Cause Marketing

I’ve been getting pushback from my Oct. 4 post titled, ‘Transactional Cause Marketing is Not the Boogeyman.” In it I dismissed people who get heartburn from the practice of transactional cause marketing, that is, when a purchase triggers the donation. Fear not friends, there is a middle ground as evidenced by Hope tennis balls from Wilson that you see on the left. But first, the pushback. Here’s what I wrote then : “Transactional cause marketing is a promotion. So are coupons, sales flyers, sampling, among many others. But let’s just drill down on sampling. It’s very clear that when stores sample a product you’re more likely to buy it because it generates a powerful sense of reciprocity. Cause marketing pulls many of the same psychological strings. So why does the addition of a cause make transactional cause marketing somehow more underhanded than sampling? For that matter, it seems that lump-sum donations are just as likely to get you to buy something as transactional cause mark...