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.

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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