Cause Marketing

If you’re a NASCAR fan imagine racing against other skilled fans in full pro-race conditions at Daytona. Or imagine a little 11 on 11 action against other amateurs playing “the beautiful game” in between periods at the finals of the World Cup. Nature Valley Granola Bars sponsors something very like that for amateur golfers in the United States called the Nature Valley Amateur . Meet the requirements, sign up, pay your fee (it’s never more than a couple hundred dollars) and you get to play against other amateur golfers on TPC courses across the country. The ad at the left is from Golf Digest in 2009, but the series is planned again for 2011. At the end of the Nature Valley Amateur series, a championship is held at the famed TPC Sawgrass in Florida, headquarters of the PGA! TPC means Tournament Players Club, a chain of golf clubs operated by the PGA and optimized for professional tournaments. Pretty cool, right? If you’re a competitive amateur golfer what a thrill it would be “step insid...

In the past year I’ve profiled what I call ‘faux cause marketing.’ It’s marketing that looks or sounds like cause marketing, but in fact no cause benefits from it. At left is a small ad that ran in the back of Golf Digest magazine in October 2009, Breast Cancer Awareness Month. There’s the familiar pink ribbon, emblematic of breast cancer causes. But look closely and you’ll see that the company makes no claims about any charity benefiting from the sale of pink ribbon golf club covers. Although I found the same clubheads on the company’s website, I couldn’t find any evidence of support for breast cancer causes. If indeed the company sells the pink ribbon clubhead covers without any remuneration to breast cancer charities then the ad is unethical in my book and I pronounce a pox on their business. A kind of faux cause marketing with a sense of humor can be seen from AirTran , the discount airline. Both the two-color ads on the left, which ran in the same issue of Sports Illustrated ...