Cause Marketing

Henkel’s, the German consumer packaged goods company whose brands in America include Right Guard and Purex, is back again with its Get Kids Fit campaign effort and “one lucky school will win $25,000 in fitness cash to improve youth fitness at their school.” You read that right, the total payout is $25,000 and it all goes to one school. Here’s how it works : There’s a self-nomination procedure. You submit an essay with the answer to this question: “How could $25,000 be used to improve fitness, inspire self-esteem, and build teamwork at your school?” If your school gets past the first round, Henkel asks you to submit a video. The top finalists are voted on by the public, meaning the $25,000 winner is the school that does the best job of getting out the vote. In the past, I’ve defended sponsors who spent more on a promotion than they give to their benefiting cause. And, in most cases, I’d still defend it. That’s because if my cause is, say, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, I’d be glad to...

In 2010 Kroger sold 24 packs of their house-brand water in ½ liter bottles benefiting their breast cancer effort, Giving Hope a Hand. The top was pink and the side panels featured stories of Kroger employees who’d successfully fought breast cancer. Now Brawny, the Georgia-Pacific brand of paper towels, has taken a page from Kroger and produced a limited-edition 8-roll pack co-branded with The Wounded Warrior Project that tells the charity’s story. The campaign also generates a donation for Wounded Warrior via an expanded Facebook ‘like’ effort. Sign a ‘thanks’ wall, like the Facebook page, or text ‘thanks’ to 272969 and Georgia-Pacific will back a $1 donation per action. The packaging also features QR codes that lead to a donation site for Wounded Warriors project. I haven’t seen Wounded Warriors messaging for the packaging yet so I can’t comment. But I hope they’re telling stories of injured service members and vets who were once in bad way, but are now better thanks to the help pr...

Dogs and cats contract cancer at about the same rate as humans, but while an estimated 577,000 Americans will die of cancer in 2012, some 14 million cats and dogs will die from or (in many cases) with the disease. The treatment options for pets is narrower than with people and many pet parents euthanize their pets rather than treat them. To raise awareness of the options and to generate money for pet cancer research Petco , the pet supply chain, and the Blue Buffalo Foundation, the charity affiliate of the pet food company of the same name, celebrated its third annual Pet Cancer Awareness Month in May 2012 demolishing its fundraising goal of $1 million. The effort generated $1.5 million. Nice! The money in 2012 will go to 10-year research study with 2,500 dogs to “determine the genetic, nutritional and environmental risk factors for cancer and other diseases that affect dogs.” Here’s how the promotion worked: Petco and Blue Buffalo invited people to make a donation to the cause...

One way to activate a cause marketing campaign when the sponsor sells a physical product is on the packaging. I started my career in cause marketing on the charity side and I can tell you that back in the day we were thrilled to get a logo on pack of a consumer packaged good (CPG) or even just a mention. Since then, there’s been a welcome evolution of what sponsors are willing and able to do with their packaging in order to activate their cause sponsorships. That said, even today some sponsors don’t seem to have gotten the memo that when it comes to explaining your cause campaign, more really is more, even on something as small as a can or bottle. The savviest sponsors realize that their only guaranteed means of reaching actual customers with a cause marketing message is by putting it on packaging. And the reach and frequency of the media on packaging for certain high-volume CPG items is almost certainly greater than radio, print or outdoor advertising, and, in many cases, TV. More to ...

FSIs or Free-Standing Inserts are those booklets of coupons mailed to your address or stuffed into your Sunday newspaper. They’ve been a hallmark of cause marketing almost from the very earliest days when much of cause marketing involved consumer packaged goods (CPG). For a time the use of FSIs to distribute coupons was declining, but they’ve surged again during the Great Recession, as has the average value of coupons. The cover of FSI at the left, sponsored by the British-Dutch CPG company Unilever, features the cause Boy’s and Girls Clubs of America. It dropped on May 17. My FSI had eight pages of Unilever coupons not counting the cover, along with at least that many more pages from non-Unilever products. Unilever, the body copy on the cover tells us, is donating $250,000 to the Boys and Girls Club of America. But that’s the full extent of the co-branding. Where’s the paragraph or two of explanation of all the valuable things Boys and Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) do for school-age ...