Cause Marketing

All cause marketing is a form of co-branding. But one kind of co-branding is far less common in cause marketing than in sports sponsorship, namely the kind of co-sponsorship you see at the left in this page from a Shopko sales flyer. The sports folks have long been very good at mashing up sponsors. The Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, for example, could be sponsored by Ford. The Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl could be presented by Dasani water. Stateside local sports arenas… especially for pro sports… are almost certainly named for a sponsor; Wrigley Field, Rich Stadium, Coors Field, MetLife Stadium, etc. Inside each of these facilities are hundreds of square feet of advertising for non-competing brands. So while you might see ads for five or six car dealers, Coors’ naming rights allows them to exclude Budweiser at Coors Field in Denver. Likewise, there’s no Coors sold at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. [Kate B. in Louisville tells me that the State of Missouri has a "law that establishments serving li...

In the lead-up to World Environment Day , Sunday, May 5, 2011 Budweiser is asking men to save water by forgoing shaving. Called 'Grow One. Save a Million' (GOSAM), the promotion has been going on in a low-profile way since 2010. Budweiser is also donating $150,000 to the River Network , a watershed conservation charity. But the campaign has since gone Hollywood with the inclusion of Nick Offerman , the butch star of the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation . GOSAM is premised on the fact that American men use an average five gallons of water per shave. Saving a million gallons of water should be pretty easy therefore, since 1,000,000 divided by 5 gallons is 200,000. Divide that by 20, the number of days a man might shave in a month, and the result is 10,000. So if 10,000 dudes quit shaving for a month in America, we’re there. Since beer starts with water, water conservation is a natural fit for Budweiser. But Budweiser is relying on GOSAM to save water by being fun. In one release,...

Friday, April 22 is the 41st Earth Day in the United States, a day that was originally conceived as a kind of environmental ‘teach-in.’ But I think it’s fair to say that most Americans understood those first few Earth Days not as a ‘teach-in’ but as a reminder to clean up litter, as the poster at the left from the great cartoonist Walt Kelly underscores. America made great strides against litter. After that it made great strides against air pollution, and water pollution. The country still has litter and air and water pollution. But air pollution in particular is now better than it was in, say, December 1970, when the Environmental Protection Agency was founded. National carbon monoxide emissions are not quite a third of what they were in 1970. Ammonia emissions are lower now than then, so are nitrogen oxides, particulates, sulfur dioxides, and volatile organic compounds. Both surface water and groundwater are cleaner than they were in 1970 thanks to the Clean Water Acts and the Safe ...

Can you cause market to real men? Do guys who wear plaid shirts and drive trucks to work respond to garden variety transactional cause marketing? I know all the cause marketing surveys are scrupulous about including a 50:50 mix of women to men. And there’s no way to get to 88 percent approval ratings unless a good number of the men in the survey are saying that cause marketing works for them, too. But let’s be honest, there’s no bottle cap campaigns from the beer companies for prostate cancer, even though the numbers of women diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States each year is almost exactly the same as the number of men diagnosed with prostate cancer. For most of my time in cause marketing I’ve assumed that women are more responsive than men to cause marketing appeals. And the 2010 Cone Cause Evolution Study bears that out, sort of. Cone finds moms much more responsive to cause marketing than the population as a whole. More than the population as a whole, moms are more lik...