Buy One, Give One, Get One Cause Marketing

The Luxury Collection Hotels and Resorts, a unit of Starwood Hotels and Resorts, is offering travelers the classic deal you can’t refuse benefiting UNICEF.

When you book and complete a 2, 3 or 4-day stay before March 30, 2011 at one of their luxe properties you’ll not only get one or two free night stays, but $1 will be donated to UNICEF in support of malaria prevention efforts in Africa and polio, TB and measles immunizations worldwide.

It’s a logical extension of Buy One, Give One (BOGO). Only this one could be called Buy One, Give One, Get One (BOGOGO).

The ad at the left is from November 2009. I found it in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database. But the promotion has been picked up again in 2011 and ends this month.

The donation amount…$1… is modest. But high end brands like the ones in the Luxury Collection face a branding and pricing challenge in offering a larger donation amount. A room with two double beds at The Phoenician in Phoenix... one of their 12 properties in the United States... goes for around $437 a night, while a casita with a king bed starts at around $1300 a night.

If Luxury Collection sets the UNICEF donation at, say, 10 percent of the room rate, is that any more likely to get you to extend your stay than if you just took them up on their Linger promotion? I doubt it. Instead the $1 represents a ‘skin in the game’ amount.

That said, I can imagine a few simple ways to extend the promotion and the benefit to UNICEF. Here’s one:

The Phoenician has three restaurants onsite and four other lounges or cause dining places. Imagine that The Phoenician’s chefs were challenged to come up with a drink or dessert… something spectacular and/or unexpected… whose purchase also benefited UNICEF during a concomitant promotional period.

What do you think of Luxury Collection Hotels and Resorts cause promotion? What would you add or do differently?

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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...

Part 2: How Chili's Used Cause-Related Marketing to Raise $8.2 million for St. Jude

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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...

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