Cause Marketing

"Charity" by Anrea del Sarto I’ve spent a big chunk of my career working with or for charities. Many of my dearest and ablest friends are in the charity ‘space.’ And the creativity and problem-solving coming out of the nonprofit sector has never been greater.  Although I’ve had numerous nonprofit clients over the last decade or so, I haven’t worked in a charity for about 12 years now, which gives me a certain distance. Distance lends perspective and consequently, I get a lot of people asking me which charities I recommend for donations of money or time. My usual answer is, “it depends.” “On what?” they respond. “On what you want from your charitable activities,” I reply. It sounds like a weaselly consultant kind of an answer, but bear with me for a moment. The English word charity comes from the Latin word caritas and means “from the heart,” implying a voluntary act. Caritas is the same root word for cherish. The Jews come at charity from a different direct...

There are stock indexes galore; the Dow, S&P 500, the NASDAQ Composite, the Wilshire 5000, the FTSE, and hundreds more. But how would an index of the stocks of companies that do a meaningful amount of cause marketing perform compared to those well-known indexes? Pretty well, as it turns out. I first floated the idea of a stock index that would track companies that do cause marketing back in 2009 . I tried to figure out Yahoo Pipes so that I could put the feed right into this blog. But alas sometimes the geek gene does fall pretty far from the tree. So I talked to programmers to see if I could find someone who could do the same, but it was always more than I was willing to pay. Finally, last week I hired a MBA student to do it all in a spreadsheet, and what do you know but that over the last 15 years a basket of 25 cause marketing stocks dramatically outperforms the Dow, the S&P 500, the NASDAQ Composite, and the Wilshire 5000. The index, which I call the Alden Keene Cause Marke...

KFC, a unit of Yum Brands, is testing a new quick-serve restaurant version of the fried chicken outlet and among the changes is that its cause marketing efforts will be much more local, according to Anne Fuller, senior director of development for KFC eleven. The KFC eleven test store is in Louisville, Kentucky, KFC’s headquarters. When it opens August 5, 2013, it will feature rice bowls, flatbreads, salads, KFC original recipe chicken among other items, plus sides. A second test location is set to open in Louisville before year’s end. The 11 in KFC eleven is a salute to the 11 herbs and spices in their original recipe chicken. The trade-dress for the test store includes lamp lighting, digital signage with community news, and artwork from local artists. Why step into the quick serve space? Fuller answered a reporter from QSRweb.com this way: “People love KFC but it's not a frequent choice for many guests for some reason. We wanted to create a broad and balanced menu that could...

Last Monday, July 22, 2013, March of Dimes released the annual results of its campaign with Kmart... now in its thirtieth year... and thereby begged the question, what does it takes to have a multi-decade cause marketing relationship between a cause and a sponsor? In the most recent year, Kmart,the discount retailer, donated $7.4 million to the March of Dimes, bringing the 30-year total to nearly $114 million. March of Dimes works to improve the health of mothers and babies. Too many cause marketing relationships, in my estimation, resemble speed-dating more than long-term marriage. There can be good reasons for short-term cause marketing relationships. But most causes and sponsors benefit more from long-term marriages than short-term hookups, the main benefit being continuity. Cause marketing trades on the trust that people, usually consumers, put in the cause and the sponsor. The longer the relationship lasts the more trust is evidenced. There's also a sponsor finding cost ...

Today my adopted state of Utah celebrates Pioneer Day. It’s a founder’s day celebration that commemorates the day when a hardy band of 151 settlers from the distant east first landed in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, not even a year behind the star-crossed Donner Party, which had traversed basically the same route. Pioneer Day is a state holiday that we celebrate like a second ‘Fourth of July’ with pancake breakfasts, parades, BBQs, and fireworks after dark. From July 24, 1847, when the vanguard party arrived, until the time when the rails were linked by the transcontinental railroad at Promotory Point Utah in 1869, about 70,000 people made the trek to Intermountain West. They rode in wagons, pushed handcarts and walked, driven largely by religious faith and fervor. And while the the settlement of the American West was accomplished by tens of thousands who made their way along the Oregon or Sante Fe Trails, only the Utah Pioneers built fords and ferries and roads, and planted...

When translated into English, the Japanese word Kaizen is typically rendered as “continuous improvement.” That is, to keep working on your processes… implementing small and oftentimes cheap improvements… to make them better and better. Few companies or nonprofits… in Japan or anywhere else… are likely to survive if they don’t practice some version of kaizen. And it’s precisely the word to describe what Toyota’s marketing department practiced with its cause marketing effort called “ Meals Per Hour ,” which is a video about the people of Rockaways, New York in the wake of Superstorm Sandy in October 2012. Rockaways is a thin peninsula in Queens, New York that faces the Atlantic, sorta like a barrier island. As the crow flies, it’s only five or six miles from the center of Brooklyn. But unless you’re a crow it’s a little remote for New York City. And so when Sandy hit, the Rockaways were devastated, what with all that ocean frontage. And getting food relief to them was a challenge. It...

New research released this week finds that women are more price sensitive than men on almost every product and service category. Since cause marketing has been shown to help companies preserve pricing power , and since women are more responsive to cause marketing than men, the research is a virtual punch list for charities looking for sponsors who need help. The research… called Women, Power and Money … comes from FleishmanHillard and Hearst Magazines and was conducted by Ipsos. Among other questions, Women, Power and Money asked women and men to rate how important getting low prices is to them in 12 broad categories of goods and services: automobiles, household supplies, food/groceries, household appliances, personal care items/toiletries, vacations, fashion apparel and accessories, technology, watches or jewelry, household furnishings and décor, financial services/investments, beauty/personal grooming items. You can plainly see the influence of Hearst Magazines on this list of...

Back in April 2013 I wrote about Panera Bread Company’s groundbreaking Meal of Responsibility, a nutritious bowl of turkey chili with 850 calories that invited people to pay for it what they could afford. Last week the company reported that they’ve pulled the menu item and are retooling it. At the time I wrote “Here’s my problem: helping out can be very intoxicating, especially when you’re good at it, as Panera is. But as I often say in this space, generous people are no good to causes if they give until they’re broke. Cause marketers need sponsors that are cash cows. That is, companies that have a sustainable business model that can be ‘milked’ regularly. Before Panera, everybody’s poster-child for progressive corporate social responsibility was Timberland, the shoe and apparel company. But after riding high through much of the 1980s and 1990s, Timberland’s product line grew a little stale in the double-aughts. Growth stalled. Facing rising material costs and lower profit marg...

Telefonica, the big Madrid-based telecom, released an opinion survey this week of Millennials in 27 countries and six regions, asking them, among other questions, “do you think you can make a difference?” What constitutes a Millennial is open for discussion, but Telefonica picked people 18-30. Gen-Y, as they are also called, is a huge generation important to both marketers and nonprofits. In the U.S. alone there may be 80 million of these Echo-Boomers (another name for them), depending on when you set the start and finish dates for the generation. That’s bigger than the Baby Boomer generation was in the United States. As the Millennials progress in their education and careers, get married, buy houses, have children, one theory holds that they could boost the world’s economy just by dint of their size, just like the Boomers did. Some versions of the question were political, as in, “One person’s participation does make a difference in your current political system.” Globally, 45 pe...

In the Summer of 2011 results starting coming out from the Dynamics of Cause Engagement study and among the headlines was women are generally more responsive to cause marketing than men, providing further confirmation of what many have long suspected. But men aren’t absent from the cause marketing equation. I asked the Center for Social Impact Communication (CSIC) at Georgetown University, which authored the study, to parse out responses from men on key issues and they kindly obliged. Cause marketing targeted to men is a topic of some interest to cause marketers. Cause marketing is a form of sponsorship. Its biggest rival for sponsorship dollars comes from sports, which as a whole is about seven times larger than cause marketing. Men constitute the usual target market for sports. In short, men participate in sponsorship in a big way. But cause marketers are still learning how to target men. The topic of men and cause marketing also came up at a recent Cause Marketing Forum in Chicago....

In the fall of 2012 the New York Attorney General’s office released Five Best Practices for Transparent Cause Marketing . The first one was “clearly describe the promotion.” We might assume that the AG was speaking only to marketers with malintent (to use the neologism). But being clear and understandable can also be a problem for marketers with good intent too. Case in point: This coming weekend June 28-29 Dave Matthews Band is doing a two-day concert at the Susquehanna Bank Center in Camden, New Jersey. The promoter of the concert is Reverb, which is a 501(c)(3) with a mission to make concerts more sustainable. Reverb frequently partners with other nonprofits in the tours it promotes. For the Dave Matthews Band concert in Camden the nonprofit partner is the Food Bank of South Jersey. Reverb asks that fans bring non-perishable food with them to donate to the food bank. That’s a promotion we’ve all seen and can understand, right? But, amazingly, the press release issued by Reverb...

Back when the Beaver and Jack Benny show were on television, the TV sets on which Americans watched those shows was wrapped in glorious wood. The stereo in the age of the Mad Men was a piece of wood furniture as organic as the asparagus at the Farmer’s Market in Portland. But nowadays, as Fast Company recently pointed out, electronics can be metal or plastic or some combination thereby, but wood is as old fashioned as, well, an Old Fashioned . Now a Massachusetts audio company called Vers is using cause marketing to help make people comfortable again about the combination of wood and technology. Vers makes compact speakers, earphones, and iPhone cases with wood. Vers systems have a reputation for sounding better than plastic, and wood is perhaps the most sustainable material on the planet. Vers uses farmed eucalyptus and pine, plus common sustainable hardwoods for its veneers. The cause marketing piece is this: for every tree that Vers uses, it plants 400 trees via its partner, the Nat...

Two professors at the Ohio State University have a new take on the benefits of cause marketing; it helps keep supplier pricing in check. Their paper, called “ A Supply-Side Explanation for the Use of Cause Marketing ” by Anil Arya and Brian Mittendorf, starts with the proposition that, “firm profits under simple(non-strategic) corporate philanthropy wherein the firm pledges a donation amount to charity. The paper then demonstrates that the firm can achieve the same donation level while also cutting supplier costs by tying donations to sales. Such a cause marketing tie-in intrinsically undermines the per-unit profitability of each product by adding a new marginal cost of sales. As such, the cause marketing pledge makes the firm's input demand much more sensitive to supplier pricing. This increased sensitivity to pricing persuades the supplier to charge a lower price so as to boost demand for its input. In effect, by engaging in cause marketing, the firm is able to make the supplie...

In March 2013, Jennifer Maher of the Cause Academy in Phoenix lowered her standards and invited me to be part of the Academy’s senior retreat. It was a veritable who’s who of cause marketing superstars. I was frankly in awe of the other attendees. But they were all so affable and fun my awe quickly turned to respect and warmth. Two things distinguished the senior retreat from other cause marketing conventions. For one, there were no prepared presentations, just wide-ranging discussions on topical themes. The second thing that stood out was that wasn’t all just talk. Jennifer and her able director of operations, Nicole Buratovich, distilled all our ponderings (and a few vigorous debates!) into two useful and pertinent white papers: “Future Trending of Corporate Relations,” and “Words of Wisdom.” The second white paper was premised on the questions “if I knew then as a noob what I know now as a grizzly veteran what would I do differently and what would I pass on to those new to cause mar...

Tubbs, which makes snowshoes, recently announced the result of its 11th annual cause marketing event called Romp to Stomp, which benefits breast cancer charities in the United States and Canada. This post is part of an occasional series when I announce the results of cause marketing efforts that I have posted on in the past. You can read that post here . For the 2012-13, Romp to Stomp generated $369, 203 for Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. Since 2003, Romp to Stomp has raised more than $2.5 million. This year 6,000 people took part in nine Romp to Stomp events in the United States and Canada, including 355 breast cancer survivors. Romp to Stomp is basically a series of races, including Lil Romper Dash for kids 12 and under. The press coverage I saw said that 1/4 of participants tried snowshoeing for the first time at the event. It also said that the dollar amount raised was higher than the goal. Introducing new people is almost certainly another o...

In the May 2013 and June 2013 issues of Outside magazine CamelBak ran an ad for its new All Clear water-purifying bottle that looks for all the world like cause marketing. But it isn’t. It depicts a photojournalist-style picture of Garrett Means, wearing scrubs and identified in the body copy as a humanitarian aid worker. To his left is a black woman holding an All Clear bottle. The body copy continues; “the Tanzanian village that Garrett visited didn’t have any potable water. He used the CamelBak All Clear for all his personal water and taught the locals how to use it before he left.” CamelBak All Clear bottles use UV light to treat .75 liters of water. You fill the $100 bottle with clear water, press the button for two seconds which activates the UV lamp and then shake it for 60 seconds so that the UV light gets to all the water in the bottle. The bottle has a lithium-ion battery in it that’s good for about 80 cycles before it has to be recharged. You can recharge it using a U...

In another case of cause marketing mashed up with games, GoodGames offers a fraction of a cent to charity every time you play a game like Mahjongg Dimensions or Pyramid Solitaire on their website. Play three games and the cause of your choice…from a list of nearly 110,000 registered charities…gets one penny. These aren't hard-core games, just versions of familiar favorites for casual online game-players. The games come from Arkadium and the donation comes from advertising revenue on the site. Each game played generates about a penny in advertising revenue, which is split between your charity, Arkadium and GoodGames . In the past we’ve talked about gamified cause marketing, which can take several approaches . GoodGames is from the same company that brought us GoodSearch, GoodShop, and GoodDining, which together have generated a little bit less than $10 million for affiliated causes. The GoodSearch search engine generates a penny for your cause when use it. GoodSearch’s sear...

The King Salmon or Chinook is the largest species in the Pacific salmon family and in some parts of Alaska the population is weak , leading to restrictions on sport and commercial fishing in some areas of the Kenai River fishery, for instance. A fishing lodge on the Kenai Peninsula called Alaska Hooksetters thinks that might be partly a marketing problem, and so it just started promoting a catch and release approach to King Salmon called “ Spawn On ” that features its own logo and Facebook page. Catch and release is common among sport fisherman going after trout in the U.S. Catch and release means that when the fish is landed the fisherman removes the hook… usually a barbless hook… and allows the fish to swim free. Most, but not all, fish survive the ordeal. I’ve got a brother-in-law who spends maybe a quarter of his weekends every year fly-fishing the blue-ribbon trout rivers of the Western United States. I mention this because he and his fly-fishing buddies are strict catch and relea...

One of the old reliables in service journalism is the “How to Avoid a Timeshare Scam” story. I typed that phrase in Google and got 444,000 results. The words “timeshare ripoff” generates another 78,000 results in Google. ‘Timeshare hard-sell” turns up 78,700 results. “Timeshare nightmare”? 229,000 results. I’m sure there are legitimate and above-board timeshare operators, but they seem to be a pretty well-kept secret. And so I’m not surprised that an online timeshare sales service is trying cause marketing to dress up its reputation. Because if you were a good operator in disrespected sector, one way to get past public cynicism would be to align with a cause that prospective customers could care about. Public cynicism about market sectors that have been broadly tarred isn’t just a problem for companies. A friend of mine used to be an executive director for a nonprofit that specialized in wilderness therapy for teens. Their results were very good and they never had any deaths or any nea...

A new study finds that “true believers” are more likely than non-believers to increase in status and influence, especially at organizations that are ideologically-oriented. So stow away that cynicism. The research comes from the paper called “Status and the true believer: The impact of psychological contracts on social status attributions of friendship and influence,” published in the May 2013 issue of the Journal of Organization Science . “Those who were true believers in this company’s cause were considered idea leaders and influenced how other employees viewed their work,” said John Bingham, the lead author of the study and a professor of organizational leadership and strategy at BYU Marriott School of Management, but like yours truly, a alumnus of the University of Utah. “If the mission is a legitimate part of an organization’s identity, that tends to be the case,” he says. Bingham and his coauthors, James B. Oldroyd, Jeffery A. Thompson, Jeffrey S. Bednar, and J. Stuart Bund...