Skip to main content

My Crackpot Theory on The Value of Aggregating Multiple Cause Marketing Promotions

Back in December I took note of a grocery chain circular that had aggregated several cause marketing efforts onto one page and asked, rhetorically, whether it was a good idea or not. Further, I asked where are the marketing theories to give some guidance on whether a company that does multiple and coinciding cause marketing promotions, as this chain did, was right to combine them or was better to keep them separate and distinct.

I’m here now with own crackpot theory, borrowed from the field of education and informed by octogenarian educator and literary critic E.D. Hirsch. Hirsch is perhaps best known as the author of the book Cultural Literacy and a founder of the Core Knowledge movement.

In a recent essay called ‘A Wealth of Words,’ Hirsch makes the case that receding economic equality in the United States can be laid at the feet of declining student vocabulary size.

“Vocabulary size,” writes Hirsch in the City Journal, “is a convenient proxy for a whole range of educational attainments and abilities—not just skill in reading, writing, listening, and speaking but also general knowledge of science, history, and the arts. If we want to reduce economic inequality in America, a good place to start is the language-arts classroom.”

Hirsch posits that the best way for students to build their vocabularies is when schools “create familiar subject-matter contexts within a coherent sequential curriculum.” That is, they help students learn new words in the domain of similar contexts. By making the curriculum sequential, kids can thereby build on what they've already learned and make better guesses about the meanings of new words based on what they already know.

Here then is my nascent theory of activating multiple and coincident cause marketing alliances: When sponsors have multiple and coincident cause marketing alliances, aggregating their promotion has a summative effect for the sponsor because when seen in context of each other the sponsor’s halo shines brighter.

Has my theory been validated? Hardly. But if you’d like to test it, I’ve got some ideas on how we could do so. Moreover, I suspect that while aggregating the activation is good and even efficient for the sponsor, it might not be as positive for the cause.

Please comment below. I’d love to hear your theories on the topic.
Labels:

Comments

Renee Zau said…
I agree with you that multiple and coincident cause marketing alliances can make a sponsor's "halo effect" bigger. I like to see companies supporting multiple causes. However, I'm not sure the store whose ad you posted did a good job presenting that, as the campaigns were scattered on the page, lost among the many photos. Maybe if they had meaningfully devoted some space to each campaign, side by side to tie them together and highlight, they could have garnered better attention and results.
2/04/2013 9:03 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
1 comment
Read more