Cause Marketing

Twice now I’ve written about cause marketing campaigns that can be summed up in six-words. Both times I heard back from readers inspired to pen their own cause marketing summation in six-words. Now I’m coming back to the topic because L.L. Bean, the Maine retailer and catalog company, is using a six-word statement as a tagline for its cause marketing effort called 'Million Moment Mission.' The six-word line is; “You Share. We Give. Kids Win.” Here’s how it works: any time you perform a qualifying action… a like on Facebook, a Tweet, submit a story and/or photo about your experience with L.L. Bean’s merchandise or in the great outdoors…the company will donate $1 to programs for kids from the National Park Foundation. The tagline, therefore, distills the campaign very well. The Million Moment Mission is a promotion in celebration of Bean’s 100th year in business. The campaign started on January 1, 2012 and wraps on December 31, 2012. The total donation is capped at $1 million. ...

Five years ago on Tuesday October 17 I posted for the first time on this blog. On Tuesday November 1, 2011 I’ll celebrate my 700th post. Since October 2010 I’ve posted, almost without exception, every business day. I compare it to writing a daily newspaper column, with all the attendant challenges of coming up with something new… or at least different… to say five days a week. Like Ernest Hemingway famously said: "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." I don’t bleed with the same brio that Hemingway did. So my thanks to you my faithful readers for your patience when I’ve been a poor stylist, a bad grammarian, and the many times when I stopped before I had finished. In remembrance of posts past here’s my very first one, which still has punch and force these 1800 or so days later, (even if I do say so myself). Eyeballs vs. Tears Barely a day goes by that I don't see some kind of cause-related marketing, some good and some not so good...

Just as “the rich are different than us,” so too are teenagers. How so? In their hearts and souls they aspire to make the world a better place. A study conducted earlier this year for the Christian aid charity World Vision found 13-17 year-olds were more likely than adults to say that helping others is more important than ever (90%), more likely to wish they could help others (88%) and more likely to do something active to support good causes (71%). Notwithstanding the videos that appear on YouTube showing teens beating each other up at KFC or shooting each other at Taco Bell , like never before this aspirational desire to make the world a better place is baked into the zeitgeist of today’s teens. Here's a case study: In 2008 siblings Paige Cahue, Gage Cahue, and Tristan Garber… of Indianapolis… developed charms that fit through the eyelets of shoes. After a couple of months of prototyping they ordered a box of charms shaped like a pizza from a manufacturer and started selling th...

Author and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki famously has his 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint . It goes like this: When you’re making a pitch, your Powerpoint should have no more than 10 slides, take less than 20 minutes to present, and no font should be smaller than 30 points. In homage to Kawasaki , I’m going to suggest that you be able to sum up your cause marketing campaign in just six words. Why six words? It’s enough to do the job, but not enough to obfuscate. Here’s proof. Last year this time Rachel Ferschleiser and Larry Smith released their book Not Quite What I was Planning : Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure . They lead with a tale about Ernest Hemingway who was once challenged to write a book in six words. He responded: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” There’s an awful lot of pathos in those six words. But then we’re talking about Papa Hemingway (seen above), a literary legend who specialized in compact fiction. Ferschleiser and Smith published many m...