Cause Marketing

Back when the Beaver and Jack Benny show were on television, the TV sets on which Americans watched those shows was wrapped in glorious wood. The stereo in the age of the Mad Men was a piece of wood furniture as organic as the asparagus at the Farmer’s Market in Portland. But nowadays, as Fast Company recently pointed out, electronics can be metal or plastic or some combination thereby, but wood is as old fashioned as, well, an Old Fashioned . Now a Massachusetts audio company called Vers is using cause marketing to help make people comfortable again about the combination of wood and technology. Vers makes compact speakers, earphones, and iPhone cases with wood. Vers systems have a reputation for sounding better than plastic, and wood is perhaps the most sustainable material on the planet. Vers uses farmed eucalyptus and pine, plus common sustainable hardwoods for its veneers. The cause marketing piece is this: for every tree that Vers uses, it plants 400 trees via its partner, the Nat...

Some $8 billion a year is returned to American households each year in the form of rebates, estimates Parago, a rebate promotion provider in Lewisville, Texas. That dwarfs the $1.7 billion that IEG predicts companies will spend on cause marketing efforts in 2012. Surely there’s a way to mash-up these two different approaches to incentive promotions in a way that makes best advantage of both. In fact, Bota Box, which sells California wines in a box is doing exactly that to benefit the Arbor Day Foundation. In time for National Picnic Month this month, Bota Box will either donate to the Arbor Day Foundation or offer customers a rebate when they meet the terms of the rebate. Here’s how it works: When you send in the cash register receipts for three Bota boxes and the official mail-in rebate form, the company will make a $12 donation to the National Arbor Day Foundation. Or, you can take the rebate yourself. The corresponding rebate amounts for 2 Bota Boxes is $7 and $3 for one Bota Bo...

A new study out Monday, June 6, 2011 finds that contrary to conventional wisdom, religious people are more likely to donate to causes that aren’t strictly religious than to those that are. The study, conducted by Grey Matter Research and Consulting in Phoenix and commissioned by Russ Reid Company of Pasadena, shows that just 41 percent of donors who attend religious worship services regularly support a cause they described as “religious,” other than the contributions they make to their place of worship. Instead, religious donors are more likely to have given toward disaster relief (68 percent), domestic hunger or poverty relief (66 percent), helping people with disabilities (56 percent), health care or medical research (54 percent), and veterans’ causes (52 percent) than they are to have supported specifically religious causes. In short, religious people aren’t ‘lost causes’ for fundraisers and charity work that isn’t explicitly religious. “There tends to be a stereotype that relig...

When I saw this circular in yesterday’s mailbox from Lowe’s I was puzzled. It looks like cause marketing effort themed to Earth Day, but there was no further explanation anywhere in the circular. My first reaction was, “please, Lowe's, don’t do this on your own. You won’t get it right." A million tree giveaway in time for Earth Day oughta be done in partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation or with the charity American Forests . So I Googled ‘Lowe’s Million Tree Giveaway’ and low and behold Lowe’s IS partnered with American Forests. The press release went out Monday and it’s an admirable campaign. The million trees are indeed free from Lowe’s and optimized for your growing zone. You can point your smartphone at a 2D barcode on each tree bag to get tree facts, how to plant the sapling, how to care for it, and the like. The press release also says you can also register the sapling at lowes.com/earthday . Why would you want to register your tree? The press release says that reg...

It’s not clear to me that this is a trend, but I’ve seen my first cause marketing campaign with a trade group. The campaign is a tree planting effort from Odwalla , the juice company, and the trade group called the National Association of State Park Directors . It launches in May. In the United States, a trade group or trade association is a probably a nonprofit (although not necessarily a charity) with a mission to further the interests of a particular industry. The United States has not only 58 magnificent National Parks (along with more than 300 other ‘units’ managed by the National Park Service)… but it is also home to another 6,000 park units, managed by the individual states. (Among them the stunning Goblin Valley State Park , here in my home state of Utah). The directors of those state park systems can join the National Association of State Park Directors. Beginning in May, Brandweek reports, Odwalla will launch a promotion meant to plant $200,000 worth of trees in those state ...

One of the defining characteristics of many of the very best cause marketers is that they have a basic cause marketing schema that can be modified and used again and again in multiple contexts. Susan G. Komen for the Cure, for instance, does walks and runs very well. They’re very good at branded products, too. Proctor & Gamble’s ‘ Buy One, Give One ’ approach to cause marketing is well-honed across that behemoth company’s many divisions. St. Jude’s radiothon... Country Cares for Kids ... is terrific example of that fundraising approach. In addition, St. Jude is exceptional at all the back-office elements of cause marketing campaigns, much the way that Wal-Mart excels at logistics. Children’s Miracle Network raises tens of millions a year using their Miracle Balloon paper icon, which they can customize for almost any retail setting. Such schema’s form the backbone of the cause marketing efforts for those entities. For charities the power of having a basic cause marketing schema is ...

Cause-related marketing is about motivating people to change their behavior. Frequently the motivating carrot involves money going to a cause. But not always. For instance, in the campaign on the left from T-Mobile , the American mobile phone company and a division of the European Union’s largest telecommunication company, Deutsch Telekom AG. This is from the newsletter called ‘scoop’ that came with T-Mobile’s March 2008 billing statement. When you switch to paperless billing, T-Mobile, in conjunction with the Arbor Day Foundation , will plant a tree in your name in a blighted area of the United States. The Arbor Day Foundation, a tree-planting charity headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska, calls it the Restoration Project. The tree planting is concentrated in the region around New Orleans devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and areas of Southern California which were denuded of trees by the fires of 2007. The creative, from the March 2008 statement is clean and bright, if a little vi...