Cause Marketing

It’s probably fair to say that more cause marketing campaigns are activated by public relations than by advertising. You my readers are a sophisticated audience so there’s no need to detail the differences between advertising and public relations. Suffice it to say that while PR has greater credibility, it’s challenging to get the frequency using PR alone that you can get with advertising. Advertising offers frequency and repeatability, but it can be expensive and it’s less credible than PR. So how do you activate your cause marketing story using public relations? One answer is that the story you tell the media have a boy and a puppy, like the story above in People magazine about 7-year-old Evan Moss who wrote a picture book called “My Seizure Dog” about an epilepsy-detecting dog that he wished his family could afford. In the book Evan imagined he and his seizure dog in various settings, including going to outer space together. The book… sold at a local café and on Amazon …...

Two cause marketing ads in two separate publications both promote the Make-A-Wish Foundation and are both dated November 29, 2010, and yet other than the logo and the benefiting organization, they are strangely unconnected. The Make-A-Wish ad appeared in People magazine, promoting Darren, one of their wish kids, along with the organization’s seasonal awareness and fundraising effort called Season of Wishes. The other is from the inside back two pages of a Macy’s circular promoting the retailer’s ‘Believe’ campaign , which I greatly admire for its breadth and depth. As I’ve confessed before, I’m a sucker for these big involved campaigns because having worked on a few of them, I know what it takes to get them just right. It’s probably too much to ask Macy’s to coordinate its circulars or other media with Make-A-Wish, but the ad for Make-A-Wish in People … whether they paid for it or not… is commercial advertising. That is, they controlled the content and its placement. So in a magazine ...

Rachael Ray , the TV personality and chef, and now, brand, is so cute that I’m not sure that if I met her in person that I could stop myself from pinching the cheeks on her face. I admire her life story , which while not exactly hardscrabble, nonetheless demonstrates unusual determination and hard work. Good for her and all her success. She earned it. I can also commend her as a generous philanthropis t . If one word signifies her brand it’s the first word of the copy in the ad to the left; ‘Simple.’ She made her name and reputation with 30-minute meals. When she cooks she measures nothing, and her recipes are almost insouciant. She cooks like an Italian grandmother, only her dimples are a whole lot cuter. But when you become a brand and your brand is ‘Simple’ with a capital-S it’s easy to take simple pretty seriously. That’s what’s wrong with this ad for her line of dog food that benefits animal welfare groups including the North Shore Animal League and the ASPCA . Good on her. But j...

In a half-dozen English language magazines Ford Warriors in Pink has used pretty much the same ad (seen below) with a call to action to buy branded merchandise from the campaign’s website. Purchases benefit Susan G. Komen for the Cure. But the ad on the left from the Noviembre 2009 issue of People en Espanol is more of awareness and esteem builder for Spanish-speakers affected by cancer. Here’s how one bilingual friend translated it for me: This [way] isn’t going to be easy. This [other way] isn’t. It’ll be easy. A [quick] pause makes all the difference. Stop. Check yourself. Live. Fight against breast cancer. I’d be the first to say that you can’t just translate advertising from one language to another and expect it to remain effective. That said, while I can imagine a dozen reasons why Ford Warriors in Pink took this approach, none of them strike me as being terribly compelling. This is all the more puzzling to me since Fordcares.com , the site where you can but all the Warriors in ...

As a marketer and a consumer I love Target. The house brands are terrific. The Target I shop most frequently seems to have more checkers that any Walmart I’ve ever been in. I love all the 'cheap chic' they sell. And their branding is dynamite. That big red bulls eye, the funky, super-visual TV ads, the 5% of income to charity. The partnerships with St. Jude and other nonprofits. It’s all great. Of course in the great recession Walmart’s still kicking Target’s can , even though Target swears Walmart’s prices aren’t any better. Sometimes it seems to me that a contributing factor to Walmart’s continuing domination of Target is that all the damn branding Target does sometimes gets in the frickin’ way. Case in point is this ad from the August 30, 2010 People magazine. The promotion involves Baby Buggy , Jessica Seinfeld’s 501 (c)(3) nonprofit that donates infant and baby supplies to homeless shelters, parent programs, court child centers, and the like. Throughout the year-long pro...