Cause Marketing

One of the infuriating things about the pink ribbon, emblematic of the fight against breast cancer, is that no one owns it in the United States. Consequently you get really silly things like pink sex toys and pink-labeled watermelon and pick pocketknives and more insidious stuff like these collectible ornaments that were advertised in Sunday's Courier Journal newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky that are a clear and unambiguous case of pinkwashing. Shouldn’t we just get rid of the mess and the chaos and just assign ownership of the pink ribbon to one charity and be done with it, much the way the trademark to the pink ribbon in Canada is owned by the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation? In a word, no. Here’s why: It’s very clear to me that the pink ribbon brand is much bigger because no one entity owns it than it would be if one entity did. Consider the case of the Android operating system which is in more smart phones than Apple’s OS or RIM’s OS, mostly because Google gives licenses aw...

Holy crap, what was Groupon thinking?! The upstart online marketer airs an ad that starts out looking like an homage to the people and culture of Tibet and it turns out to be actor Timothy Hutton looking smarmy and paying half price at a Chicago Tibetan restaurant thanks to Groupon. (Groupon produced a second ad with a save the whales theme and featuring Cuba Gooding Jr. It was no better.) Groupon’s Tibet ad somehow managed to be tasteless, inane, and insulting at the same time. The airtime alone costs $3 million in the high-stakes world of Super Bowl advertising. But that’s the smallest cost to Groupon. Instead the private company just erased millions of dollars in brand equity in one 30-second ad. This was faux cause marketing at its most reckless. When Groupon turned down Google’s reported $5 billion buyout offer, many scratched their heads. When the company, which is making money hand over fist, decided to run a Super Bowl ad some analysts chalked it up to tech-company sock-puppet...

The Reputation Institute and the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship recently released their list of the top 50 companies in the United States in terms of corporate social responsibility. In the survey of public opinion, the top ten were: Google Campbell Soup Johnson & Johnson Walt Disney Kraft Foods General Mills Levi Strauss UPS Berkshire Hathaway Microsoft I took the list and ranked the 50 according to the amount of cause marketing that I’m aware of from each company. 0 meant that I had never seen any cause marketing from them. 1 meant I’m aware of cause marketing promotions about once a year. 2 meant I’m aware of perhaps two cause marketing promotions a year. 3 meant I’m aware of perhaps monthly cause marketing promotions in a year. 4 meant I’m aware of the company’s cause marketing as often as once a week 5 meant I'm aware of cause marketing from the company on a daily basis. Of the 50 companies, the only one I was unaware of was Express Scripts, a pharmacy s...

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 ...