Cause Marketing

Can you effectively advertise a consumer cause marketing campaign in a B2B publication? That’s the rhetorical question I had when I saw this ad in the September 29, 2010 of Information Week magazine. B2B cause marketing can work. But this isn’t a B2B cause marketing promotion. Instead it’s basically the same consumer-driven transactional cause marketing campaign that Samsung has be doing through its Four Seasons of Hope , which has generated more than $20 million in charitable donations since its founding n 2002. When you buy Samsung electronics at one of the regional retailers listed at the bottom of the ad, Samsung will donate a portion of the sales proceeds to the Dan Marino Foundation , which “provides integrated treatment programs, outreach services and research of chronic illnesses and developmental disabilities in children.” It probably goes without saying that it's highly unusual to see business to consumer cause marketing advertised in a B2B publication. So what’s Sams...

If you haven’t heard by now, Mark Zuckerberg , the bare-faced billionaire founder of Facebook just gave the school system in Newark $100 million! He’s been all over the media…old and new…starting with a guest-shot on Oprah (view at left). On October 2 I will give 100-millionth as much to LIVESTRONG …Lance Armstrong’s anti-cancer charity… thanks to RadioShack . And thanks to RadioShack you can look for my picture in Times Square this coming Saturday as proof. Here’s how it works: On RadioShack's Team28 website you can enable a gadget to put a 28Badge over your Twitter or Facebook picture. The 28 references the 28 million people worldwide with cancer. By September 17 more than 20,000 pictures had been uploaded. On October 2…‘LIVESTRONG Day’ Military Island in Times Square in New York will display all the pictures collected during that 24-hour period. For every 28Badge added on LIVESTRONG DAY, RadioShack will donate $1, up to $100,000. I like it! Although I wish RadioShack would ha...

We’ve discussed a T-shirt cause marketing by social enterprises in the past with outfits like Rosa Loves . But most of those efforts were based on e-commerce business models. Now there’s a new social enterprise that includes bricks and mortar retailers as part of its business model. Called Giving Tee , here’s how it works: Retailers sell Giving Tee T-shirt designs in their stores for $20. When customers enter a code on the hangtag of the Tee it triggers a donation to one of Giving Tee’s featured causes. There are currently 24 charities listed on Giving Tee’s website, including Habitat for Humanity , The Humane Society , Amnesty International , the Red Cross , Make-A-Wish , and the Wear Good for Haiti Initiative. The designs for Wear Good for Haiti are the only Tees Giving Tee currently sells on its website. The revenue split is as follows: The cause gets $5, the retailer gets $5, the designer (Giving Tee crowd-sources the designs) gets $1, and Giving Tee gets the remainder. After costs...

One way to improve the likelihood of response to your cause marketing is to create an aspect of rivalry. If you’re doing an icon campaign for instance, you could and probably should draw on existing rivalries to see who can sell the most. So you might pit division against division, managers against managers, and even individuals against each other for bragging rights and prizes. As I written before, icon campaigns can be thought of as sales contests . A company based here in my home state, ZAGG, is using rivalries among its consumer base in a cause marketing campaign. ZAGG sells a clear thin film that covers iPads, iPhones, smartphones and the like, as well as other accessories for electronic devices. Called the ZAGGSkins Fan Challenge, ZAGG will donate 20 percent of all proceeds to the National Kidney Foundation of Utah & Idaho when you buy either a University of Utah or Brigham Young University branded ZAGG covering. The Utah-BYU rivalry... sometimes called the 'Holy War...

Back in August I bought this cause-marketed Snickers bar during my fourth trip of the day to Home Depot. (Is it even possible to do home repairs and take care of all your needs with just one trip to Home Depot / Lowes ?) Here’s how it works: Snickers is donating the cost of 2.5 million meals to Feeding America, the nation’s leading hunger-relief charity. On the inside of the wrapper is a code. Text that code to 45495… or enter it at snickers.com… and Snickers will donate the cost of one meal to Feeding America, up to one million additional meals. The Feeding America website says that each dollar you donate provides seven meals. So Snickers donation might be something like $500,000. But I like that Snickers quantified its donations in terms of meals made available, rather than dollars. That’s much more concrete. It doesn’t hurt that 3.5 million is a much bigger number than $500,000. I also like the way they structured the donation. By guaranteeing 2.5 million meals, the risk of a poor...

A bunch of emails pitching various cause marketing stories have been piling up in my inbox and now it’s time to set them free in a giant gallimaufry . One Eyed Rhyno , a Sacramento-based teen rock group comprised of brother and sister James (16) and Elaine (18) Hunter and longtime friend, Andrew Daniels (17), have released their single entitled, “The Bird,” inspired by the Exxon Valdez and made newly-relevant by the BP Gulf oil spill. Proceeds from the download of “The Bird” go to The Student Conservation Association . Bisquick is making $250 grants to qualified nonprofits to put on pancake breakfast benefits. Now in its second year, Bisquick Pancake Nation granted nearly $30,000 last year to more than 100 schools and nonprofits to kickstart their pancake breakfasts. Lights. Camera. Help. , a national nonprofit organization whose mission is to celebrate “cause-driven films,” is holding a local event at the Olde North Charleston Picture House in Charleston, South Carolina on September ...

Buy a specially-marked bottle of Bayer HealthCare’s venerable brand One A Day multivitamin between September 16 and November 30 and you can redeem a code on the packaging or the store receipt at CaféPress.com and for $10 you get a semi-customized T-shirt with $1 from the sale of each T-shirt going to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation , up to a maximum donation of $10,000. How do I know this? It's certainly not in the headline or subhead of the FSI to the left. Instead that run-on thought of a cause-marketing effort is spelled out right there on the very bottom of the FSI in reversed out 2-point type. Sharp-eyed mice everywhere will be able to read it. It’s also on One A Day’s microsite, whatmatterstoyou.com . Where to start with this mess of a cause marketing campaign? Certainly multi-stage efforts like this have been a part of cause marketing almost since the beginning. But this one is complicated enough to be almost silly. The FSI ad above literally can’t explain it all wi...

For about three years Louis Vuitton , the luxury goods maker, has been doing cause marketing with celebrities in benefit of the celebrity’s cause of choice. In the current issue of Conde Nast Traveler magazine the celebrities are Bono and his wife Ali and the cause is Conservation Cotton Initiative Uganda . For cause marketers this is all pretty boilerplate until you get to the second (and last) sentence of the body copy, which reads: “Profits from the bag, as well as Ali and Bono’s fee, benefit Conservation Cotton Initiative Uganda.” (my italics) (If I were any good at Photoshop the two halves of the double-truck ad would blend together better and I’d do a callout of the sentence for you, my faithful readers. But alas.) Bono and Ali also appear in the ad in their own ethical clothing line called Edun . I’ve been looking at these Louis Vuitton ads for a while now and this is the first time I’ve seen that clause or another clothing line co-branded. But it demonstrates four things: No...