Cause Marketing

The other day I bought a paper icon at national chain store. The icon has a bar code and the clerk scanned it and handed me a receipt when the transaction was finished. At the bottom of the receipt was an 800-number keyed to a customer satisfaction survey. Dial the number, or call up the website on my mobile device, answer some questions and I’m entered into a drawing for $10,000. As I left I thought, ‘they know I just bought a paper icon. Instead of offering me the chance to win $10,000, why not offer to donate $2 (or more!) to the cause in question whenever someone completes their customer satisfaction survey?’ Why haven’t I ever seen this kind of cause marketing? Cause marketing is all about encouraging certain behaviors in exchange for helping a cause. Framed that way customer satisfaction surveys are a natural fit for cause marketing. My purchase of the paper icon clearly demonstrates that I have some affinity for the cause in question. I’m not a code monkey, but I doubt that it’s...

Consider this cause marketing hypothetical. You’ve made your best cause marketing pitch to a would-be sponsor. It’s smart, strategically appropriate, and well activated across new media and old. You’re certain your prospect’s customers will get it and respond. But then a week goes by without hearing back from the prospect. So on day eight you call, but don’t press very hard. The prospect apologizes all over herself. Everybody back at corporate loves the proposal, she says. Trouble is, unbeknownst to the marketing staff, the CEO had promised a campaign to another cause. The marketing department doesn’t think they can or should do both this year. So sorry. Maybe next time. While you could play off of their guilt and press for a donation from the company foundation, instead you decide to offer a counter proposal. How about if all the company does is ask their customers for a straight ahead donation? I don’t know whether or not this is what happened with this effort from big box sports ret...

Since cause marketing usually faces the consumer, retailers are under pressure to engage in cause marketing campaigns for causes large and small. Necessarily this means that retailers say no to more cause partnerships than they say yes to. This is as it should be. There are a million or so 501(c)(3) nonprofit charities in the United States and only a thin slice of them are good matches for retail sponsors. That said, there are certainly many instances when a retailer could be well-matched with more than one cause. Indeed, some grocers do paper icon campaigns for MDA , Children’s Miracle Network , Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and others, albeit separated by several months. Witness this circular from Lowe’s that came to me yesterday. On the front page one of the on-sale items is an 18-piece tool kit, in pink because it benefit's Lowe's campaign for Habitat for Humanity, called ' Women Build .' Appropriately, Lowe’s supports Habitat for Humanity philanthropically...

The other day I bought a paper icon at a chain drugstore. The icon has a bar code and the clerk scanned it and handed me a receipt as we finished the transaction. At the bottom of the receipt was an 800-number keyed to a customer satisfaction survey. Dial the number, answer some questions and I’m entered into a drawing for $10,000. I don’t know what their response rate is, but the $10,000 amount suggests that it’s pretty low. Taco Bell’s survey gives out $1,000 per week. The satisfaction survey at a regional seafood restaurant gives me a code that garners a free dessert when I complete their survey. Finish Home Depot’s survey and you’re entered to win a $5,000 gift card good at the retailer. As I left the store I thought, ‘they know I just bought a paper icon. Instead of offering me and other people who buy the icon the chance to win $10,000, why wouldn’t they offer to donate $2 (or more!) to the cause in question whenever someone completes the survey?’ Why haven’t I ever seen this kin...

Back in August I bought this cause-marketed Snickers bar during my fourth trip of the day to Home Depot. (Is it even possible to do home repairs and take care of all your needs with just one trip to Home Depot / Lowes ?) Here’s how it works: Snickers is donating the cost of 2.5 million meals to Feeding America, the nation’s leading hunger-relief charity. On the inside of the wrapper is a code. Text that code to 45495… or enter it at snickers.com… and Snickers will donate the cost of one meal to Feeding America, up to one million additional meals. The Feeding America website says that each dollar you donate provides seven meals. So Snickers donation might be something like $500,000. But I like that Snickers quantified its donations in terms of meals made available, rather than dollars. That’s much more concrete. It doesn’t hurt that 3.5 million is a much bigger number than $500,000. I also like the way they structured the donation. By guaranteeing 2.5 million meals, the risk of a poor...

Remember your marketing class in college when the professor would show examples of consumer packaged goods that would tout ‘all new packaging!’ as though it were a genuine benefit? Well, over the last week or so the cause marketing blog has gone through a number of changes, courtesy of Charissa Wilson at Triple Latte Design . And while the colors are all-new, I think the improvements to the blog are more than skin-deep. First off, the blog is in a three-column design, which I think is easier on the eyes. Alden Keene’s definition of cause marketing is right up in the masthead, where you also see a bridge; a graphical representation of cause marketing. In the second column my contact information is front and center and we’ve added a RSS feed that finds and displays news and information with keywords like ‘cause marketing, ‘corporate social responsibility’ and ‘cause related marketing.’ At the top of the third column, on the far right side, is a feed of images of cause marketing c...

In the last few months The Home Depot , has made a giant right turn in its charitable endeavors and landed in bed with Habitat for Humanity in a five-year, $30 million sponsorship deal , a little more than a year after CEO Frank Blake got his job. It’s a familiar place for Blake, whose wife, Mrs. Liz Blake is a Senior Vice President at Habitat for Humanity . Mr. and Mrs. Blake told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that they recused themselves in the negotiations between the two parties. I’m sure they did. And to be completely accurate, the relationship is actually between The Home Depot Foundation, which is a 501(c)(3), and Habitat for Humanity. Moreover Mr. Blake doesn’t hold a position on the Foundation’s 10-member board which consists entirely of Home Depot employees; I counted one executive vice president, three senior vice presidents, and six lesser lights. But to be frank, a CEO doesn’t need to have a vote to influence how the vote turns out on a board where everyone, in effect,...

Cause-Marketing with a Hispanic Flavor In Thursday’s posting we raised the question posed by Gabriel Q., who works for a notable California multi-cultural consultancy: what about cause marketing to multi-cultural audiences? Gabriel was specifically interested in cause-related marketing and Hispanic-Latino audiences. Of course marketing to multi-cultural audiences can be damnably difficult because…just to take up just Hispanics-Latinos…Spanish speakers in the United States may come from dozens of countries. While Spanish itself is a lingua franca, there are hundreds of accents, and thousands of culturally-specific word meanings. Considering the 1951-mile-long border between Mexico and the United States, Mexican Spanish predominates, especially in the American Southwest. But there are also 3.3 million people born in the Caribbean and 2.1 million people born in South America now living in the United States, according to 2003 survey from the U.S. Census Bureau. The 2000 U.S. Census identif...

Soldiering Through the First Quarter Blues It’s the day after Christmas in the States and the malls and stores are full again, this time with people returning gifts, but also people spending the gift cards they got yesterday. Gift cards, or stored value cards, are a growing Christmas gift trend in North America. Before the holiday, the National Retail Foundation projected gift card sales would balloon to $24.81 billion in 2006, a $6 billion increase over 2005’s $18.48 billion. Consumers like gift cards because they maximize their choices. Retailers love them because “ Unused Gift Cards Give Retailers $8 Billion Boon ,” to quote a recent headline from the E-Commerce Times. That is, one-third of the value on those gift cards is never redeemed and falls to the retailers' bottom line. Nice, eh? So it’s something of a curiosity that Home Depot ran this cause-related marketing ad in a flyer that came with the local newspaper on Saturday, December 24. Here’s the offer. Use a Home Depot gi...