Cause Marketing

Most of the pink ribbon cause marketing we’ll see this month won’t make a clear distinction between research and awareness. Unless they say otherwise, the major pink ribbon charities put the money they raise from cause marketing where they deem best. As a former charity executive, I’ve long argued that for charities that’s one of the principal advantages of cause marketing. The problem is, over the years Komen in particular, but also other pink ribbon charities have positioned themselves as cure-seekers. It’s Susan G. Komen for the Cure, after all. But cancer cures are big-ticket items, costing billions of dollars and decades of time. So Komen, and others, have also covered their bets by also being about awareness. For instance, pressing women to get mammograms well before most doctors were recommending it. If breast cancer is caught at the earliest stages, the five-year survivability rate is 98 percent. And the mortality rate for breast cancer has been clipped by 30 percent since 19...

Cause marketing sponsors might have several reasons for engaging in cause marketing  including boosting sales, building brand, and bolstering PR, among others. One of those goals might also be to give customers a good reason to come back after supporting a cause. Informally, it’s called a bounceback and you’ll see it commonly in retail settings for food and other consumables. At the left is a current cause marketing campaign from Arby’s on behalf of a fundraiser called Happy Not Hungry that benefits childhood hunger fighting efforts from the Arby’s Foundation . Make a donation to Happy Not Hungry during the month of September and you’ll get a coupon for a free item from Arby’s value menu, when you also purchase something else. Although the flyer doesn’t mention it, the money passes through the Arby’s Foundation to No Kid Hungry campaign from the anti-hunger cause Share Our Strength. There’s two elements to get right in a bounceback offer. The first is that it has to both move pe...

Remember when your geometry teacher told you that 'all squares were rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares'? Well, get ready for a similar mind-bender from cause marketing; all cause marketing is co-branding, but not all co-branding is cause marketing. Dictionary.com defines co-branding as a "marketing effort or partnership between companies to join forces and use the best technology or content of each and lending both of their brands to the final product." That sounds a little highfalutin. So let's just say that co-branding describes when brands combine efforts in ways such that they create mutual benefit. There are several kinds of co-branding, including cause marketing itself. Promotional/Sponsorship . This is the category cause marketing falls under. Another example is Fedex’s league-wide sponsorship of the National Football League. Ingredient. A recipe in a free-standing insert that includes Hershey chocolate bar and Kraft Marshmallows o...

Back in the day, one of the things I put in proposals to potential sponsors was that cause marketing helped you stand out from competitors. Nowadays, in certain competitive industries like consumer packaged goods (CPG) one way to emerge from the clutter is to NOT do cause marketing. That is to say, cause marketing has become such a pervasive way of doing business that consumers expect it. So if you don't do cause marketing in competitive sectors like CPG, it becomes very noticeable, and not in a good way. So corporate marketers might rightly ask, as one did Tuesday night, “with so many of my competitors doing cause marketing, how can I make my brands emerge from the clutter?” Three quick thoughts: Do it right . There’s still much more bad cause marketing than good. Either it’s overly complicated, not very transparent, the match with the cause(s) is hard to fathom, the donation amount is wrong, the campaign is activated inadequately, the MacGuffin is missing, etc. The first t...

This handsome infographic on cause marketing comes courtesy of Carousel30, a digital agency with offices in Alexandria, Virginia, Princeton, New Jersey, and Raleigh, North Carolina. It highlights current opinion, both overseas and domestic, of the growth of the practice and the esteem with which cause marketing is held. If I may be so bold, the next cause marketing infographic that Carousel30 ought to undertake is one that gives shape to how best to activate cause marketing campaigns, especially digitally. My thanks to Breeanna Beckham, VP of marketing at Carousel30 for letting me post the infographic.

In the moments and hours after the Super Bowl advertising executives appear like earthworms after a rainstorm to grade and critique the television ads. Never mind that very few of these experts have ever actually produced a Super Bowl ad, much less one that would pass muster with their equally critical peers! So not one more word on the 2012 Super Bowl ads, at least from me. Instead I want to raise the banner for a kind of cause marketing I’d like to see actually develop. The idea was prompted by a trip to Walgreens when I purchased a paper icon benefiting the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. At the bottom of the Walgreen receipt there was a website toll-free phone number. Dial the number, answer some questions and you’re entered into a drawing for $10,000. Other companies that do this direct you to a website URL. I don’t know what their response rate is, but the $10,000 amount suggests that it’s pretty low. Taco Bell’s survey gives out $1,000 per week. At a regional seafood rest...

I’ve highlighted numerous products that utilize Buy One Give One; shoes, baby blankets, fruit snacks, watches, neckties, fragrances, wine, and eyeglasses, to name a few. I’ve certainly seen services that use cause marketing; including law firms, hotel chains and vacation companies. Now a video production company in Belgium is using BOGO to cause market their service. For each travel video Timbooktwo produces, the company will make a video for a charity. Here’s how it works; when the company is in a region of the world shooting for a paying client, they will contact a charity in the region and shoot for a day. The company says: “In our experience, most charity projects fit into this time frame.” In that way, what Timbooktwo is doing is similar to companies that pay employees for certain volunteer work. But, of course, that analogy is incomplete since the shooting of a video is only the start. At the very least it requires many more hours of both pre and post-production time. I should al...