Cause Marketing

On a Wednesday a few Octobers back I had a pink ribbon day to beat all. For breakfast I had a carton of pink-topped Yoplait Strawberry-Mango yogurt. That carton top, along with the others we’d collected, garnered $0.10 apiece for Susan G. Komen for the Cure. At mid-morning I stopped at my grocer’s deli and picked up a little smoked turkey. The lady at the counter was wearing a pink hat with Komen’s version of the pink ribbon, but like all the versions of the pink ribbon, emblematic of the fight against breast cancer. There was a counter card saying that Boar’s Head deli product supported Komen. Later I was looking for one of those clear film protectors for my mobile device and I came across a local firm that sells just the thing. Oh, and they donated 5% of online sales in October to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Without much effort we could list dozens of pink ribbon cause marketing efforts that take place each fall. But here's the conundrum, in the United States with a co...

At left is a thermometer that displays the ambient room temperature on its maker’s computer screen. It was built by a friend using an Arduino circuit board. Arduino is an open source hardware control unit. He could plug in a humidity sensor and do a little more programming and his display would show the humidity in the room. He could add an altimeter, or a GPS sensor to display latitude and longitude. He could set up a website to put on view the temperature of the room where he works. He could add an accelerometer to signal earthquake activity (or theft of the device). He could have the unit send him text if the temperature in the room rose above 80 degrees. Etc., etc. By now business people, even those outside of IT, are sort of inured to the idea of ‘open source’ anything. But open source cause marketers still offers cause marketers countless opportunities. Two examples of open source cause marketing leap to mind. General Mills’ Box Tops for Education campaign is an open source cau...