Cause Marketing

Government and Cause-Related Marketing My Feb. 6 posting was about the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women campaign . This posting will be about the AHA’s stable mate in the Red Dress campaign, the National Heart and Lung Institute of the National Institutes of Health… aka HeartTruth… which falls under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Up until now, all my postings have been about cause-related marketing relationships between corporate and not-for-profit entities. Strictly speaking, the Red Dress campaign doesn’t raise money for the government or its programs, so it’s probably more appropriately called social marketing than cause marketing. But because the campaign borrows liberally from the best practices in cause-related marketing and because some of the elements of the Red Dress campaign do raise money for nonprofit entities, I’m covering the highlights here. In the United States heart disease kills more than 330,000 women a year, far and away the most comm...