Cause Marketing

The grand-daddy of all buy one, give one (BOGO) cause marketing is TOMS Shoes , which I've profiled in the past. TOMS gives away a pair of its alpargatas-style shoes when your buy a pair. TOMS has never advertised heavily, but so great was the buzz that TOMS generated that its founder, Blake Mycoskie, was featured in TV ad on the left for AT&T. I've also profiled BOGO efforts from HUGO Fragrances , Pampers , LJ Urban which built a house in Burkina Faso when you bought one of their homes in Sacramento, a solar charger called Solio that provided a match for a soldier serving abroad when you bought another. On April 1, 2009, I even ran a post saying that India's Tata Motors was doing a BOGO for their $2,500 Nano car. It was an April Fool's Day joke that no one ever called me on. I now confess now that I made up the whole thing. These next BOGOs, however, are no joke. Buy a men’s tie, either a necktie or bowtie, from Figs and they’ll send a school uniform to a school...

The American economy is in the doldrums, although still, apparently, not in a recession. And, according to a new survey from the Better Business Bureau, the result is that Americans consumers have lost trust in 13 of 15 business industries. Simply put, the love is gone. How can industries including the auto industry, car dealers, gas stations, banks and financial institutions raise their numbers and get the love back of the American Consumer? Well Dr. Paul is here for you. And Dr. Paul wants to help you feel the love again. The good news is, it’s a simple 2-step program. But the first one’s a doozy. Not to be flip, but if you’re a mortgage company and a big part of your business plan was to fudge the numbers and get people into mortgages they couldn’t afford… assuming you’re still in business…you need start by learning how not to screw your customers! Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on to step two. You need some insurance. Among the industries whose negative numbers have ri...

Cause-Marketing with a Hispanic Flavor In Thursday’s posting we raised the question posed by Gabriel Q., who works for a notable California multi-cultural consultancy: what about cause marketing to multi-cultural audiences? Gabriel was specifically interested in cause-related marketing and Hispanic-Latino audiences. Of course marketing to multi-cultural audiences can be damnably difficult because…just to take up just Hispanics-Latinos…Spanish speakers in the United States may come from dozens of countries. While Spanish itself is a lingua franca, there are hundreds of accents, and thousands of culturally-specific word meanings. Considering the 1951-mile-long border between Mexico and the United States, Mexican Spanish predominates, especially in the American Southwest. But there are also 3.3 million people born in the Caribbean and 2.1 million people born in South America now living in the United States, according to 2003 survey from the U.S. Census Bureau. The 2000 U.S. Census identif...