Cause Marketing

A new e-tail website called Harrys.com launched last week with a BOGO cause marketing approach. Harry’s sells moderately-priced men’s shavers, giving the handles names and taking a boutique approach. If that sounds familiar it’s because Harrys.com was started by Warby Parker co-founder Jeffrey Raider. BOGO means Buy One, Give One. Harrys.com isn’t the first direct-to-consumer shaving company. Dollar Shave Company with its profane-a** commercials was into the space well before Harry's. And it’s easy to guess why; the business model is so classic, so bulletproof  it has its own name ! The razor blade business model is why Proctor and Gamble paid $57 billion for Gillette back in 2005. Of course, Procter and Gamble has tens of millions to spend on branding and advertising its razor products. No wonder Dollar Shave Company goes blue with its branding and advertising. How else to break through the clutter? Well, one way is with cause marketing and BOGO. “We are passionate about...

Tuesday’s post was about the increasing use of ‘free’ as a business model. No less a company than Google is built on ‘free.’ So are Craigslist and Facebook and Flickr. And free is coming on like a lion. AOL used to be primarily a subscription-based service. But every year their subscriber base shrinks. Nowadays, as a free portal, AOL.com is the fourth most-visited Web property. The mighty Wall Street Journal’s online version had a subscription model. But Rupert Murdoch, who recently purchased the Journal, announced that it will soon be largely free. It will no doubt grow as a result. As Chris Anderson writes in his cover story, “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business,” in the March 2008 Wired magazine : “People think demand is elastic and that volume falls in a straight line as price rises, but the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great market and none at all.” “The huge psychological gap between ...