Cause Marketing

I’ve been writing this blog for almost seven years and have been involved with cause marketing for more than 20 years. During that time one of my enduring complaints has been that marketers from the causes and from the sponsors were talking to each other, but not really listening. It was like a modestly-happy couple communicating everything, except trust. But now there are increasing signs that they’re finally hearing and trusting each other. Witness a label effort from 2011 that I found in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database called Child Hunger Ends Here from ConAgra Foods on behalf of Feeding America. ConAgra owns more than a half dozen food brands including three that target children; Chef Boyardee, Peter Pan peanut butter, and the Kid Cuisine brand of quick-serve meals. When you entered the 8-digit code from the package of any participating ConAgra item at www.childhungerendsheare.com and a donation is made to Feeding America, up to 2.5 million meals. That probably represented...

Project Potential from Kraft's ready-to-eat meal brand Lunchables sounds like a wondrous effort. In an ad that ran in the May 2010 Glamour magazine and is now archived in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database, a cute little girl is said to be leaping from princesshood to… maybe… the presidency thanks to Project Potential. And what is Project Potential? The ad promised to send 50 entire classrooms on fieldtrips. I suppose that a class fieldtrip could help someone fulfill their potential. Peter Parker got bit by a radioactive spider on a class fieldtrip and became Spiderman after all! Says the website: “It's not a reach when their potential is so great. That's why we're dedicated to providing kids with as many academic learning opportunities as possible—to help them reach their full potential! Every time you buy LUNCHABLES Lunch Combinations, you're supporting our efforts to help kids realize just how far they can go in life.” Wow! No wonder I’m such a sch...

On Monday’s post I touched on the topic of telling people what your cause marketing campaign accomplished when completed. I’ve recommended this approach to clients as a way to keep open the lines of communication with customers and clients and to get extra value from the campaign. In other words, you’ll want to hold back some of the promotion’s budget to continue to activate the effort until the very end. But what if that really cuts across the grain in your organization? What if it’s just not in your corporate DNA to do anything but to frontload your cause marketing activation? Well, then, add the report back to the activation of your next cause marketing effort. New Belgium Brewing of Ft. Collins, Colorado, said to be the seventh largest brewery in the United States, did just that with this ad in Sunset magazine. I found this ad in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database. New Belgium donates $1 for every barrel it brews and sells. It’s a BOGO cause marketing effort, Buy One Give On...

For a short while signs have appeared that seem to suggest that a company’s halo shines just as brightly whether they sponsor a transactional cause marketing effort as when they just make a lump sum pre-donation and promote it. Cone’s most recent Cause Evolution study found that people are only slightly more favorably inclined towards companies employing transactional cause marketing (53%) than to lump sum charitable donations (47%). Transactional cause marketing is when the sponsor ties its donation directly to a purchase. Cone’s survey amplifies a small experiment highlighted in the book, “Yes: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive,” by Goldstein, Martin, Cialdini, which had a similar finding. But these studies make me itchy and uncomfortable, like a wool sweater in Indian Summer. It could be self-interest that gives me the itch. I make my living helping causes and companies put together effective cause marketing campaigns, after all, not showing people how to wri...

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...

Within the next few weeks you can count on seeing a lot of pink merchandise; garden shears, NFL Player’s shoes, cupcakes and more. But before you go pink golfer Phil Mickelson and his sponsors want you to think blue first. When you buy Mickelson’s blue cap for $29.95 from KPMG’s Phil Mickelson website, $7.50 will go to First Book, the children’s literacy charity, with a guaranteed donation of $50,000. The hat is the same one Mickelson is wearing on the PGA Tour this year. It features KPMG’s logo on the front and Calloway’s logo on the back, two of ‘Lefty’s’ major sponsors. The ad at the left was in Fortune magazine early this year and comes from the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database. The $7.50 figure is in the fine print on the website . KPMG promotes the purchase of the hat as bringing First Book three books. To promote the campaign in the social media, when you Tweet a picture of the hat using the hashtag #PhilsBlueHat, you’re entered to win a VIP trip to Mickelson’s home ...

Kind Readers: Now you can join hundreds of others in the Cause Marketing Newsgroup and get all the thought-provoking insight, the top-flight analysis, and the bleeding-edge cause marketing ideas delivered right to your email box every business day. All from the largest, most comprehensive cause marketing site in the blogosphere. It couldn’t be easier to subscribe. Simply send me your name and your email address to aldenkeene at gmail dot com. When you subscribe each new post comes directly to your email box every business day. And when you subscribe you'll get a PDF copy of "Five Flavors of Cause Marketing," a matrix which explains the elements of Cause Marketing and includes specific examples. It's a great brainstorming tool that helps ensure your cause marketing campaigns have all the appropriate components. Did I mention that all this cause marketing fabulousness is free? And not just free, but free from obligation and worry. Because, rest assured, I will never sel...

Back in 2007 and 2008 Hamburger Helper ran a fun cause marketing promotion called My Hometown Helper that I don’t remember at all. In fact, there’s nothing about it at www.myhometownhelper.com, the campaign’s old website. Dial up that URL and you’ll be redirected to hamburgerhelper.com. If not for the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database and the long tail of the Internet, My Hometown Helper would be just a distant memory for the Hamburger Helper brand manager and the recipients of the grants.   Here’s what a press release from General Mills , which owns the Hamburger Helper brand, said about the campaign in February 2008. “Today, Hamburger Helper announces the call for entries to the 2008 "My Hometown Helper" grant program, a nationwide initiative that lends a "helping hand" to local groups making a  difference in their community. People looking to improve their hometown --  from helping fund a volunteer fire department, to restoring a town landmark, to supporti...

‘Yadelin,’ a hospitality student, in a comment posted earlier this month about a post I wrote about using cause marketing to fund a charity’s endowment, expresses surprise that cause marketing could be considered to be about raising funds. Yadelin learned in a corporate responsibility class that cause marketing is primarily about raising awareness. With this post I respond to Yadelin. Cause marketing can certainly be about awareness raising. But it can also be used to motivate all kinds of behavior. My cell phone service provider has used cause marketing to motivate customers to switch to electronic statements. My local electric utility has used cause marketing to incentivize me to allow the company to put a switch on my air conditioning unit that they allows them to turn off my air conditioning during periods of peak demand. On the left, Whirlpool, which makes major household appliances like washers, dryers and refrigerators, used elements of cause marketing to draw volunteers to a...

The Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database… my proprietary library of cause marketing ‘activations’…has thousands of examples that go back more than 10 years. But the folder labeled ‘Thank You Ads’ is all but empty. I just don’t see many examples of sponsors or causes thanking supporters for their help after a campaign has ended. This is a major missed opportunity for both causes and sponsors. Transparency is vital to cause marketing. And a vital… if mostly ignored… part of transparency is to report back how it all went. Such reporting reassures supporters that whatever effort they took helped in some way. If in the future most cause marketing campaigns did no more than to announce how much money was raised, they will have done more than what 99 percent of cause marketing campaigns do today. A better approach would be to announce how the money that was raised was used. If you did a paper icon campaign for a children’s hospital and the campaign generated enough money to buy 50 hig...

There’s dozens of ways to activate cause marketing. But the most common way… and frequently the least expensive… is with public relations. One story that you must master when 'efforting' women’s magazines in particular is a pretty standard transactional cause marketing pitch; buy our thing and a portion of the proceeds benefits this fine cause. Get the details right and you’ll probably score some coverage. But this is a classic case of good news/bad news. The good news is you’ve got a pretty good chance at getting coverage in women’s magazines like Ladies Home Journal , O, the Oprah Magazine , Allure , Elle , Vogue , Lucky , Shape , Town and Country , and Self . The Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database has cause marketing stories from all of these women’s magazines and more. The bad news, you’ll almost certainly have to share the coverage with other cause marketing efforts which may be thematically similar to yours. Magazine editors publish this kind of combined story with grea...

On October 18 2011 I wrote a post about the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship 2011 CSR Index and how by my reckoning six of the top ten and 33 of the 50 companies listed did at least some cause marketing. A few days later reader Jessica Marlo left the following comment. "It really bothers me that you can't share this information with the rest of us! What companies make up the the "six" of the top ten and "33" of the 50? Sheesh!" I left the list out of the post not to perturb Jessica or anyone else, but because most such lists tend to be like chloroform in print; real snoozers. But I promised Jessica that I’d post the list. So fortify yourself with a good strong belt of caffeine and plow in. Now, this is admittedly idiosyncratic. Some of these firms may have done cause marketing that I’m unaware of. By the same token, the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database has more than 5,000 cause marketing images. I don’t see all the cause marketing in...

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...

Last Sunday August 7, 2011 Boxtops for Education ran a tightly coordinated back to school promotion in my market, and probably yours as well. It featured dozens of ads in my local newspaper promoting many of its supporting brands. This post includes a representative number of scans of the ads I spotted in the paper, all of which are now found the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database. Boxtops for Education was founded by General Mills, but has been adopted by other non-competing brands. The biggest presence overall was General Mills’ themed FSI (Free Standing Insert), which, in my market, had 12-pages of coupons. Mainly it was General Mills strongest brands, Yoplait, Big G Cereals, Progresso, Nature Valley, Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, etc. There was at least some Boxtops for Education branding on 11 of the 12 pages in the FSI. The FSI cover is on the left. Yoplait, so closely associated with Susan G Komen for the Cure was one of the brands in the FSI, and indeed some cartons of ...

Actress, supermodel, TV producer, philanthropist, and mother of four Heidi Klum wants you to buy the hoodie off her back to benefit StandUp2Cancer, the telethon and charity. The hooded sweatshirt retails on the STU2C website for $46.99 and features versions of its logo on front and back. Klum, of course, is lovely and talented and STU2C is an admirable, innovative and hard-pressing cause. STU2C has always struck me as a charity in a hurry, and I like that about them. Cancer has bedeviled the world for too long as far as I'm concerned. The ad at the left is from the August 1, 2011 issue of Sports Illustrated magazine. But here’s comes the ‘but.’ I’m always little chary when causes use sex to sell. Certainly other cause marketing campaigns use sex in their campaigns. MAC Cosmetics uses sex very effectively in its ads benefiting the MAC AIDS Fund . But then again, that approach is true to MAC's brand and corporate ethos. While STU2C commonly uses celebrities like Klum in their a...

So insidious, wretched, low-down, and invidious are the techniques of cause marketing that they should be banned for use by soft drink companies, argues a staff attorney for the advocacy group The Public Health Advocacy Institute in an article published on the PHAI website titled “Organizations that Care About Health Should Play No Part in the Soft Drink Industry’s Effort to Rehabilitate Its Public Image.” After citing the many cause marketing successes from Coke and Pepsi, author Cara Wilking concludes: “Organizations that care about health should establish a policy that identifies and distinguishes between traditional business relationships, corporate philanthropy and cause-marketing and should commit to not participate in cause-marketing campaigns that promote products, such as sugary drinks, that pose a public health threat.” What Ms. Wilking would have us believe is that cause marketing is irresistible. A kind of catnip that we mere mortals can't begin to say no to. Hence, it...

Snickers, the candy bar brand from Mars Inc., is a prominent and generous supporter of the anti-hunger charity Feeding America. So why are they doing something that looks suspiciously like faux cause marketing? The ad in question is from Sports Illustrated magazine and depicts a bee, a roaring grizzly bear, insult comedian Don Rickles, and actor Joe Pesci, who specializes in playing out-of-control-angry mob characters. The ad depicts a kind of gas gauge with an arrow and the headline “How Angry Does Hunger Make You?” That headline seems custom-made for a cause marketing campaign. Are you hungry enough to really do something about the crisis of the hungry in United States?, is where this ad could be heading. If so, kill two birds with one stone by grabbing a Snickers. When you do, we’ll make a donation to our long-time partner Feeding America. But this isn't an ad or an effort in support of Feeding America. Certainly past Snickers efforts for Feeding America have featured much more...

Cause marketing with consumer packaged goods often takes place on packaging. While companies are sometimes loathe to forgo this valuable real estate, it’s almost always the case that the campaign sponsor and cause both benefit most when the packaging explains the campaign well. Remember the wise words from our friends in direct marketing: “tell more, sell more.” In fact, I once undertook a study of higher value food items on store shelves for a client. What I found was that more expensive or high cachet food items had, on average, more than 20% words on their packaging than did less expensive substitute items. High cachet items were more likely to tell a story or include a narrative of some kind. The packaging items from the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database, all circa 2002-2004, illustrate my point. Blue Sky Soda sells in natural food stores. I picked up this can at Whole Foods. Blue Sky, owned by the larger soda purveyor Hansen’s, is kind of the Shasta of natural sodas. That is, ...

Project Potential from Kraft's ready-to-eat meal brand Lunchables sounds like a wondrous effort. In the ad at the left from the May 2010 Glamour magazine, a little girl is said to be leaping from princesshood to… maybe … the presidency thanks to Project Potential. And what is Project Potential? The ad promises to send 50 entire classrooms on fieldtrips. I suppose that a class fieldtrip could help someone fulfill their potential. Peter Parker got bit by a radioactive spider on a class fieldtrip and became Spiderman after all! Says the website : “It's not a reach when their potential is so great. That's why we're dedicated to providing kids with as many academic learning opportunities as possible—to help them reach their full potential! Every time you buy LUNCHABLES Lunch Combinations, you're supporting our efforts to help kids realize just how far they can go in life.” Wow! No wonder I’m such a schlub. I didn’t go on enough fieldtrips as a schoolchild. Listen, I’m h...

A special issue of U.S. News & World Report magazine, in November 2010, tells the story of Brooke Ellison , who was left a quadriplegic at age 11 after being stuck by a car. She went on to be the first quadriplegic graduate of Harvard and is now working on her PhD in sociology at Stony Brook University. (A movie about her life was directed by Christopher Reeve, his last project. You can watch the movie's trailer at the left.) She’s not bitter in part because she makes a habit of extending herself to others. Volunteers like Brooke garner physical and emotional rewards. Studies show that no matter what their health is when they start, volunteers have less stress, less depression, and longer lives. “Helping is an independent, unique predictor of reduced risk of mortality,” says Stephanie Brown of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Brown studied 400 elderly couples over a 5-year period and found volunteers were half as likely to die as nonvolunteers, ...