Cause Marketing

Einstein supposedly said that compound interest was the eight wonder of the world, or the gateway to the fifth dimension, or the sixth sense, or the seventh law of thermodynamics, or something like that. I say supposedly because Snopes.com is dubious. Regardless, for causes the goal cause marketers ought to aspire to is the point at which you earn income even on nights and weekends. That’s what’s happening in this effort from Nestle benefiting the Girl Scouts of the USA . This is almost certainly some sort of licensing agreement whereby Nestle pays the GSUSA a fee to use their logo on the package. The Girl Scouts sell several flavors of cookies that are, like this particular Nestle Crunch bar, peanut-flavored. If you’re on the receiving end of a licensing fee, it can seem like a windfall. The GSUSA doesn’t have to line up manufactures to make the candy. Individual Scouts don’t have to sell them. The nonprofit has no distribution hassles. It may not even bother issuing a press releas...

Communities Take Root is an effort from Dreyer’s Fruit Bars brand, started in 2010, that plants fruit tree orchards in deserving neighborhoods across the country. Dreyer’s, owned by Swiss food giant Nestle, partners with the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation to fulfill the backend of the promotion. There’s a nomination procedure at www.communitiestakeroot.com . Nominated communities then seek votes online at the same website. Top vote getters receive a fruit orchard planted by locals with the Tree Planting Foundation’s help and advice. The promotion is activated via PR and on Dreyer’s packaging (see at left). The YouTube video that explains the promotion has a scant 383 views, two of them mine, since it was posted back on Feb. 21, 2011.  I have just enough Jeffersonian Ideal of a Democratic agrarianism in me to admire and appreciate when the American economy was based mainly on agriculture that one of the first things settlers would do was plant a fruit tree orchard. Even today, t...

The water business used to be a pretty sweet deal. You package water, which might have come from a municipal source, for a fraction of a penny per gallon and you sell it in individual plastic bottles for dollars per quart. Best of all, people need to drink gallons of water a week just to survive. All you needed was a cool bottle and a fancy brand and the distribution to match and you were in business. And then the world began to wake up to the silliness and waste of bottled water. There’s no need to recount the ridiculousness of it all or even cite sources. We all know about that ginormous plastic island floating in the Pacific Ocean. We all know about the crazy amounts of landfill space going just to water bottles that won’t ever degrade. We all sense the folly of water being shipped from Fuji (or even New York) to your store in Texas or California or Minnesota. It would be easy to defend if water was bad in all those places. Only it’s not. In most of North America, Europe, Australia,...