Skip to main content

Some Sweet Payback for Your Good Deeds

Link

The Generous Store was a pop-up store in Denmark, open for just one day, that didn’t take your money for its products. Instead, Anthon Berg the European chocolatier which operated The Generous Store, asked you to pledge to perform some specific good deed for a friend or loved one in return for which you got some of Berg’s chocolates.

The promotion plays on Anthon Berg’s tagline which is “You Can Never Be Too Generous.”

There were no cash registers in the store. Instead, Anthon Berg clerks wandered the store with iPads. You’d log onto your Facebook account, friend Anthon Berg and pledge to your friend/loved one whatever the required good deed was for the specific item. In the following days and weeks Facebook filled with the photos and accounts of good deeds done by those keeping their pledges.

It’s a lovely idea.

Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Shops do a free cone day every year, so they could certainly adopt something like this.

It would be great to see a cause element added whereby you pledge to do a good deed for a specific charity or cause, although I can understand why Anthon Berg didn’t take that approach. After all, who would post the deed to Facebook?

I can also imagine some kind of pay it forward aspect. You hear about people in drive-up windows paying for the order of the person immediately behind them. Surely the people receiving the good deed could somehow be encouraged to keep the chain of good deeds going.

(By the way, causemarketing.biz now has more than 800 posts, generously donated by yours truly. If you ever feel like offering a token of thanks for this boon of cause marketing information and opinion, I'll be happy to accept it in the form of fine European chocolates).
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Three Ways to Be Charitable

I’ve spent a big chunk of my career working with or for charities. Many of my dearest and ablest friends are in the charity ‘space.’ And the creativity and problem-solving coming out of the nonprofit sector has never been greater.  Although I’ve had numerous nonprofit clients over the last decade or so, I haven’t worked in a charity for about 12 years now, which gives me a certain distance. Distance lends perspective and consequently, I get a lot of people asking me which charities I recommend for donations of money or time. My usual answer is, “it depends.” “On what?” they respond. “On what you want from your charitable activities,” I reply. It sounds like a weaselly consultant kind of an answer, but bear with me for a moment. The English word charity comes from the Latin word caritas and means “from the heart,” implying a voluntary act. Caritas is the same root word for cherish. The Jews come at charity from a different direction. The Hebrew word that is usually rendered as charity is t…
Post a Comment
Read more

Top Eight Cause-Related Marketing Campaigns of 2007

Yeah, You Read it Right. It's a Top 8 List.

More cause-related marketing campaigns are unveiled every day across the world than I review in a year at the cause-related marketing blog. And, frankly, I don’t see very many campaigns from outside North America. So I won’t pretend that my annual list of the top cause-related marketing campaigns is exhaustive.

But, like any other self-respecting blogger, I won’t let my superficial purview stop me from drawing my own tortured conclusions!

So… cue the drumroll (and the dismissive snickers)… without further ado, here is my list of the eight best cause-related marketing campaigns of 2007.

My list of the worst cause-related marketing campaigns of 2007 follows on Thursday.


Chilis and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
I was delighted by the scope of Chilis’ campaign for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. As you walked in you saw the servers adorned in black co-branded shirts. Other elements included message points on the Chilis beverage coas…
Post a Comment
Read more

Five Steps To Nurture a 30-Year Cause Marketing Relationship

Last Monday, July 22, 2013, March of Dimes released the annual results of its campaign with Kmart... now in its thirtieth year... and thereby begged the question, what does it takes to have a multi-decade cause marketing relationship between a cause and a sponsor?

In the most recent year, Kmart,the discount retailer, donated $7.4 million to the March of Dimes, bringing the 30-year total to nearly $114 million. March of Dimes works to improve the health of mothers and babies.

Too many cause marketing relationships, in my estimation, resemble speed-dating more than long-term marriage. There can be good reasons for short-term cause marketing relationships. But most causes and sponsors benefit more from long-term marriages than short-term hookups, the main benefit being continuity. Cause marketing trades on the trust that people, usually consumers, put in the cause and the sponsor. The longer the relationship lasts the more trust is evidenced.

There's also a sponsor finding cost that…
Post a Comment
Read more