Cause Marketing

Although I surely come off as a homme du monde and maybe even a bon vivant, I confess that I spent the first nine years of my life at the edge of a tiny desert hamlet in the American Southwest where I lived across a dirt road from a large cotton field. I lived so close to the field and far enough from town that many’s the morning I was awoken by crop duster airplanes. My family had been city-folk for three generations before me. Still, as a boy I envied the handsome blue corduroy jackets worn by the members of the Future Farmer’s of America (FFA). I missed this campaign from Campbell’s in 2009 and 2010 benefiting the FFA. But I came across it while working on the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database. And though Campbell’s hasn’t renewed the campaign, it’s one of my favorite cause marketing efforts of all time. Called Help Grow Your Soup, in 2010 the campaign restored five barns… chosen by popular vote by people inputting Campbell's Soup UPC codes… in Michigan, Indiana, Maryland and...

With just a few more than 90 days before the end of the year, here are seven easy steps you could take in the next 30 minutes to improve your cause marketing career before year end. Make an Appointment before Thanksgiving with Your Opposite Number at Your Partner Charity or Sponsor. Finish reading this list then call your partner at the cause or sponsor you work with and plan a casual meeting. The explicit purpose of the meeting, whether you admit to or not, is to help improve your personal relationship with this person, even if the relationship is already good. Remember what Covey said about trust: when trust is high, everything goes faster, costs less, and more pleasant. You almost can’t work too much on maintaining and building trust. Remember: how well you work with your colleague helps determines your success, their success and the success of your campaign. If you two don’t work well together your career could suffer and you’ll be less likely to achieve key goals. Create a S...

Imagine that you’ve got at least the bones of a new cause marketing campaign in place and it’s now time to test it and see how the market will react. What do you ‘sell’ in those first few meetings with prospective sponsors? There are two schools of thought. In the first school, you never go to any meeting unprepared. That is, you put together a pretty buttoned-down sponsorship packet that outlines exactly what you’re asking of the prospective sponsor and what they get in return. In this view, what you're really selling is you and your competence at the cause marketing game. In the other school, you prepare a bare-bones document that explains what you have in mind and why they’d want to participate, along with an educated guess of how much money you’re likely to ask for. Then, once you get in front of a decision-maker you ask what they’d want in return for their sponsorship dollars. Which is best? Well, it depends in part on you and what kind of person you are. If you can’t do anyth...

Yogi Berra, the former Yankee player and manager was famed for his fractured English, or Yogi-isms. For instance, Berra once said, "a nickel ain't worth a dime anymore." And, "it's like deju vu all over again." (The drawing at the left of Berra is by the talented caricaturist Jerry Breen ). He also said, "you can observe a lot just by watching." To that I'd add, you can learn a lot about what reporters think about cause marketing by the questions they ask. I get calls from reporters wanting quotes about the practice of cause marketing. I know David Hessekiel at the Cause Marketing Forum and Joe Waters, author of Cause Marketing for Dummies take plenty of calls as well. The reporter I spoke few weeks back asked the questions in bold and my responses follow. I won't reveal her name or publication until her piece is published. Until then, get a sense about what's on reporter's minds about cause marketing by reading the questions she a...

One of the things I love about cause marketing is also one of the things I love about my wife; it (like she) continues to surprise me. Here are 10 cause marketing efforts or campaigns, culled from more than 200 posts in 2011, that were cool or fun or smart or effective or innovative or surprising. And sometimes all of those adjectives at once! Here in date order of the original post are my top eleven Best Cause Marketing Efforts of 2011. Instant-On Cause Marketing for Earthquake Relief. In March I was wowed by an instant-on cause marketing effort from Infinity on behalf of the American Red Cross for the victims of the Tōhoku earthquake that arrived in my email box less than 6 days after the quake rocked Japan’s northern islands. Cause marketing has its failings and one of them is that picking causes, figuring donation amounts, concepting and messaging, and clearing legal can take so darn much time. In cases like Haiti earthquake in January 2010 and Tōhoku in March 2011, time is of th...

The graphic at left is a Venn diagram that describes cause marketing relationships between the usual three stakeholders; cause, company/brand and the consumer. Keep in mind that most cause marketing faces the consumer. While cause marketing can work when only two of the three circles intersect, there's a sweet spot when all three intersect. In such instances the cause marketing becomes 'painless.' We use the diagram to find the sweet spot of cause marketing for our clients at Alden Keene. There are several ways to place brands (cause or corporate) in the Venn diagram. You can just survey internal audiences at either the cause or the company/brand. That's the least expensive and also the least effective. You can also use certain focus groups/ qualitative efforts like sorts and the like and get close. But the best results come using a proprietary 48-question qualitative survey. Naturally, that's also the most expensive option. Finally, a note of explanation about the...

The year 2010 was a memorable year for cause marketing. What follows are, in my judgment, the 10 best cause marketing campaigns of the year. Please know that this list is hardly exhaustive. Thousands of cause marketing efforts take place each year. In 2010 I posted nearly 190 times and reviewed or highlighted more than 200 different cause marketing efforts. I probably Tweeted out that many more cause marketing campaigns on my Twitter account ( @paulrjones ) that I didn’t post on. Moreover, to add an extra twist, I frequently post on efforts found in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database, and are therefore from years other than 2010. I’ve listed the top ten in no special order, although I will say that I think the Subaru effort profiled at the bottom of this post is the best of the best. The numbers are just for ease of reference. During 2010 I also profiled an effort from HUGO Element/HUGO Man fragrances. It’s a buy one give one (BOGO) campaign and notable for the way it connects d...

Suppose when you get into the office tomorrow, the boss comes in and says, “I think we need to look seriously at cause marketing. Look into it will you?” Getting the right answers depends on asking the right questions. So where do you start? Let’s just stipulate that you’ll search the Internet. Maybe check the entries at Wikipedia.com or About.com. You’ll almost certainly come across the Cause Marketing Forum. If you go a little deeper you may find Cone, or other agencies that specialize in the practice. You may find IEG, which has a long history with cause marketing, but considers it to be a subset of sponsorship. Maybe you’ll go to Amazon.com and check the available titles. You’ll almost certainly find Business in the Community in England, which takes a very holistic approach to cause marketing and Business for Social Responsibility, which is basically its opposite number Stateside. Scratch the surface a little more and you’ll certainly find criticisms of the practice; usually variat...

Dear Faithful Readers: In January 2011 I'll post my much anticipated annual best and worst cause marketing campaigns for 2010. But this year I want to make it more interactive. So once a week for the next 12 weeks I'll ask you to vote for your favorite cause marketing of a given month. Up first, January 2010. Simply follow the bit.ly links which lead straight to the post, read it, and then vote for your fav. Thanks, Paul