Cause Marketing

Versatile action star and Broadway song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman has started a new ‘all-benefits company’ that he explicitly says was inspired by Newman’s Own. Here’s five bits of entirely unsolicited cause marketing advice to Mr. Jackman from yours truly. 1. Put Your Face On the Packaging. I don’t know what Laughing Man means and probably most of your potential customers don’t either. Speaking of Newman and yourself, you told Entertainment Weekly magazine, “This is a really great to, uh, exploit your popularity, basically. It is shameless exploitation.” Except the name Laughing Man is hardly shameless exploitation of your celebrity. To really be shameless and to get the most bang for your buck, you need to put the face of one of World’s Most Beautiful People on the packaging of Laughing Man. 2. Turn Your Face Into a Caricature. Brands including Betty Crocker, Uncle Ben, KFC, the Quaker Oats Quaker dude and even Paul Newman are all represented by illustrated characters. Betty Croc...

17-year-old Canadian heartthrob Justin Bieber wants you to buy his new perfume line called Someday , and when you do all net profits “after taxes, royalties, expenses and company requirements are deducted” will go to Pencils of Promise, a school-building charity and the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Bieber’s promotional partner for Someday, a New York outfit called Give Back Brands , promises to donate its Someday profits to “restoring after-school programs” and “school food programs.” Someday appears to be Give Back’s only product right now. But this isn’t just a straight transactional cause marketing promotion. Instead, Bieber has split the middle between a straight-ahead cause marketing promotion and an all-benefits brand of the type that Rachael Ray uses in her dog food line called Nutrish. It’s hard to say whether or not Bieber is making any scratch on this deal. Royalties is one way celebrities make money from endorsements. But I’m willing to give him the benefit of a doubt. ...

To get into Harvard, jewelry designer Joan Hornig made a deal not with the devil, but with her better angels : if she got in, she told herself, by the time she was 50 she would give away all her earnings to charity. She does just that with her eponymous jewelry line sold on her website and at retail outlets like Bergdorf Goodman. Like other ‘ all benefits ’ companies, 100 percent of her profits… year-round… are donated to charity. When you purchase it online, you designate where you’d like the donation to go. Hornig also does exclusive lines for retailers that benefit predetermined charities. For instance the earrings above are from her Snowflake line at Bergdorf, which benefited UNICEF.  Hornig's jewelry is priced in the ‘if you gotta ask, you can’t afford it’ range. It goes without saying that not everyone could manage this. Town & Country  magazine reports that Hornig is independently wealthy. But the appeal to would-be consumers is mighty. How easy it would be...

After a private battle, Paul Newman passed away from lung cancer on Friday, September 26, 2008 surrounded by family and friends. He will be remembered as a splendid actor, a competitive professional race car driver, a political activist, philanthropist and accidental leader. But I’ll remember him as the preeminent face of cause-related marketing in our day. (And certainly as the star of my favorite Western, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid . See left with Katharine Ross). On a lark in 1982 along with his neighbor and friend writer A.E. Hotchner, Newman started selling salad dressing that they called Newman’s Own. Later they added pasta sauce, popcorn, salsa, wine, cookies, among many other items, to the line. The labels featured jokey caricatures of Newman and the pledge that 100 percent of the proceeds from the venture, after taxes, would be donated to charity. From its founding through 2007, Newman’s Own had donated more than $220 million to charity. Last year’s charitable donation...

In my never-ending quest to root out new cause-related marketing buzzwords, I came across this one: “all-benefits companies.” It means companies that are in business to give away all their distributable profits after expenses and profits. Newman’s Own is a prominent example, but I came across the expression on the website for PeaceKeeper Cause-Metics. We all know the story of Newman’s Own. Paul Newman and his friend, author A.E. Hotchner whipped up a batch of salad dressing and sold it to neighbors. It was an instant and unlikely success… as a funny little slide show on the company website explains… that led to an extensive food product line. Since 1982 Newman’s Own has given more than $200 million to charity. According to its website, PeaceKeeper has set a very similar goal for itself. PeaceKeeper sells a line of mineral makeup including lipstick, lip gloss, lip balm, and nail polish. The products, PeaceKeeper tells us, are made without a long list of harmful (usually artificial) ch...