Related Marketing.’ Welsh, who was then executive vice president worldwide marketing and communications at Amex, coined the term ‘cause-related marketing’ to describe the legendary campaign to fund the restoration of the Statue of Liberty in 1983. In a Feb. 2009 interview with Welsh, he told me that the wording of this new term was purposeful. “I believe in the deliberate use of language, so I was careful in crafting the term ‘Cause-Related Marketing.’ CRM is not philanthropy; it’s rather marketing through an artful association with a charitable cause. Otherwise, I would have called it something like ‘Marketing-Related Philanthropy.’” Despite Welsh’s fastidiousness with language, one of the wonders of the term cause marketing is that it’s flexible enough to permit efforts for causes that aren’t officially-sanctioned charities. In my hometown of Salt Lake City, there’s a cause marketing campai...

Uh-oh! Your A-list celebrity supporter just pulled a Tiger and embarrassed himself and his family on a tape first seen on TMZ and now airing on every screen on the planet. It seems like everywhere they point a camera, someone new is coming forward to say that they, too, did something appalling with your alpha celebrity. (Cue Karl Malden VO) “ What will you do? What will you do? " Fire him? Disavow? Stand by her for as long as you can stand the heat? A new study by Harris Poll suggests that maybe you do nothing. Although there is a veritable cottage industry of celebrity trackers waiting for them to step outside without any makeup, or look less than flattering in their bikini, or utter a drunken calumny, or run over a paparazzi in their Mercedes, maybe none of that matters. An Adweek Media/Harris Interactive Poll published Monday finds that three-quarters of Americans don’t impute any of the blame or think negatively of your brand as a result of your endorsers’ indiscretions. Conc...

For the last 10 years or so it seems like every other business leader I talk has an idea for a business that will funnel profits to a charity, while every charity leader I know wishes s/he had a for-profit venture that spun out loads of cash. Examples of both abound. National Geographic Magazine is a benefit of membership in the not-for-profit National Geographic Society. But almost everything else—their catalog, their television shows, their travel tours—are for-profit business enterprises; enterprises on which National Geographic pays taxes. A recent example of a company meant to funnel profits to nonprofit endeavors comes from my own hometown. Members of the billionaire Jon M. Huntsman family have acquired the high-end Sotheby’s real estate franchise in the luxury enclaves of Sun Valley , Idaho and Jackson Hole , Wyoming . (The splendid photo of the Grand Tetons comes from JT Palmer Photography). Profits from the franchise will go to the Huntsman Cancer Center he...