Cause Marketing

I saw this ad in one of the local daily newspapers and groaned audibly. Breast cancer awareness! Really? By now isn’t every person in the developed world who can fog a mirror aware of breast cancer? Apparently not. And the irony may be that it is the very fittest who are most immune to the message. No woman sees breast cancer coming. But it’s probably even more true when you’re young, strong, and healthy. Listen to the breast cancer story of Annabeth Eberle. The elite athlete was a seven-year member of the US National Gymnastics team, a featured performer in the 2006 Touchstone gymnastics movie Stick It and an eight-time All American at the University of Utah. She was diagnosed at age 27 . Eberle was the veritable poster girl for fitness when she noticed one of her breasts was getting smaller. A visit to her doctor brought the bad news. “When you are young you think no way will this happen to me,” she told the Deseret News . “It really does happen. It helped me to tell her my story an...

A recent flyer from a local grocer with about 10 stores in the chain features two cause marketing campaigns and is timed specifically for the holiday season, one for the local food bank and one for the Salvation Army’s Angel Tree program. For me this raises a question; regardless of how generous the intent of the grocer, how many cause campaigns can a retailer reasonably sustain at a time? Although these are both full-page images, I didn’t crop them so that you could get a clear sense of the amount of space the grocer, called Macys, devoted to both causes in the same flyer. The food bank effort is in some ways an analog to the Chamber of Commerce paper ico n campaign I profiled on Monday, November 15, although it is not the same effort. And it’s not a paper icon campaign. When you’re in the store, purchase a bag of food and pick your favorite team and the food goes to the associated food bank. The team whose fans donate the most food and money get bragging rights for the year. Of cour...

The Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce is offering paper icons to member organizations to raise funds for the annual University of Utah vs. Brigham Young University (BYU) Food Drive, which culminates at the rivalry football game in Salt Lake City on Saturday, November 27. The money collected by BYU fans goes to the Community Action Services and Food Bank in Utah County. The suggested retail price for the icons, called ‘Y Marks,’ is $1. (At left is a flyer for the campaign. I haven't laid my hands on an actual 'Y Mark' yet). This is the first time I’ve seen a Chamber of Commerce sponsor a paper icon campaign, but it’s not hard to imagine why the Utah Valley Chamber choose to do it. Utah County, where BYU and the Utah Valley Chamber is located, is a natural hotbed of BYU football fans. It’s logical to assume that most of the small businesses in Utah County are either owned by or employ BYU fans. Retail businesses are frequently members of Chambers of Commerce, and paper icon cam...

One way to improve the likelihood of response to your cause marketing is to create an aspect of rivalry. If you’re doing an icon campaign for instance, you could and probably should draw on existing rivalries to see who can sell the most. So you might pit division against division, managers against managers, and even individuals against each other for bragging rights and prizes. As I written before, icon campaigns can be thought of as sales contests . A company based here in my home state, ZAGG, is using rivalries among its consumer base in a cause marketing campaign. ZAGG sells a clear thin film that covers iPads, iPhones, smartphones and the like, as well as other accessories for electronic devices. Called the ZAGGSkins Fan Challenge, ZAGG will donate 20 percent of all proceeds to the National Kidney Foundation of Utah & Idaho when you buy either a University of Utah or Brigham Young University branded ZAGG covering. The Utah-BYU rivalry... sometimes called the 'Holy War...

The American economy is in the doldrums, although still, apparently, not in a recession. And, according to a new survey from the Better Business Bureau, the result is that Americans consumers have lost trust in 13 of 15 business industries. Simply put, the love is gone. How can industries including the auto industry, car dealers, gas stations, banks and financial institutions raise their numbers and get the love back of the American Consumer? Well Dr. Paul is here for you. And Dr. Paul wants to help you feel the love again. The good news is, it’s a simple 2-step program. But the first one’s a doozy. Not to be flip, but if you’re a mortgage company and a big part of your business plan was to fudge the numbers and get people into mortgages they couldn’t afford… assuming you’re still in business…you need start by learning how not to screw your customers! Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on to step two. You need some insurance. Among the industries whose negative numbers have ri...

Words I Meant to Say On Friday, Feb 1 I was a panelist at the Global Philanthropy Symposium sponsored by the University of Utah Law School and moderated by the school’s energetic young dean, Hiram Chodosh . There were two sessions: Public/private Healthcare Initiatives and Microfinance/ Corporate Social Responsibility. One of the subtexts of the second session in particular was that how a company gave was as important as what or how much it gave. Or, as one of the other panelists put it directly: “I have concluded that there is no altruism in corporate philanthropy.” Maybe not. But does that matter? That’s what Brady Stuart…a second-year law school student whose précis of the history of corporate giving in the United States had introduced the session… asked me and another panelist over lunch. His question, I think, was prompted by this discussion about the ‘why’ of corporate giving. During the session I made the point that while direct corporate donations to charities have been legal ...

I caught a lecture yesterday delivered by the new Dean of the College of Science at the University of Utah, Dr. Pierre Sokolsky , a physicist, that was strangely relevant to cause-related marketing. Although there were faculty members in the audience, the audience could be described as more as science boosters rather than scientists. (I was there after all). Dean Sokolsky talked about funding, as deans will, and he said that while the college has done just fine attracting Federal and private research dollars, he lamented the degree to which research proposals these days require proof in advance of efficacy. Grant applications require not only that you describe the problem, but the expected answer, too. He wasn’t just talking about having a hypothesis before you start, which of course is central to the scientific method. He was saying that modern research grant applications are funded in part on how clearly you can predict the results. But of course science doesn’t always work this way....

A New Rigor is Found In Arguments for Corporate Social Responsibility The most lasting rebuke of corporate social responsibility came from Milton Friedman , the small of stature economist who even in death continues to cast a huge intellectual shadow. In September 1970 Friedman wrote “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profit,” for the New York Times Magazine. In it, he argued persuasively that corporate social responsibility was just so much twaddle, socialism in a corporate wrapper that undermines a free society. Businesses that practiced corporate responsibility were playing Robin Hood with someone else’s money. “The discussions of the ‘social responsibilities of business,’” Friedman wrote, “are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor. What does it mean to say that ‘business’ has responsibilities? Only people have responsibilities.” Instead, companies should maximize their profits and return capital to shareholders so that individuals could then do...