How Big is Cause Marketing?

I’m delighted to offer a guest post today by my friend and cause marketing colleague David Hessekiel, the founder and president of the Cause Marketing Forum and the co-author of the new book on cause marketing called Good Works, out as June 5, 2012. David co-wrote Good Works with marketing legend Phillip Kotler and Nancy Lee.

Today David tackles the issue of just how big cause marketing is and how we can get to a more meaningful measure of its size and dimensions. For years the only calculation we’ve had is IEG’s annual projection of how much companies plan on spending on cause marketing in the year to comes. As a gauge of cause marketing it’s a little determining the health of your car by measuring how much air pressure is in the back right tire. It’s inadequate and not very telling.

One of the fabulous yet sometimes frustrating aspects of cause marketing is its diversity.

Some campaigns focus on raising funds (buy this and we’ll give a dime), others concentrate on sharing a message (join us in supporting this cause), some try to change behavior (change your smoke detector battery). Most are hybrids of the above with a healthy dose of employee engagement, corporate philanthropy and socially responsible business practices thrown in.

This assortment of activities makes the field fascinating, but makes quantifying how much cause marketing is going on very difficult.

I confronted this issue while co-authoring “Good Works! Marketing and Corporate Social Initiatives that Build a Better World and the Bottom Line.” Like most of us in the field, I referred to the IEG Sponsorship Report’s annual forecast of total sponsorship spending. (This year, for example, cause is expected to attract $1.73 billion in corporate sponsorship, a 3.1% increase and 10% share of total sponsorship spending.)

I was glad to have this information as a directional guide, but it is a poor proxy for all the spending going on at the intersection of cause and commerce. IEG does not share its methodology, beyond saying that it surveys numerous corporations and then uses some sort of formula to come up with totals for expected corporate investment in the sports, entertainment, cause and other sponsorship sectors.

I’m quite sure IEG does not capture investment in or value generated by cause campaigns in the form of paid or earned media, skilled and unskilled employee volunteer labor or money contributed by consumers through the purchase of paper icons or via donations online or at checkout.

And I don’t fault them for not doing so. Companies are reticent at best about revealing marketing budgets. Capturing and valuing earned media and employee volunteerism are inexact sciences with great variations based on who is analyzing the data.

I’d love to be able to announce that my company, Cause Marketing Forum, is going to produce an omnibus study serving up all of this data in a nice tidy report, but we can’t.

We are, however, going to put in the work to add a few data points to the equation in the form of some illuminating top ten lists to be published in 2013. Right now we are thinking of the Ten Largest Transactional Programs (I assume.General Mills’ Boxtops for Education would be #1) and the Ten Largest In-Store Fundraising Programs (e.g. Macy’s Shop for a Cause or Chili’s Create-A-Pepper to Fight Childhood Cancer).

Now is the time to let us know if there are other cause-related top ten lists based on publicly available quantitative data that you’d like to get your hands on.

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...

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