Cause Marketing

Saturday May 9, is the nationwide Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive in the United States. If you’re Stateside, before you read anything else in this post be sure and put together a bag of non-perishable food items. Then get it out at your mailbox before your mail carrier gets there May 9. Start on paragraph two when you get back You back? Good. I hope you included lots of high protein items. If not, go find an unopened jar of peanut butter (in a plastic jar, please) and add it to the bag, then come back and start with the third paragraph. With that out of the way let’s talk about what word of mouth guru Andy Sernovitz calls “ The Chocolate Problem .” Nobody, Sernovitz points out, has ever emailed a friend and wrote in the subject line, “Have you ever tried this stuff called chocolate? It’s amazing!” Whether you like or dislike it, everyone knows about chocolate. And this campaign from Cambell’s , the US Postal Service and the National Association of Letter Carriers has a bad case of the ...

As far as the marketing mainstream is concerned, the price for launching a new consumer brand in the United States starts around $100 million. Speaking only for myself, that's a little out-of-reach. But in his book Word of Mouth Marketing Andy Sernovitz says there's ways to build a respected brand for less. In this post I discuss his five Ts of word of mouth marketing and the challenge of The Chocolate Problem. Lastly, my apologies to Sernovitz and to you, because I misspelled his name in my initial posting. Rest assured that I have fired the idiot who made the mistake. Sernovitz cites five Ts in word of mouth marketing: Find people who will talk. Bear in mind that talkers may not be customers and that if you try and buy their participation, you’ll almost certainly undermine their credibility as talkers. Give them a topic. And don’t make it in the marketing-speak of features and benefits. Nobody recites a brochure list of features and benefits when they pass on word of mouth. G...

re·mark·a·ble adj 1. worthy of notice: worth noticing or commenting on 2. unusual: unusual or exceptional, and attracting attention because of this The success of your next cause-related marketing campaign (and perhaps all your marketing efforts) may hang on this single adjective. That’s the word from Andy Sernovitz, author of the book Word of Mouth Marketing and founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association . I caught Andy’s remarks at a speech he gave last night. What follows is the first part of my precis of his presentation. Part II follows on Thursday's post. Word of mouth has been around forever and everyone knows how powerful it can be, for good and ill. But without an assist from the tenets of marketing, word of mouth by itself is like pasta without the sauce. That is, incomplete. Propelling good word of mouth, Sernovitz says, has never been easier. Email and the social media amount to word of mouth particle accelerators, getting more from word of mouth than it could ...