Cause Marketing

A new consumer opinion survey shows that among the major car makers, Subaru enjoys the highest net promoter score. By a lot; eight percentage points better than second-place finisher Toyota. Could it be that Subaru’s score started catching fire just as it’s cause marketing effort called ‘Share the Love’ started to gain momentum. The Net Promoter Score, as you’ll recall is a super-simple measure of customer satisfaction. The Net Promoter Score is measured with an eight word question: “would you recommend this product/business to a friend?” The Net Promoter scores are based on a 0-10 scale and the measure the degree to which someone is genuinely pleased with your product, company or service and why. Here’s the scale: 9-10 Net Promoter 7-8 Neutral 0-6 Detractor Subaru launched the ‘Share the Love’ promotion in 2008. In it Subaru donates $250 to several causes when you buy or lease a new Subaru between the middle of November and the first week in January. There’s also a Facebook ‘like’ cam...

So your cause's cause marketing campaign is over (or at a pause) and it’s time to evaluate. How do you do that? If your nonprofit is like most of your peers you’ll probably put everybody who was even remotely connected to the project in a room and hash it out until everyone’s eyes bleed. Sounds like a good reason to cut back on the number of participants, right? On the contrary. The fact is, given the turnover in nonprofits, the very most junior person involved with the campaign this year could be running it 18 months from now. Moreover a debriefing is a form of training. (But be careful that it’s not training in how not to run a debriefing!) At a minimum the debriefing should lead to a discussion about whether the campaign met the goals you set out for it. Of course that means that you committed the goals to paper or some digital format beforehand, didn’t you? It also means that people come to the meeting prepared to talk specifics. If the goal was to convert fans into donors, the...

Using Customer Satisfaction to Find Donors I sat in on a very interesting presentation last week at the Wasatch Online Marketers Association (WOMA) by Ryan Davies of Progrexion , a multi-disciplinary marketing and marketing research firm with offices in San Francisco and Utah. One of Progrexion’s house specialties is customer satisfaction surveys, one of the more dreary (if necessary) parts of marketing research. You know what I mean if you’ve ever been subjected to a customer satisfaction survey that runs 4 pages single-spaced in about 9-point type. Completing those surveys can be like that scene in the Dustin Hoffman movie Marathon Man when Sir Lawrence Olivier plays the Mengele-like ex-Nazi dentist Dr. Christian Szell who extracts information along with teeth. But Progrexion draws from the work of author and Bain consultant Fred Reichheld to come up with a much more streamlined and painless approach. Reichheld wrote the 2006 book “The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and Tru...