Cause Marketing

I started my cause marketing career back when gasoline cost about $1.15 a gallon, the median price of a house was a little more than $80,000 and a 30-second Super Bowl ad cost ‘just’ $850,000. And yet cheap as prices were back in 1992 do you think any sponsor would spring for even one national cause marketing ad on TV? The answer is a resounding ‘no!’ Yet right now there’s goodly number of sponsors whose Christmas ad mix includes cause marketing messaging on behalf of a cause. At left are two current ads that I found on YouTube, one for Coke’s campaign on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund and the other from Macy’s Believe effort benefiting Make-a-Wish. It may be that the version running in your market is different, but it’s enough to say that both firms are actively advertising their cause promotions on TV. I won’t bother dissecting either ad beyond saying that the Coke ad is just a little too earnest while the Macy’s ad strikes just about the right tone. But I want to have a little ...

Coca-Cola has been drawing neutral to positive reviews for its white can promotion benefiting the World Wildlife Fund. Mark me down as neutral to negative, because I don’t think it goes quite fair enough. Here’s why: Amory Lovins, the slightly heterodox environmental scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute has a new book out called “ Reinventing Fire : Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era,” wherein he finds that we don’t often enough take a systemic approach to energy and resource conservation. The result is missed opportunity. I think the same is true in cause marketing. Here’s the outlines of the promotion as constituted: Starting tomorrow, Nov 1, 2011 through February 2012, Coke will release its flagship product in white cans in order to draw awareness of the plight of the Arctic and the shrinking habitat of the polar bear in particular. Coke has used polar bears in its advertising since 1922. Coke will donate $1 million to the WWF and asks that Coke drinkers also donate...