Cause Marketing

If you’re the kind of person who wishes that every day could be like the first day of spring or that Christmas music would play all year long then has Lee, the apparel maker, got a cause marketing campaign for you. The ad at the left was in the April 2011 issue of women’s magazine Redbook. The next Lee National Denim Day is Friday, October 7, 2011, a full six months from tomorrow. Lee runs these ads…heck, it runs this very ad… about six months out of the year in women's and other magazines. Lee National Denim Day is a fine and well-promoted cause marketing campaign that dates to 1996. In the years since the campaign has generated more than $83 million for breast cancer research. You could hardly do better than to learn the lessons this smart campaign can teach. But to repeat the question in the headline, is it smart to plug a one-day effort year round? There’s actually not many campaigns that run 12 months a year, with Campbell’s Labels for Education, General Mills’ Boxtops for Ed...

We’ve all seen how causes recognize multiple sponsors for, say, races and events. If you got a t-shirt from participating in a Team in Training race for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, to pick on just one, you know what I'm talking about; it’s logo-soup spilled all over the back of your t-shirt. But suppose your company supports multiple causes. How do you display that without doing the same thing to your ads? That’s the question I had when I pulled this ad for Cabot Cheese from the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database. Cabot Cheese , a co-op in Vermont, supports a handful of causes in different ways and in pretty different spaces; the arts, schools, women and children’s causes, environmental causes, even the Girl Scouts. How does Cabot pull it off? Quite admirably, I’d say. Each of the causes is assigned its own icon, even the Girl Scouts. One of problems of the logo-soup approach is that logos come in all sizes, colors, and orientations. If you regularize their size or go wit...