Cause Marketing

It’s probably fair to say that more cause marketing campaigns are activated by social media and public relations than by advertising. You my readers are a sophisticated audience so there’s no need to detail the differences between advertising, public relations and social media. Suffice it to say that while PR has greater credibility, it’s challenging to get the frequency using PR alone that you can get with advertising. Advertising offers frequency and repeatability, but it can be expensive and it’s less credible than PR. Social media can have both frequency and credibility; Kony 2012 , for instance. But I think we can agree that Kony is the rarest sort of exception. So how do you activate your cause marketing story using social media and PR? One answer is that the story you tell the media has a boy and a puppy like the story that appeared in People magazine last year about then 7-year-old Evan Moss. Young Evan wrote a picture book called “My Seizure Dog” about an epilepsy-detecting...

Should breast cancer awareness ever be more about the breast than it is the cancer? I wonder when I see ads like the one at the left by Estee Lauder. Over the last few years there’s been a general sexualizing of the disease that troubles me. Don’t get me wrong. Part of the early genius of Susan G. Komen for the Cure and her sister breast cancer charities was the recognition that breast cancer was different for women than, say, lung cancer, even if a cancer in the breast might be only a few centimeters away from a cancer in the lung. One reason why Komen et al acquired so much momentum is because there’s a personalness to breast cancer that also touches things like feminine sexuality. Survivors fight more than just the disease. Even as a clueless man I get that. Breast cancer affects a women’s sense of self in ways that other diseases, say, heart disease—which kills twice as many women in the United States as breast cancer—do not. But I don’t think the cause is well-served by ads like t...

It’s probably fair to say that more cause marketing campaigns are activated by public relations than by advertising. You my readers are a sophisticated audience so there’s no need to detail the differences between advertising and public relations. Suffice it to say that while PR has greater credibility, it’s challenging to get the frequency using PR alone that you can get with advertising. Advertising offers frequency and repeatability, but it can be expensive and it’s less credible than PR. So how do you activate your cause marketing story using public relations? One answer is that the story you tell the media have a boy and a puppy, like the story above in People magazine about 7-year-old Evan Moss who wrote a picture book called “My Seizure Dog” about an epilepsy-detecting dog that he wished his family could afford. In the book Evan imagined he and his seizure dog in various settings, including going to outer space together. The book… sold at a local café and on Amazon …...