Cause Marketing

The Summer 2011 Outdoor Retailer Show attracts something close to 25,000 people… about the population of a small city… and puts them in a space about the size of 2 city blocks square. Several cause marketers realized it was also a good time to do a little cause marketing to a densely populated and captive audience. Gerber, the knife maker repeated a promotion in ran in January 2011 at the SHOT (Shooting Hunting Outdoor Trade) Show in Las Vegas by selling a knife branded to TV adventurer Bear Grylls and benefiting the Boy Scouts of America. Buy the pocket knife for $10 and proceeds benefit the BSA. Columbia Sports Wear held six fashion shows during the 2011 show featuring willowy models and its tech-savvy outdoor wear. When you Tweeted a picture from one of the shows and included the hashtag #ORshowCA, they made a $5 donation to the Conservation Alliance . Almost any trade show could do similar cause marketing promotions. Here’s my good friend Scott Welch from Columbia exp...

Bear Grylls, the eat-anything host of the Discovery Channel’s hit show Man vs. Wild (called Born Survivor in the U.K.), recently endorsed a compact knife for Boy Scouts, sold by American knife maker Gerber. A special sale of the knife at the SHOT Show (Shooting Hunting Outdoor Trade) in January 2011 in Las Vegas generated $22,000 for the Cascade Pacific Council in Northwest Oregon, where Gerber is headquartered. I saw the item in Outdoor USA Magazine ... seen in the upper right hand column... a trade publication for the outdoor retailing industry, and was just a little surprised. Not by Bear Grylls endorsing a product; the adventurer has been pitching stuff in the U.K for years. I’m not surprised by the Boy Scout connection; he’s the Chief Scout of The Scout Association in the U.K., the youngest person to ever hold that position. What surprised me was that Gerber did a cause marketing campaign for the Boy Scouts, which has been rather outré for more than a decade now. While 110 mill...

There I was watching the always fascinating Bear Grylls on Man vs. Wild rig a makeshift compass out of small strand of steel wire, a tree leaf and a cup full of water in a tiny rock cistern and I asked myself, aside from simple curiosity what good is knowing how to do this? I’m a marketing and communications consultant so will knowing this make my spreadsheets more fulsome. Will my analysis be more keen, my writing more incisive now that I know how to do the same? For that matter is there any value in knowing stuff that isn’t directly related to one’s vocation? The short answer is: yes. I address how that's so in my blog on informal learning named The Learner’s Guild in a post called Knowledge as a Goal of Informal Learning .