Cause Marketing

There’s been some chatter recently in the blogosphere and elsewhere about strategic cause marketing. That is, if you’re a sponsor, ensuring that your sponsorship of the cause bears some rational relationship to your business. The effort on the left from Montblanc, the fountain pen maker, pretty much passes muster. From June 2009 to May 2010 when you bought this special edition pen, called the Meisterstruck Signature for Good Edition, 10 percent of the purchase price went to a UNICEF education programs because “The ability to read and write is a fundamental human right and the most important asset to children.” (For examples of other Montblanc 'donation pens,' click here . For this campaign, Montblanc set a minimum donation of $1.5 million. And while we're at it, let us now take a moment to praise a campaign that sets a minimum donation, but not a maximum. Huzzahs to Montblanc)! I would have said that parents who can feed and shelter their children is a child’s most importan...

After a show in Palm Beach Florida in April 2006, David Copperfield and two companions were mugged at gunpoint by three assailants who asked for the magician’s wallet. Instead, Copperfield performed a sleight of hand , palming his wallet, phone and passport while turning out his pockets to suggest that he didn’t have anything to steal. We have something like a sleight of hand going on with this ad for Clorox Bleach. It looks like cause marketing, with a dot.org website, something that looks like a nonprofit logo, and a mission to stop an eradicable tree disease, but in fact, there’s no cause marketing here. This ad is from the Dec-Jan. 2009 issue of Parenting magazine and it’s the first of three consecutive pages of ads for Clorox Bleach. The headline reads: “Saving Trees Big and Small: Clorox Regular Bleach. The art shows an ornament hanging from an evergreen branch. The body copy suggests that using Clorox Bleach to kill bacteria in water will prolong the life of live Christmas tre...