It’s Not a Good Sign When Your Cause Marketing Campaign Requires Three Graphics to Explain It

From November 26, 2010 through December 25, 2010 when Southwest Airline passengers check in at the Airport using Facebook Places and their web-enabled device, Southwest will donate $1 to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, up to $300,000.

That’s pretty straightforward. And yet the webpage that describes the how-to of the promotion requires the three graphics at the left to walk you through it.

The first graphic explains that you must open Facebook Places with your mobile device and click “Check In.”

There’s a little more to the second graphic:

“Select the Place where you are from the Nearby Places list,” it says. “If you don’t see the Place name, type the name of the Place where you are into the ‘Search Nearby Places’ box.”

“You can also toggle the left-right arrows on the right of the search box to display lists of other Nearby Places.”

The third explanatory graphic is probably the raison d’etre of this promotion:

“Write an optional description of what you are doing at the Place where you are checking in. You can also tag your friends at the Place where you are.”

“Click the ‘Check In’ button again to share your visit.”

For people that check in through Facebook Places and leave descriptions, Southwest gets a very deep sense of the particulars of its passengers’ travel. Depending on the passenger it could be a nice basket of quantitative and qualitative market research along with all the other data that Facebook gives up on its users, multiplied by as much as 300,000 people. All for not much more than $300,000; a real bargain!

Anybody with a mobile-enabled device probably only has to do this once before they get it. But this campaign isn’t about the second time, it’s about the first.

The challenge is, complexity is the enemy of good cause marketing.

Subaru’s wonderfully effective Share the Love cause marketing promotion, featured in yesterday’s post, can be explained in 20 words.

If Facebook Places ever becomes commonplace, this cause marketing promotion might not require more than 20 words of explanation either. But Facebook Places isn’t there yet, and Southwest knows it. These three graphics make that abundantly clear.

Until then, Southwest is asking an awful lot of this cause marketing campaign.

Comments

Chili’s and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

I was in Chili’s today and I ordered their “Triple-Dipper,” a three appetizer combo. While I waited for the food, I noticed another kind of combo. Chili’s is doing a full-featured cause-related marketing campaign for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. There was a four-sided laminated table tent outlining the campaign on the table. When the waitress brought the drinks she slapped down Chili’s trademark square paper beverage coasters and on them was a call to action for an element of the campaign called ‘Create-A-Pepper,’ a kind of paper icon campaign. The wait staff was all attired in black shirts co-branded with Chili’s and St. Jude. The Create-A-Pepper paper icon could be found in a stack behind the hostess area. The Peppers are outlines of Chili’s iconic logo meant to be colored. I paid $1 for mine, but they would have taken $5, $10, or more. The crayons, too, were co-branded with the ‘Create-A-Pepper’ and St. Jude’s logos. There’s also creatapepper.com, a microsite, but again wi...

Part 2: How Chili's Used Cause-Related Marketing to Raise $8.2 million for St. Jude

[Bloggers Note: In this second half of this post I discuss the nuts and bolts of how Chili's motivates support from its employees and managers and how St. Jude 'activates' support from Chili's. Read the first half here.] How does St. Jude motivate support from Chili’s front line employees and management alike? They call it ‘activation’ and they do so by the following: They share stories of St. Jude patients who were sick and got better thanks to the services they received at the hospital. Two stories in particular are personal for Chili’s staff. A Chili’s bartender in El Dorado Hills, California named Jeff Eagles has a younger brother who was treated at St. Jude. In both 2005 and 2006 Eagles was the campaign’s biggest individual fundraiser. John Griffin, a manager at the Chili’s in Conway, Arkansas had an infant daughter who was treated for retinoblastoma at St. Jude. They drew on the support Doug Brooks… the president and CEO of Brinker International, Chili’s parent co...

A Clever Cause Marketing Campaign from Snickers and Feeding America

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...

Cause Marketing

Search This Blog