Cause Marketing

Two professors at the Ohio State University have a new take on the benefits of cause marketing; it helps keep supplier pricing in check. Their paper, called “ A Supply-Side Explanation for the Use of Cause Marketing ” by Anil Arya and Brian Mittendorf, starts with the proposition that, “firm profits under simple(non-strategic) corporate philanthropy wherein the firm pledges a donation amount to charity. The paper then demonstrates that the firm can achieve the same donation level while also cutting supplier costs by tying donations to sales. Such a cause marketing tie-in intrinsically undermines the per-unit profitability of each product by adding a new marginal cost of sales. As such, the cause marketing pledge makes the firm's input demand much more sensitive to supplier pricing. This increased sensitivity to pricing persuades the supplier to charge a lower price so as to boost demand for its input. In effect, by engaging in cause marketing, the firm is able to make the supplie...

In March 2013, Jennifer Maher of the Cause Academy in Phoenix lowered her standards and invited me to be part of the Academy’s senior retreat. It was a veritable who’s who of cause marketing superstars. I was frankly in awe of the other attendees. But they were all so affable and fun my awe quickly turned to respect and warmth. Two things distinguished the senior retreat from other cause marketing conventions. For one, there were no prepared presentations, just wide-ranging discussions on topical themes. The second thing that stood out was that wasn’t all just talk. Jennifer and her able director of operations, Nicole Buratovich, distilled all our ponderings (and a few vigorous debates!) into two useful and pertinent white papers: “Future Trending of Corporate Relations,” and “Words of Wisdom.” The second white paper was premised on the questions “if I knew then as a noob what I know now as a grizzly veteran what would I do differently and what would I pass on to those new to cause mar...

Tubbs, which makes snowshoes, recently announced the result of its 11th annual cause marketing event called Romp to Stomp, which benefits breast cancer charities in the United States and Canada. This post is part of an occasional series when I announce the results of cause marketing efforts that I have posted on in the past. You can read that post here . For the 2012-13, Romp to Stomp generated $369, 203 for Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. Since 2003, Romp to Stomp has raised more than $2.5 million. This year 6,000 people took part in nine Romp to Stomp events in the United States and Canada, including 355 breast cancer survivors. Romp to Stomp is basically a series of races, including Lil Romper Dash for kids 12 and under. The press coverage I saw said that 1/4 of participants tried snowshoeing for the first time at the event. It also said that the dollar amount raised was higher than the goal. Introducing new people is almost certainly another o...

In the May 2013 and June 2013 issues of Outside magazine CamelBak ran an ad for its new All Clear water-purifying bottle that looks for all the world like cause marketing. But it isn’t. It depicts a photojournalist-style picture of Garrett Means, wearing scrubs and identified in the body copy as a humanitarian aid worker. To his left is a black woman holding an All Clear bottle. The body copy continues; “the Tanzanian village that Garrett visited didn’t have any potable water. He used the CamelBak All Clear for all his personal water and taught the locals how to use it before he left.” CamelBak All Clear bottles use UV light to treat .75 liters of water. You fill the $100 bottle with clear water, press the button for two seconds which activates the UV lamp and then shake it for 60 seconds so that the UV light gets to all the water in the bottle. The bottle has a lithium-ion battery in it that’s good for about 80 cycles before it has to be recharged. You can recharge it using a U...

In another case of cause marketing mashed up with games, GoodGames offers a fraction of a cent to charity every time you play a game like Mahjongg Dimensions or Pyramid Solitaire on their website. Play three games and the cause of your choice…from a list of nearly 110,000 registered charities…gets one penny. These aren't hard-core games, just versions of familiar favorites for casual online game-players. The games come from Arkadium and the donation comes from advertising revenue on the site. Each game played generates about a penny in advertising revenue, which is split between your charity, Arkadium and GoodGames . In the past we’ve talked about gamified cause marketing, which can take several approaches . GoodGames is from the same company that brought us GoodSearch, GoodShop, and GoodDining, which together have generated a little bit less than $10 million for affiliated causes. The GoodSearch search engine generates a penny for your cause when use it. GoodSearch’s sear...

The King Salmon or Chinook is the largest species in the Pacific salmon family and in some parts of Alaska the population is weak , leading to restrictions on sport and commercial fishing in some areas of the Kenai River fishery, for instance. A fishing lodge on the Kenai Peninsula called Alaska Hooksetters thinks that might be partly a marketing problem, and so it just started promoting a catch and release approach to King Salmon called “ Spawn On ” that features its own logo and Facebook page. Catch and release is common among sport fisherman going after trout in the U.S. Catch and release means that when the fish is landed the fisherman removes the hook… usually a barbless hook… and allows the fish to swim free. Most, but not all, fish survive the ordeal. I’ve got a brother-in-law who spends maybe a quarter of his weekends every year fly-fishing the blue-ribbon trout rivers of the Western United States. I mention this because he and his fly-fishing buddies are strict catch and relea...

One of the old reliables in service journalism is the “How to Avoid a Timeshare Scam” story. I typed that phrase in Google and got 444,000 results. The words “timeshare ripoff” generates another 78,000 results in Google. ‘Timeshare hard-sell” turns up 78,700 results. “Timeshare nightmare”? 229,000 results. I’m sure there are legitimate and above-board timeshare operators, but they seem to be a pretty well-kept secret. And so I’m not surprised that an online timeshare sales service is trying cause marketing to dress up its reputation. Because if you were a good operator in disrespected sector, one way to get past public cynicism would be to align with a cause that prospective customers could care about. Public cynicism about market sectors that have been broadly tarred isn’t just a problem for companies. A friend of mine used to be an executive director for a nonprofit that specialized in wilderness therapy for teens. Their results were very good and they never had any deaths or any nea...

A new study finds that “true believers” are more likely than non-believers to increase in status and influence, especially at organizations that are ideologically-oriented. So stow away that cynicism. The research comes from the paper called “Status and the true believer: The impact of psychological contracts on social status attributions of friendship and influence,” published in the May 2013 issue of the Journal of Organization Science . “Those who were true believers in this company’s cause were considered idea leaders and influenced how other employees viewed their work,” said John Bingham, the lead author of the study and a professor of organizational leadership and strategy at BYU Marriott School of Management, but like yours truly, a alumnus of the University of Utah. “If the mission is a legitimate part of an organization’s identity, that tends to be the case,” he says. Bingham and his coauthors, James B. Oldroyd, Jeffery A. Thompson, Jeffrey S. Bednar, and J. Stuart Bund...

Two surveys out this week uncover new insights about the push and pull of cause marketing. In the first, the Cause Marketing Forum looks for million-dollar cause marketing campaigns at checkout and finds 63 of them generating a total of $358.4 million. That’s an average of $5.6 million per campaign. But the average is pulled up by the first five donations that total more than $150 million by themselves. The Cause Marketing Forum is meeting in Chicago so I haven’t had the chance to talk with them, but I suspect that in the years to come this survey will turn up much bigger numbers. The big winners are children’s charities. Forty-seven percent of the total raised went to the name-brand children’s charities; Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, Easter Seals, March of Dimes, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, etc. One surprise was eBay’s number. The online company generated $54 million for 22,000 charities, the most of any company on the list. The other surprise was Safeway, which ge...

Selling cause marketing sponsorships… like selling radio or television airtime… means selling the intangible. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have inventory. Races have space on t-shirts and signs, telethons and radiothons have airtime, packaged goods products have packaging. Keep brainstorming and other cause marketing inventory will become plain. I advised a friend, a New York Times best-selling author with his own charity, to auction off the rights to name a character in one of his upcoming books. Shortly before I left Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals I was working on adding a kind of behind-the-scenes tour to my sponsors who achieved certain fundraising levels; never underestimate the degree to which people love to pull back the curtain on how “Oz” manages his acts of magic. A really fun kind of alternate cause marketing inventory came across my desk recently. In Raleigh, North Carolina Terramor Homes does a BBQ in support of the Duke Children’s Hospital Radiothon. The BBQ in...

Today is Memorial Day 2013 in the United States. Memorial Day is a federal holiday, but also a day to do a little cause marketing. CSK, the big railway company is doing just that with their campaign on behalf of the Wounded Warrior Project called, Drop and Give Them 10 . It’s a fun campaign that just happens be on the wrong holiday. Drop and give me ten is an American colloquialism that means to do ten pushups. When you do 10 pushups and visit the campaign website and affirm that you did yours, CSX will donate a dollar to the Wounded Warrior Project. Post it on your social network and CSX will donate another $1. The total donation is capped at $50,000. The campaign started Monday, May 20 2013 and runs through Wednesday, May 29. Why pushups? “All service members have a few things in common:” says the campaign website, “bravery, sacrifice and, of course, the pushup. This Memorial Day, to honor the men and women of the military, CSX is asking all Americans to do 10 pushups.” ...

On Monday I posted about five good habits of great cause marketers. But cause marketers... good and bad... can have bad habits too. In his terrific 2012 book The Power of Habit Pulitzer prize-winning-reporter Charles Duhigg tells about the three phases of habits: the cue; the routine or behavior; and the reward. To change bad habits to good habits, Duhigg writes, you have to transform the routine / behavior. That’s how Alcoholic Anonymous works and the means by which Tony Dungy turned the Indianapolis Colts into Super Bowl champs, to cite two examples from the Duhigg’s book. I recommend The Power of Habit highly. Here, then, are five bad habits that too many cause marketers have. Analyzing the Data Badly. Immature people, like immature cause marketers, almost always struggle with what scientists call ‘confirmation bias.’ That is, they tend to want to shape the data to their conclusions and prejudices, rather than the other way around. Confirmation bias leads to bad science an...

Aristotle wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Of course, that’s true. There are a whole host of things that are challenging the first times we do them, but become easier as we repeat them. Scientists call it “automaticity.” I’ve been driving for more than 25 years and notwithstanding all the cognitive effort it took when I was 16, it’s pretty easy for me to drive safely now. William James, the first real American psychologist, said that habits are like the crease in a man’s suit pants or the channels set by the water that came before. “Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state,” James said. Warren Buffet, the avuncular billionaire, told Caroline Ghosn , cofounder of women's careership startup Levo League, that you should look at the qualities you most admire in others and cultivate those habits in yourself.  "Ju...

In Feb 2013, I got an email from a remarkable student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who had an intriguing question: why isn’t there more cause marketing between sponsors and faith-based nonprofits?   It’s a question I’d wondered about myself so it was fun to be asked to think about. Marshele Carter Waddell and I talked about it several times in the intervening months. Marshele is a grad student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC, the executive director of a faith-based nonprofit, the author of four books, the 28-Year Wife of a U.S. Navy SEAL Commander (ret) and mother of a U.S. Marine Infantry Officer who received the “Bronze Star for Valor for things sons don't tell their mothers,” as she puts it.   With her permission I publish the conclusion of her analysis which is one section in a report of a larger project called, "Corporations, Creeds and Cause-related Marketing Campaigns: Defining the Graces that Save and the Sins that Sink C...

Years ago I read a book by a man who had been the public defender in the bad old days of Soviet Russia. There were horrors aplenty, all worthy of a Kafka novel. One of the things that has stuck with me ever since was his belief that he wasn’t defending his clients against just the Soviet apparatchik. He also had to defend against the expectations of jurors who ‘knew’ what the government wanted; even when there was no communication from any level of the Nomenklatura. Such kangaroo courts didn’t require any direct intervention from Soviet officials at all, he wrote. That is during a trial jurors didn’t need to get something like a telegram from the Politiburo to know how to rule. They convicted defendants based on what they thought the Politburo and the Party would want them to do. These memories came back to me over the weekend when I learned that Internal Revenue Service (IRS) officials in the Cincinnati offices in charge on non-profit were giving unwarranted scrutiny to applicatio...

I’m delighted to offer a guest post today by my friend and cause marketing colleague David Hessekiel, the founder and president of the Cause Marketing Forum and the co-author of the new book on cause marketing called Good Works , out as June 5, 2012. David co-wrote Good Works with marketing legend Phillip Kotler and Nancy Lee. Today David tackles the issue of just how big cause marketing is and how we can get to a more meaningful measure of its size and dimensions. For years the only calculation we’ve had is IEG’s annual projection of how much companies plan on spending on cause marketing in the year to comes. As a gauge of cause marketing it’s a little determining the health of your car by measuring how much air pressure is in the back right tire. It’s inadequate and not very telling.  One of the fabulous yet sometimes frustrating aspects of cause marketing is its diversity.   Some campaigns focus on raising funds (buy this and we’ll give a dime), others concentrate...

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...

Along with David Hessekiel of the Cause Marketing Forum, I was quoted in the April 2009 issue of Pizza Today on the subject of cause marketing (the article "Just Cause" begins on page 55.) It’s not the New York Times , to be sure. But there’s an interesting side benefit to being quoted in Pizza Today ; you get a special voucher that’s accepted at most small pizza parlors across the country that allows you to get extra cheese on your pizzas for free. I plan on giving it a try tonight!

What do you do, as a cause marketer, to keep learning? How you answer the question of self-education determines things like: how successful your cause-related marketing campaigns are, indeed, how successful you are; your income ; your lifespan ; researchers have even shown a correlation between happiness and education . It’s almost axiomatic that more you know the more you want to know (and as Socrates pointed out, the more you realize how little you do know)! I hope this will be a conversation rather than a monologue or disquisition, so I invite you to comment on what you do to stay on top of your game. Business/General Interest I subscribe to and read a number of business magazines so as to understand current issues, trends, economics and the like, as well as several news magazines. Since I don’t have a business degree I feel like this reading has gone a long way in advancing my understanding of business. I also read newspapers, but mainly online. I especially admire the reporting in...

You Say You Want an Evolution? There’s not a card-carrying cause marketer who’s been in the business more than 10 years or so who doesn’t owe a debt of gratitude to Cone , Inc. the cause-marketing and social responsibility agency now owned by the Omnicom Group. Back in the day 14 years ago when we were knocking on corporate doors, putting together proposals and making presentations to corporate marketers about the only substantive weapon we had at our disposal that suggested that cause marketing worked was the old Cone-Roper survey of attitudes about cause marketing. It was a revelation and it helped enormously. The Cone surveys have been often updated over the years. The latest version of the Cone study, called the Cone Cause Evolution Study , is out and many of my fellow cause-marketing bloggers and analysts have already done an admirable job of addressing the study’s intriguing findings. Check Selfish Giving , or David Hessekiel’s newsletter at the Cause Marketing Forum , for instan...