Cause Marketing

Versatile action star and Broadway song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman has started a new ‘all-benefits company’ that he explicitly says was inspired by Newman’s Own. Here’s five bits of entirely unsolicited cause marketing advice to Mr. Jackman from yours truly. 1. Put Your Face On the Packaging. I don’t know what Laughing Man means and probably most of your potential customers don’t either. Speaking of Newman and yourself, you told Entertainment Weekly magazine, “This is a really great to, uh, exploit your popularity, basically. It is shameless exploitation.” Except the name Laughing Man is hardly shameless exploitation of your celebrity. To really be shameless and to get the most bang for your buck, you need to put the face of one of World’s Most Beautiful People on the packaging of Laughing Man. 2. Turn Your Face Into a Caricature. Brands including Betty Crocker, Uncle Ben, KFC, the Quaker Oats Quaker dude and even Paul Newman are all represented by illustrated characters. Betty Croc...

One of the most confounding charitable endeavors I was ever involved in was figuring out how to fund a startup charity that made grants to other charities. HelpUsAdopt.org, founded in 2007, is in a similar boat. The 501(c)(3) foundation grants would-be adoptive parents up to $15,000 for adoption expenses. In short, they raise money to give it away. Included in their fundraising mix are gala-type events, annual donor solicitation, and a small catalog of products including the necklace and bracelets modeled in the ad at the left by actress Nia Vardalos, of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame. The necklace Nia is wearing in this ad from the June 2011 Redbook magazine goes for $225 and the bracelets for $35 each. The HelpUsAdopt.org store also currently sells a brown wooden bead necklace for $95 and a tote bag for $20. The nonprofit fundraising world is set up to favor established charities, and with good reason. IRS figures show that 16 percent of nonprofit charities that filed a 990 tax re...

At the yet-to-open Shebeen Bar in Melbourne, Australia when you order a beer or wine from a developing country, a donation will be made to a cause in the drink’s country of origin. So toast someone with a Vietnamese beer at Shebeen and perhaps a kid in Vietnam learns a marketable skill. Raise a glass of South African chardonnay and maybe a microfinance donation is made to help someone start a street cart business in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. The social benefit business is the brainstorm of 27-year-old Simon Griffiths, who came up with the idea while traveling through Africa. The idea is not about guilting people into Shebeen bar, Griffiths told the Melbourne daily newspaper, The Age . (The photo of Griffiths at left comes from The Age .) “We are moving away from the Oxfam tin-rattling approach to retail to a space where we create high-quality products and services and make them non-profit.” Griffiths is wonderfully ambitious. Using what some call ‘embedded giving’ social entrepren...

Rachael Ray , the TV personality and chef, and now, brand, is so cute that I’m not sure that if I met her in person that I could stop myself from pinching the cheeks on her face. I admire her life story , which while not exactly hardscrabble, nonetheless demonstrates unusual determination and hard work. Good for her and all her success. She earned it. I can also commend her as a generous philanthropis t . If one word signifies her brand it’s the first word of the copy in the ad to the left; ‘Simple.’ She made her name and reputation with 30-minute meals. When she cooks she measures nothing, and her recipes are almost insouciant. She cooks like an Italian grandmother, only her dimples are a whole lot cuter. But when you become a brand and your brand is ‘Simple’ with a capital-S it’s easy to take simple pretty seriously. That’s what’s wrong with this ad for her line of dog food that benefits animal welfare groups including the North Shore Animal League and the ASPCA . Good on her. But j...

To get into Harvard, jewelry designer Joan Hornig made a deal not with the devil, but with her better angels : if she got in, she told herself, by the time she was 50 she would give away all her earnings to charity. She does just that with her eponymous jewelry line sold on her website and at retail outlets like Bergdorf Goodman. Like other ‘ all benefits ’ companies, 100 percent of her profits… year-round… are donated to charity. When you purchase it online, you designate where you’d like the donation to go. Hornig also does exclusive lines for retailers that benefit predetermined charities. For instance the earrings above are from her Snowflake line at Bergdorf, which benefited UNICEF.  Hornig's jewelry is priced in the ‘if you gotta ask, you can’t afford it’ range. It goes without saying that not everyone could manage this. Town & Country  magazine reports that Hornig is independently wealthy. But the appeal to would-be consumers is mighty. How easy it would be...

In my never-ending quest to root out new cause-related marketing buzzwords, I came across this one: “all-benefits companies.” It means companies that are in business to give away all their distributable profits after expenses and profits. Newman’s Own is a prominent example, but I came across the expression on the website for PeaceKeeper Cause-Metics. We all know the story of Newman’s Own. Paul Newman and his friend, author A.E. Hotchner whipped up a batch of salad dressing and sold it to neighbors. It was an instant and unlikely success… as a funny little slide show on the company website explains… that led to an extensive food product line. Since 1982 Newman’s Own has given more than $200 million to charity. According to its website, PeaceKeeper has set a very similar goal for itself. PeaceKeeper sells a line of mineral makeup including lipstick, lip gloss, lip balm, and nail polish. The products, PeaceKeeper tells us, are made without a long list of harmful (usually artificial) ch...