Cause Marketing

Trey Watson owns a fruit tree nursery in East Texas called Legg Creek Farm and so naturally when he decided to do some cause marketing he choose congenital heart defects. During the week of Feb 7-14, 2013 Legg Creek donated 10 percent of gross sales to several congenital heart defects causes. Wait a minute, you say, a fruit tree nursery and congenital heart defects? How does that track? In general, research shows that customers prefer to be able to easily understand the relationship between the cause and the sponsor. But certainly that isn’t always the case. Target, the big retailer, doesn’t have an obvious connection to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Kohl’s doesn’t sell only to children, so why is their cause called Kohl’s Cares for Kids? IKEA is an international retailer, but that only addresses half the reason for their support of the UNHCR, the United Nation’s relief agency. All these retailers can break the usual rule because either they support what I call the “universa...

Last week I confessed my man-crush on Kohl’s and their remarkable cause marketing efforts using stuffed animals, books, CDs and toys: Since the year 2000, Kohl’s has generated $180 million for kids’ causes. But Kohl’s has more than 1100 stores in 49 states. Could Kohl’s approach scale down to a business with just 1-2 storefronts? My answer is an equivocation. Kohl’s has done deals with whoever owns the rights to Dr. Suess, among many other name-brand children’s book authors. A small operator like Dante’s Pizza, a real three-store chain in Dothan, Alabama that I Googled, wouldn’t be able to pull off that kind of deal. But the good news is that they probably wouldn’t have to do it exactly the way Kohl’s does. At the left is a flyer from big-box retailer IKEA, which has around 50 stores in the United States. Buy one of their toys during the promotional period and IKEA’s foundation will donate $1 to education programs from Save the Children and UNICEF. IKEA’s U.S. website says that in 201...