Cause Marketing

Some 37 years after the end of the Cambodian civil war, landmines left by the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese and unexploded ordnance from the Americans still shroud the landscape. Wikipedia says that it will take a decade more to remove the majority of it. Like a monster with long arms, the mines and unexploded ordnance (called UXO) of long-past wars regularly reaches forward in time to kill and maim Cambodians today. If placing landmines or dropping ordnance is easy, clearing minefields is laborious, expensive, and dangerous. Taking a role in this complicated dynamic is Saught , a social enterprise based Singapore that buys the metal left behind by landmines and UXO and helps to support the training of Cambodians artisans to create jewelry which Saught sells on its website. At left is the “Laurels of Us” necklace, which features streamlined doves and olive branches and was designed by Song Lin. The necklace sells for $129.90, which is on the high end of Saught’s offerings. Saught is...

Versatile action star and Broadway song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman has started a new ‘all-benefits company’ that he explicitly says was inspired by Newman’s Own. Here’s five bits of entirely unsolicited cause marketing advice to Mr. Jackman from yours truly. 1. Put Your Face On the Packaging. I don’t know what Laughing Man means and probably most of your potential customers don’t either. Speaking of Newman and yourself, you told Entertainment Weekly magazine, “This is a really great to, uh, exploit your popularity, basically. It is shameless exploitation.” Except the name Laughing Man is hardly shameless exploitation of your celebrity. To really be shameless and to get the most bang for your buck, you need to put the face of one of World’s Most Beautiful People on the packaging of Laughing Man. 2. Turn Your Face Into a Caricature. Brands including Betty Crocker, Uncle Ben, KFC, the Quaker Oats Quaker dude and even Paul Newman are all represented by illustrated characters. Betty Croc...

At the yet-to-open Shebeen Bar in Melbourne, Australia when you order a beer or wine from a developing country, a donation will be made to a cause in the drink’s country of origin. So toast someone with a Vietnamese beer at Shebeen and perhaps a kid in Vietnam learns a marketable skill. Raise a glass of South African chardonnay and maybe a microfinance donation is made to help someone start a street cart business in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. The social benefit business is the brainstorm of 27-year-old Simon Griffiths, who came up with the idea while traveling through Africa. The idea is not about guilting people into Shebeen bar, Griffiths told the Melbourne daily newspaper, The Age . (The photo of Griffiths at left comes from The Age .) “We are moving away from the Oxfam tin-rattling approach to retail to a space where we create high-quality products and services and make them non-profit.” Griffiths is wonderfully ambitious. Using what some call ‘embedded giving’ social entrepren...

For the last 10 years or so it seems like every other business leader I talk has an idea for a business that will funnel profits to a charity, while every charity leader I know wishes s/he had a for-profit venture that spun out loads of cash. Examples of both abound. National Geographic Magazine is a benefit of membership in the not-for-profit National Geographic Society. But almost everything else—their catalog, their television shows, their travel tours—are for-profit business enterprises; enterprises on which National Geographic pays taxes. A recent example of a company meant to funnel profits to nonprofit endeavors comes from my own hometown. Members of the billionaire Jon M. Huntsman family have acquired the high-end Sotheby’s real estate franchise in the luxury enclaves of Sun Valley , Idaho and Jackson Hole , Wyoming . (The splendid photo of the Grand Tetons comes from JT Palmer Photography). Profits from the franchise will go to the Huntsman Cancer Center he...

After a private battle, Paul Newman passed away from lung cancer on Friday, September 26, 2008 surrounded by family and friends. He will be remembered as a splendid actor, a competitive professional race car driver, a political activist, philanthropist and accidental leader. But I’ll remember him as the preeminent face of cause-related marketing in our day. (And certainly as the star of my favorite Western, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid . See left with Katharine Ross). On a lark in 1982 along with his neighbor and friend writer A.E. Hotchner, Newman started selling salad dressing that they called Newman’s Own. Later they added pasta sauce, popcorn, salsa, wine, cookies, among many other items, to the line. The labels featured jokey caricatures of Newman and the pledge that 100 percent of the proceeds from the venture, after taxes, would be donated to charity. From its founding through 2007, Newman’s Own had donated more than $220 million to charity. Last year’s charitable donation...

...An Interview with Social Entrepreneur Michael Arkes, Part I In the last 10 years there’s been an explosion of ‘social entrepreneurship.’ There’s probably a better definition somewhere but I think of social enterprises as entities that sell goods or services to further their own mission. In the United States social enterprises can be organized as for-profits. After all there’s no law here that says a company can’t have a ‘mission’ beyond generating profits. There are certain advantages to organizing as a for-profit, including: fewer regulatory hurdles, faster decision cycles, and better access to capital markets. I don’t have official numbers in front of me but I think it’s safe to say that most social enterprises are organized as nonprofits, chiefly because in the States a nonprofit with a mission generally has more moral authority than a for-profit with a mission. Let me hasten to add that social enterprises are not a recent innovation. Many people know about Greyston Bakery in Yon...

Cause-related marketing from the avant-garde Founded by an avant-garde group of artists-designers-developers, Rosa Loves is a proto-nonprofit charity that sells limited-edition t-shirts meant to raise money and tell personal stories of the dispossessed in North America, Latin America, Africa and Asia. On the outside, the t-shirts feature art meant to illustrate the stories. Inside the t-shirts… placed over the heart… is a printed summary version of the story. The wonderfully evocative t-shirt above illustrates the story of grandmother… raising three grandchildren alone… who lost her home of 27 years to fire. The t-shirts are made in men’s and women’s fitted sizes in limited editions for $25. Sixty percent of the purchase price goes to the cause it illustrates. The edition is limited by the number of t-shirts it takes to reach their fundraising goal. The t-shirts are sold online at rosaloves.com and through select retail outlets. The problem with these for-profit social entrepreneurs i...

Eric Cheung, an aspiring social entrepreneur and a recent graduate of the University of Toronto, has a big question: would you like to help the stop the genocide in Darfur, Sudan? Cheung is answering that question with an intriguing cause-related marketing approach. He may also have the answer to a lot of urgent if less grave questions that university students in particular have at his new website, OneBigU.com . Here’s the premise: students post questions at OneBigU. For instance, “what is the Albedo Effect?” Other students from across the world, give the answers. “The albedo of an object is the extent to which it diffusely reflects light from the sun.” The site features Google Ads that generates revenue. A small honorarium, split out from the Google Ads revenue is put into a ledger account in the name of the answerer for each accepted response. The person may take the honorarium or donate it to Help Darfur Now , a nonprofit founded in 2005 by high school students to help address the ...