Cause Marketing

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...

Must…control…the…urge…to…be…sarcastic. In its recently-released Cause Evolution Study , (registration required) Cone, Inc. found that people are only slightly more favorably inclined towards companies employing transactional cause marketing (53%) than to lump sum charitable donations (47%). Transactional cause marketing is when the donation is tied to a purchase. I’m still processing that part of Cone’s findings and I’m not sure if I believe or not. Maybe I just don't see how that finding really benefits sponsors. Assuming it's accurate, we can probably expect more efforts like the FSI (Free Standing Insert) above. In late September, in time for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Purina dropped this FSI supporting Susan G. Komen for the Cure . Purina , which started making animal feed in 1894, will write a check for $300,000 to Komen in support of its mission to cure breast cancer… in humans. Back in May 2010, Purina ran a themed FSI for National Pet Month, in which during...