Cause Marketing

Get ready to have your heart warmed. Last year, when he was six, Jamie Ashbourne of Jensen Beach, Fla., wanted to give some toys to less-fortunate kids at Christmas-time. But he found the whole process of donating unwrapped toys to kids he’d never meet somewhat joyless. That's the little fellow at the left. So he set about buying… I assume bankrolled by mom and day…and wrapping enough toys to fill a sleigh. But by the time he was finished, it was just days before Christmas and most toy drives were over. But in the last hour the Gertrude Walden Child Car Center in Stuart, Fla. welcomed him, and Jamie got to play Santa after all. Now age seven, Jamie will be back at the Walden Center on Dec. 19. But Jamie has also turned his eye to the kids affected by Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey, although it’s too soon to see how that will play out. Jamie’s website, elffactory.org , is set up to accept donations and well wishes. And, I suppose, if you can do anything to help...

Most cause marketing is hosted by companies that face the consumer; retailers, restaurants, and the like. But B2B cause marketing has long existed, if on a much more modest scale than consumer-based cause marketing. The usual sticking point is foot traffic. Your average warehouse just doesn’t generate enough foot traffic to support something like a paper icon campaign. That’s why B2B cause marketing, when it’s done, usually takes a different tack. Toolmex , in Natick, Mass., supplies the industrial marketplace with things like power chucks, end mills, milling inserts, electric motors, and CNC lathes. Few of us have ever set foot in a place like Toolmex. So what kind of cause marketing does the company do? Well, you could describe it as gateway cause marketing for a B2B supplier like Toolmex. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from the press release : “Toolmex Industrial Solutions is proud to support Toys for Tots this holiday season, and is helping to make the holidays brighter for di...

Unless you subscribe to some publication like the Army Times or Aviation Week and Space Technology , or you frequent the Yellow or Blue lines of the Washington D.C. Metro subway on the Virginia side of the Potomac, chances are you don’t often see much advertising from military contractors. But this is Christmas. And to hear Lockheed Martin tell it, sometimes Santa himself needs their C-130 aircraft to see that needy kids have toys to play with come Christmas Day. The ad features Lockheed Martin employees supporting Toys for Tots, a charitable effort of the US Marine Corp Reserve. With revenues of $47 billion in 2010, Lockheed Martin is one of the largest defense contractors in the world with specialties in aircraft, missiles, and spacecraft. On the left side of the ad you see a photo of a row of C-130s, which the company has produced since the 1950s. Quoting a Mother Jones article, Wikipedia says that Lockheed received 7 percent of all the funds paid out by the Pentagon in 2009. I ...

I started my cause marketing career back when gasoline cost about $1.15 a gallon, the median price of a house was a little more than $80,000 and a 30-second Super Bowl ad cost ‘just’ $850,000. And yet cheap as prices were back in 1992 do you think any sponsor would spring for even one national cause marketing ad on TV? The answer is a resounding ‘no!’ Yet right now there’s goodly number of sponsors whose Christmas ad mix includes cause marketing messaging on behalf of a cause. At left are two current ads that I found on YouTube, one for Coke’s campaign on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund and the other from Macy’s Believe effort benefiting Make-a-Wish. It may be that the version running in your market is different, but it’s enough to say that both firms are actively advertising their cause promotions on TV. I won’t bother dissecting either ad beyond saying that the Coke ad is just a little too earnest while the Macy’s ad strikes just about the right tone. But I want to have a little ...