Peggy Lee Cause Marketing

The water business used to be a pretty sweet deal. You package water, which might have come from a municipal source, for a fraction of a penny per gallon and you sell it in individual plastic bottles for dollars per quart. Best of all, people need to drink gallons of water a week just to survive. All you needed was a cool bottle and a fancy brand and the distribution to match and you were in business.

And then the world began to wake up to the silliness and waste of bottled water. There’s no need to recount the ridiculousness of it all or even cite sources. We all know about that ginormous plastic island floating in the Pacific Ocean. We all know about the crazy amounts of landfill space going just to water bottles that won’t ever degrade. We all sense the folly of water being shipped from Fuji (or even New York) to your store in Texas or California or Minnesota.

It would be easy to defend if water was bad in all those places. Only it’s not. In most of North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan water from the tap is reliably wholesome, if not always tasty.

What used to be a great business model has turned into something more difficult. Now the water business requires genuine innovation. Increasingly the water bottlers are turning to cause marketing to help them differentiate and remain commercially viable.

One of the big dogs among water bottlers is Nestle Waters North America, a division of the Swiss food giant, which sells Poland Spring, Perrier, Pellegrino, Callistoga and Arrowhead, among a few others.

On the Arrowhead website the tab about corporate responsibility, called ‘Doing Our Part’ runs to 1600 words!

For Arrowhead part of that is figuring out ways to make plastic bottles ever thinner and encouraging recycling. A big piece of Doing Our Part is a cause campaign with the National Parks Conservation Association, the august nonprofit that has been helping preserve and protect America’s National Parks for more than 90 years.

Last May Arrowhead and its Nestle Waters sister organizations announced it would make a $600,000 donation to the NPCA with a special emphasis on “trail maintenance and building, removal of non-native, invasive plants and planting of native species, wetland restoration, and general park maintenance” in select parks. Arrowhead’s also did an ancillary Facebook promotion worth $40,000 to select National Parks in the west. (Go to Arrowhead's Facebook site today and you'll see a different cause promotion benefiting the American Heart Association.)

Last fall members from the company participated in a trail remediation effort in Yosemite National Park.

I live within a day’s drive of at least a dozen national parks, including the bid daddies like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone. My family and I spend time in the parks basically every summer. Thank goodness for them and the efforts of the NPCA and the National Park system in general.

So while I value this campaign and its results, it kinda leaves me with what I call “the Peggy Lee Question.” The Peggy Lee Question existentially asks, “Is That All There Is?”

Honestly, Arrowhead and Nestle Waters North America need to do more than just make a fat donation to conservation organizations like the NPCA. Nestle needs a recycling effort with a sweet carrot in it for consumers. Arrowhead's cause marketing needs to give people real incentives to recycle.

Otherwise, their business is going to evaporate like water on a sidewalk in Phoenix in August.

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