Cause Marketing

Kroger’s Giving Hope a Hand campaign, an anti-breast cancer effort is gaining momentum for much the same reasons that General Mills’ Boxtops for Education and Campbell’s Labels for Education have; it’s opened up the effort to other brands. That is, Giving Hope a Hand… like Campbell’s Labels for Education and General Mills Boxtops for Education… has made the leap from its exclusive relationship with Kroger to including the participation of other brands, including Dannon’s Activa brand of yogurt, Freschetta pizza, Kraft cheese, Pepsi, Purina, Windex, and Ziploc, among others. (Parenthetically, it’s interesting to note that other Dannon brands participate in Labels for Education. Ziploc also participates in Boxtops for Education! Kraft, of course, also does a prominent cause marketing effort on behalf of Feeding America). At the left are the front and back panels of a box of Keebler’s Town House crackers that I saw in December 2011, but which certainly predated that time period. The Keeb...

In my wallet are cards and keyfobs for a half-dozen loyalty programs from the sophisticated, like SkyMiles and Marriott Rewards and a couple grocery chains to several no-tech buy 10 get one free punch cards from a bakery and a couple of restaurants. Your wallet or handbag probably holds a similar variety of rewards cards. But is there a potential match between loyalty programs and cause marketing? Marketing superstar Coke, which runs the gigantic MyCokeRewards.com rewards program, has placed its bet. Now to be clear, label redemption efforts from Campbell’s, the Boxtops for Education campaign from General Mills and others are both loyalty and cause marketing programs. But MyCokeRewards was founded as an effort to reward Coke purchasers, not their favored causes. At the left is an ad that ran in the 15 August, 2011 issue of People magazine. Register your school at mycokerewards.com/sprite and it could receive a $25,000 grant to become a ‘Sprite Spark Park.’ Formatted as a ...

If you’re the kind of person who wishes that every day could be like the first day of spring or that Christmas music would play all year long then has Lee, the apparel maker, got a cause marketing campaign for you. The ad at the left was in the April 2011 issue of women’s magazine Redbook. The next Lee National Denim Day is Friday, October 7, 2011, a full six months from tomorrow. Lee runs these ads…heck, it runs this very ad… about six months out of the year in women's and other magazines. Lee National Denim Day is a fine and well-promoted cause marketing campaign that dates to 1996. In the years since the campaign has generated more than $83 million for breast cancer research. You could hardly do better than to learn the lessons this smart campaign can teach. But to repeat the question in the headline, is it smart to plug a one-day effort year round? There’s actually not many campaigns that run 12 months a year, with Campbell’s Labels for Education, General Mills’ Boxtops for Ed...

Like the look and feel of a webpage? Well copyright laws notwithstanding, nothing could be easier to steal. Open the webpage’s source code and there it all is. From a distance it looks like Dannon Yogurt’s newish label campaign benefiting the National Breast Cancer Foundation opened the source code to Yoplait’s longstanding effort for Susan G. Komen for the Cure and just copied and pasted. Both benefit breast cancer charities. The donation amount… $0.10 is the same. The pink ribbons on each are similar, as are the labels in question. The only real difference is that Dannon is redeemed via an online method and Yoplait requires you to mail the labels to a physical address. It seems like a defensive measure on Dannon’s part. In one fell swoop, Dannon made Yoplait’s cause marketing effort slightly generic. Of course, that’s a two-edged sword because it made Dannon’s yogurt cause marketing slightly generic, too. To continue the source code metaphor, there are webpage designers who take sour...

For more than three decades Campbell’s admirable Labels for Education has helped the soup maker maintain pricing power, fend off competitors and kept soup and the company’s other consumer package goods relevant for kids. The result is that Campbell’s is a veritable fortress, especially in condensed soups, but also in ready-to-eat soups. One of Campbell’s few competitors of consequence is Progresso, which specializes in ready-to-eat soup and so-called 'meal replacement.' Progresso was privately held but has long been owned by General Mills. General Mills, of course, has its own label cause marketing program benefiting schools called Boxtops for Education . Boxtops for Education is younger, but no less admirable than Labels for Education and the benefits accrue in cold, hard cash, rather than in goods, which is how Labels for Education works. Boxtops is now the bigger campaign in part because they allow brands other than General Mills participate. But I note that the Labels for...

Following General Mills’ lead , Campbell’s Labels for Education is rebranding so as to be more appealing to would-be partners. “The logo was very heavily Campbell-branded,” Mike Salzberg, president, Campbell Sales, told Brandweek. “We’ve never gone outside as far as sharing it or getting partners. But now we believe there is an opportunity for partnerships, starting with the one we formed with the Grammy Foundation.” (The logo on the left is the old one. When I get the new one I'll share it). With this new ‘open source cause marketing’ approach Campbell is doubling down in the bad economy. “In a troubled economy, being able to collect and win any free stuff in places where they’re taking things away [works],” says Salzberg. Now in its 36th year, Labels for Education has generated more than $110 million in goods and supplies for the nation’s schools. About 75 percent of the nation’s schools participate in Labels for Education. Campbell’s renewed effort underscores something I’ve wri...

In today’s rocky economy it may be small businesses that have may have the most to gain from integrating cause marketing into their marketing efforts. For purposes of definition, cause marketing is a relationship that bridges commerce and cause in a way that benefits both parties.   Cause marketing has been shown to improve sales, brand and increase customer loyalty. It can help a company stand out from competitors and improve employee recruiting and retention. And it does several and sometimes all these things while helping a cause. Cause marketing is like red wine. It feels good and it’s good for you. Here then are ‘7 Tips to Turbocharge Your Small Business Marketing With Cause Marketing.’ Pick an appropriate cause. Consider not only a cause’s appeal, but its capacity to support your effort. It may be that the best cause marketing fit for your small business may be a small charity. Weigh the option of weaving cause marketing into your overall business strategy. General Mills’...

Today’s post features a collection of all kinds of news relating to cause marketing, corporate giving and charitable donations. With my comments in italics. Stationary for the Troops For every $50 spent at FineStationary.com through the end of the year they will donate stationary, note cards and writing papers to members of the armed forces deployed overseas via Operation Gratitude . Hey, I appreciate businesses do what they can. But $50 is a pretty high threshold to trigger what amounts to an in-kind gift. Corporate Giving up in 2007 The Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy in New York released the results of a survey that found that corporations increased their giving in 2007 over the year prior when measured as median amount and when measured as a percentage of pre-tax profits. 2007 was a year of mixed economic news. Maybe this bodes well for 2008-9. A Holiday Card that Gives Network for Good offers a ‘ Good Card ’ this holiday season meant to serve as a client gift. You l...

On October 1, 2008 Cone Inc. , in conjunction with the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, released the best validated proof yet that cause-related marketing gives certain products a sales lift. The study had two parts. In the first, 182 individuals aged 18-62 and broadly representative of the American consumer reviewed the contents of a new regional magazine. Each were randomly assigned to either a ‘cause’ group or a control group. The cause group saw cause-related marketing advertisements for four products: shampoo; toothpaste; chips; and lightbulbs. The control group did not see the CRM ads. Then the study participants were ushered into a convenience store setting with approximately 150 SKUS. Some of products had a shelf tag that said something like, ‘great value.’ Others said, “proud supporter of…” Study participants were given real money to shop with and were allowed to take home both the products they bought and any leftover money. While all four products saw a sales lif...

Nestle Waters North America has a label campaign out called GoLife that benefits schools by providing sports equipment and school trips. But there’s an elephant in the classroom. If label campaign benefiting schools sounds like familiar ground, you’re right. Campbell’s has been doing one for more than 30 years, and General Mills has been doing their Boxtops for Education campaign for 12 years. General Mills is the larger of the two in no small part because schools can redeem the Boxtops for cash rather than merchandise. Schools and PTAs/PTOs encourage parents to collect boxtops/labels and assign someone to manage all the collecting, counting and redeeming. In my kids’ school one of the secretaries has this assignment and there are two large barrels in the school office, one for Labels and one for Boxtops. Before the Internet this was a whole lot more work than it is now. But even still there’s probably not too many school secretaries or PTA/PTO label coordinators who relish this par...

Less doesn’t always mean less. Sometimes in life there’s an inverse relationship between resources and creativity. For instance, Einstein didn’t need the Large Hadron Collider to figure out relativity. Then again, sometimes less is less. And that’s certainly true of this promotion from Henkel. This doubletruck FSI page from August 10, 2008 is more a promotion than a cause-related marketing campaign. But there is a cause element. The page features pictures of kids heading back to school and promises that some lucky school is going to win $25,000. School cause-related marketing in the United States is a well-trod path. Both Campbell’s and General Mills do it to great effect. Henkel could do a whole lot worse than emulate either one. The promotion is not tied to sales of any of Henkel’s products. Rather it’s contest driven. You point your Internet browser to henkelhelps.com and write a 200-500 word essay on what your school could do with that lone prize. For one school $25,000 is a me...

At Alden Keene we use a handy-dandy chart we call “The Five Flavors of Cause-Related Marketing” that helps us build cause-related marketing campaigns for our clients. That’s the same chart I send you when you sign up for the Cause-Related Marketing GoogleGroup. Until now, I’ve never published it on the blog. But the time seems ripe to share a version of it with all my readers. The chart we use is in graphic form and has more information. But what follows is substantially the same. I need to give props to Professors Michael Jay Polansky and Richard Speed of the University of Newcastle and University of Melbourne respectively in Australia, who published it in their paper called “Linking Sponsorship and Cause-Related Marketing.” Without further ado, The Five Flavors of Cause-Related Marketing: Broad-Based. A large campaign, perhaps one the runs year-round, and generally has no limits on the donation that might be made. Example: the General Mills Box Tops for Education effort. Limited. ...

Four studies have come out this year that aim to measure either directly or obliquely consumer’s attitudes towards cause-related marketing. All the studies have confidence levels of 95 percent or more. And yet two of them suggest that consumers have jaundiced opinions of cause-related marketing and two find that they’re quite positive on the practice. How could that be? The four studies are: “Rethinking Corporate Responsibility” from the PR firm Fleishman-Hillard and the National Consumers League, and conducted by Western Wats. “Consumer Survey: Media Use, Holiday Trends, Cause-Marketing” commissioned by the American Marketing Association , and conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation. “2007 Cone Cause Evolution Survey” from Cone, LLC, an advertising agency, and also conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation. The most recent is from Edelman, also a PR firm, in support of the launch of its new consultancy Good Purpose, and called the Goodpurpose Consumer Study. All the studies...

Back in August I wrote about something I termed ‘ open source cause-related marketing .’ In it I described how “in effect General Mills had opened up the ‘source code’ to non-competing brands” to its well-executed Boxtops for Education campaign. With Breast Cancer Awareness Month in full flower in the United States, it’s apparent that there’s a second kind of open source cause marketing going on… ‘open-source charity icons.’ I’ve written skeptically about charities using colored ribbons ; some colors of ribbon are somehow meant to represent five or more different causes. But the ne plus ultra of colored ribbons in the U.S. is the pink ribbon, which signifies breast cancer awareness. That kind of brand awareness is enormously valuable. And yet a cursory glance at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office suggests that no one has registered pink ribbons. Oh, Susan G. Komen has trademarked the terms ‘pink ribbon regatta,’ ‘pink ribbon golf tourney,’ and ‘pink ribbon celebration.’ And the Nati...

I had dinner with some self-described geeks the other night, two of whom are planning a local business conference on the business benefits of blogging. They’ve already lined up speakers and sponsors and are finalizing the arrangements for details like the room and the flyer and other promotional vehicles. In short, there’s still time to add a cause-related marketing ‘overlay’ to the event. Here then is an open letter to Jason Alba (Jessica’s cousin!) and Matthew Reinhold (who may be, for all I know, Judge Reinhold's cousin). Hi Guys: Thanks for the chance to jaw with you at geek dinner Thursday night. I felt like I got more than I contributed. But my specialty…cause-related marketing… is slightly esoteric even though it represents about 10 percent of the $13 billion sponsorship market. What is cause-related marketing? Just imagine the lid on a cup of Yoplait yogurt or the box top on a product from General Mills. When you clip that box top and send it in, a dime goes to local school...

Excuse me while I coin a phrase; “open source cause-related marketing.” In effect General Mills has turned its Box Tops for Education campaign into an open source cause marketing campaign. I realized this as I walked into Sam’s Club the other day and was handed the handbill above. On the front it details a small promotion for earning bonus Box Tops. On the backside it lists 33 items available in Sam’s Club that participate in Boxtops for Education. But here’s the kicker, they’re not all General Mills products. As I noted in my April 3, 2007 posting, General Mills opened up Box Tops to other non-competing brands in 2006. What wasn’t apparent to me then was the degree to which General Mills has pulled its own branding from the Box Tops campaign. Notice that General Mills name and logo are conspicuously absent from the Box Tops logo. If you go to the Box Tops for Education website you’ll find General Mills in the fact sheet. But otherwise its presence is largely confined to a small copyri...

Wind-Powered Cause Marketing As I write this, I don’t know exactly where the electricity that powers my computer comes from. I live in Utah and a good deal of electrical power is generated from locally-mined coal. So it could have come from a relatively dirty source like that. I’m about five miles away from a canyon stream where there’s been a small hydroelectric plant for more than 80 years. Environmentally-speaking, that’s quite clean. Moreover, this part of the American West is dotted with super-sized hydroelectric plants. So it could have come from one of those sources, too. Or maybe a nuclear or solar power plant. Illustrated above is an interesting cause-related marketing and sweepstakes campaign from Silk , the soymilk which is positioned against its competition in two main ways. The first is that it’s kept in the refrigerator case near the dairy milk and thereby tastes more like cow’s milk. Soymilk doesn't have to be refrigerated. Silk, in fact has a line of soymilk that i...

Fortunes at the Bottom of the Pyramid The four campaigns we talked about in Thursday’s post are all classic examples of ‘the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’ thinking. The book of the same name by University of Michigan scholar C.K. Prahalad , lays out how technology… and new ways of thinking about customers… can enable companies to deliver products and services of value to the four billion people across the globe who live on less than $2 a day. In a similar way, these four single-element campaigns raise big money, not by asking for large donations, but by asking for small ones. The US Postal Service Breast Cancer Semipostal Stamp generates just six pennies at a pop! The BoxTops for Education campaign from General Mills just 10 cents. Needless to say, this flies in the face of conventional wisdom in fundraising which goes something like this: ‘it’s just as much work to ask for a modest donation as a big one, so you might as well ask for a big one.’ In other words, focus on the to...

There are a handful of big ‘single-element' cause-related marketing campaigns that have been around for decades, and in their longevity they hold lessons for cause marketers everywhere. Today I'll review four of the very best. In my next post I’ll discuss what we can learn from them. First some caveats. I'm going to list four campaigns not because there are only four, but because any more than that would make these posts unwieldy. Three-forths of them are North American because frankly, I'm most familiar with them. If you have examples from somewhere else that should be on this list, by all means leave a comment or email me at aldenkeeneatgmaildotcom. I'd love to feature campaigns from other places. Here's how I determined my list. I looked at large-scale campaigns that have been around for at least 10 years, have broad appeal and have raised at least $50 million over their term. I eliminated all the walks, runs, bike-a-thons, etc. Although those kinds of campai...