Cause Marketing

I beat up Outdoor Research pretty badly in yesterday’s post for promoting its sponsorship of the nonprofit charity Leave No Trace so inconspicuously that it could scarcely be seen. Already I’ve been getting blowback for being too sharp in my criticism. Others have asked, in effect, “alright Mr. Smart Guy, how should sponsors promote their cause relationships when the ad itself isn’t primarily about the cause?” It’s easy to understand this sentiment. I suspect that Outdoor Research's advertising budget is modest. No one, least of all me, blames a small company for adding one of its long time causes… Leave No Trace… to its existing advertising. By and large its bigger companies... like Proctor & Gamble and Coke... with fat advertising budgets that feature only their chosen cause. The effort at left from Pure Protein Bar manages to balance its ad with the logo of its preferred cause just fine. The ad is about making better food choices, not Multiple Sclerosis. But no one would l...

In the early days of the practice the cause marketing you were most likely to see involved consumer packaged goods with donations predicated on coupon redemption. Cause marketing has gone 100 different directions in the since and CPG promotions no longer dominate the cause marketing landscape. Nonetheless I see at least four lessons for today’s cause marketers from Proct er & Gamble’s current CPG promotion at the left for Special Olympics . The first is longevity. P&G and Special Olympics have a 28-year relationship. I have no inside knowledge of this partnership, but I’d bet that in those three decades there’s been dozens of personnel changes. I’ll bet there’s been strong personal relationships and weak ones and plenty that fell in between. I’ll bet either party has thought about walking away from the partnership. What P&G and Special Olympics have is something like a long and happy marriage that is stronger in part because there’s been some push and pull between the par...

Tuesday found me in a meeting with a new client. We were talking about cause marketing and I asked if they would like to see any data or research on the value of cause marketing in your marketing mix. I keep a digital portfolio of such information at the ready. “For who?” he asked. “For your sales group or your management team,” I said. “Nope,” he replied. “We don’t need it.” Now my client is a sophisticated marketer with gray at his temples and decades of experience at strategic and tactical marketing. For my part, I’ve been involved with cause marketing to some degree or another for coming up on 20 years now but on Tuesday I realized for the first time that cause marketing has reached its tipping point. Cause marketing has become ‘the man.’ I use the catchphrase ‘tipping point’ deliberately, if reluctantly. Before Malcolm Gladwell popularized it, it was pretty much reserved for use by epidemiologists to describe the point at which a viral outbreak becomes an epidemic. Still, that’s w...

One of the defining characteristics of many of the very best cause marketers is that they have a basic cause marketing schema that can be modified and used again and again in multiple contexts. Susan G. Komen for the Cure, for instance, does walks and runs very well. They’re very good at branded products, too. Proctor & Gamble’s ‘ Buy One, Give One ’ approach to cause marketing is well-honed across that behemoth company’s many divisions. St. Jude’s radiothon... Country Cares for Kids ... is terrific example of that fundraising approach. In addition, St. Jude is exceptional at all the back-office elements of cause marketing campaigns, much the way that Wal-Mart excels at logistics. Children’s Miracle Network raises tens of millions a year using their Miracle Balloon paper icon, which they can customize for almost any retail setting. Such schema’s form the backbone of the cause marketing efforts for those entities. For charities the power of having a basic cause marketing schema is ...

In a world where much of the air stinks, HUGO fragrances wants to help. When you buy specially-marked packages of HUGO Element (on the left) or HUGO Man fragrances, HUGO will pay for the planting of one or more than a dozen species of trees in the Amazon rainforest. The campaign is meant to mitigate pollution in the earth’s atmosphere, rainforest deforestation, and rising CO2 levels. The campaign is in support of the Pur Project, a kind of collective led by social entrepreneur Tristan Lecomte. Pur members plant tree seeds, nurture them in nurseries, and transplant them to one of three plantations in tropical Peru or Bolivia. The labor required puts locals to work in both countries. The packages of HUGO Elements and Man are coded such that you can enter an access number and see exactly where your tree is planted on Google Maps! Cool! I like this campaign a lot. It makes good use of the ‘ buy one, give one ’ (BOGO) paradigm that is so compelling.The cause itself is solution-based. Th...

Research shows that when there is asymmetry in cause marketing between the sponsors and the cause, the entity that gains the most from the relationship is the smaller brand. But there’s an asymmetry continuum of sorts. For instance, when Yoplait yogurt and Susan G. Komen for the Cure link up, the brands which are arguably equivalent in their respective spheres, the benefits confer symmetrically. Same when Weight Watchers and Share Our Strength tie in together. So what happens when l’Oreal hooks up with the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund , as it did earlier this year with a cosmetics bag campaign? Or like Jiffy Lube does in my home state of Utah, when it does a holiday season cause marketing campaign benefiting the Utah Food Bank ? In such cases, the causes benefit disproportionately thanks to their association with the better known brands. Does the obverse hold true? That is, can a sponsor benefit asymmetrically from an association with a better-known nonprofit brand? Yes it can. F...

Kind Readers: A few months back I had an extended conversation about cause marketing with Supreet Kaur, then an MBA student at India ’s prestigious Management Development Institute in Gurgaon. Well Supreet has finished her studies and is headed toward a marketing position at Proctor & Gamble in June. She offered her services to my company... Alden Keene... but I can’t use them in that time frame.   Instead, I can endorse Supreet’s marketing skills, preparation and passion for cause marketing. For the right agency, nonprofit or company, Supreet would be a wonderful addition until she joins Proctor & Gamble in June.  Contact her directly at supreet.86 @ gmail. com. If you’d like a copy of her resume, you can contact her or me.

Dear Pampers: Just a quick note of thanks for your 1 pack = 1 vaccine campaign benefiting UNICEF. You may know that I love these ‘buy one, give one’ campaigns. They’re the best thing to come along in cause-related marketing in a long time. Consumers respond to them. They understand them. They feel good about participating in them. And they can generate crazy word-of-mouth. Your execution has been dynamite, including the follow-up FSI page in the August 31 Proctor & Gamble brandSAVER. Consumers want to know what happens after all the talk and promotion. I appreciate the transparency on your website as well that describes the exact donations made. Smart! I have to say something about the TV ad , too. It gives me a visceral reaction every time I see it. The moment when the Asian toddler waddles over for a hug and kiss is pure magic. Normally that would be a cheap visual cliché, but by gad it nearly reduces me to tears every time. And I’m not exactly your target market. The track… ‘D...

In commenting on Tuesday’s posting about the “Five Flavors of Cause-Related Marketing," Carolyn asks: “Can you give an example of a ‘replacement’ campaign? As an outsider, it can be hard to definitively identify a replacement program. But there are some earmarks. The most telling may be the language in the ad. When you read something like; “When you buy [our product] you help us make a donation of $250,000 to [cause].” Or, as in the case of this ad from a free-standing insert (FSI) from Proctor & Gamble’s April brandSAVER, which reads: “Now P&G has set a goal of donating 50 million more liters through brandSAVER. For every coupon you redeem from the April issue of brandSAVER, P&G will supply a liter of filtered water to someone in the developing world who desperately needs it. And you can help just by redeeming coupons for the products you already bring home to your family.” Let me be clear, without talking to the P&G folks I don’t know if this is replacement camp...

There I was, glancing through my March issue of Teen Vogue (don’t ask) when I came across the arresting image on the left. Like any fashion magazine, Teen Vogue is mostly ads of girls in fashionable attire in chichi locales. So this ad for a cause-related marketing campaign from Proctor & Gamble’s Tampax brand really pops. The campaign is another branch of Proctor & Gamble’s growing relationship with African causes and the United Nations. P&G’s water purifier brand Pur supports water purification efforts in Kenya. And P&G has been doing a packaged goods cause-related marketing campaign for UNICEF for at least a half-dozen years. The campaign is multi-faceted and, frankly, more than just a little confusing. You don’t need to go to the beinggirl.com/hero website to get that. Just look at the ‘logo soup’ at the bottom of the ad. Here’s the bones of the campaign: P&G is donating $1.4 million to HERO , a campaign of the United Nations Association (UNA-USA). The money ...

The Entertainment Industry Foundation , a federated charity founded in 1942 by Samuel Goldwyn, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and the Warner Brothers, has always held a wonderful fascination for me. Nowadays you’re likely to know about the EIF because of the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance, co-founded by Katie Couric after the death of her husband Jay Monahan to colorectal cancer, and administered under the auspices of the Foundation. But EIF’s other major initiatives include their Women’s Cancer Programs, National Arts and Education Initiative, and Diabetes Aware. But IEF also has a number of other minor initiatives as well as donor-advised funds supervised by such luminaries as rockers the Blackeyed Peas, former Bondman Pierce Brosnan, the Animal Actors Guild (I can only assume Lassie barks her orders at board meetings), American Idol softy Randy Jackson, and others. Their mission statement goes like this: “The Entertainment Industry Foundation, as the leading charitable...

Exporting Caring and Dollars American Express’ Member’s Project , which will fund one member project to the tune of as much as $5 million based on the vote of American Express card holders, is now down to five finalists: National Parks Foundation, for the repair and refurbishment of the 391 National Parks. American Solar Energy Society to create a small solar-powered generating unit suitable for residential homes. US Fund for UNICEF Children’s Safe Drinking Water initiative to deliver clean, pure water to children worldwide. DonorsChoose.org, a web-enabled way to match school needs with outsiders willing to help. American Forests initiative called Plant a Million Trees, a global reforestation campaign to plant trees in the United States and around the globe. For those of you keeping score at home, two out of five of those projects have truly global reach. And as of this writing, the UNICEF safe water campaign holds a commanding lead in advance of the August 7 deadline. UNICEF’s lead ma...

Let Us Now Praise Good Cause-Related Marketing So far there are six posts at causerelatedmarketing.biz and everyone of them has been critical to one degree or another. The point of this blog isn’t to flame every cause-related campaign I see as bad or inadequate. I expect there’s more to be learned more from good campaigns than bad ones. So, on All Hallow’s Eve I want to back off my criticism to praise a cause-related campaign from a company that consistently gets cause-related marketing right, Proctor & Gamble. This cause-themed FSI for UNICEF, which dropped circa September-October 2006 is one of Proctor & Gamble’s monthly “brandSAVER coupon booklets.” I haven’t kept count, but the cause-themed brandSAVERs seem to appear at least quarterly. They’ve done a year-end FSI for Special Olympics for many years and I’ve seen special versions for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, VH-1 Save the Music, and others. They’ve done an FSI for UNICEF for at least four years. Dur...