Cause Marketing

I have watched the plentiful news coverage about Wal-Mart’s green turn and read many opinions both skeptical and convinced. Until now I have withheld judgment. Talk, after all, (mine included) is cheap. But it seems increasingly clear that Wal-Mart is not…as the doubters say… just ‘ greenwashing ’. How did I come to this conclusion? Well I read a number of feature stories in the American business press, for one. And one of the common threads is that Wal-Mart has discovered that by trimming packaging, excising unnecessary waste, and maximizing energy costs they are saving tens of millions every year. Wal-Mart’s unique business proposition is that they are the low price leader and their margins are razor-thin. “A penny saved is a penny earned,” the saying goes. And that’s truer for Wal-Mart than, say, Rolls Royce. To its bones, Wal-Mart is a cost-cutter. But I also keep coming across marketing efforts... ironically enough... that evidence Wal-Mart is serious in its greening. Above is a p...

Certification Exhaustion A few years back a would-be client came to me with an interesting question: would people in the first world support cause-related marketing that served people in the Third World? In their case, they were building children’s hospitals in Africa, Asia and Latin America. That sounds like a mountainous undertaking, but the fact is, you can build and equip a pretty darn good children’s hospital in Uganda, India or El Salvador for pennies compared to what it would cost in North America or Europe. I didn’t have a ready answer for these folks, but I told them there were two ways to test the idea. Either they could commission a rock-solid probabilistic conjoint survey for $25,000 más o menos , or they could hire me to build them a campaign for the same amount of money and we’d test it in the marketplace. I’m still not sure of the answer, but increasingly it seems that companies are willing to test in the marketplace the idea of cause-related marketing in the First World...