Cause Marketing

A grad student recently sent me a series of questions about the future of cause marketing and one of the things I see more of over the near term is causes putting out their own lines of branded merchandise. When I look at this pink miniskirt skirt from the Loft benefiting the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, I wonder why. Right now when you buy this sequined miniskirt (in ‘blushing rose’) for $70, the Loft will give 25 percent to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Clothing at retail is said to be marked up between 100 and 350 percent, more for luxury brands. Little surprise then that enterprising nonprofit managers look at these margins longingly. “We have a compelling brand,” they say, “and an engaged user base willing to buy things from us directly. Why not build a merchandise line?” But. But. But. Ann Taylor Stores Corporation, which owns the Loft, has almost 60 years experience figuring out what women want and what they like to wear. The 510 Loft stores have clerks traine...

I’ve been getting pushback from my Oct. 4 post titled, ‘Transactional Cause Marketing is Not the Boogeyman.” In it I dismissed people who get heartburn from the practice of transactional cause marketing, that is, when a purchase triggers the donation. Fear not friends, there is a middle ground as evidenced by Hope tennis balls from Wilson that you see on the left. But first, the pushback. Here’s what I wrote then : “Transactional cause marketing is a promotion. So are coupons, sales flyers, sampling, among many others. But let’s just drill down on sampling. It’s very clear that when stores sample a product you’re more likely to buy it because it generates a powerful sense of reciprocity. Cause marketing pulls many of the same psychological strings. So why does the addition of a cause make transactional cause marketing somehow more underhanded than sampling? For that matter, it seems that lump-sum donations are just as likely to get you to buy something as transactional cause mark...

When you cause market with a retail partner, in most cases the donation is based on accessing their customer base. In such promotions, the cause is probably enough to get some customers to donate. But sometimes you want or need what I call a ‘MacGuffin,” a term I borrow from the illustrious film director, Alfred Hitchcock. In this case from Ulta Beauty stores the MacGuffin is a sweepstakes for anyone who donates at least a dollar to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation at one of their stores during the month of October 2012. In Hitchcock’s definition, a MacGuffin is a plot device that impels people to act. George Lucas said the MacGuffin in Star Wars is R2D2. In Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, the MacGuffin is the Crystal Skull. In Mission Impossible IV, it’s the Russian nuclear launch codes. The MacGuffin in this promotion from Ulta is a chance to win one of 532 beauty bags, one per store. In order to pass muster with Federal and state regulators, there is an alternate form of...

U.S. Census figures put ecommerce at 5.1 percent of total retail sales in the second quarter of 2012, up from 4.6 percent in the second quarter of 2011. Almost everyone see etail’s percentage of total retail sales doubling and even trebling in the next three to five years. Naturally a lot of cause marketing has migrated to etail as well. However, rare is the etail cause marketing promotion that really makes good use of the Internet’s many powers. It’s like running a TV commercial, but without using any sound. Or, showing a blockbuster on 25 percent of the movie screen. This campaign by Chicbuds.com, which sells earbuds and this cute little powered speaker for your mobile device for $40 called a fauvette. During October, 2012, 20 percent of the sale of each bedazzled fauvette… or $8… goes to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Fauvette, in French, means a small singing bird, like a nightingale or a warbler. These fauvettes come bedazzled with crystals in pink, black and gold, ...

Throughout October 2012, in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I’ll post on a new breast cancer cause marketing campaign each business day. First up is Clinique’s Great Skin, Great Cause moisturizing lotion now available wherever Clinique is sold, as well as online . The lotion is $36 and comes with a pink ribbon key ring and a breast cancer awareness pink ribbon charm. Of the $36, $10 goes to the cause, a generous donation amount from a dedicated sponsor. Clinique is owned by the Estee Lauder Companies, so the benefiting charity is the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, which was founded by Evelyn Lauder in 1993. Evelyn Lauder was the daughter-in-law of Estee and for many years the public face of the company until her death in 2011.  Evelyn Lauder, along with Alexandra Penney, then editor of Self magazine, also co-founded and popularized the pink ribbon as a symbol of the fight against breast cancer in 1992. In the 20 years since, the one place where you are almost guaran...

Every October... National Breast Cancer Awareness Month... I write a post wherein I bow admiringly (and low!) to the power of the pink ribbon. This month in America you can’t swing a leaf rake without hitting breast cancer fundraising or awareness in the store, the mall, your home, or in any media outlet. To wit this FSI (Free-Standing Insert) page from Brillo, which makes steel wool scrubbing pads infused with a detergent, usually green but for the next little while available in pink-ribbon pink. When you buy a pack of Brillo pads, $0.25 goes to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, up to a limit of $50,000. Brillo doesn’t even bother messaging this promotion to breast cancer. Why bother? Only some crazily-creative Hollywood writer-type… Joss Whedon , maybe?…could possibly draw a link between breast cancer and Brillo pads that comes across as empowering rather than sexist. Instead, Brillo plays it absolutely straight. Here’s the pink Brillo pads, here’s Breast Cancer Research Foundat...

The issue of Time magazine currently on newsstands is all about cancer, including a story on cancer research charities called ' Check Your Charity .' One charity highlighted in the article, called the National Breast Cancer Research Charity, made me do a double-take. Time reports that it took $12.7 million in 2009, and spent 52 percent on fundraising. The reporter’s lead says a lot; “It's not that the National Breast Cancer Research Center is a scam….” What gave me the double-take was that National Breast Cancer Research Center sounds so much like The Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the New York nonprofit which took in $30.2 million in revenue in 2009 and spent a scant 5.9 percent on fundraising. The phrase ‘cancer research’ has become a marketing conceit. Put the words together and you have fundraising magic. But it sucks to be a well-proven charity like The Breast Cancer Research Foundation, when a less efficient charity can invoke the same magic words. "I shudd...

Buy a specially-marked bottle of Bayer HealthCare’s venerable brand One A Day multivitamin between September 16 and November 30 and you can redeem a code on the packaging or the store receipt at CaféPress.com and for $10 you get a semi-customized T-shirt with $1 from the sale of each T-shirt going to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation , up to a maximum donation of $10,000. How do I know this? It's certainly not in the headline or subhead of the FSI to the left. Instead that run-on thought of a cause-marketing effort is spelled out right there on the very bottom of the FSI in reversed out 2-point type. Sharp-eyed mice everywhere will be able to read it. It’s also on One A Day’s microsite, whatmatterstoyou.com . Where to start with this mess of a cause marketing campaign? Certainly multi-stage efforts like this have been a part of cause marketing almost since the beginning. But this one is complicated enough to be almost silly. The FSI ad above literally can’t explain it all wi...

On October 23, I posted about Ulta's Windows of Love campaign for the Breast Cancer Reseaerch Foundation. Earlier this week Ulta sent out this recap email to supporters. Thanks to Kate L. for sharing!

Clients ask me all the time: have the breast cancer charities sucked out all the oxygen out of the atmosphere for cause marketing during October? That is, can anyone else do cause marketing during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month? I can't give a categorical answer, but here are three quick takes on cause marketing campaigns going on in this month that aren’t about breast cancer, plus a forth that is about breast cancer, only with fewer pink ribbons than usual. Sigg Drop of Hope Water Bottle for the Jane Goodall Institute . When you buy the Drop of Hope water bottle from Sigg , the Swiss aluminum bottle makers, they’ll donate $5 to the Jane Goodall Institute to build rainwater tanks for schoolchildren in Africa. The campaign is well-timed coming, as it does the heels of news that Sigg used BPA as an element in the plastic liner of its water bottles after first denying doing so. Benihana/Fuji Water Co-Promotion for Best Buddies . Last night at dinner with the fam at Benihana ...

Successful cause marketing appeals not only to your head, but to your heart as well. The head part comes easier for me and probably for many of you as well. So how do you inject heart into a cause marketing campaign? Ulta’s answer is to ask people to write their breast cancer stories in a letter and then post them in the front windows of their stores. They call it 'Windows of Love.' Ulta supports The Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Ulta is the largest discount cosmetics and fragrance retailer in the United States with more than 330 stores in some 38 States. There’s an Ulta store that I can almost coast down to from my house, so I went down there to check it out. The store devoted the better part of three of its four windows to the promotion. One of the window displays explained the promotion and the other two contained actual letters. The letters were unformatted. That is, so near as I could tell they were posted exactly as they were submitted. The challenge was that some of...

Mae West famously said that “too much of a good thing is... wonderful.” But is it? A female friend forwarded me a recent ‘moms’ e-newsletter she got about a week ago. It had the expected content but the bottom was lined with four products ‘for the cure;’ shower gel for the cure, a CD with Amy Grant for the cure, fantasy bubble bath for the cure, and a sketchbook for the cure. All offering ‘100 percent of the net proceeds’ for breast cancer research. She made the point that now, near the end of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, she’s a little ‘pinked out.’ I can see her point. In magazines, with their long calendars, the editorial and the advertising for Breast Cancer Awareness Month might start in September or even August. The last notices of breast cancer awareness might appear in November. It’s less true of the electronic media like TV or the Internet, but still that’s as many as four months of pink ribbons. In that time there’s hundreds of events, thousands of pink themed cause-markete...

I saw the Anne Klein ad to the left in the October 2008 Elle magazine and intended to question the unnecessarily abstruse language at the bottom that refers to “translational research,” whatever that means. And then I came across this remarkable document on The Breast Cancer Research Foundation website . Remarkable because there in one PDF is all you need to know about the various jewelry items being sold this breast cancer season benefiting the BCRF. It includes the jewelry price, where it’s being sold, how much of a donation is generated, press contacts, product descriptions, etc. [The design of the document is rather blasé and the PDF itself could be more crisp. But I’m picking nits here.] I've often written in this space about the necessity of transparency in cause-related marketing. (Click here for more.) Transparency is vital in cause-related marketing and far too rare. Vital because more than almost anything else you can name, cause-related marketing trades on trust. BTW...