Cause Marketing

Some things go better together in threes; a cheeseburger, fries and a Coke, for instance. Or, Crosby, Stills and Nash. Or, Athos, Porthos and Aramis. Or, Groucho, Chico and Harpo. Or, Newton’s Laws of Motion. Or, faith, hope and charity. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that companies which face the consumer better do three things well: practice corporate social responsibility; have a strong green tint; and, engage in cause marketing. Time was when companies could pick one of the three and be fine. But the corporate environment has changed. Now companies like Starbucks have altered consumer expectations and demands of what corporate social responsibility means. Starbucks pays its employees fairly and offers benefits. It sells fair-trade coffee to benefit its farmer-suppliers. It works to lower its environmental footprint. And it does smart cause marketing. Like no other large company, Starbucks practices the Holy Trinity of corporate social responsibility. Starbucks, along with C...

In 2011, Amazon’s sales were $43.59 billion and its profit was $7.64 billion. It is the world’s biggest etailer. That's part of their Seattle headquarters at the left. And how much did Amazon donate to charity? It's not clear. Although I suspect that MercyCorps and the Red Cross have both received meaningful donations from Amazon.com. We do, however, know that Amazon.com spent $1.5 million in lobbying in 2011, and more than $21 million since 2001 . Likewise, we know that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s billionaire founder and chief executive, his mother and father, and his wife, author Mackenzie Bezos, have given more than $28,000 to Washington Senator Patty Murray (D) since 2009. Amazon’s website reports that its “customers have contributed more than $35 million to global relief programs since 2001.” But Amazon’s piece of that is probably in-kind only. A statement at Amazon.com says: “We… contribute to the communities where our employees and customers live. Our contributions can be seen...

This holiday season Payless ShoeSource will donate $1.2 million worth of shoes free of charge to children in North America, and 11 countries in the Caribbean and Latin America. Now in its fourth year the program… called Payless Gives Shoes 4 Kids… is accepting applications from nonprofits right now at Paylessgives.com . Having just finished Ross Shafer’s slender volume called ‘Grab More Market Share: How to Wrangle Business Away from Lazy Competitors,’ I wonder if Payless hasn’t come a little late to the party with this helpful if pedestrian program. Shafer’s premise is that in tough economic times it may be easier and cheaper to out-compete rivals than to win over entirely new costumers by simply doing the things competitors are unwilling to do. There’s a certain logic to Shafer’s thinking. Now-defunct electronics chain Circuit City spent many years and millions of dollars winning customers. And even if the stores weren’t the same as Best Buy it’s a simple transition for former Circu...

Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship released its annual CSR Index the other day even as Occupy Wall Street and its satellite efforts continue their protests that are, in part, anti-corporate . The top 10 were : Publix Super Markets Google UPS Kellogg’s Amazon.com Berkshire Hathaway FedEx Campbell Soup Baxter International 3M By my count I’ve seen cause marketing from six of the top 10 and 33 of the full list of 50 companies. According to the BCCCC the index is based on a survey of “how the public perceives a company in three dimensions:” "Citizenship: Does the company contribute positively to its surrounding community in a socially and environmentally responsible fashion? "Governance: Is the company business run in a fair and transparent fashion? Do stakeholders associate the company with high ethical business standards? "Workplace: Are employees treated fairly and paid a decent wage? Does the company invest in developing employee skill sets and career opport...

It’s probably fair to say that more cause marketing campaigns are activated by public relations than by advertising. You my readers are a sophisticated audience so there’s no need to detail the differences between advertising and public relations. Suffice it to say that while PR has greater credibility, it’s challenging to get the frequency using PR alone that you can get with advertising. Advertising offers frequency and repeatability, but it can be expensive and it’s less credible than PR. So how do you activate your cause marketing story using public relations? One answer is that the story you tell the media have a boy and a puppy, like the story above in People magazine about 7-year-old Evan Moss who wrote a picture book called “My Seizure Dog” about an epilepsy-detecting dog that he wished his family could afford. In the book Evan imagined he and his seizure dog in various settings, including going to outer space together. The book… sold at a local café and on Amazon …...