Cause Marketing

Ketchum, the big PR firm, is currently trumpeting the results of a new study that finds, as the headline for the press release puts it, that when it comes to cause marketing most consumers are “All Talk, Little Action.” Called the ‘BlogHer 2011 Social Media Matters Study,’ it purports that , “while Americans claim they are more likely to purchase a product if the brand supports a cause, and more than 40 percent have ‘liked’ a brand or posted on Facebook for supporting a cause, barely one in five actually put their money where their good intentions are by switching brands, paying more or purchasing more.” Let’s unpack that sentence a little. The suggestion is that if you have liked a cause on Facebook... the online equivalent of drinking a Diet Coke so as to mitigate the effect of the slice of cheesecake you had with dinner...you are still nonetheless unlikely to have actually made some kind of a real commitment to a cause. Go figure. Quick raise of hands here from all the nonprofits. ...

In every bad cause marketing campaigns, ads and research I’ve autopsied this year I’ve tried to find something to praise. This is in stark contrast to the postmortems they do on all those CSI-style dramas that air on TV nearly nonstop in the States these days. You’d never hear this dialogue on any of those shows: “How did he die, doc?” “Well, he ate a high fiber diet that kept his blood cholesterol in a very healthy range. And it looks like he had the resting heart rate of Tour de France champion. But I’d say it was the bullet to his heart that killed him.” But in the interest of fairness, I tried to do just that in 2008. Right now, though, in the interest of brevity, I'm just going to be snarky. I couldn’t believe the little ad I saw in Cookie magazine for a fundraiser for startup charity called  Cookies for Kids Cancer . The headline read: “But a Cookie, Save a Life.” As I wrote then, “my reaction was, ‘Oh no they just didn’t!’ The ad was one of seven on a single page; the ...

If you were the CEO of a food company, what would be your top priority for the company? Making a profit, you say? Employing people? Providing food to people who want or need it? Supporting your family? Ha, silly you. In a survey published in October by Ketchum , 1000 people… 200 each in the US, UK, Germany, Argentina and China… were asked what they’d do if they were CEO of global food company. Before I ridicule the poll from Ketchum, a global PR agency and a unit of the jinormous Omnicom Group , let me address the two elements of the study pertinent to cause marketers. In those five countries, more than 40 percent say they would pay more for food if it would improve water and food deliver medicine to the needy. The consumers who said they’d be most responsive to this cause marketing-like approach were from China (64 percent) and Argentina (58 percent). That would be potentially interesting if the rest of the survey were actually credible. The survey mainly asked pretty standard questi...