Cause Marketing When You’re the Avis of Your Niche

The rental car agency Avis, for years the perennial second banana to Hertz, used to promote itself with the tagline, “when you’re number two, you try harder.” Avis long since changed the slogan to “At Avis, We Try Harder.” The old tagline was advertising as a syllogism. It made an argument rather than just a declaration.

The nonprofit featured in the ad to the left, After School All Stars is in Avis’s position and maybe even further back than that. The big dogs of after school programs are Boys and Girls Clubs of America, a federation of more than 4,000 clubs serving about 4 million boys and girls, and 4-H, with 90,000 clubs and 6.5 million members.

After School All Stars is an after-school and summer program in 450 schools in 13 cities across the United States, with an especially strong showing in Chicago. It was founded by Arnold Schwarznegger in 1992 as the Inner-City Games Foundation and subsequently broadened its focus to include arts and academics in addition to health and fitness. It serves 78,000 kids and has a budget of $30 million.

Schwarznegger and his wife Maria Shriver remain honorary co-chairs of the board. The board chairman is Paul Wachter, founder and CEO of Main Street Advisors. Other board members include Henry Cisneros, who was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton administration, and Randy Freer, president of the Fox Sports Network. They even have an advisory boardmember from the Avis Budget Group!

Celebrity support comes from all those NFL players in the ad above, plus NBA players Kobe Bryant and Chris Bosh, and rapper/actor Common. Actor Dwayne Johnson is listed on their website. Michael Eisner is in their annual report.

They’ve done sponsorship deals with Hummer, PowerBar, Vitaminwater, Audemars Piguet North America, Walmart and others.

With 71% of its budget coming from governmental sources… which are always subject to changing political realties… After School All Stars must want to broaden its fundraising base. But how do they position the nonprofit against Boys and Girls Clubs and 4-H, both of which serve 50 times more kids and offer more programming choices?

One approach they could take is to be more targeted. Boys and Girls Clubs have a facility to pay for. They have to keep the lights on and pay for the trash to be collected. After School All Stars are mainly based in schools, so because their overhead is lower they can spend more money per child.

Both 4-H and Boys and Girls Clubs are highly decentralized and diffuse; it’s probably the only way they can serve so many kids. But After School All Stars is less so, meaning it can almost certainly act and react faster to changing events. If Boys and Girls Clubs spot a developing trend, their program people can put something together, test it and get it to the field in a year or two. After School All Stars can probably react after a few phone calls or emails. Their smaller size and more centralized structure means they can be more nimble.

If a sponsor wanted to do something specific with Boys and Girls Clubs, the national organization can only really negotiate on its own behalf. That is, it can build new programs and ask the clubs to participate. But because Boys and Girls Clubs are a confederation, individual clubs can always decline opportunities that aren’t in their contract with national. So pouring rights for Coke, one the sponsors at the national level, is probably not possible at all 4,000 clubs. In terms of sponsorship, After School All Stars could certainly build sponsorships that touched all the 13 cities at once.

It’s not all whipped cream and frosting for After School All Stars. No stand-alone facilities means some kinds of sponsorships aren’t possible. And 13 cities is really too few even for the football player promotion above to be as effective as it could be.

Batting Your Eyelashes at Prescription Drug Cause Marketing

I’m a little chary about making sweeping pronouncements, but I believe I've just seen the first cause marketing promotion in the U.S. involving a prescription drug. The drug is from Allergan and it’s called Latisse , “the first and only FDA-approved prescription treatment for inadequate or not enough eyelashes.” The medical name for this condition is hypotrichosis. Latisse is lifestyle drug the way Viagra or Propecia are. That is, no one’s going to die (except, perhaps, of embarrassment) if their erectile dysfunction or male pattern baldness or thin eyelashes go untreated. Which means the positioning for a product like Latisse is a little tricky. Allergan could have gone with the sexy route as with Viagra or Cialis and showed lovely women batting their new longer, thicker, darker eyelashes. But I’ll bet that approach didn’t test well with women. (I’m reminded of a joke about the Cialis ads from a comedian whose name I can’t recall. He said, “Hey if my erection lasts longer than ...

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 ...

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...

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