Cause Marketing

The youngest person ever to attempt a solo crossing trip to the South Pole on snowshoes, the bass player for Kanye West’s touring band, Tony Stewart’s left side tire changer, a participant at a Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure event and OK-GO all share something in common; they want to be or are being sponsored. Each of these examples offers lessons for a charity that wants their cause marketing to get sponsored, too. OK-GO is sponsored because it brings a wild amount of creativity to its music and music videos. Chevrolet sponsors OK-GO’s latest music video of its song, x, because the band consistently turns out the most downloaded music videos on the Internet. And we all go to watch their videos because of OK-GO’s wonderful power-pop sensibility and a visual approach to music videos that you can’t find anywhere else. These guys are both rock and roll and nerds. The result is that their videos are the craziest kind of eye candy you’ve ever seen in a music video. And all of us respond. ...

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...

An open letter to my friends in the nonprofit world. Dear Nonprofit Cause Marketer: The September 27 Forbes listed the value of the world’s top sponsored sports events, by the amount of money they generate per day. They are: 1. Super Bowl… $336 million 2. Summer Olympics…$176 million 3. Fifa World Cup…$103 million 4. NCAA Men’s Final Four…$90 million 5. Winter Olympics…$82 million 6. Rose Bowl…$72 million 7. MLB World Series…$61 million 8. Kentucky Derby…$59 million 9. NBA Finals…$58 million I notice that your nonprofit isn’t on the list. Indeed, no nonprofit is. There’s two reasons for that. Forbes compiled a list of the top sports event sponsorships. I’ll get to the second reason in a second. But cause-related marketing is… in the main… just a form of sponsorship. Why isn’t your cause making a $103 million per day like the World Cup? Think of all the advantages you enjoy. You have tremendous heart. You have a list of supporters who literally open their wallets for you several times ...