Cause Marketing

I’ve been writing this blog for almost seven years and have been involved with cause marketing for more than 20 years. During that time one of my enduring complaints has been that marketers from the causes and from the sponsors were talking to each other, but not really listening. It was like a modestly-happy couple communicating everything, except trust. But now there are increasing signs that they’re finally hearing and trusting each other. Witness a label effort from 2011 that I found in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database called Child Hunger Ends Here from ConAgra Foods on behalf of Feeding America. ConAgra owns more than a half dozen food brands including three that target children; Chef Boyardee, Peter Pan peanut butter, and the Kid Cuisine brand of quick-serve meals. When you entered the 8-digit code from the package of any participating ConAgra item at www.childhungerendsheare.com and a donation is made to Feeding America, up to 2.5 million meals. That probably represented...

So how should a corporate sponsor go about sniffing out a cause marketing partner? There are several… oftentimes opposing… schools of thought on the subject. One is that you should pick causes that have some sort of link to your business. For instance, a food business should pick a food charity. Why? So that your customers prospects don’t have to spend too much cognitive energy figuring out what the link is between the two organizations. Because customers just won’t do it. If it doesn’t make sense, they’re not going to pull out their phones to Google the question ‘Why does Acme Axel Manufacturing Company sponsor bone cancer research?’ Instead, it will seem like 'cause-nitive dissonance' and they’ll just ignore it. The opposing view holds that customers see such links as cynical. In this view, a Consumer Packaged Goods that makes canned spaghetti sauce and links up with a network food bank network during the Christmas season is plainly just playing on their customer's em...

In Zen Buddhism there is the notion of a koan, often a riddle, but sometimes a statement or question or dialogue that can’t be understood through strictly rational thought. A koan is meant to help train the mind to better access intuition, especially through meditation The most famous koan, says Wikipedia , might be ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping?’ Here’s one for cause marketers; ‘when is cause marketing not a partnership?’ The rational mind says that, of course, cause marketing is always a partnership. The riddle makes no sense. Except in cases where the sponsor is the cause there’s always at least two parties. Boom. That’s a partnership. But meditate on it a little longer and you can see when cause marketing might not be a partnership. When one party benefits in gross disproportion to the other. Or when one party doesn’t work to make sure that the putative partner benefits to his or her satisfaction. There’s no partnership in cause marketing unless all parties to the agreeme...