Cause Marketing

Yesterday I was a judge in the preliminary rounds of my state’s DECA convention/competition. If you’ve never done it, do yourself a favor and volunteer. It will renew your faith in the youth of America. Each student-pair got a prepared case study and 20 minutes to work up a campaign… the case study given to the students I judged was about marketing a new dental practice in a medium-sized community… then 10 minutes to present it in front of the judges. For our part, we were to ask three prepared questions. One of those questions was words to the effect, ‘won’t this promotion you planned disturb the other dental practices in the community?’ Perhaps half the teams felt bad that this was the case and proposed potential ways to remedy it. But one team in particular was unapologetic. They said something like this: “If our promotion shakes customers away from the existing dental practices, it’s probably because they weren’t being well served. If the established practices don’t step up thei...

Through May 9, 2010 each bucket of specially-marked KFC chicken sold generates a $.50 donation to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The KFC bucket also invites you to visit bucketsforthecure.com to make an additional donation. As the website URL suggests, the campaign sports the unwieldy name of 'Buckets for the Cure." The redoubtable Scotty Henderson , and many others, have raised the issue of "cause-nitive dissonance,' to coin a term. That is whether fried food should be supporting breast cancer research, since research has shown obesity be a risk-factor for breast cancer and since fried chicken is high in fat. Many, many others, including the Wall Street Journal , have weighed in. This issue of 'tainted money' is one I've raised more than once and can appreciate. Back in 2007 Newsweek reporter Jessica Bennett asked me, "Advertising is obviously not about morals. But isn't there a moral conflict in the idea that cause marketing is tapping into consu...

Tuesday’s post was about the increasing use of ‘free’ as a business model. No less a company than Google is built on ‘free.’ So are Craigslist and Facebook and Flickr. And free is coming on like a lion. AOL used to be primarily a subscription-based service. But every year their subscriber base shrinks. Nowadays, as a free portal, AOL.com is the fourth most-visited Web property. The mighty Wall Street Journal’s online version had a subscription model. But Rupert Murdoch, who recently purchased the Journal, announced that it will soon be largely free. It will no doubt grow as a result. As Chris Anderson writes in his cover story, “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business,” in the March 2008 Wired magazine : “People think demand is elastic and that volume falls in a straight line as price rises, but the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great market and none at all.” “The huge psychological gap between ...

A ‘Marketing Conceit’ Regular readers know that transparency is my bête noire . Directly or indirectly, I must have 10 posts that address the issue. But it bears repeating; when it comes to cause-related marketing, don’t try to snooker the customer. I saw this ad for Hooah Energy Bars in All You magazine, a women’s magazine published for Wal-Mart by Time Inc., and it has some transparency problems. The ad and the website say, “Every HOOAH bar helps fund research that improves soldier safety, diet, and quality of life.” Promotional material for its liquid companion, HOOAH Soldier Fuel energy drink use similar language. Supporting the troops sounds great doesn’t it? Especially to people like me with a military background (I was in the Army National Guard). But that’s not exactly what’s happening here. The formulas for the bar and the drink were licensed by the US Department of Defense to D’Andrea Brothers, LLC, which produces and markets them under the HOOAH name. In other words, the...