Tuesday found me in a meeting with a new client. We were talking about cause marketing and I asked if they would like to see any data or research on the value of cause marketing in your marketing mix. I keep a digital portfolio of such information at the ready. “For who?” he asked. “For your sales group or your management team,” I said. “Nope,” he replied. “We don’t need it.” Now my client is a sophisticated marketer with gray at his temples and decades of experience at strategic and tactical marketing. For my part, I’ve been involved with cause marketing to some degree or another for coming up on 20 years now but on Tuesday I realized for the first time that cause marketing has reached its tipping point. Cause marketing has become ‘the man.’ I use the catchphrase ‘tipping point’ deliberately, if reluctantly. Before Malcolm Gladwell popularized it, it was pretty much reserved for use by epidemiologists to describe the point at which a viral outbreak becomes an epidemic. Still, that’s w...
Dedicated to highlighting and dissecting the best and the worst cause marketing promotions and campaigns.