Cause Marketing

You’ve got a big pitch coming up, so it’s time to get the team together for a brainstorming session. Here, then, is a softball of a question: Who will come up with more innovative ideas? 1). A team of individuals. 2). The people from the team working individually. Most of us probably answered number 1. And most of us are wrong. I learned this in a March 2013 from Professor Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University in the in-flight magazine for Southwest Airlines. That's Professor Thompson on the left. “Individuals who brainstormed alone,” she writes, “generated 21 percent more ideas, and their ideas were 42 percent more original than those that generated from groups.” Although how they determined that the ideas were more original she doesn’t say. Thompson’s insights come from her new book Creative Conspiracy: The New Rules for Breakthrough Collaboration. If you think about it for a minute you can guess why this is so. Who hasn’t been in a creative meeting ...

Academic research in cause marketing has long centered around the degree to which the practice affected things like reputation, goodwill, consumer loyalty, or how cause marketing could preserve pricing power. A new study finds that a corporation’s ‘pro-social activities’ positively influence how consumers feel about how their actual products perform. The study, called ' Doing Well By Doing Good: The Benevolent Halo of Social Goodwill ' featured a series of four experiments by Sean Blair, a PhD candidate at Northwestern University, and Alexander Chernov, and associate professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. In the first experiment attendees at an executive education seminar were given wine to taste in plastic cup. A card accompanied the wine that described the winery that made the wine. Some of the tasters read a card with a sentence that explained that the wine donated 10% of sales to the American Heart Association. Other tasters saw no s...

Professors at Brigham Young University , Toronto University , and Northwestern University conducted a simple experiment and found that a room scented with Lemon Windex made test subjects more likely to volunteer for a charity and share more cash with partners in a trust-based exercise. Read their paper here . For charitable fundraisers I think it's worth your own test. And it wouldn't be terribly difficult. If you do multiple similar events in a year, try one with the room scented with lemon and one unscented as a control and compare the results both in terms of dollars raised and volunteers recruited. Or you could use last year's event as the control, although it wouldn't be as precise. Likewise, event-based cause marketers could scent their events with lemon. Lemony candles oughta do the trick.