Cause Marketing

I’ve highlighted numerous products that utilize Buy One Give One; shoes, baby blankets, fruit snacks, watches, neckties, fragrances, wine, and eyeglasses, to name a few. I’ve certainly seen services that use cause marketing; including law firms, hotel chains and vacation companies. Now a video production company in Belgium is using BOGO to cause market their service. For each travel video Timbooktwo produces, the company will make a video for a charity. Here’s how it works; when the company is in a region of the world shooting for a paying client, they will contact a charity in the region and shoot for a day. The company says: “In our experience, most charity projects fit into this time frame.” In that way, what Timbooktwo is doing is similar to companies that pay employees for certain volunteer work. But, of course, that analogy is incomplete since the shooting of a video is only the start. At the very least it requires many more hours of both pre and post-production time. I should al...

We see evidence of big cause marketing all the time. You know, cause marketing so massive… like the Red campaign or Boxtops for Education … that it seems to create its own gravity. Plainly, when properly designed, cause marketing scales up very well, thank you very much. But what about the little guys? Does cause marketing scale down as well as up? Here’s why this is an important question. In the States small businesses… generally companies with 500 or fewer employees… represent 99 percent of all businesses that have employees, and over the last 15 years, small businesses have generated 64 percent of all new jobs . Small business is also really dynamic. Small businesses rise and fail quickly in round after round of Schumpeter-style ‘ creative destruction .’ Likewise, most 501(c)(3) nonprofit charities in the United States are small. There’s only one American Red Cross with its $4 billion budget , but at least 1 million smaller charities. Is cause marketing only for the top one percen...