Cause Marketing

My travels yesterday took me to a suburban Ulta Beauty store. There was a great deal of cause marketing going on there, none of it… not surprisingly… aimed at a someone like me. But why not? Men are both directly and indirectly affected by breast cancer. About 2,000 men are diagnosed with breast cancer every year, and about 400 men a year die from it. It’s far more likely that men will be indirectly affected by breast cancer via their wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts and cousins. My mother was a breast cancer survivor, for instance. Men have a major stake in breast cancer awareness and a cure, in other words. So where’s the pink ribbon cause marketing targeted at men? Some pink ribbon shoes come in men’s sizes. The NFL offers pink merchandise in men’s sizes in conjunction with its partner the American Cancer Society. A man could certainly play tennis with a Wilson Hope Lite racquet or soccer with Puma Project Pink skill ball. There’s some pink ribbon jewelry that men could w...

A study from Kirk Wakefield, Ph.D. of Baylor University released Monday finds strong linkage between official NFL sponsors and purchase decisions, especially among fans. Called “The Effect of Fan Passion and Official League Sponsorship on Brand Metrics: A Longitudinal Study of Official NFL Sponsors and ROO,” the study was co-authored by Anne Rivers of the New York City firm Brand Asset Consulting. The study compared official NFL sponsors to non-official sponsors in banking, beer, credit cards, pizza and telecommunications over the three year period between 2008 and 2010. Then they measured public opinion of the official brand in each category against 2 competing brands in the same category that weren’t official sponsors. So in the pizza category Papa John’s, the official sponsor, was measured against two non-official sponsors; Pizza Hut and Domino’s. Says Professor Wakefield, “Companies with official sponsorship of the NFL receive a significant lift among NFL fans compared to non-fans....

One trend I expect to see more of in 2012 is the mashup of cause marketing and video/computer games. Certainly the market is huge. The Entertainment Software Association reports that 72 percent of American households play computer/video games. And it’s not just teens and preteens. The average game player is age 37. And while video/computer game players are more likely to be male than female, across the board 42 percent of players are female (which is about the same gender mix as the NFL's audience ). That it’s a 60:40 male to female strikes me as a positive for some businesses and causes. Men can be a hard audience to reach, especially if you can’t afford the premiums that come with sponsoring professional sports or buying sports television airtime. Cause marketing has already been successfully undertaken by Zynga, makers of Farmville and Mafia Wars on behalf of the victims of the Haiti Earthquake of 2010. In 2011, they did another relief effort on behalf the victims of the Japane...

Five years ago on Tuesday October 17 I posted for the first time on this blog. On Tuesday November 1, 2011 I’ll celebrate my 700th post. Since October 2010 I’ve posted, almost without exception, every business day. I compare it to writing a daily newspaper column, with all the attendant challenges of coming up with something new… or at least different… to say five days a week. Like Ernest Hemingway famously said: "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." I don’t bleed with the same brio that Hemingway did. So my thanks to you my faithful readers for your patience when I’ve been a poor stylist, a bad grammarian, and the many times when I stopped before I had finished. In remembrance of posts past here’s my very first one, which still has punch and force these 1800 or so days later, (even if I do say so myself). Eyeballs vs. Tears Barely a day goes by that I don't see some kind of cause-related marketing, some good and some not so good...

Should breast cancer awareness ever be more about the breast than it is the cancer? I wonder when I see ads like the one at the left by Estee Lauder. Over the last few years there’s been a general sexualizing of the disease that troubles me. Don’t get me wrong. Part of the early genius of Susan G. Komen for the Cure and her sister breast cancer charities was the recognition that breast cancer was different for women than, say, lung cancer, even if a cancer in the breast might be only a few centimeters away from a cancer in the lung. One reason why Komen et al acquired so much momentum is because there’s a personalness to breast cancer that also touches things like feminine sexuality. Survivors fight more than just the disease. Even as a clueless man I get that. Breast cancer affects a women’s sense of self in ways that other diseases, say, heart disease—which kills twice as many women in the United States as breast cancer—do not. But I don’t think the cause is well-served by ads like t...

Every day my RSS reader sends me a fat email with all the day’s listings of the word cause marketing. I see cause marketing campaigns advertised on TV, in magazines, or Facebook and the myriad other social media. My friend and fellow blogger Joe Waters has a Dummies book, for crying out loud, coming out in July about cause marketing. Every business day I add my own content to all the rest with this blog. Today, I celebrate the 600th post on the Cause Marketing Blog. One of those posts , from a few years back, declared that we are in the golden age of cause marketing, quoting the old Carly Simon song Anticipation , which features the lyrics, “these are the gold old days.” So far as it goes, I believe that’s still the case. But the current state of cause marketing, I think, could be summarized in the U2 song sung by that old cause marketer Bono , ‘ I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For .” That’s because for almost as long as I’ve known about cause marketing, nearly 20 years now, I’v...

The September 27, 2007 Forbes magazine listed the value of the world’s top sponsored sports events, by the amount of money they generate per day. They are: Super Bowl… $336 million Summer Olympics…$176 million Fifa World Cup…$103 million NCAA Men’s Final Four…$90 million Winter Olympics…$82 million Rose Bowl…$72 million MLB World Series…$61 million Kentucky Derby…$59 million 9. NBA Finals…$58 million I notice that your nonprofit isn’t on the list. Indeed, no nonprofit is. There’s two reasons for that. Forbes compiled a list of the top sports event sponsorships. I’ll get to the second reason in a second. But cause marketing is… in the main… just a form of sponsorship. Why isn’t your cause making a $336 million per day like the Super Bowl? Think of all the advantages your cause enjoys. It has tremendous heart. It has a list of supporters who literally open their wallets for you several times a year. Some of your supporters are as passionate about your cause as any face-painting fan of...

In the past year I’ve profiled what I call ‘faux cause marketing.’ It’s marketing that looks or sounds like cause marketing, but in fact no cause benefits from it. At left is a small ad that ran in the back of Golf Digest magazine in October 2009, Breast Cancer Awareness Month. There’s the familiar pink ribbon, emblematic of breast cancer causes. But look closely and you’ll see that the company makes no claims about any charity benefiting from the sale of pink ribbon golf club covers. Although I found the same clubheads on the company’s website, I couldn’t find any evidence of support for breast cancer causes. If indeed the company sells the pink ribbon clubhead covers without any remuneration to breast cancer charities then the ad is unethical in my book and I pronounce a pox on their business. A kind of faux cause marketing with a sense of humor can be seen from AirTran , the discount airline. Both the two-color ads on the left, which ran in the same issue of Sports Illustrated ...

The Salvation Army USA, in conjunction with the Dallas Cowboys, Fox Sports, and the National Football League, kicked off its annual kettle drive with a performance by country music star Keith Urban during halftime of the Cowboys – New Orleans Saints game held yesterday, Thanksgiving Day 2010. This is the fourteenth year the Salvation Army and the Cowboys have teamed up. Since 1997, the Salvation Army holiday kettle drive has generated $1.3 billion, $139 million last year alone. I couldn’t find any actual footage yet of the performance, so you’re going to have to trust me for now. But the way the Salvation Army was integrated into the performance itself was more stilted than it should have been. The video footage at left is what we used to call a video news release (VNR) meant to promote the kettle drive kickoff. Immediately before the Urban halftime concert we see footage of him leaving his travel bus parked in the bowels of Dallas Cowboys Stadium. As he walks the corridors toward th...

Last Friday I extolled the many virtues of the pink ribbon. But the ‘open source’ nature of the pink ribbon ain’t all sweet yogurt and tasty lunch meats. When everybody owns the ribbon nobody owns it and the result is that news coverage, like that at the left from NBC Nightly News on Sunday, October 17 ends up celebrating everything but the charity. The piece leads with Washington Redskins Tight End Chris Cooley, whose mother Nancy was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer in 2008, and was treated with chemotherapy. The reporter, Peter Alexander, covers Cooley's feelings, Nancy's stiff upper lip in the face of the disease, an effort led by Cooley and his wife, and some of Cooley's Redskins teammates to brighten the lives of women in the Washington, D.C. area recently diagnosed with breast cancer. Alexander mentions that the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month is in its twenty-fifth year. We learn about the NFL being behind the pinkness in the pro football locker rooms, a...

Five or six years ago the term 'co-branding' was one of those hot marketing buzzwords. Nowadays co-branding is so commonplace as to be mundane. The point of co-branding is for brands to combine such that they create notable synergy. There are several kinds of co-branding, including cause marketing itself. This article, from Tiger Woods' previous sponsor , Accenture, names six : Promotional/Sponsorship. This is the category cause marketing falls under. Also Motorola's sponsorship of the National Football League. Ingredient. Betty Crocker brownie mix made with Hershey chocolate, or any of the Jack Daniels' dishes at TGI Fridays . Innovation Based. The Apple-Nike tie-up. Value-Chain , which is meant to bring new experiences to the consumer, not just another flavor. There are three varieties of value-chain co-branding: Product Service. Sea World and Southwest Airlines . Supplier-Retailer. Starbucks wifi service from AT&T. Alliance. Think FTD , or those all...

Last September, at the request of San Francisco blogger Gayle Roberts, I posted my predictions on the future of cause-related marketing. With the coming of the New Year it makes sense to re-release this post. I have a spotty record predicting the future. I bought a Zip drive about a week before the first USB drive came out. And then, admiring the portability of said USB drives, I bought 2 of them with 56K of memory for about $50 a pop. I have two complete sets of the 1987 Topps baseball cards (which includes the rookie cards for Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire) still in the original shrink-wrap. They’re worth almost exactly what I paid for them. Or rather less, considering the ravages of inflation. (I also have a first edition of Hayduke Lives by Edward Abbey in very fine condition that has more than doubled in value. So, I’m not always dead wrong.) So imagine my surprise to get a short missive from Bay-area fundraising consultant Gayle Roberts asking me to weigh in on the topic...