Cause Marketing

It’s Valentine’s Day, a natural reminder that it's time to get rid of the evidence of someone you once 'liked.' After all, there's your ex in every other post on your Facebook wall and scattered all throughout your timeline. What do you do after you’ve moved on but the evidence of your past likes remain? Well, back in the day, Stalin had an army of skilled photo retouchers to call upon when someone fell out of favor. (See some of their handiwork at left) Today a cheeky New York digital agency named ClearHart launches a new mobile app that will remove all evidence of your ex from your Facebook page faster than you can say ‘Stalinist Purge.’ And 20 percent of the sales of the app benefit the American Heart Association of New York, up to $5,000 Called KillSwitch, the app deletes pictures, videos, and wall posts, and unlikes status updates. “KillSwitch is not a vindictive tool, so much as an answer to a very natural, pre-existing human behavior,” says ClearHart...

The first weekend after Memorial Day is the annual Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals Telethon. Like Go Red for Women from the American Heart Association or Thanks + Giving from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the Telethon serves as rallying point; a kind of concourse for sponsors, supporters and beneficiaries alike assemble and to wrap their cause marketing around. At left is a simple Telethon sponsorship activation from Ameriprise that appeared in the May 2012 edition of Costco Connection magazine. Costco is one of Children’s Miracle Network Hospital’s largest sponsors. These rallying points are a common feature of the very largest, most prominent cause marketers; Breast Cancer Awareness Month, American Heart Month, Hunger Action Month, the various walks and runs and races from the likes of the March of Dimes, the Multiple Sclerosis Society, American Diabetes Association, Susan G. Komen and others, and the aforementioned Thanks + Giving and CNMH Telethon. You can understa...

Normally, when it comes to cause marketing longer relationships are better for sponsor and charity alike. Think Rolling Stones and U2 not one-hit-wonder bands like Fountains of Wayne or Los Lonely Boys. That’s because cause marketing is a form of co-branding and like any branding endeavor it takes years for brands to achieve real customer awareness. Frequently changing partners confuses customers and stakeholders. For instance, I can all but guarantee you that even after more than 15 years of deep association, in a test of unaided recall few people would be able to identify Subway Sandwiches and the American Heart Association as cause marketing partners. I’ve written before that lasting corporate-cause relationships are like marriages that require constant upkeep. Or like bank accounts whereto you must make frequent deposits to cover the inevitable withdrawals. But there are certainly times when it makes sense to end cause marketing relationships. For causes it’s probably more ...

An article in the May 2012 issue of Wired magazine makes it clear that I have another thing to feel inadequate about; my Klout score, which is a very modest 31. (Maybe it's time to take that Facebook thing seriously. Hmm.) For camparison's sake, Justin Bieber’s Klout score is a perfect 100. Robert Scoble’s is 85. But now I can use my inadequacy for good. Klout for Good is a promotion that asks you to support Charity: Water, the World Wildlife Fund, and the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women. Klout also promoted a Christmastime tweet drive that generated gifts for underprivileged kids. The Go Red and World Wildlife Fun efforts are primarily awareness-raisers, although they’ll certainly take your money. But the Charity: Water promotion is a fundraiser and a clever one at that. Charity: Water asks you to ‘donate your birthday;’ that is to ask your social networks to donate to the cause in your name on your birthday. As of this writing, 12,889 people had pledged...

I saw a job description the other day for one of the chief marketers at Macy’s, the giant retailer. Among the listed job responsibilities was cause marketing, something Macy’s does well with sophisticated efforts for Make-A-Wish and the American Heart Association. Big companies and big charities tend to suck all the oxygen of the room when we speak of cause marketing. But small companies and causes can do it effectively too. Case in point is this wrapper at the left for a chocolate bar from the Big Island in Hawaii. It couldn’t be more homey and local. The paper wrapper feels like copy paper and the foil wrapper it came in seemed home-wrapped. The printing looks like it came from an inkjet paper and the design is so rudimentary it might have been done in Word. The chocolate bar itself was a little thicker at one end than the other. The place of origin is Pepeekeo a tiny town on the opposite side of the Big Island where the bar was purchased at an ABC Store. ABC Stores are home-grown in...

One trend I expect to see more of in 2012 is the mashup of cause marketing and video/computer games. Certainly the market is huge. The Entertainment Software Association reports that 72 percent of American households play computer/video games. And it’s not just teens and preteens. The average game player is age 37. And while video/computer game players are more likely to be male than female, across the board 42 percent of players are female (which is about the same gender mix as the NFL's audience ). That it’s a 60:40 male to female strikes me as a positive for some businesses and causes. Men can be a hard audience to reach, especially if you can’t afford the premiums that come with sponsoring professional sports or buying sports television airtime. Cause marketing has already been successfully undertaken by Zynga, makers of Farmville and Mafia Wars on behalf of the victims of the Haiti Earthquake of 2010. In 2011, they did another relief effort on behalf the victims of the Japane...

OK, you didn’t hear this from me. But if you want to get the boost that comes from partnering with a prominent national charity, but don’t want to jump through the hoops or pay their fat minimum fees, one work-around is to strike a deal with one of the national’s affiliates. Affiliates are not only smaller (read, easier to navigate) than the mother ship, they may be hungrier too, because they have fundraising targets that national foists on them every year. Best of all the local affiliate still carries the same name as the national. Let me be clear, this is NOT what Maytag is doing in this Facebook campaign . In fact, Maytag, a division of Whirlpool, pays the Boys and Girls Clubs of America… the national organization… $1.5 million a year through its Dependability Awards effort. Maytag’s campaign asks you to nominate a person in your life who personifies dependability, the company’s long-time unique selling proposition. Meanwhile on the Facebook nomination page, Maytag highlights volu...

Cause marketing, like all forms of sponsorship, requires activation, or promotion of the campaign in some form. Imagine, then, how sweet it is when you sign one or more members of the media as a campaign sponsor. It’s a little like coming home every night to Giselle Bundchen (or, if you prefer, Tom Brady). Too bad the media sponsor in this effort benefiting the Red Dress campaign didn’t take a few extra steps to ensure that the campaign had a second life. The Red Dress Awards have been sponsored for the last eight years by Woman’s Day magazine, the Hachette Filipacci title with a circulation of almost 4 million readers. The Red Dress campaign is a sprawling effort held each February to raise awareness of heart disease among woman. Heart disease is far and away the deadliest killer of women in the United States. Red Dress efforts are spearheaded jointly, but separately by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association . In 2010 the Red Dress Awards benefited th...

‘Seal’ campaigns defy easy categorization in cause marketing. They’ve been around forever. Witness the American Dental Association (ADA) Seal of Acceptance which dates from 1930. Strictly speaking seal campaigns are a kind of licensing deal. Generally they involve pre-set criteria and or testing. (The even older Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval was begun by the eponymous magazine in 1900 and the Underwriter’s Laboratories first opened their doors in 1894. Both were founded as for-profit entities). If your product or service meets the criteria and passes applicable tests you are eligible to apply to display the seal of approval/acceptance. Usually the license involves a fee, sometimes a hefty one. And like sponsoring the Olympics, all paying the licensing fee does is give you the right to spend more money on activating the deal! If most cause marketing is a kind of partnership, seal campaigns are more like a business deal. For the most part if you meet the criteria and pay your fee,...

Alden Keene & Associates got its annual renewable energy report the other day from our electric utility, Rocky Mountain Power. In December 2008 we signed up with ‘Blue Sky,’ a wind-energy offsets program, so as to help lessen the environmental impact of Causemarketing.biz. At left is the statement for the last 12 months. The back of the statement is below. Last time around the statement included a bulleted list of the positive effects of the program, customized to Alden Keene. This year Rocky Mountain Power gave the list a little extra graphical punch and with it more relevance in my view. I think there’s a lesson here for cause marketers. Even if such customization isn’t usually possible for most cause marketing campaigns, cause marketers need to report back campaign results. Such reporting builds transparency and as I posted earlier this month… “Transparency is vital to cause marketing. And part of transparency is to report back on how it all went. Such reporting reassures suppo...

The water business used to be a pretty sweet deal. You package water, which might have come from a municipal source, for a fraction of a penny per gallon and you sell it in individual plastic bottles for dollars per quart. Best of all, people need to drink gallons of water a week just to survive. All you needed was a cool bottle and a fancy brand and the distribution to match and you were in business. And then the world began to wake up to the silliness and waste of bottled water. There’s no need to recount the ridiculousness of it all or even cite sources. We all know about that ginormous plastic island floating in the Pacific Ocean. We all know about the crazy amounts of landfill space going just to water bottles that won’t ever degrade. We all sense the folly of water being shipped from Fuji (or even New York) to your store in Texas or California or Minnesota. It would be easy to defend if water was bad in all those places. Only it’s not. In most of North America, Europe, Australia,...

In a post about a paper icon campaign dated 12/23/2010 I suggested that the sponsor use the back of the icon to help explain the campaign, both for the benefit of the consumer and for the cashiers who sell them. But what might you put on the back of a paper icon or similar effort? The Go Red for Women campaign from the American Heart Association featuring the Red Dress pin, comes with a little card that the pin is mounted to. The Red Dress pin is a kind of icon campaign. I bought this one at Macy’s . The back of the card, which is 3.5 inches by 2 inches (about the size of a standard business card in the United States), has these few lines of text. "Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women in America. Wearing the red dress, which is the symbol of women and heart disease, is a way to speak up against this largely preventable disease. Our Hearts. Our Choice. Join us and Speak Up to Save Lives." That’s 47 words in five sentences. Which is about right. I’m not sure I follow th...

The smartest charities have a rule that they must thank their donors in at least 5 ways. For good reason, too. Gratitude is a powerful inducement to future gifts. But how should sponsors thank customers/participants in cause campaigns? To site just the last couple of posts; how should Chipotle thank the customers that pay $2 for a Boorito and thereby benefit Jaime Oliver’s charity? How might the hoteler Kimpton thank customers who buy their specialty drinks and help make a donation to local AIDS/HIV charities? At left is how a local grocer thanked participants in making a donation to the American Heart Association. Because there’s no context in the blurb it’s hard to know what customers are being thanked for. Sans that context the blurb is merely a nice gesture, but less than helpful to Maceys or the American Heart Association. Transparency is chronically missing in cause marketing. And its absence means cause marketing campaigns are less effective than they could be. What would be be...

I’ve been training people to look for ads that feature cause marketing and... among other things... I tell them to look for unusual logos, emotionally-charged words and special populations like military, fireman, children and animals. At first blush these two ads… for Eukanuba and Novartis’s over-the-counter drug brands… both seem like they could be cause marketing. Except neither of them are. The Eukanuba ad has a K-9 dog (with a name, no less) and the endorsement of a handsome, smiling police officer in uniform. Missing is some kind of cause for retired police dogs or some kind of shelter that takes in police dogs that have been injured in the line of duty. In the Novartis FSI ad we see smiling adults… all women… and children. Surely these women are trying to improve their health by watching what they eat. Or maybe they’re training for a race event that will boost their health while raising some money for the American Heart Association or the HeartTruth . There’s a special logo fo...

Faithful readers: The following is from my periodic column in the business weekly, the Salt Lake Enterprise . In it I profile how a fast-growing company and a innovative charity connected five years ago in a way that has greatly benefited both parties. Warm regards, Paul Since its founding a little more than five years ago, Ragnar Events LLC , which produces the super-sized Ragnar Relay Series, has sprinted to become the nation’s premier overnight relay race. And almost from the day Ragnar strung out its first yellow finish line, the company has had a charity partner, Salt Lake City, Utah-based Operation Kids . Headquartered in Kaysville, Utah, Ragnar owns and operates 10 relay races around the country in Arizona, Boston, Florida, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Minnesota, New York, Utah, Washington, D.C., and Washington State. (The picture above comes from Ragnar's Relay Del Sol race, which takes place in Arizona.) The races typically cover 200 miles. Teams of 12, sometimes dressed in ...

Cone Inc.’s blog 'Do You Stand for Something?' recently posted on the topic of cause marketing with celebrities. They cited two surveys… one of marketers and the other of consumers… to suggest that cause-related marketing with celebrities is a less than effective tactic. Yet still we see celebrities and causes tying the knot faster than Britney Spears on a weekend bender in Las Vegas. What's up with that? Certainly you have to parse out the surveys a little. Here’s what they wrote on the Cone blog : “New Research out this week surveyed marketers to explore the roles of celebrities in cause-marketing efforts, and the findings indicate that while these spokespeople often help raise awareness of a cause, they are not particularly effective in inspiring people to act. According to (the) survey, the majority of respondents (about 58%) indicate a celeb’s tie to a cause may motivate them to look into the cause, but not necessarily become involved. Cone’s own consumer research foun...

'Top Eight' 'Bottom Nine' What Do I Have Against the Number 10? I was contemptuous of a pretty good number of cause-related marketing campaigns and cause marketing ads in 2007. Nine of them make my list for the worst campaigns of 2007. [Read my list of the best eight cause-related marketing campaigns here .] But only one gave me a visceral reaction. That was an ad in BabyTalk Magazine by American Greetings and featuring the Sesame Street character Elmo. The ad had the look and feel of a cause-related marketing campaign meant to benefit kids in Third World countries “Instead… as you read the fine print… you learn that Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit which produces Sesame Street and other children’s shows, applies the money it earns from its licensees to underwrite the production of versions of Sesame Street in other countries. Sure, and when I fill up on gas at CITGO stations kids in Venezuela are able to go to college.” The only reason this ad didn’t lead the list is be...

Scared Pointless When it comes to cause marketing the disease charities have potential conflicts of interest that other causes probably don’t. For example, if the American Heart Association does a cause-marketing campaign with Bayer’s 80mg ‘baby aspirin’ then there’s an implied endorsement of both Bayer and the 80mg dose, whether or not the AHA offers an explicit endorsement of either or both. About 10 years ago, the attorneys general of several States gave the single disease charities a good scare when it comes to cause marketing by drafting a document about the legal and ethical use of the practice for certain kinds of charities. However, the document never received the support of the full membership of the National Association of Attorney’s General, according to their communications director. Nonetheless, in the wake of that unwanted attention, many of the single-disease charities developed strict policies about what they will and will not do when it comes to cause-related marketing...

Woman 18-34, Enjoys Scrapbooking, Seeks Marketers Who Can Make Her Care Scrapbooking is now the biggest chunk of the craft and hobby industry in North America, according to the Craft and Hobby Association , with estimated annual sales of $2.44 billion in 2006, a growth rate of 2.4 percent over 2005. The total craft and hobby market size is estimated to be $30 billion. I only just found these figures , but they don’t surprise me. I live with a scrapbooker/ cardmaker. One of my wife’s sisters works for a company that has a substantial (more than 200 SKUs) scrapbook line. My wife and her sister have been to at least a half-dozen scrapbook shows together from Texas on west. The research I saw from the Craft and Hobby Association, doesn’t break out the female-male gender ratio in scrapbooking, but I think it’s fair to say that more women than men scrapbook. The research does show that the age group most likely to scrapbook is 18-34, an attractive demo to nonprofits and to companies alike. ...

Are there some cause marketing elements that should not be placed together in the same campaign? Or, if your company has a cause campaign with one charity are there other charities you should not support with a cause campaign? These and other questions came to me recently while watching roofers replace the roof on a neighbor's house. They put copper flashing around the chimney and then very carefully nailed it down with expensive copper nails. Anyone who has every roofed a house knows why. If you used the same galvanized nails that you use to nail down shingles they would react with the copper. First the nails would corrode and then the copper flashing in the area where the nail had been would corrode. It’s the result of an electrochemical reaction called galvanic corrosion. You see the same effect in the kitchen when you bake salty foods like lasagna in a steel pan and cover it with aluminum foil. Leave it on too long and the foil will get pitted where it touches the lasagna. That...