Cause Marketing

~Let's Put Her to Work Paying Down the Deficit! ~ Currently on newsstands is Forbes magazine’s '100 Most Powerful Women' issue and there at number 11 is Lady Gaga, whose blurb tells us that she is 25, that she ‘banked $90 million last year’ and ‘raised $202 million to fight HIV/AIDS through MAC’s VIVA GLAM Lipstick and Lipgloss sales.” Holy Simoleans, Batman. $202 million?!!! That makes Lady Gaga the most effective single cause marketer ever given that she’s only been in the public eye for about three years. How did I miss this amazing cause marketing story? In fact, the truth is a little ‘more nuanced,’ as the politicians like to say, even if Gaga may really turn out to be among the greatest cause marketers ever. John Demsey, group president of The Estee Lauder Companies, which has owned MAC since 1997 and who chairs the MAC AIDS campaign, introduced some reality in an interview with the Wall Street Journal recorded February 18, 2011. The MAC AIDS Fund raises money for p...

The September 27, 2007 Forbes magazine listed the value of the world’s top sponsored sports events, by the amount of money they generate per day. They are: Super Bowl… $336 million Summer Olympics…$176 million Fifa World Cup…$103 million NCAA Men’s Final Four…$90 million Winter Olympics…$82 million Rose Bowl…$72 million MLB World Series…$61 million Kentucky Derby…$59 million 9. NBA Finals…$58 million I notice that your nonprofit isn’t on the list. Indeed, no nonprofit is. There’s two reasons for that. Forbes compiled a list of the top sports event sponsorships. I’ll get to the second reason in a second. But cause marketing is… in the main… just a form of sponsorship. Why isn’t your cause making a $336 million per day like the Super Bowl? Think of all the advantages your cause enjoys. It has tremendous heart. It has a list of supporters who literally open their wallets for you several times a year. Some of your supporters are as passionate about your cause as any face-painting fan of...

There he is at your fancy gala; rich, successful, and bored out of his mind. He’s got an MBA from an Ivy League school, an undergrad in economics and a wife… who studied art history… and who drags him kicking and screaming to your events. He’s worth a mint, but the most you may ever get from him is the price of the gala’s tickets. Is it even possible to get this Philistine to change his mind about your cause? The answer has as much to do with how people learn and what kind of ideas they are exposed to as it does how much money they have to give. (Read more about the learning side of this equation on my blog on informal learning called The Learner's Guild .) A yet-to-be published study by Professor Raymond Fisman from Columbia Business School… along with Shachar Kariv of UC Berkeley and Daniel Markovitz of the Yale Law School… suggests that even mature students can change their minds when presented with powerful ideas. In this study Fisman and his co-authors Shachar Kariv and D...

Early this month Forbes ran a guest column by Columbia Business School Professor Raymond Fisman that is strangely relatable to both cause-related marketing and informal learning, the topics of my two blogs. The Forbes headline describes it beautifully; “You Are What You Learn.” I’ve posted on what Fisman’s findings mean to informal learners on my blog on informal learning called The Learner’s Guild . Tomorrow in this space I’ll post on what Fisman’s study might mean to fundraisers and to those of us who practice cause-related marketing. So why the brain in the box on the left? Fisman’s study supports two seemingly diametrically-opposed conclusions. The first is that your training determines who you are. The second is that you can change all that. Stay tuned...

An open letter to my friends in the nonprofit world. Dear Nonprofit Cause Marketer: The September 27 Forbes listed the value of the world’s top sponsored sports events, by the amount of money they generate per day. They are: 1. Super Bowl… $336 million 2. Summer Olympics…$176 million 3. Fifa World Cup…$103 million 4. NCAA Men’s Final Four…$90 million 5. Winter Olympics…$82 million 6. Rose Bowl…$72 million 7. MLB World Series…$61 million 8. Kentucky Derby…$59 million 9. NBA Finals…$58 million I notice that your nonprofit isn’t on the list. Indeed, no nonprofit is. There’s two reasons for that. Forbes compiled a list of the top sports event sponsorships. I’ll get to the second reason in a second. But cause-related marketing is… in the main… just a form of sponsorship. Why isn’t your cause making a $103 million per day like the World Cup? Think of all the advantages you enjoy. You have tremendous heart. You have a list of supporters who literally open their wallets for you several times ...

Higher Cause Marketing Let’s try a thought experiment. Suppose you’re a dominant retail player in a fast-growing $30 billion segment . Suppose your founder and CEO was number 242 on the Forbes list of richest Americans, with an estimated net worth of some $1.5 billion. Suppose you had 386 outlets in 30 heartland states . Suppose your sales are expected to come in around $1.8 billion in 2007. Suppose you have your own in-house ad agency and a history of advertising both weekly specials along with holiday time image campaigns. Now suppose your company is avowedly Christian and everybody knows it. Do you/should you do Christian-themed cause-related marketing? If yes, who would your partners be? This thought was sparked by the ad above run on Easter Sunday by Hobby Lobby, the privately-held retailer founded and owned by David Green, age 64. Since confession is good for the soul, let me confess that I’ve never been in a Hobby Lobby store and I don’t know if they do any cause marketing or ...

Huzzahs to Rotary and Kiwanis, the Un-Red While everyone else is fawning over the new Red campaign, your humble servant is reviewing a very local campaign that gathers coats and winter items for the less fortunate here at home. But wait, you’re saying, isn’t this out of character? Aren’t you the one who said that for cause-related marketing campaigns “sponsorship is about eyeballs, [but] the sisters of the orphans and all their charity cousins think it's about tears. When it comes to cause-related marketing, they're only half right.”? Yes I did. And yes I still believe that. But I want to demonstrate that the principles of good cause-related marketing can scale up… as in the global Red campaign… as well as they scale down. This ad, which appeared in the local newspaper on Sunday, November 12, 2006 wrapping the comics page is for Les Schwab , which sells tires. Les Schwab, headquartered in Prineville, Oregon has about 400 outlets in seven western US states. Their prices are com...