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...

Dan Fink, editor of the Reading-Eagle Business Weekly in Pennsylvania, called me recently for some national perspective quotes on a story his staff was preparing on a local cause marketing effort . Many of his readers are small businesses, so I was especially happy to be able to reach out to that audience with the message about the power of cause marketing. Dan’s questions are in bold and my answers follow in italics. Do you have any numbers that show growth trends? The keeper of long-term cause marketing growth data is IEG, in Chicago. They track all sponsorship dollars, for instance the NFL and music festivals. IEG considers cause marketing to be a subset of sponsorship. This is a link to a projection they released in January . It lists only their projection for 2012, but they've been releasing this report for more than 20 years. So they can give a sense of long-term cause marketing trends. Who are the biggest users of cause marketing (in terms of dollars given to nonprofits)? Th...

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...

Kohl’s the Milwaukee-based department store with about 1130 stores in 49 states has raised $180 million for kids’ education and health through its cause marketing efforts, and with this ad in their weekly flyer they’re bragging a little. That’s not an unrivaled amount of money for a company to generate via product sales cause marketing: VIVA GLAM is now north of $225 million in funding for HIV/AIDS; Newman’s Own is over $300 million; Geoffrey Beene is right around $150 million. (Comment below with anyone I've missed). But all those cause marketers had a jump on Kohl’s. VIVA GLAM and Geoffrey Beene both started their cause marketing efforts in 1994. Newman’s Own was founded in 1982. By contrast, Kohl’s Care’s for Kids was launched in the year 2000. Maybe a small brag isn’t out of line! After all, like the great pitcher Dizzy Dean…the last Major Leaguer to win 30 games in a season…famously said, “It ain’t bragging if you can back it up.” Kohl’s can plainly back it up. Where does ...