Cause Marketing

I’m working a speech I’ll give next week on cause marketing and the meeting planners asked if I could share some actual ROI data. Such data isn’t impossible to discover. But it’s not at all common. You don’t have too think to hard about it to know why this is so. If a transactional cause marketing was based on sales, then it would be a matter of simple arithmetic for a competitor to figure out unit sales during the time period of the cause marketing promotion, something most companies would be reluctant to reveal. For different reasons we don’t always know what charities net out of their cause marketing efforts, even though their 990 tax return tell us how much money individual U.S. charities take in overall. But in just the last week, I’ve seen two prominent cause marketers who have parted the kimono… but only a little… on actual results. In a news item published October 14, 2011 the executive director of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure chapter in central Oklahoma, Lorna Palmer… revea...