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

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...

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...

An Interview with Cause-Related Marketing Pioneer Jerry Welsh

Jerry Welsh is the closest thing cause marketing has to a father. In 1983 after a number of regional cause-related marketing efforts, Welsh, who was then executive vice president of worldwide marketing and communications at American Express looked out his window in lower Manhattan at the Statue of Liberty. The Statue was then undergoing a major refurnishing, and in a flash Welsh determined to undertake the first modern national cause marketing campaign. I say modern because almost 100 years before in January 1885, the Statue of Liberty was sitting around in crates in New York warehouses because the organization building the pedestal ran out of money. And so Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the newspaper called The World , proposed a very grassroots solution reminiscent in its own way to Welsh’s cause-related marketing. Pulitzer ran an editorial promising he would print the name of everyone who donated even a penny. Sure enough pennies, along with dimes and nickels, quarters a...