Cause Marketing

The year 2010 was a memorable year for cause marketing. What follows are, in my judgment, the 10 best cause marketing campaigns of the year. Please know that this list is hardly exhaustive. Thousands of cause marketing efforts take place each year. In 2010 I posted nearly 190 times and reviewed or highlighted more than 200 different cause marketing efforts. I probably Tweeted out that many more cause marketing campaigns on my Twitter account ( @paulrjones ) that I didn’t post on. Moreover, to add an extra twist, I frequently post on efforts found in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database, and are therefore from years other than 2010. I’ve listed the top ten in no special order, although I will say that I think the Subaru effort profiled at the bottom of this post is the best of the best. The numbers are just for ease of reference. During 2010 I also profiled an effort from HUGO Element/HUGO Man fragrances. It’s a buy one give one (BOGO) campaign and notable for the way it connects d...

Hollywood, California-based WeWOOD will plant a tree every time you purchase one of its wooden watches. The tree-planting will be undertaken by the nonprofit American Forests under the banner of its Global ReLeaf program. American Forests has been around since 1885 and represents a savvy choice by WeWOOD for a charity partner. I’ve noted before that in cases where the charity is better known than the sponsor, the sponsor benefits most from the relationship. WeWOOD watches are available in several styles and four different kinds of wood. The red-brown wood (as at left) is reclaimed from flooring material waste. All the watches are currently priced at $119 and available online. WeWOOD’s approach is a fresh take on BOGO, buy one, give one, that has taken cause marketing by storm, and reminiscent of Proctor & Gamble’s buy one plant effort for its men’s fragrance brand HUGO . WeWOOD could certainly borrow a page from the HUGO campaign and allow people to track where their tree is pla...

The grand-daddy of all buy one, give one (BOGO) cause marketing is TOMS Shoes , which I've profiled in the past. TOMS gives away a pair of its alpargatas-style shoes when your buy a pair. TOMS has never advertised heavily, but so great was the buzz that TOMS generated that its founder, Blake Mycoskie, was featured in TV ad on the left for AT&T. I've also profiled BOGO efforts from HUGO Fragrances , Pampers , LJ Urban which built a house in Burkina Faso when you bought one of their homes in Sacramento, a solar charger called Solio that provided a match for a soldier serving abroad when you bought another. On April 1, 2009, I even ran a post saying that India's Tata Motors was doing a BOGO for their $2,500 Nano car. It was an April Fool's Day joke that no one ever called me on. I now confess now that I made up the whole thing. These next BOGOs, however, are no joke. Buy a men’s tie, either a necktie or bowtie, from Figs and they’ll send a school uniform to a school...

In a world where much of the air stinks, HUGO fragrances wants to help. When you buy specially-marked packages of HUGO Element (on the left) or HUGO Man fragrances, HUGO will pay for the planting of one or more than a dozen species of trees in the Amazon rainforest. The campaign is meant to mitigate pollution in the earth’s atmosphere, rainforest deforestation, and rising CO2 levels. The campaign is in support of the Pur Project, a kind of collective led by social entrepreneur Tristan Lecomte. Pur members plant tree seeds, nurture them in nurseries, and transplant them to one of three plantations in tropical Peru or Bolivia. The labor required puts locals to work in both countries. The packages of HUGO Elements and Man are coded such that you can enter an access number and see exactly where your tree is planted on Google Maps! Cool! I like this campaign a lot. It makes good use of the ‘ buy one, give one ’ (BOGO) paradigm that is so compelling.The cause itself is solution-based. Th...