How to Know It’s Time to Fire Your PR Group

The most common way to activate or promote your cause marketing campaign is via public relations. If your firm has complications like multiple locations doing the same cause marketing promotion at the same time then your PR crew has a responsibility to step up their game.

Here’s what happened instead from the franchisor of SIGNARAMA, the world’s largest sign franchise with nearly 900 locations in 50 countries. Some number of SIGNARAMA stores do a cause marketing style promotion called Signs of Support whereby they make in-kind donations worth as much as $10,000 to local causes in their service area.

So how does SIGNARAMA corporate parent activate this effort? With the same press release in each market, released on the same date over the same PR wire.

At left is proof. There are three press releases for SIGNARAMA stores in Edmonton, Alberta, Peterborough, Ontario, and Louisville, Kentucky all with exactly the same leads or first paragraphs. They differ in the second paragraph, but the format is virtually the same.

I get press releases from this wire service as a RSS feed. The keyword for my feed is, naturally, ‘cause marketing.’ And I got more of this same release than just these three. Anyone else searching on ‘cause marketing’ got the same fat batch of releases on Dec. 16, 2012.

What the United Franchise Group, SIGNARAMA’s parent, has done here is an efficient way to activate a cause marketing effort. But effective? I don't think so.

Comments

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

Why Even Absurd Cause-Related Marketing Has its Place

Buy a Bikini, Help Cure Cancer New York City (small-d) fashion designer Shoshonna Lonstein Gruss may have one of the more absurd cause-related marketing campaigns I’ve come across lately. When you buy the bikini or girls one-piece swimsuit at Bergdorf-Goodman in New York shown at the left all sales “proceeds” benefit Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center . Look past the weak ‘ proceeds ’ language, which I always decry, and think for a moment about the incongruities of the sales of swimsuits benefiting the legendary Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Cancer has nothing to do swimming or swimsuits or summering in The Hamptons for that matter. And it’s not clear from her website why Shoshanna, the comely lass who once adorned the arm of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, has chosen the esteemed cancer center to bestow her gifts, although a web search shows that she’s supported its events for years. Lesser critics would say that the ridiculousness of it all is a sign that cause-related marketing is

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

Cause Marketing

Search This Blog