Cause Marketing

In the Summer of 2011 results starting coming out from the Dynamics of Cause Engagement study and among the headlines was women are generally more responsive to cause marketing than men, providing further confirmation of what many have long suspected. But men aren’t absent from the cause marketing equation. I asked the Center for Social Impact Communication (CSIC) at Georgetown University, which authored the study, to parse out responses from men on key issues and they kindly obliged. Cause marketing targeted to men is a topic of some interest to cause marketers. Cause marketing is a form of sponsorship. Its biggest rival for sponsorship dollars comes from sports, which as a whole is about seven times larger than cause marketing. Men constitute the usual target market for sports. In short, men participate in sponsorship in a big way. But cause marketers are still learning how to target men. The topic of men and cause marketing also came up at a recent Cause Marketing Forum in Chicago....

My travels yesterday took me to a suburban Ulta Beauty store. There was a great deal of cause marketing going on there, none of it… not surprisingly… aimed at a someone like me. But why not? Men are both directly and indirectly affected by breast cancer. About 2,000 men are diagnosed with breast cancer every year, and about 400 men a year die from it. It’s far more likely that men will be indirectly affected by breast cancer via their wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts and cousins. My mother was a breast cancer survivor, for instance. Men have a major stake in breast cancer awareness and a cure, in other words. So where’s the pink ribbon cause marketing targeted at men? Some pink ribbon shoes come in men’s sizes. The NFL offers pink merchandise in men’s sizes in conjunction with its partner the American Cancer Society. A man could certainly play tennis with a Wilson Hope Lite racquet or soccer with Puma Project Pink skill ball. There’s some pink ribbon jewelry that men could w...