Cause Marketing Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Pizza Hut would like to do some cause marketing with your charity. I know this because a flyer pasted on top of the box of the Big Dipper pizza we ordered the other day said as much.

What Pizza Hut has in mind is discount card promotion. You can find plenty of similar efforts from other food retailers. If Pizza Hut’s is compelling to your audience, consider calling the number listed.

But instead of this rather standard issue campaign, what if instead Pizza Hut offered a donation to your charity of choice… say $0.25… plus the opportunity to donate a much larger amount when you respond to customer satisfaction survey?

The idea was waiting for me when I turned over the self-same flyer. When you complete the customer satisfaction survey on the phone or online, you are entered into a drawing for a free iPod along with 10 chances to win a daily prize of $1,000.

These kinds of offers are commonly printed on the back of receipts (see below).

If you read the fine print, it appears that Pizza Hut has approximately $438,000 to award every year ($1,000 cash plus $200 per iPod x 365 days, assuming they award prizes every day).

Now a quarter per survey isn’t very much for a $14 food order, the price we paid for our Big Dipper. But it’s on par with the price and the donations made by Procter & Gamble when you redeem a coupon for a 48-load bottle Tide detergent from one of their charity brandSAVER FSI’s.

Moreover, I’m suggesting that Pizza Hut keep the contest element so that one charity would get a bigger payoff every day. Assuming that Pizza Hut donated to a universe of perhaps 5 charities, they would average about $90,000 each. Not world-beating, but respectable. Especially since each of the charities would also get exposure every single day on Pizza Hut’s automated survey system.

As in: “If you want your donation to go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, press 1. If you’d like it to go to the Nature Conservancy, press 2…”

Or, for the sake of simplicity, Pizza Hut could give the full $1,200 a day to the one charity which gets the most votes every day.

Why wouldn’t Pizza Hut go for this?

The idea is a little out there, I confess.
They’d have to choose the charities smartly. Pizza Hut is already involved with the World Food Programme among others. The WFP might be put out by being just one of several benefiting charities.
The potential total payoff for charities is rather low, especially for the Komens and the St. Jude’s of the charity world. They might not go for it.
I’m not a lawyer, but there may be some legal hassles involved with registering in the 40 or so states and municipalities that require it, although I suspect Pizza Hut has already dealt with that issue.
There’s always the question of whether it would ‘pull’ better than the approach Pizza Hut is already taking. But that would be pretty easy to test.
There may be some internal and external silo issues. Pizza Hut probably hires out these customer surveys to an outside vendor, and that vendor may not have the inclination or expertise to try something like this.
While I’ve made suggestions on how this might work, the fact of the matter is you’d almost certainly want to test several different combinations of donation and daily prize amount to find the optimum. It could be that Pizza Hut thinks the idea wouldn’t be worth the hassle.

Finally, adding in a charity component might be enough to turn a customer satisfaction survey into a lead-generation vehicle. After the survey is over and the vote is registered for one of the charities, why couldn’t you then ask people for their cell phone number or email?

Cause Marketing: The All Packaging Edition

One way to activate a cause marketing campaign when the sponsor sells a physical product is on the packaging. I started my career in cause marketing on the charity side and I can tell you that back in the day we were thrilled to get a logo on pack of a consumer packaged good (CPG) or even just a mention. Since then, there’s been a welcome evolution of what sponsors are willing and able to do with their packaging in order to activate their cause sponsorships. That said, even today some sponsors don’t seem to have gotten the memo that when it comes to explaining your cause campaign, more really is more, even on something as small as a can or bottle. The savviest sponsors realize that their only guaranteed means of reaching actual customers with a cause marketing message is by putting it on packaging. And the reach and frequency of the media on packaging for certain high-volume CPG items is almost certainly greater than radio, print or outdoor advertising, and, in many cases, TV. More to

Why Even Absurd Cause-Related Marketing Has its Place

Buy a Bikini, Help Cure Cancer New York City (small-d) fashion designer Shoshonna Lonstein Gruss may have one of the more absurd cause-related marketing campaigns I’ve come across lately. When you buy the bikini or girls one-piece swimsuit at Bergdorf-Goodman in New York shown at the left all sales “proceeds” benefit Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center . Look past the weak ‘ proceeds ’ language, which I always decry, and think for a moment about the incongruities of the sales of swimsuits benefiting the legendary Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Cancer has nothing to do swimming or swimsuits or summering in The Hamptons for that matter. And it’s not clear from her website why Shoshanna, the comely lass who once adorned the arm of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, has chosen the esteemed cancer center to bestow her gifts, although a web search shows that she’s supported its events for years. Lesser critics would say that the ridiculousness of it all is a sign that cause-related marketing is

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

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