Outside Magazine's 'Best Places to Work' and Cause Marketing

The electrons were barely dry on yesterday’s post about cause marketing and Fortune’s ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’ list when I got an email from a friend in the outdoor business. ‘What about us?’ she asked.

Indeed Outside magazine also publishes an annual list of the ’50 Best Places to Work.’ Outside’s list is based on surveys of employee benefits, compensation, policies, job satisfaction, environmental initiatives, community-service programs and more.

More than either the Fortune list or the list from Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, Outside’s list is made up of very small companies. Take away Eddie Bauer and Chesapeake Energy and no other company on the list has even 1,000 employees.

Not surprisingly because of the emphasis that Outside puts on community service and environmental initiatives, this list also features a number of firms that do cause marketing.

By my count, four of the top ten and 23 overall use cause marketing as a part of their marketing mix. The full list follows.

What can we conclude from the fact that three ‘best company’ lists feature so many cause marketers? Frankly, I’m going to be cautious and say that the criteria that all three lists used to select their best companies slants towards firms more likely to do cause marketing.

And I’m not even going to try and draw the causation arrows. Does cause marketing yield good companies or do good companies yield cause marketing? Truth be told, there’s just not enough information here to say.

That said, I think we can nonetheless conclude that one of the earmarks of good companies is that they frequently are also cause marketers.

3 Sterling-Rice Group
5 Clif Bar
7 Groundspeak
8 Skullcandy
10 Colle + McVoy
11 Kashi
13 New Belgium Brewing
19 Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners
20 USANA Health Sciences
26 Fuse
28 NOLS
29 Osprey Packs
34 Keen
38 Patagonia
39 Carmichael Lynch
40 Brooks Sports
41 Livestrong
42 Smartwool
43 Mireball
44 Camelbak
45 Deckers Outdoor
46 Nixon
48 Eddie Bauer

As before, I ask that you backstop me by going to Outside’s website and looking at their full list. If there’s companies on their list but not mine which you believe utilize cause marketing, please comment below or email me at aldenkeeneatgmaildotcom.

Comments

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

[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...

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...

Cause Marketing

Search This Blog