Skip to main content

Cause Marketing Cooperative

There’s dozens of ways to activate cause marketing. But the most common way… and frequently the least expensive… is with public relations.

One story that you must master when 'efforting' women’s magazines in particular is a pretty standard transactional cause marketing pitch; buy our thing and a portion of the proceeds benefits this fine cause. Get the details right and you’ll probably score some coverage.

But this is a classic case of good news/bad news.

The good news is you’ve got a pretty good chance at getting coverage in women’s magazines like Ladies Home Journal, O, the Oprah Magazine, Allure, Elle, Vogue, Lucky, Shape, Town and Country, and Self. The Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database has cause marketing stories from all of these women’s magazines and more.

The bad news, you’ll almost certainly have to share the coverage with other cause marketing efforts which may be thematically similar to yours. Magazine editors publish this kind of combined story with great regularity.

What do you do?

•    Do you hold out for your own story?
•    Do you pitch lesser titles?
•    Do you skip magazines altogether and target powerful mommy blogs, or even ‘women’s’ TV?

You first job is to try and make your cause marketing story stand out in a way that others can’t or don’t. Barring that, my suggestion is that you own your cause marketing story for what it is (and isn’t). If you can’t imagine a way to truly distinguish your cause marketing narrative, then I suggest as a fallback position that you approach would-be ‘competitors’ and enlist their cooperation in pitching your collective stories together.

In most cases the big PR agencies would balk at this idea. The only exception I can think of is if they’re representing a whole catalog of cause marketing campaigns in house. In such a case they might consider packaging the cause marketing campaigns they represent together, much the way sports agents will package multiple clients together in certain trades.

Here’s why a package deal might be a good idea for multiple cause marketing campaigns. Suppose that seven separate but similar cause marketing campaigns decided to pitch their stories together. Your PR budget is approximately 1/7th of what your six peers have to spend. By combining you can call upon seven times the resources you have by yourself.

This approach probably requires that the charities and/or the sponsors contact willing peers and then jointly hire a single agency capable of pulling off a seven-way pitch.

Granted there’s real risks involved. What happens if the magazine’s editors choose stories from only five of the seven partners?

But I think these risks are outweighed by the potential rewards of being able to bring many more resources to bear than one cause marketing campaign could by itself.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Batting Your Eyelashes at Prescription Drug Cause Marketing

I’m a little chary about making sweeping pronouncements, but I believe I've just seen the first cause marketing promotion in the U.S. involving a prescription drug. The drug is from Allergan and it’s called Latisse , “the first and only FDA-approved prescription treatment for inadequate or not enough eyelashes.” The medical name for this condition is hypotrichosis. Latisse is lifestyle drug the way Viagra or Propecia are. That is, no one’s going to die (except, perhaps, of embarrassment) if their erectile dysfunction or male pattern baldness or thin eyelashes go untreated. Which means the positioning for a product like Latisse is a little tricky. Allergan could have gone with the sexy route as with Viagra or Cialis and showed lovely women batting their new longer, thicker, darker eyelashes. But I’ll bet that approach didn’t test well with women. (I’m reminded of a joke about the Cialis ads from a comedian whose name I can’t recall. He said, “Hey if my erection lasts longer than ...
4 comments
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
11 comments
Read more