Strategic vs. Non-Strategic Cause Marketing Relationships

There’s been some chatter recently in the blogosphere and elsewhere about strategic cause marketing. That is, if you’re a sponsor, ensuring that your sponsorship of the cause bears some rational relationship to your business.

The effort on the left from Montblanc, the fountain pen maker, pretty much passes muster. From June 2009 to May 2010 when you bought this special edition pen, called the Meisterstruck Signature for Good Edition, 10 percent of the purchase price went to a UNICEF education programs because “The ability to read and write is a fundamental human right and the most important asset to children.”

(For examples of other Montblanc 'donation pens,' click here. For this campaign, Montblanc set a minimum donation of $1.5 million. And while we're at it, let us now take a moment to praise a campaign that sets a minimum donation, but not a maximum. Huzzahs to Montblanc)!

I would have said that parents who can feed and shelter their children is a child’s most important asset, but I guess that’s because I’m a parent and not high-end fountain pen maker.

Caviling about silly hyperbole in ad copy aside, it’s easy to see the relationship between Mont Blanc and UNICEF’s educational programs.

But there’s plenty of successful cause marketing that goes on between sponsors and charities that share almost no strategic relationship.

This ad for Ford Warriors in Pink, which benefits Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is a good example. In the main, Ford Warriors in Pink sells merchandise, little of it car related. Profits go to Komen. In 16 years, Ford has donated $105 million, a number which may also include Race for the Cure sponsorship dollars.

Critics would say that just because the campaign is successful for Komen doesn’t mean it’s a strategic choice for Ford. By rights, the thinking goes, Ford should be doing cause marketing for environmental organizations. Ford vehicles and the fuel they run on, deplete and pollute the earth’s resources and no matter what else it does Ford to mitigate that it should also do so with its cause marketing efforts.

But Ford supporting the Sierra Club or the Environmental Defense Fund, say, or even the Nature Conservancy, is a veritable minefield for both Ford and any would-be environmental partner. All three of those nonprofit organizations are membership-based and members of the Sierra Club, in particular, fought a bloody battle over cause marketing deals the Club engaged in with The Clorox Company, to cite one.

I sincerely doubt Ford and the Sierra Club could find common ground.

Then there’s the problem of what that cause marketing might look like. Warriors in Pink sells stuff; a lot of apparel but also accessories like scarves, and ties, a totes, along with a sprinkling of keychains and license plate frames. That model would be tainted for many environmental organizations, too.

Likewise you couldn’t exactly do transactional cause marketing either. Try out this thought experiment to see what I mean: “When you buy the 2011 F-150 Nature Conservancy edition Ford will donate an acre of grasslands to the Nature Conservancy…”

I’m not saying creative people couldn’t design something that worked for both parties. What I am saying is that a sponsor’s best choice for a charity cause marketing partner isn’t always necessarily the most strategic choice.

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...

Cause-Related Marketing with Customer Receipts

Walgreens and JDRF Right now at Walgreens…the giant pharmacy and retail store chain with more than 5,800 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico… they’re selling $1 paper icons for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). This is an annual campaign and I bought one to gauge how it’s changed over the years. (Short list… they don’t do the shoe as a die cut anymore; the paper icon is now an 8¾ x 4¼ rectangle. Another interesting change; one side is now in Spanish). The icon has a bar code and Jacob, the clerk, scanned it and handed me a receipt as we finished the transaction. At the bottom was an 800-number keyed to a customer satisfaction survey. Dial the number, answer some questions and you’re entered into a drawing for $10,000 between now and the end of September 2007. I don’t know what their response rate is, but the $10,000 amount suggests that it’s pretty low. Taco Bell’s survey gives out $1,000 per week. At a regional seafood restaurant they give me a code that garner...

An Interview with Cause-Related Marketing Pioneer Jerry Welsh

Jerry Welsh is the closest thing cause marketing has to a father. In 1983 after a number of regional cause-related marketing efforts, Welsh, who was then executive vice president of worldwide marketing and communications at American Express looked out his window in lower Manhattan at the Statue of Liberty. The Statue was then undergoing a major refurnishing, and in a flash Welsh determined to undertake the first modern national cause marketing campaign. I say modern because almost 100 years before in January 1885, the Statue of Liberty was sitting around in crates in New York warehouses because the organization building the pedestal ran out of money. And so Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the newspaper called The World , proposed a very grassroots solution reminiscent in its own way to Welsh’s cause-related marketing. Pulitzer ran an editorial promising he would print the name of everyone who donated even a penny. Sure enough pennies, along with dimes and nickels, quarters a...

Cause Marketing

Search This Blog