Cause Marketing

With the 2004 publication of his landmark book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid in 2004 , C.K. Prahalad laid out the case for how technology… and new ways of thinking about customers and business models… could enable companies to deliver products and services of value to the four billion people across the globe who live on less than $2 a day. Companies like Hindustan Unilever are doing just that with great success. But is there a way that technology could do the same for cause marketing and philanthropic giving? A startup funded on Indigogo called CentUp is trying to do just that with a microgiving approach targeted at content developers and the people who support them. Here’s how it works: Producers, like me for instance, put the CentUp button in proximity to their content. The button acts as a like button. The user preloads some sum into their CentUp account and each CentUp like is releases a few pennies. Half goes to the provider, half to so-far unnamed charities. This i...

There are a handful of big ‘single-element' cause marketing campaigns that have been around for decades, and in their longevity they hold lessons for cause marketers everywhere. Today I'll review four of the very best and discuss what we can learn from them. First some caveats. I'm going to list four campaigns not because there are only four, but because any more than that would make this post unwieldy. Three-fourths of them are North American because frankly, I'm most familiar with them. The fourth... Red Nose Day... is from the UK. That's some of their publicity material on the left If you have examples from somewhere else that should be on this list, by all means leave a comment or email me at aldenkeene @ gmail dot com. I'd love to feature campaigns from other places. Here's how I determined my list. I looked at large-scale campaigns that have been around for at least 10 years, have broad appeal and have raised at least $50 million over their term. I eli...

Fortunes at the Bottom of the Pyramid The four campaigns we talked about in Thursday’s post are all classic examples of ‘the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’ thinking. The book of the same name by University of Michigan scholar C.K. Prahalad , lays out how technology… and new ways of thinking about customers… can enable companies to deliver products and services of value to the four billion people across the globe who live on less than $2 a day. In a similar way, these four single-element campaigns raise big money, not by asking for large donations, but by asking for small ones. The US Postal Service Breast Cancer Semipostal Stamp generates just six pennies at a pop! The BoxTops for Education campaign from General Mills just 10 cents. Needless to say, this flies in the face of conventional wisdom in fundraising which goes something like this: ‘it’s just as much work to ask for a modest donation as a big one, so you might as well ask for a big one.’ In other words, focus on the to...

There are a handful of big ‘single-element' cause-related marketing campaigns that have been around for decades, and in their longevity they hold lessons for cause marketers everywhere. Today I'll review four of the very best. In my next post I’ll discuss what we can learn from them. First some caveats. I'm going to list four campaigns not because there are only four, but because any more than that would make these posts unwieldy. Three-forths of them are North American because frankly, I'm most familiar with them. If you have examples from somewhere else that should be on this list, by all means leave a comment or email me at aldenkeeneatgmaildotcom. I'd love to feature campaigns from other places. Here's how I determined my list. I looked at large-scale campaigns that have been around for at least 10 years, have broad appeal and have raised at least $50 million over their term. I eliminated all the walks, runs, bike-a-thons, etc. Although those kinds of campai...

Right now the monster RED campaign is drawing all kinds of fire for spending dollars to make pennies. The rhetoric is flowing hot and fast in the new media and the old. A reporter for Newsweek even approached me for my opinion. I hope she quotes me. In the event she doesn't, I’ll post half her questions and my responses today and the remainder on Thursday. On 3/9/07, Bennett, Jessica 1234@newsweek.com > wrote: hi paul, ok, feel free to pick and choose from these and contribute your own thoughts if you think there's anything i've overlooked. also let me know if you've got any suggestions of background info or studies i should look into. 1. what's the premise behind cause marketing, why does it work, and how pervasive is it today? A lot of things are called cause marketing that are probably mislabeled. As I think of it cause marketing is generally a promotional tactic meant draw on the appeal of a cause to help sell a product for a company. Like most promotions, th...