Cause Marketing

Actress, supermodel, TV producer, philanthropist, and mother of four Heidi Klum wants you to buy the hoodie off her back to benefit StandUp2Cancer, the telethon and charity. The hooded sweatshirt retails on the STU2C website for $46.99 and features versions of its logo on front and back. Klum, of course, is lovely and talented and STU2C is an admirable, innovative and hard-pressing cause. STU2C has always struck me as a charity in a hurry, and I like that about them. Cancer has bedeviled the world for too long as far as I'm concerned. The ad at the left is from the August 1, 2011 issue of Sports Illustrated magazine. But here’s comes the ‘but.’ I’m always little chary when causes use sex to sell. Certainly other cause marketing campaigns use sex in their campaigns. MAC Cosmetics uses sex very effectively in its ads benefiting the MAC AIDS Fund . But then again, that approach is true to MAC's brand and corporate ethos. While STU2C commonly uses celebrities like Klum in their a...

Outdoor advertising companies have an expression about signs that are so busy the message can’t be taken in one glance. They call such signs, ‘park and reads.’ The usual rule of thumb for billboard is that they have no more than 8-10 words and fewer than 4 lines of text. Total. But of course many people either don’t know or think the rule doesn’t apply to them. You see such signs all the time, although the one below probably has a subject matter you’ve never before seen on a billboard. The ad above, from the March 31, 2011 Fortune magazine, is a park and read from the fashion designer Geoffrey Beene. The ad features Ann and Nancy Wilson of the 70s and 80s rock group Heart along with two cancer researchers, Marion Knott, MD, PhD and Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD. There’s no arguing with the intent of this PSA campaign or the sincerity of GBGB (Geoffrey Beene Gives Back) from Geoffrey Beene, LLC. All profits from operations fund a wide array of philanthropic endeavors. GBGB is basically Newma...

The September 27, 2007 Forbes magazine listed the value of the world’s top sponsored sports events, by the amount of money they generate per day. They are: Super Bowl… $336 million Summer Olympics…$176 million Fifa World Cup…$103 million NCAA Men’s Final Four…$90 million Winter Olympics…$82 million Rose Bowl…$72 million MLB World Series…$61 million 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 marketing is… in the main… just a form of sponsorship. Why isn’t your cause making a $336 million per day like the Super Bowl? Think of all the advantages your cause enjoys. It has tremendous heart. It has a list of supporters who literally open their wallets for you several times a year. Some of your supporters are as passionate about your cause as any face-painting fan of...

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...