Cause Marketing

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...

This post is endorsed by 'President Barack Obama,' 'Oprah Winfrey,' 'Hillary Clinton,' 'Coldplay' and other high-ranking search terms in Google. The hope-filled inauguration of President Barack Obama yesterday morning means that 2009 is still dewy enough that we can talk about New Year’s resolutions. Professionally I set a series of goals each year including sales and profitability goals. I’ve also set a grand total of one professional New Year’s resolution. I resolve to spend more time evangelizing the advantages and benefits of cause marketing.  In the past I have contented myself to talk about the many positives of cause marketing with clients and on this blog. The blog is easy to find if you know the word ‘cause marketing.’ But not that many people know the expression or the ideas behind it. Google’s keyword search tool says that in December 2008 the search volume for the term cause marketing was 14,800 with another 4,400 for the search ter...

At the risk of being immodest, your's truly was quoted several times in a recent article on cause-related marketing in the January issue of Western & English Today , a trade magazine for the Western and English equine industry. Also quoted were Carol Cone , cause-marketing grandee, and David Hessekiel, the founder of the Cause Marketing Forum and a subscriber to this blog. Follow this link to the excellent article by Carol Gustafson and read it online. It begins on page 58. You can also read all the questions Carol Gustafson posed to me last November along with my answers here .

Cause Branding® Made Easy Years ago Carolyn Cone and her eponymous Boston agency Cone, Inc ., started using the term “Cause Branding®:” branding cause marketing, as it were. I don’t think she or Cone, Inc. had anything to do with Staples Easy Button campaign . If not, then at least Staples owes a debt of gratitude to Carol Cone because this campaign is a fine example of Cause Branding®. In the States there are three national office supply superstores: Staples, Office Depot and the much smaller OfficeMax. Staples invented the business model and remains the largest company as well as the class of the bunch. Its stock has outperformed its competitors… as well as the broader stock market… and its growth prospects are superior. Staples has countless other competitors including wholesalers and regional and local suppliers and stores. It’s a crowded marketplace, in other words. So Staples began to do what any self-respecting marketing-driven company would do, they begin to brand themselves ...