Displaying Multiple Cause Marketing Allegiances

We’ve all seen how causes recognize multiple sponsors for, say, races and events. If you got a t-shirt from participating in a Team in Training race for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, to pick on just one, you know what I'm talking about; it’s logo-soup spilled all over the back of your t-shirt.

But suppose your company supports multiple causes. How do you display that without doing the same thing to your ads? That’s the question I had when I pulled this ad for Cabot Cheese from the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database.

Cabot Cheese, a co-op in Vermont, supports a handful of causes in different ways and in pretty different spaces; the arts, schools, women and children’s causes, environmental causes, even the Girl Scouts.

How does Cabot pull it off? Quite admirably, I’d say.

Each of the causes is assigned its own icon, even the Girl Scouts. One of problems of the logo-soup approach is that logos come in all sizes, colors, and orientations. If you regularize their size or go with just one color somebody’s logo inevitably looks like crap.

But by representing causes as icons, everything is uniform and eye-pleasing. And you can represent causes without having to get permission to use their logos. Now I’m not advocating dishonesty, misrepresentation, or even a lack of transparency by sponsors or would-be sponsors.

But I am on the record for advocating that causes, especially the largest ones, figure out a way for the little guy to give without requiring sponsorship fees that are unapproachable for the smallest sponsors. This might be one way to achieve that goal.

What do you think?

Comments

Marketing consultants Perth said…

I also bookmarked and tweeted this. Thank you so much for showing great concern for other people. Much Respect!

3/01/2011 12:34 AM

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