Cause Marketing

The grand-daddy of all buy one, give one (BOGO) cause marketing is TOMS Shoes , which I've profiled in the past. TOMS gives away a pair of its alpargatas-style shoes when your buy a pair. TOMS has never advertised heavily, but so great was the buzz that TOMS generated that its founder, Blake Mycoskie, was featured in TV ad on the left for AT&T. I've also profiled BOGO efforts from HUGO Fragrances , Pampers , LJ Urban which built a house in Burkina Faso when you bought one of their homes in Sacramento, a solar charger called Solio that provided a match for a soldier serving abroad when you bought another. On April 1, 2009, I even ran a post saying that India's Tata Motors was doing a BOGO for their $2,500 Nano car. It was an April Fool's Day joke that no one ever called me on. I now confess now that I made up the whole thing. These next BOGOs, however, are no joke. Buy a men’s tie, either a necktie or bowtie, from Figs and they’ll send a school uniform to a school...

First off the usual disclaimers. This is by no mean an exhaustive list. I don’t see much cause marketing from outside North America . I read and speak only English; and, well, a smattering of Esperanto ;). There may well be… and probably is… some brilliant cause marketing coming out of Senegal or Bengal or Finland or Vietnam or Rio de Janeiro that I just don’t know about. I certainly don’t even see all the cause marketing done in North America . I only post about cause marketing about twice a week. So needless to say, I don’t review all the cause marketing that comes over the transom. There can be no doubt but that I have blind spots. But I did review a lot of cause marketing in 2008… more than 135 posts… and I saw much more than that. So with that said, here’s the best 11 cause marketing efforts of 2008 (as far as I know). In January I was besotted by TOMS Shoes ‘buy one, give one’ (BOGO) campaign. Buy a pair of their alpergatas shoes and they give away a pair to a needy ch...

Buy a house, give a house On January 10, 2008, I highlighted the streamlined cause-related marketing campaign of TOMS Shoes , whereby for every pair of their Argentine-inspired alpargatas shoes you buy, another pair goes to needy kids in places like Africa and South America. Now drawing inspiration directly from TOMS Shoes… and with just a little bit of puffery… LJ Urban says that when you buy one of their 35 LEED ND certified homes from their ‘Good eco-community’ in urban Sacramento, California, a home gets built in Burkina Faso. LJ Urban calls the campaign, ‘Do Some Good Now.’ In fact, LJ Urban, an eco-real estate developer in Sacramento, pays for the training of masons in Burkina Faso in a technique called Voute Nubienne . It includes using locally-made baked earthen bricks, making vaulted ceilings using an ancient Egyptian practice, and a locally-sustainable way of sealing the bricks against water. The training is provided by the French nonprofit, Association la Voute Nubienne . LJ...