Cause Marketing

AVEX water bottles have a handy water spout that keeps out the grit and dirt and can be activated with one hand. In this second video interview from the 2013 Winter Outdoor Retailer trade show in Salt Lake City, I talk with AVEX’s Brand Ambassador Neil Bradshaw about how this product feature figured into their decision about which charity to support when it came time to do some cause marketing. As with yesterday’s interview with Bearpaw marketing VP Randy McKinley, AVEX found its cause marketing partner close at hand. But proximity just made the meetings easier. Watch now as Bradshaw explains how the cause’s mission and appeal sealed the deal for AVEX.

The Outdoor Retailer Show increasingly features a lot of cause marketing. You can always find a lot of very visible ‘big cause marketing’ at the trade show, which took place in January 2013 in Salt Lake City. But in my fifth time at the biannual trade show I went looking for small efforts; cause marketing that’s just being tried out. And I asked them how they found their cause partners and what they hoped to accomplish. Today, a conversation with Randy McKinley, VP of marketing at Bearpaw, a boot company, that turned over the canvas of its shoes to young art students. Watch and listen as Randy describes how the promotion developed and what Bearpaw’s expectations are going forward.

Kind Readers: Gwen D. from the Northumberland region of the U.K. (home to Hogwarts!) is the latest to join the Cause Marketing Google Newsgroup. It’s super-easy to subscribe. Simply send me your name and your email address to aldenkeene at gmail dot com. Like the Accio spell on Harry Potter which brings desirable objects to you, when you subscribe each new post comes directly to your email, usually every business day. It's like Muggle magic! And like Gwen, when you subscribe I’ll also send you a PDF copy of the "Five Flavors of Cause Marketing" which explains Cause Marketing in an easy-to-follow matrix that includes examples. It's a great brainstorming tool and helps ensure that your campaign has all the components appropriate for that flavor of Cause Marketing. Rest assured that I will never sell your name or email address. So join today. Warm regards, Paul Aldenkeene at gmail dot com

Five years ago on Tuesday October 17 I posted for the first time on this blog. On Tuesday November 1, 2011 I’ll celebrate my 700th post. Since October 2010 I’ve posted, almost without exception, every business day. I compare it to writing a daily newspaper column, with all the attendant challenges of coming up with something new… or at least different… to say five days a week. Like Ernest Hemingway famously said: "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." I don’t bleed with the same brio that Hemingway did. So my thanks to you my faithful readers for your patience when I’ve been a poor stylist, a bad grammarian, and the many times when I stopped before I had finished. In remembrance of posts past here’s my very first one, which still has punch and force these 1800 or so days later, (even if I do say so myself). Eyeballs vs. Tears Barely a day goes by that I don't see some kind of cause-related marketing, some good and some not so good...

Kind Readers: I’ve heard from a handful of people over the last few days about whether or not the Cause Marketing Blog has a newsgroup. Good news, it does! It’s super-easy to subscribe. Simply send me your name and your email address to aldenkeene at gmail dot com. And when you do each new post comes directly to your email every business day. As an inducement I’ll also send you a PDF copy of the "Five Flavors of Cause Marketing" which explains Cause-Related Marketing in an easy-to-follow matrix and includes examples. It's a great brainstorming tool and helps ensure that your campaign has all the components appropriate for that flavor of Cause Marketing. Your privacy is important to me, so be assured that I will never sell your name or email address. One other bit of housekeeping: Some idiot… whose reflection looks a lot like me… accidentally deleted the last 25 comments made on the Cause Marketing blog. They’re totally unrecoverable and lost to the ether. The buck stops h...

Every day my RSS reader sends me a fat email with all the day’s listings of the word cause marketing. I see cause marketing campaigns advertised on TV, in magazines, or Facebook and the myriad other social media. My friend and fellow blogger Joe Waters has a Dummies book, for crying out loud, coming out in July about cause marketing. Every business day I add my own content to all the rest with this blog. Today, I celebrate the 600th post on the Cause Marketing Blog. One of those posts , from a few years back, declared that we are in the golden age of cause marketing, quoting the old Carly Simon song Anticipation , which features the lyrics, “these are the gold old days.” So far as it goes, I believe that’s still the case. But the current state of cause marketing, I think, could be summarized in the U2 song sung by that old cause marketer Bono , ‘ I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For .” That’s because for almost as long as I’ve known about cause marketing, nearly 20 years now, I’v...

A study , published in the December 2009 Journal of Marketing Research , found that children’s charities would receive greater donations if they depicted sad-looking children in their appeals. But real-world results show that the research may not be valid, especially for animals. “The working theory,” I wrote in a June 2009 post , “was that people ‘catch’ one another’s emotions…something that’s been shown again and again in many other studies… but which had never been applied to charitable appeals.” “They tested their thesis in a series of experiments, including a behavioral test where they showed subjects randomly-selected charitable appeals and gave them money to give. “In the other tests researchers tried to zero in on the emotional state of the test subjects. “The paper, called ‘The Face of Need,’ was authored by Professor Debora Small of The Wharton School and Nicole Verrochi, a PhD candidate, who openly wonder why charities don’t use sad faces of children more often. “I’ve got a ...

Faithful Readers: The other day Mrs. Alden Keene asked what the Cause Marketing Blog has done to help the world of nonprofits that have done so much for our world (and my livelihood). I pointed out that the blog is coming up on 600 posts, each indexed with helpful keywords and easily searched. It’s the longest-tenured blog on cause marketing, says author and fellow cause marketing blogger Joe Waters . In almost five years of posting, people from better than 99 percent of the countries in the world have found and read the Cause Marketing Blog. The whole Cause Marketing Blog is a public service, I said. “Yes,” she replied, “and don’t pull any muscles patting yourself on the back. But what have you done for individual nonprofits and sponsors?” I continued to pointlessly make my case before conceding that, of course, she was right. So with Mrs. Alden Keene’s encouragement I have decided that I need offer a direct public service to you, my faithful readers. I am therefore offering a free Q...

I’ve been writing this blog for almost five years and have been involved with cause marketing for coming up on 20 years. During that time one of my enduring grumblings has been that marketers from the causes and from the sponsors were talking to each other, but not really listening. It was like a modestly-happy couple communicating everything but trust. But now there are increasing signs that they’re finally hearing and trusting each other. Witness this label effort called Child Hunger Ends Here from ConAgra Foods on behalf of Feeding America . ConAgra owns more than a half dozen food brands including three that target children; Chef Boyardee , Peter Pan peanut butter , and the Kid Cuisine brand of quick-serve meals. Enter the 8-digit code from the package of any participating ConAgra item at www.childhungerendsheare.com and a donation is made to Feeding America, up to 2.5 million meals. That probably represents a cash donation of around $360,000, since Feeding America says it can ge...

Every year tens of thousands of teens go to the prom and when it’s done the boys take their tuxes back to the rental shop and the girls tuck their prom dresses into the back of their closets. A number of grassroots organizations have sprung up to get prom, quinceañera and other special occasion dresses out of the closets and on to the backs of girls who might not otherwise be able to afford a fancy dress for their special night. Hearst, the publisher of Seventeen magazine, has a website called Donatemydress.org , to serve as a kind of national information clearinghouse for girls looking to donate or receive donations of special occasion dresses. As far as causes go, passing on prom dresses to girls who can’t afford them isn’t exactly curing cancer or feeding the hungry. But it is a wonderfully romantic idea. And I don’t mean romantic in the sense of horny teens in the back seat of a limo. I mean it in the sense of idealism. It’s exactly the kind of idea that might really catch hold i...

I began this blog four years ago this month. This is posting number 438. The cause marketing blog gets 5,000 visits and nearly 8,000 page views a month. In four years the blog has received nearly 150,000 visits and 225,000 page views. In those first few weeks, a good chunk of the traffic came from one or more people in Hyderabad, India. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to encourage me to keep going. In October 2006 I thought I was writing for U.S., Canadian and maybe U.K. audiences, since I write in English. I know a great number of people in India speak English, but that traffic from Hyderabad surprised and delighted me nonetheless. Now, while the bulk of the traffic still comes from Stateside readers, 30% comes from readers outside North America. The blog gets hundreds of readers from places like Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Bulgaria and Kenya. I started the blog because in 2006 most of the available information on cause marketing was advocacy; i.e. here’s why you should undertak...