Cause Marketing

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...

Yesterday’s post ‘Five Questions Nonprofit Marketers Need Answers to From Potential Sponsors’ was inspired by a monthly column in Smart Money . Each month the personal finance magazine publishes a feature called “10 Things X Won’t Tell You.” The intent of the feature is to show that your interests and those of your bank, say, don’t always align. In the interest of better alignment between causes and sponsors, here are five questions that a potential sponsor better have a satisfying answer to before engaging in a cause marketing relationship with a charity. Am I Just a Paycheck to You? I had a conversation the other day with a potential cause marketing sponsor scouting for a cause. Their first goal was to generate money for their putative partner. Of course, they also had several business and marketing goals as well. Sophisticated sponsors know that most causes expect money from cause marketing. Fair enough. But if that represents most of a cause’s motivation a sponsor ought to know ...

Right now best-selling author and financial advice doyenne Suze Orman is appearing in ads on behalf of the QVC Channel’s annual Fashion Footwear Association of New York (FFANY) shoe event, which benefits cancer research. Now in its 18th year, the FFANY event takes place Thursday, October 13, 2011 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. FFANY’s website reports that the event has sold more than a million pairs of shoes and generated more than $35 million for a variety of cancer charities. The Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database has images of past spokespeople including Fergie, Jessica Simpson and Reba McEntire. The ads appear in women’s magazines including Cosmo , Elle , O, the Oprah Magazine , TV Guide , and elsewhere. I spotted this one in Redbook . Usually the creative in the ads touches on the personal connection the celebrity has to cancer. But for Suze Orman the creative is an explicit seal of approval. The headline reads, “You’re Approved,” which is plainly a riff on the...

On Monday The New York Times profiled a new cause marketing effort from a maker of healthy snacks and do-gooder Daniel Lubetzky, who owns Kind Healthy Snacks. Lubetzky has a small problem. Some of his competitors, including Snickers Bars from confection giant Mars Incorporated, are also using cause marketing to sell their own snack lines. The Times reporter, Stuart Elliott, never puts it this directly but the logical question is inescapable. If you're a consumer-facing company with a commitment to cause marketing is it a good thing if your competitors are utilizing cause marketing, too? All of us who have been involved in cause marketing for more than a decade or so remember that one of our primary sales points to prospects was that cause marketing helps you distinguish your product or service from competitors and gives you a new story to tell customers and the press. Increasingly that advantage is disappearing. (The result is a lament like the Gotterdammerung some Americans fe...

Last week I did “email interview” on cause-related marketing with Carol Gustafson, a writer for W&E Today , a trade magazine for the western and English equine industry. She asked me five questions. I’ll post the answers to the first two questions on today’s post, and the remaining on next Tuesday’s post. Carol’s questions are in italics, followed by my answers. 1. With money tight and ad budgets shrinking, why should a business, especially a smaller one, include cause-related marketing in its promotional mix? Old time marketers used to lament that the average person saw perhaps 250 commercial messages a day. Nowadays, the estimates range from a few hundred to perhaps 3,000! I expect there’s a lot of shock value built into these estimates. But as Seth Godin puts it in his landmark book Permission Marketing , the biggest challenge for marketers today isn’t the number of commercial messages per se. Instead, it’s the number of messages combined with the fact that most commercials are ...

I caught a lecture yesterday delivered by the new Dean of the College of Science at the University of Utah, Dr. Pierre Sokolsky , a physicist, that was strangely relevant to cause-related marketing. Although there were faculty members in the audience, the audience could be described as more as science boosters rather than scientists. (I was there after all). Dean Sokolsky talked about funding, as deans will, and he said that while the college has done just fine attracting Federal and private research dollars, he lamented the degree to which research proposals these days require proof in advance of efficacy. Grant applications require not only that you describe the problem, but the expected answer, too. He wasn’t just talking about having a hypothesis before you start, which of course is central to the scientific method. He was saying that modern research grant applications are funded in part on how clearly you can predict the results. But of course science doesn’t always work this way....

I have a spotty record predicting the future. I bought a Zip drive about a week before the first USB drive came out. And then, admiring the portability of said USB drives I bought 2 of them with 56K of memory for about $50 a pop. I have two sets of the 1987 Topps baseball cards (which includes the rookie cards for Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire) still in the original shrink-wrap. They’re worth almost exactly what I paid for them. Or rather less, considering the ravages of inflation. (I also have a first edition of Hayduke Lives by Edward Abbey that has doubled in value. So, I’m not always dead wrong.) So imagine my surprise to get a short missive from Bay-area fundraising consultant Gayle Roberts asking me to weigh in on the topic of “Predicting the Future of Fundraising” for the September Giving Carnival. But like all pundits, I’ve got an opinion no matter my history of accuracy! That said, to paraphrase Abbey’s ‘warning’ at the front of Hayduke “Anyone who takes these predictions seri...