Skip to main content

Cause Marketing Won’t Save a Bad Business

Borders appears headed for bankruptcy. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection back in September 2010. Circuit City is gone. Ultimate Electronics is about to fade into the dust heap of failed electronics retailers.

And I’m having a hard time finding any current signs of life of the hot jeans brand PRVCY Premium, whose distinctive back-pocket stitching adorned the patooshkas of starlets like Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, Paris Hilton, Christina Applegate, Jennifer Lopez, Miley Cyrus, and Jessica Alba. PRVCY was founded by Carolyn Jones in 2002.

Blockbuster did some great cause marketing back in the day with Children’s Miracle Network. Borders still touts its community giving programs, with a special emphasis on literacy causes. I posted in this space on one of Circuit City's cause marketing efforts. I'll bet Ultimate Electronics had active community outreach programs as well.

Here’s what PRVCY Premium’s website says about its purpose.
“The company was founded with a noble goal in mind: to share the profits with various breast cancer research foundations across the country and help in early detection and cure for the disease. Today the company continues this legacy and is expanding its support to search for cure of various types of cancers in cooperation with established charitable and other organizations.”
The three threads of the back-pocket stitching are meant to stand for ‘faith,’ ‘hope,’ and ‘love.’

Like the company says, noble. But it appears that the company has gone dark. The Facebook page and Twitter postings are old. There’s no current press clippings. The blog posts have stopped.

I hope to learn that PRVCY Premium is actually thriving. In the event it is not it underscores a sad truth: cause marketing won't save a bad business.

In the absence of good information I won’t speculate about PRVCY Premium, but Blockbuster is still producing buggy whips long after the horse has been replaced by the automobile. Circuit City and Ultimate Electronics were done in by a combination of Best Buy, the sour economy, and bad business models.

Borders doesn’t have enough stores to compete with Barnes & Noble in convenience or the negotiating muscle to compete with Amazon on price. And almost all failed businesses have some version of the same problem: they run out of cash.

None of those business challenges is mitigated by good or even great cause marketing. While cause marketing can hold a strategic place in a business; think Newman’s Own, for instance. You still have to practice smart business to be successful.

It bears repeating. Cause marketing won’t save a bad business.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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