Cause Marketing

Faithful readers. Thursday's post on Scotties tissue (on the left is a recent free-standing insert [FSI]) has generated a fair amount of back-channel conversation. The following comes from Jeff Atlas , one of the pioneers of cause marketing. I post his remarks with his permission. Your recent post about Scotties led me to do a little bit of investigating. I remember when Weyerhaeuser advertised itself as "The Tree Growing Company." So, I wondered why they had dropped (or perhaps "felled") that name. Here's the story from the ad/pr company that Weyerhaeuser used: "Political turbulence on a number of issues surrounded Weyerhaeuser Company in the 1990's. Perceptions about clear cutting, log exports, old growth logging, the endangered spotted owl and stewardship of natural resources were conspiring to undercut the reputation of the industry in general and Weyerhaeuser in particular. There was a real danger that this situation could lead to new and cos...

Imagine that you're Nucor , the steel manufacturer that makes steel by recycling old steel, and you form a new relationship with Union Pacific to recycle its old track and replace it with newly reforged Nucor steel track. Or, imagine that you 're a vertically-integrated chocolate company... like Mars ... and you learn that cacao trees grow better under a canopy of taller trees. So you plant taller jungle trees over your cacao trees so that they yield more beans per tree. If you were Nucor or Mars practicing that kind of forward 'environmental' thinking you'd probably want to crow about that wouldn't you? [ Cue the sarcastic smirk ]. In effect, that's what tissue maker Irving Tissue, Inc., the maker of Scotties Tissue, is doing with its "Renewable Forest Project." Running in ads (this one was in the March issue of More magazine) and Free-Standing Inserts (FSIs), Scotties says that it "will plant three seedlings in the spring and summer for v...