Which Celeb To Pick for Your Cause Marketing Campaign?

Pop quiz: You have an enviably large promotional budget for your cause marketing campaign and you need a celebrity. Do you choose Marcus Samuelsson, celebrity chef? Or do you choose Harrison Ford, the man who has sold more than $3.6 billion in domestic movie tickets in his career and whose planes are worth more than you’ll make in your lifetime?

The answer is, of course, it depends.

Marcus Samuelsson is co-owner of Acquavit restaurant in New York City, plus several others, and has a wonderfully interesting personal history. He’s originally from Ethiopia, but was adopted along with his older sister by a Swedish couple when he was three years old.

He took an early interest in cooking and trained in Sweden, Switzerland and Austria before coming to the United States at age 21 and promptly establishing a reputation as a chef to be reckoned with. He has a philanthropic bent, a brilliant smile and is married to the lovely model Gate Maya Haile.

By contrast, Harrison Ford is so rich and famous that he can now make treacly movies like Extraordinary Measures.

Choose Ford and you’d get a 1000-watt celebrity, who would rather fly his planes than appear at your events or do any publicity for you.

Choose Samuelsson and you get a 50-watt celebrity who cares about some causes quite personally. Samuelsson is probably busier than Ford, but I’ll be he has more time for Feeding America and UNICEF’s TAP Project than Ford does for Create the Good.

So which celebrity do you choose?

If you can live with someone like Ford doing not much more than bringing his celebrity to your cause marketing efforts through ads, he’s definitely your guy.

But if you need a celebrity who will lend not only his name but his passion to your cause marketing, you probably want someone more like Samuelsson.

Comments

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...

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...

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...

Cause Marketing

Search This Blog