Cause Marketing

As of yesterday we are 1/3 of our way through National Breast Cancer Awareness Month 2012 and conspicuous by its absence is the one thing that separates cause marketing from every other kind of tactical marketing, namely genuine emotion. Too few cause marketers get this right during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. That is, they use the symbols of the month…pink and pink ribbons… as a short hand for the real emotion that surrounds the diagnosis. It’s a simple semiotics problem, in fact. Semiotics, says Merriam-Webster, is “a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals especially with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages and comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics.” Here’s an example using an English cliché from the American idiom: dumb cause marketing is ‘easier than falling off a log.’ The noun ‘log’ is not actually a log. It’s not even a facsimile of a log like a photograph of a log would be. Instead, it’s an abstract...

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...