Cause Marketing

There’s been some chatter recently in the blogosphere and elsewhere about strategic cause marketing. That is, if you’re a sponsor, ensuring that your sponsorship of the cause bears some rational relationship to your business. The effort on the left from Montblanc, the fountain pen maker, pretty much passes muster. From June 2009 to May 2010 when you bought this special edition pen, called the Meisterstruck Signature for Good Edition, 10 percent of the purchase price went to a UNICEF education programs because “The ability to read and write is a fundamental human right and the most important asset to children.” (For examples of other Montblanc 'donation pens,' click here . For this campaign, Montblanc set a minimum donation of $1.5 million. And while we're at it, let us now take a moment to praise a campaign that sets a minimum donation, but not a maximum. Huzzahs to Montblanc)! I would have said that parents who can feed and shelter their children is a child’s most importan...

Send Me Something Nice, I'm for Sale Well, it's happened. I've now officially sold out my integrity as journalist blogger. Yesterday I got a package from TOMS Shoes with the handsome alpergatas loafers on the left with a nice note from Blake Mycoskie, the founder and CEO of TOMS Shoes. I've twice posted on the great appeal of TOMS’ no-nonsense cause-related marketing; when you buy a pair of TOMS Shoes, another pair goes to a needy kid in someplace like Africa or South America. It's a great approach that puts shoes on kids’ feet generates scads of word of mouth for TOMS. In my posts I made a few suggestions about other things they could do to keep the momentum going. In gratitude, Jake from TOMS emailed me and asked me if I'd like a free pair. And in a momentary lapse of ethical propriety, I thought, what the heck? So go ahead, Montblanc, Rollex, Steinway, send me something nice. Especially something that can be easily liquidated (such gifts are taxable in th...

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…...

Seeing Through The Wicker Man Darkly It’s almost impossible to overstate how much transparency matters in cause-related marketing. It’s more important than the campaign's creative. It’s more important than the offer in the campaign's advertising. It’s more important than the appeal being made. Here’s why. Americans are a ridiculously generous people when it comes to charitable giving. Much of that generosity is directly attributable to our tax laws, which encourage charitable giving. Part of it is attributable to the thinness of the public welfare net in the U.S., as compared to Europe or Japan. Some it can be attributed to our native “communal self-government,” first highlighted in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America back in 1840. What powers all that is trust. Americans trust charities almost implicitly. Even when they’re skeptical they trust that the Congress and the IRS, along with state and local regulators, will keep charity noses clean. And the IRS and the state...