Skip to main content

Buy One, Give One Cause Marketing for Services

I’ve highlighted numerous products that utilize Buy One Give One; shoes, baby blankets, fruit snacks, watches, neckties, fragrances, wine, and eyeglasses, to name a few. I’ve certainly seen services that use cause marketing; including law firms, hotel chains and vacation companies. Now a video production company in Belgium is using BOGO to cause market their service.

For each travel video Timbooktwo produces, the company will make a video for a charity.

Here’s how it works; when the company is in a region of the world shooting for a paying client, they will contact a charity in the region and shoot for a day. The company says: “In our experience, most charity projects fit into this time frame.”

In that way, what Timbooktwo is doing is similar to companies that pay employees for certain volunteer work.

But, of course, that analogy is incomplete since the shooting of a video is only the start. At the very least it requires many more hours of both pre and post-production time.

I should also point out that the paying client can’t choose the charity that Timbooktwo (fun name, BTW) creates the video for, although they say they’re open to suggestions.

I spent part of my early career writing, producing and selling corporate video, which was very expensive in those days. There were crews to pay, expensive cameras and editing equipment, and you’d have to futz around with the lighting and sound.

I feel like such an old guy for pointing this out, but Timbooktwo’s promotion is enabled by digital technology. Back in the old days there were consumables when you shot video. You’d shoot on Betamax or ¾” tape and then have, usually, no less than two editing cycles.

Nowadays because you can shoot, edit and distribute digitally, you squeeze out a lot of those old costs.

Never mind that you can get a very high-quality image even in bad and low light with low-cost equipment. It’s all very disruptive. Very Joseph Schumpetery. It’s like a redo of desktop publishing revolution again. Only with a slamming audio track!

What does it mean at a bottom-line level?

It means you could shoot a video with an $800 DSLR, edit it on a $2,000 computer with $500 worth of software and put the results on TV.

Doubters sometimes portray cause marketing as the last refuge of scoundrel companies trying to preserve pricing power by linking up with a respected cause.

But this effort from Timbooktwo makes it clear that cause marketing can also better enable disruptors to better play their role in the circle that is creative destruction.

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