Cause Marketing

Nowadays when every brand has a YouTube channel, and pages on Pinterest, Google+, and Facebook, it’s easy to think that when you activate your cause marketing on a social  network that you’re done. Not so fast, Twitter-breath. You still need to reach customers and prospects where they are and that can mean activating cause marketing on packaging, signage, and yes, placemats. Black Bear Diner, a franchise with 56 locations in nine western states, went old school to help activate its Dec 2012 effort for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Black Bear Diner is one of those places where the ample portion sizes seem just about right for NFL linemen. In the promotion Black Bear sold Make-A-Wish’s star-shaped paper icons (aka pinups) and donated $1 for each dessert sold from a select list. The total donation was capped at $50,000. Using paper placemats was the right approach for this cause marketing activation. After all, once a patron is in the restaurant, the best way to reach them isn’t via G...

I saw a job description the other day for one of the chief marketers at Macy’s, the giant retailer. Among the listed job responsibilities was cause marketing, something Macy’s does well with sophisticated efforts for Make-A-Wish and the American Heart Association. Big companies and big charities tend to suck all the oxygen of the room when we speak of cause marketing. But small companies and causes can do it effectively too. Case in point is this wrapper at the left for a chocolate bar from the Big Island in Hawaii. It couldn’t be more homey and local. The paper wrapper feels like copy paper and the foil wrapper it came in seemed home-wrapped. The printing looks like it came from an inkjet paper and the design is so rudimentary it might have been done in Word. The chocolate bar itself was a little thicker at one end than the other. The place of origin is Pepeekeo a tiny town on the opposite side of the Big Island where the bar was purchased at an ABC Store. ABC Stores are home-grown in...

Kathy Ireland is raising money for Jewelers For Children through the sales of her eponymous jewelry line at Fred Meyer Jewelers, and I want to help this ageless paramour from my youth. If only I knew what Jewelers for Children was. Ronald McDonald House Charities helps support Ronald McDonald Houses, which are homes away from homes for families who have children in hospitals. The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption helps enable adoptions. Target does a lot of work with St. Jude, which is a children’s research hospital in Memphis. J.C. Penney supports after-school programs at 4-H and Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Home Depot and Lowes help Habitat for Humanity, which builds houses for people who need them. But Jewelers for Children I had to look up. It turns out to be a charity of the jewelry industry. Since its founding in 1999, it has donated more than $37 million to children’s charities, four of which… St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foun...

I started my cause marketing career back when gasoline cost about $1.15 a gallon, the median price of a house was a little more than $80,000 and a 30-second Super Bowl ad cost ‘just’ $850,000. And yet cheap as prices were back in 1992 do you think any sponsor would spring for even one national cause marketing ad on TV? The answer is a resounding ‘no!’ Yet right now there’s goodly number of sponsors whose Christmas ad mix includes cause marketing messaging on behalf of a cause. At left are two current ads that I found on YouTube, one for Coke’s campaign on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund and the other from Macy’s Believe effort benefiting Make-a-Wish. It may be that the version running in your market is different, but it’s enough to say that both firms are actively advertising their cause promotions on TV. I won’t bother dissecting either ad beyond saying that the Coke ad is just a little too earnest while the Macy’s ad strikes just about the right tone. But I want to have a little ...

17-year-old Canadian heartthrob Justin Bieber wants you to buy his new perfume line called Someday , and when you do all net profits “after taxes, royalties, expenses and company requirements are deducted” will go to Pencils of Promise, a school-building charity and the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Bieber’s promotional partner for Someday, a New York outfit called Give Back Brands , promises to donate its Someday profits to “restoring after-school programs” and “school food programs.” Someday appears to be Give Back’s only product right now. But this isn’t just a straight transactional cause marketing promotion. Instead, Bieber has split the middle between a straight-ahead cause marketing promotion and an all-benefits brand of the type that Rachael Ray uses in her dog food line called Nutrish. It’s hard to say whether or not Bieber is making any scratch on this deal. Royalties is one way celebrities make money from endorsements. But I’m willing to give him the benefit of a doubt. ...

Early in my career a grizzled old veteran of marketing and communications for nonprofits said in a meeting “its all comes down to the T-shirts.” He meant that when it came to marketing and communications campaigns the biggest battles were often over the smallest things, like the T-shirt. Because when it comes to marketing and communications while almost nobody knows anything of the marcom concepts of ‘return of customer investment’ or, ‘share of requirement’ everybody from the CEO to the janitor understands T-shirts. I’m now a grizzled old veteran and I beg to differ. Everybody seems to want input on T-shirts, that’s true enough. But it’s not all about the T-shirt. No, in cause marketing one of the details you should obsess over is the picture… or pictures… that illustrates the cause. Among other talents, these days an effective cause marketer better be a good photo editor. The classic example is Special Olympics. As soon as you see the kids racing in a pool, getting a medal, or reachi...

Brooke Shields’ face graced this ad for Allergan’s prescription eyelash-grower called Latisse in dozens of magazines for the better part of 18 months. Allergan still lists her as a celebrity supporter on the Latisse website , even though actress Claire Danes has superseded Brooke in the recent print ads I’ve seen. Latisse sponsors the Make-A-Wish Foundation. I first profiled this campaign back in July 2009 , when I saw it in Real Simple magazine, meaning the creative was available at least in time for that ad. Since everything else is in the creative is basically the same except for some typography, why on earth would Allergan not use Brooke in this ad that ran in the September-October 2009 issue of Bride’s Magazine , but would use her ad in the November-December 2009 issue of Bride’s ? One obvious possibility is that Bride’s Magazine , which publishes 6-times a year, has a longer lead time than Real Simple , which publishes monthly. But I doubt it. It could be that Allergan is testin...

Two cause marketing ads in two separate publications both promote the Make-A-Wish Foundation and are both dated November 29, 2010, and yet other than the logo and the benefiting organization, they are strangely unconnected. The Make-A-Wish ad appeared in People magazine, promoting Darren, one of their wish kids, along with the organization’s seasonal awareness and fundraising effort called Season of Wishes. The other is from the inside back two pages of a Macy’s circular promoting the retailer’s ‘Believe’ campaign , which I greatly admire for its breadth and depth. As I’ve confessed before, I’m a sucker for these big involved campaigns because having worked on a few of them, I know what it takes to get them just right. It’s probably too much to ask Macy’s to coordinate its circulars or other media with Make-A-Wish, but the ad for Make-A-Wish in People … whether they paid for it or not… is commercial advertising. That is, they controlled the content and its placement. So in a magazine ...

From November 26, 2010 through December 25, 2010 when Southwest Airline passengers check in at the Airport using Facebook Places and their web-enabled device, Southwest will donate $1 to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, up to $300,000. That’s pretty straightforward. And yet the webpage that describes the how-to of the promotion requires the three graphics at the left to walk you through it. The first graphic explains that you must open Facebook Places with your mobile device and click “Check In.” There’s a little more to the second graphic: “Select the Place where you are from the Nearby Places list,” it says. “If you don’t see the Place name, type the name of the Place where you are into the ‘Search Nearby Places’ box.” “You can also toggle the left-right arrows on the right of the search box to display lists of other Nearby Places.” The third explanatory graphic is probably the raison d’etre of this promotion: “Write an optional description of what you are doing at the Place where you a...

Sunday’s newspaper was clogged with flyers from most of the major retailers in my market; Macy’s , Walmart , Target , JC Penney , Sears , Kohl’s and Kmart. The first six listed all devoted at least some space in their sales flyers to their respective cause marketing efforts. Conspicuous by its absence was Kmart. At left is the cause marketing campaign from Sears called Heroes at Home Wish Registry, which offers Sears gift cards to military members and the families registered in the program. Sears is the sponsor and founder of the campaign. (Macy's campaign benefits Make-A-Wish, Target's benefit's St. Jude; JC Penney's benefits the Salvation Army Angel Tree, and Kohl's benefits Kohl's Cares for Kids). I show this page from the Sears flyer because Sears Holdings owns the 1,327 or so Kmarts in operation. Indeed, go to either Sears.com or Kmart.com and you’ll see the overlap of the brands. Sears Holdings is publicly held, but controlled by billionaire-financier Edd...

We’ve discussed a T-shirt cause marketing by social enterprises in the past with outfits like Rosa Loves . But most of those efforts were based on e-commerce business models. Now there’s a new social enterprise that includes bricks and mortar retailers as part of its business model. Called Giving Tee , here’s how it works: Retailers sell Giving Tee T-shirt designs in their stores for $20. When customers enter a code on the hangtag of the Tee it triggers a donation to one of Giving Tee’s featured causes. There are currently 24 charities listed on Giving Tee’s website, including Habitat for Humanity , The Humane Society , Amnesty International , the Red Cross , Make-A-Wish , and the Wear Good for Haiti Initiative. The designs for Wear Good for Haiti are the only Tees Giving Tee currently sells on its website. The revenue split is as follows: The cause gets $5, the retailer gets $5, the designer (Giving Tee crowd-sources the designs) gets $1, and Giving Tee gets the remainder. After costs...

I’m a little chary about making sweeping pronouncements, but I believe I've just seen the first cause marketing promotion in the U.S. involving a prescription drug. The drug is from Allergan and it’s called Latisse , “the first and only FDA-approved prescription treatment for inadequate or not enough eyelashes.” The medical name for this condition is hypotrichosis. Latisse is lifestyle drug the way Viagra or Propecia are. That is, no one’s going to die (except, perhaps, of embarrassment) if their erectile dysfunction or male pattern baldness or thin eyelashes go untreated. Which means the positioning for a product like Latisse is a little tricky. Allergan could have gone with the sexy route as with Viagra or Cialis and showed lovely women batting their new longer, thicker, darker eyelashes. But I’ll bet that approach didn’t test well with women. (I’m reminded of a joke about the Cialis ads from a comedian whose name I can’t recall. He said, “Hey if my erection lasts longer than ...

Dear Editor I am more than 8 years old. Some of my peers say that there is no Christmas cause marketing. Papa says, “if you see in the cause marketing blog, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there Christmas cause marketing? Virginia O’Hanlon Virginia, your little friends are almost right. There’s not much Christmas cause marketing going on in the States. Charities large and small have carved out the Halloween season (October). St Jude has branded Thanksgiving (which falls on the fourth Thursday in November in the United States). You’ll see cause marketing promotions on virtually every American holiday: St. Patrick’s Day, Valentines Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, etc. But Christmas? Not so much. This despite the fact that many charities do their best fundraising in the Christmas season. Annual giving is very big at Christmas time for many charities. And corporate earnings rise and fall depending on how well they do at Christmas. And yet, there’s precious little cause marketing and ...

Best Buy and Fisher House Early in my career a grizzled old veteran of marketing and communications for nonprofits said in a meeting “it’s all about the T-shirts.” He meant that when it came to marketing and communications campaigns the biggest battles were often over the smallest things, like the T-shirt. Because when it comes to marketing and communications even if few people know the marcom concepts of ‘return of customer investment’ or, ‘share of requirement’ everybody from the CEO to the janitor understands T-shirts. I’m now a grizzled old veteran and I beg to differ. Everybody seems to want input on T-shirts, that’s true enough. But it’s not all about the T-shirt. No, in cause-related marketing campaigns one of the details you should obsess over is the picture… or pictures… that illustrates the cause. Among other talents, these days an effective cause marketer better be a very good photo editor. The classic example is Special Olympics . As soon as you see the kids racing in a po...

The 'Ancillary Opportunities' Section of Your Cause-Marketing Proposal At the end of your cause-marketing proposal to sponsors there should be a section called something like “Ancillary Opportunities.” It’s the place where you add the other stuff that came out of brainstorming sessions that you can pull off and which complements the principal part of the promotion. Ancillary means ‘subordinate’ or ‘of secondary importance.’ But don’t think that just because ancillary opportunities are subordinate or secondary that you can leave them out of the proposal. For one thing, you may have spent a lot of time researching the target sponsor and still missed their hot button. Remember Hotmail was the second idea that Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith presented to Silicon Valley venture capitalists Draper Fisher Jurvetson . The ‘Ancillary Opportunity’ section is also a place to showcase your creativity and generate trust. And like the book title says, “ You Don’t Get what You Deserve, You Get W...

Not Exactly Golden Locks How do you target Gen Y, the 76 million [in the States] ‘Millennials’ born between 1978 and 2000? Well a cause campaign is not a bad idea because the members of Gen Y are characterized as idealistic, optimistic, honest and sincere. And they like to shop. Few of them remember the time before the Internet and they’re the most technologically savvy generation ever. We used to say they were the most wired generation, but that’s no longer true; if I have any Gen Y readers they’re probably reading this on their cell phones. But what kind of cause appeals to them? United Way is for people who drive Buicks. Susan G. Komen is for the mothers and grandmothers of Gen Y. Make-A-Wish ? You’re getting warmer. Finesse hair shampoo and conditioner picked Locks of Love , the Lake Worth, Florida nonprofit that solicits donations of natural hair which is then manufactured into wigs and distributed to kids and adults with long-term hair loss, usually due to a condition called al...

Add to the Bank It’s fair to say that most marketers are likely to grow tired of their marketing long before their customers do. So after a few meaningful years it’s easy to look at your cause-related marketing relationships and wonder how to get out of them. In most cases, that’s a mistake. Just as acquiring customers is more expensive than keeping them, so too with your cause-related marketing relationships. Moreover, unless you’ve spent tens of millions of dollars on your cause-related marketing campaigns for a dozen years, chances are a big chunk of your customers still don’t know about it. When I was at Children’s Miracle Network (CMN) every person on the staff had at least five anecdotes about individuals who had mistaken CMN for the Make-A-Wish Foundation . This despite the fact that CMN dwarfed Make-A-Wish, got good publicity, was associated with 170 children’s hospitals and 210 TV stations, and had a telethon that aired for 21 hours each year. I’d bet money that after decades...

High-Dollar Cause-Related Marketing Comes of Age Cause-related marketing has long been especially common in packaged goods promotions; Wish-Bone Dressing and Make-A-Wish or Yoplait and Susan G. Komen, to name just two. But does cause-related marketing work with high-dollar goods and services? More and more the answer is yes. Above are four recent campaigns… from Dell , Oreck , American Century Investments , and Levenger … that increasingly demonstrate that cause-related marketing has legs even when the items in play cost hundreds or dollars or more. Let me hasten to add that none of these high-dollar cause-related marketing promotions are exactly ‘first-movers.’ Ford and BMW have both done cause-related marketing promotions. Kitchen Aid has long made special editions of their appliances in pink that generate donations for Susan G. Komen. They’ve also done straightforward ‘buy a qualifying dishwasher and we’ll donate $50 to Susan G Komen’ promotions. Whirlpool … which owns Kitchen Aid…...

Let Us Now Praise Good Cause-Related Marketing So far there are six posts at causerelatedmarketing.biz and everyone of them has been critical to one degree or another. The point of this blog isn’t to flame every cause-related campaign I see as bad or inadequate. I expect there’s more to be learned more from good campaigns than bad ones. So, on All Hallow’s Eve I want to back off my criticism to praise a cause-related campaign from a company that consistently gets cause-related marketing right, Proctor & Gamble. This cause-themed FSI for UNICEF, which dropped circa September-October 2006 is one of Proctor & Gamble’s monthly “brandSAVER coupon booklets.” I haven’t kept count, but the cause-themed brandSAVERs seem to appear at least quarterly. They’ve done a year-end FSI for Special Olympics for many years and I’ve seen special versions for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, VH-1 Save the Music, and others. They’ve done an FSI for UNICEF for at least four years. Dur...