Cause Marketing

The National Debt Clock on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan continuously updates, highlighting the amount of debt the American people are encumbered with. Hospital emergency rooms in my market and across the country are currently running wait time counters on billboards. AMD ran a counter on its electronic sign in Times Square in New York City that purported to show how much time is wasted by ‘slow’ Intel chips compared to ‘fast’ AMD chips. And, on the back page at the bottom of its weekly flyers, the big box pet retailer Petsmart runs a counter that shows how many lives Petsmart Charities have saved. Counters or clocks can be a powerful marketing concept. Trouble is, the figures from Petsmart Charities don’t seem to change very often. Here are two weekly Petsmart flyers in my market, separated by three weeks, that show the same number of lives saved, 4,122,832. How to account for the sameness of the number? It could be, of course, that Petsmart Charities’ efforts did not result in any ...