Cause Marketing

Fortune magazine just published its annual “ 100 Best Companies to Work for ” list and I wondered, how many of these companies are also known for their cause marketing? Regular readers know that I have found a strong correlation between the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship 2011 CSR Index and whether or not the company was active in cause marketing. By my reckoning six of the BCCCC CSR List made the top ten and 33 of the 50 companies listed did at least some cause marketing. Fortune’s ‘100 Best’ list is a little trickier when it comes to cause marketing. Cause marketing almost always faces the consumer, but a good number of companies on Fortune’s list are B2B. There’s several law firms for instance, and multiple energy companies and construction firms. Moreover, Fortune’s list includes a number of companies that are either regional in their focus or otherwise unfamiliar to me. Which is another way of saying that they may be cause marketers and I just don’t know about it....

If you’re the kind of person who wishes that every day could be like the first day of spring or that Christmas music would play all year long then has Lee, the apparel maker, got a cause marketing campaign for you. The ad at the left was in the April 2011 issue of women’s magazine Redbook. The next Lee National Denim Day is Friday, October 7, 2011, a full six months from tomorrow. Lee runs these ads…heck, it runs this very ad… about six months out of the year in women's and other magazines. Lee National Denim Day is a fine and well-promoted cause marketing campaign that dates to 1996. In the years since the campaign has generated more than $83 million for breast cancer research. You could hardly do better than to learn the lessons this smart campaign can teach. But to repeat the question in the headline, is it smart to plug a one-day effort year round? There’s actually not many campaigns that run 12 months a year, with Campbell’s Labels for Education, General Mills’ Boxtops for Ed...

Back in the 1980s, at the behest of Jerry Welsh, American Express trademarked the term ‘Cause-Related Marketing.’ Welsh, who was then executive vice president worldwide marketing and communications at Amex, coined the term ‘cause-related marketing’ to describe the legendary campaign to fund the restoration of the Statue of Liberty in 1983. In a Feb. 2009 interview with Welsh, he told me that the wording of this new term was purposeful. “I believe in the deliberate use of language, so I was careful in crafting the term ‘Cause-Related Marketing.’ CRM is not philanthropy; it’s rather marketing through an artful association with a charitable cause. Otherwise, I would have called it something like ‘Marketing-Related Philanthropy.’” Despite Welsh’s fastidiousness with language, one of the wonders of the term cause marketing is that it’s flexible enough to permit efforts for causes that aren’t officially-sanctioned charities. In my hometown of Salt Lake City, there’s a cause marketing campai...

Jerry Welsh is the closest thing cause marketing has to a father. In 1983 after a number of regional cause-related marketing efforts, Welsh, who was then executive vice president of worldwide marketing and communications at American Express looked out his window in lower Manhattan at the Statue of Liberty. The Statue was then undergoing a major refurnishing, and in a flash Welsh determined to undertake the first modern national cause marketing campaign. I say modern because almost 100 years before in January 1885, the Statue of Liberty was sitting around in crates in New York warehouses because the organization building the pedestal ran out of money. And so Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the newspaper called The World , proposed a very grassroots solution reminiscent in its own way to Welsh’s cause-related marketing. Pulitzer ran an editorial promising he would print the name of everyone who donated even a penny. Sure enough pennies, along with dimes and nickels, quarters a...

It was my pleasure to interview via email Jeff Atlas, the lead creative behind the celebrated American Express campaign 26 years ago to restore to glory the Statue of Liberty. The campaign launched modern cause marketing. Jeff’s client, Jerry Welsh, who was executive vice president worldwide marketing and communications at American Express, even coined the term ‘cause-related marketing.’ Like a show that gets tested in regional theaters before going to Broadway, Amex tried out cause-related marketing first regionally before bringing it to New York and Lady Liberty. Atlas writes, “It started in small regional efforts to support the arts. ‘Eat for the Arts’ was one memorable line we used. Another directed people to American Express Travel offices. ‘If you love the Dallas ballet, go away.’ Then came an effort to help Mount Vernon [George Washington’s home], then the Statue of Liberty. The rest is marketing history.” The first thing I posed to Jeff wasn’t so much a question as a ...