Cause Marketing

A post on the website Just Means from Akhila Vijayaraghavan is critical of cause marketing and it made me wonder, should the impious ever be permitted to pray? Should teachers wait until their students know the alphabet before allowing them to speak? Should I, as a father, wait until I’m emotionally available to my kids before I listen to what they're telling me? Is Nobel Laureate Al Gore the only person who can legitimately donate to Greenpeace or the Sierra Club? And, while we're on the topic, could any company ever be morally upright enough to make donations to a good cause via cause marketing? Of Kellogg’s Share You Breakfast effort, Vijayaraghavan writes: “Some of the products that Kellogg (sic) has been promoting as part of its campaign includes Frosted Flakes and Nutri-Grain bars. However both products have been criticized for the high levels of sugar that they contain. Frosted Flakes mascoted by Tony the Tiger contains 11gms of sugar per three-fourths cup serving...

This week is 'National Breakfast Week,' sponsored in part, as we shall see, by Kellogg’s. Why should we care? Because “1 in 5 children live in homes where breakfast is hard to come by.” What should we do? “Share Your Breakfast” on Kellogg’s corporate site or their Facebook page by saying what you had for breakfast this morning. I had a yogurt and oatmeal, so I entered that into the appropriate box. I was then invited to share that via Facebook or an email that included the following message: Help kids in need get off to their best starts. Share what you had for breakfast and Kellogg's will help provide a breakfast for a child in need. What happens? Kellogg’s donates one school breakfast, up to one million meals, each time you 'Share Your Breakfast.' Basically, Kellogg’s writes a check for up to $200,000. Kellogg’s cause partner is Action for Healthy Kids , a consortium of 70 or so organizations like the Whole Grains Council, the American Academy of Pediatrics an...

Kroger’s Giving Hope a Hand campaign, an anti-breast cancer effort is gaining momentum for much the same reasons that General Mills’ Boxtops for Education and Campbell’s Labels for Education have; it’s opened up the effort to other brands. That is, Giving Hope a Hand… like Campbell’s Labels for Education and General Mills Boxtops for Education… has made the leap from its exclusive relationship with Kroger to including the participation of other brands, including Dannon’s Activa brand of yogurt, Freschetta pizza, Kraft cheese, Pepsi, Purina, Windex, and Ziploc, among others. (Parenthetically, it’s interesting to note that other Dannon brands participate in Labels for Education. Ziploc also participates in Boxtops for Education! Kraft, of course, also does a prominent cause marketing effort on behalf of Feeding America). At the left are the front and back panels of a box of Keebler’s Town House crackers that I saw in December 2011, but which certainly predated that time period. The Keeb...

Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship released its annual CSR Index the other day even as Occupy Wall Street and its satellite efforts continue their protests that are, in part, anti-corporate . The top 10 were : Publix Super Markets Google UPS Kellogg’s Amazon.com Berkshire Hathaway FedEx Campbell Soup Baxter International 3M By my count I’ve seen cause marketing from six of the top 10 and 33 of the full list of 50 companies. According to the BCCCC the index is based on a survey of “how the public perceives a company in three dimensions:” "Citizenship: Does the company contribute positively to its surrounding community in a socially and environmentally responsible fashion? "Governance: Is the company business run in a fair and transparent fashion? Do stakeholders associate the company with high ethical business standards? "Workplace: Are employees treated fairly and paid a decent wage? Does the company invest in developing employee skill sets and career opport...

Friday, April 22 is the 41st Earth Day in the United States, a day that was originally conceived as a kind of environmental ‘teach-in.’ But I think it’s fair to say that most Americans understood those first few Earth Days not as a ‘teach-in’ but as a reminder to clean up litter, as the poster at the left from the great cartoonist Walt Kelly underscores. America made great strides against litter. After that it made great strides against air pollution, and water pollution. The country still has litter and air and water pollution. But air pollution in particular is now better than it was in, say, December 1970, when the Environmental Protection Agency was founded. National carbon monoxide emissions are not quite a third of what they were in 1970. Ammonia emissions are lower now than then, so are nitrogen oxides, particulates, sulfur dioxides, and volatile organic compounds. Both surface water and groundwater are cleaner than they were in 1970 thanks to the Clean Water Acts and the Safe ...

I saw a recent post on Just Means critical of Kellogg’s new cause marketing campaign called ‘ Share Your Breakfast ’ and I wondered, should sinners or the impious be permitted to pray? Should teachers wait until their students know the alphabet before allowing them to speak? Should I, as a man, wait until I’m emotionally available to my wife before I listen to something she’s telling me? Is Nobelist Al Gore the only person who can legitimately donate to Greenpeace or the Sierra Club ? Or, while we're on the topic of charitable donations, could any company ever be morally upright enough to make donations to a good cause via cause marketing? The post in question was written by staff writer Akhila Vijayaraghavan, whose beat at Just Means is corporate social responsibility. She writes: “Some of the products that Kellogg has been promoting as part of its campaign includes Frosted Flakes and Nutri-Grain bars. However both products have been criticized for the high levels of sugar tha...