Cause Marketing

Cause marketing is often directed at employees and other internally stakeholders. Cause marketing can help build employee morale and loyalty, improve employee productivity, skills and teamwork and produce a pipeline of future talent. One well-designed cause marketing effort that focuses closely on employee engagement comes from the Luxottica Group, the Italian eyewear company whose brands in the United States include Ray-Ban, Oakley and Revo along with retail outlets LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, and Pearle Vision. OneSight, founded by Luxottica in 1988, is a public 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity that redistributes millions of eyeglasses a year in more than three dozen countries across the globe. The World Health Organization estimates that 314 million people suffer from poor but correctable vision. Luxottica says it funds most of OneSight’s administrative costs such that 92 percent of public donations go to fund programs. Luxottica offers employees the chance to volunteer…with pay…to work ...

Most cause marketing is hosted by companies that face the consumer; retailers, restaurants, and the like. But B2B cause marketing has long existed, if on a much more modest scale than consumer-based cause marketing. The usual sticking point is foot traffic. Your average warehouse just doesn’t generate enough foot traffic to support something like a paper icon campaign. That’s why B2B cause marketing, when it’s done, usually takes a different tack. Toolmex , in Natick, Mass., supplies the industrial marketplace with things like power chucks, end mills, milling inserts, electric motors, and CNC lathes. Few of us have ever set foot in a place like Toolmex. So what kind of cause marketing does the company do? Well, you could describe it as gateway cause marketing for a B2B supplier like Toolmex. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from the press release : “Toolmex Industrial Solutions is proud to support Toys for Tots this holiday season, and is helping to make the holidays brighter for di...

Yesterday’s post ‘Five Questions Nonprofit Marketers Need Answers to From Potential Sponsors’ was inspired by a monthly column in Smart Money . Each month the personal finance magazine publishes a feature called “10 Things X Won’t Tell You.” The intent of the feature is to show that your interests and those of your bank, say, don’t always align. In the interest of better alignment between causes and sponsors, here are five questions that a potential sponsor better have a satisfying answer to before engaging in a cause marketing relationship with a charity. Am I Just a Paycheck to You? I had a conversation the other day with a potential cause marketing sponsor scouting for a cause. Their first goal was to generate money for their putative partner. Of course, they also had several business and marketing goals as well. Sophisticated sponsors know that most causes expect money from cause marketing. Fair enough. But if that represents most of a cause’s motivation a sponsor ought to know ...

I write this post from my home office in my basement, which is heated, well-lit and comfortable. The floor beneath my feet is carpeted. Had the basement lacked any of these features, we probably wouldn’t have bought this house. Such amenities are assumed. But as a college student I lived in one of those classic ‘pit’ kinds of apartments. The house was about 100 years old back then and the foundation was made of rock rather than concrete. The basement floor in that old house was compacted dirt. Increasingly cause marketing is assumed as well for companies that face the consumer, notably grocers. This was made clear in several questions the SuperMarketGuru.com asked its 1800-member consumer panel about cause marketing. ‘Guru’ asked four cause marketing questions in addition to its other questions: Were consumers more likely to shop in a supermarket that supports causes? Would consumers be tolerant of price increases that allow for donations? Were consumers likely to travel further to sh...

In 2011, Amazon’s sales were $43.59 billion and its profit was $7.64 billion. It is the world’s biggest etailer. That's part of their Seattle headquarters at the left. And how much did Amazon donate to charity? It's not clear. Although I suspect that MercyCorps and the Red Cross have both received meaningful donations from Amazon.com. We do, however, know that Amazon.com spent $1.5 million in lobbying in 2011, and more than $21 million since 2001 . Likewise, we know that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s billionaire founder and chief executive, his mother and father, and his wife, author Mackenzie Bezos, have given more than $28,000 to Washington Senator Patty Murray (D) since 2009. Amazon’s website reports that its “customers have contributed more than $35 million to global relief programs since 2001.” But Amazon’s piece of that is probably in-kind only. A statement at Amazon.com says: “We… contribute to the communities where our employees and customers live. Our contributions can be seen...

When I saw the cause marketing ad at the left in my local newspaper, my first reaction was, frankly, uncharitable. I thought: my golly hearing aid retailers must have gaudy profit margins! Those uncharitable feelings aside, I think there’s some lessons for using cause marketing to better keep customers for life. Here’s the offer. When you buy your first hearing aid(s) from My Hearing Centers, the company will donate $100 to “the children’s hearing and speech center,” presumably an in-house entity. My Hearing Centers will also offer as much as $1200 towards the purchase of new hearing aids when you trade-in existing hearing aids. My Hearing Centers promises that your trade-ins will be refurbished for use by kids in need. My Hearing Centers is a five-unit chain with locations in the Mountain West states of Idaho, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. In a 2009 review , Consumer Reports found that the hearing aid market was fractured and that hearing aids were expensive. In Metro New York City, t...

Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship released its annual CSR Index the other day even as Occupy Wall Street and its satellite efforts continue their protests that are, in part, anti-corporate . The top 10 were : Publix Super Markets Google UPS Kellogg’s Amazon.com Berkshire Hathaway FedEx Campbell Soup Baxter International 3M By my count I’ve seen cause marketing from six of the top 10 and 33 of the full list of 50 companies. According to the BCCCC the index is based on a survey of “how the public perceives a company in three dimensions:” "Citizenship: Does the company contribute positively to its surrounding community in a socially and environmentally responsible fashion? "Governance: Is the company business run in a fair and transparent fashion? Do stakeholders associate the company with high ethical business standards? "Workplace: Are employees treated fairly and paid a decent wage? Does the company invest in developing employee skill sets and career opport...

It is with great pleasure I offer up this guest post from Yinka Olaito, a specialist in brand communication, social media, and business communication in Lagos, Nigeria. Yinka is the chief communication officer of Michael Sage Company in Lagos, and a trainer, speaker and fellow blogger . I asked him to address the topic of Cause Marketing in Nigeria. (That's part of the Lagos skyline on the left). Cause marketing is not new to any tribe (industry, nation, state, or professional association). The challenge in implementing cause marketing is how to be involved, where to be involved and when to be involved in order to create right impression and get maximum value. Most organizations involved in cause marketing often jump into it just to feel good or because they see other companies doing it. Many get involved in causes that the top management feel good about without any strategic consideration. We’ve seen misdirected cause involvement actually hurting corporate image and perception ins...

The Consumer Wars have been fought, and frankly, Consumers won. In the process, retailers ceded their pricing power and maybe their sustainability. Can cause marketing come to the rescue? That question came after reading the unsigned editorial at the left in a recent issue of Outdoor USA Magazine , a trade publication of the outdoor retailers and manufacturers industry. The editorial is specifically about the dangers to outdoor retailers of using Groupon . But at a broader level for retailers it's really about preserving brand, margins, maybe even the business itself in this post-Consumer world. Groupon really isn’t the problem so much as it is the symptom. After-all retailers have had deep-discount sales promotions in their arsenal for generations. Instead, Groupon is another sign that retailers don’t have many weapons left in that arsenal to preserve pricing power. Opines the magazine’s editors; “At the end of the day, marketing channels like Groupon and Facebook Deals are really...

Cause marketing is often directed at employees and other internally stakeholders. Cause marketing can help build employee morale and loyalty, improve employee productivity, skills and teamwork and produce a pipeline of future talent. One well-designed cause marketing effort that focuses closely on employee engagement comes from the Luxottica Group , the Italian eyewear company whose brands in the United States include Ray-Ban, Oakley and Revo along with retail outlets LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, and Pearle Vision. OneSight, founded by Luxottica in 1988, is a public 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity that redistributes millions of eyeglasses a year in more than three dozen countries across the globe. The World Health Organization estimates that 314 million people suffer from poor but correctable vision. Luxottica says it funds most of OneSight’s administrative costs such that 92 percent of public donations go to fund programs. Here’s a link to a list of OneSight’s extensive programs. Luxotti...

Plus 3 Network wants to turn your “sweat equity into social capital,” and they’re using a non transactional form of cause marketing to do it. Here’s what that means: You register at Plus 3, a kind of social media network, and then keep an online log of all your workouts. Each mile you train… mainly running, walking and biking… translates to a small donation paid for by sponsors to a select group of charities. Certain training activities are also awarded with prizes or rewards like chain lube or training socks. So you get fitter and maybe some new socks, the sponsor gets the usual benefits of cause marketing and the charity gets a donation. Of course, Plus 3 gets something out of it too. It’s a cause marketing triple play. The donations are higher when you upload the data from a GPS enabled device than if you make a hand entry. For instance, walking pays out $.05 a mile when uploaded from Garmin GPS device, but just $.0167 when you hand enter the data. Plus 3 says this is because the...

CLOSE ON GUS -- He holds the envelope in his hand, trying not to show his excitement. But you can practically hear his heart pounding. Now, almost afraid to look, he slowly edges the check out of its envelope. He closes both eyes. Now he opens one eye and peeks. INSERT -- On the "Expenses" check emerging from the envelope. First we SEE the name: AUGUST GORMAN. And then...the amount: $85,789.80! GUS (o.s.) (quietly) Pennies from heaven. Round-Up Some Change Imagine if, like Richard Pryor’s character Gus Gorman in Superman III, that the charity you work with or for could get just a few pennies from each retail transaction. It wouldn’t necessarily mean an $85 million payday, but a bunch of pennies really adds up. (The excerpt is from scifiscripts.com . Superman III was written by David Newman and Leslie Newman). If the charity you work for or with generates a lot of affinity and has a particularly strong relationship with a retailer or a banking institution, you may be a likel...

Last September, at the request of San Francisco blogger Gayle Roberts, I posted my predictions on the future of cause-related marketing. With the coming of the New Year it makes sense to re-release this post. I have a spotty record predicting the future. I bought a Zip drive about a week before the first USB drive came out. And then, admiring the portability of said USB drives, I bought 2 of them with 56K of memory for about $50 a pop. I have two complete sets of the 1987 Topps baseball cards (which includes the rookie cards for Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire) still in the original shrink-wrap. They’re worth almost exactly what I paid for them. Or rather less, considering the ravages of inflation. (I also have a first edition of Hayduke Lives by Edward Abbey in very fine condition that has more than doubled in value. So, I’m not always dead wrong.) So imagine my surprise to get a short missive from Bay-area fundraising consultant Gayle Roberts asking me to weigh in on the topic...

The Above Headline was Written with Google in Mind! On Thursday someone searched the Cause-Related Marketing blog using these terms: "business+benefits+cause+marketing." I instantly slammed my hand to my forehead Homer Simpson -style and said, "d'oh!" After 40-something posts I've somehow neglected this basic topic. So without further ado, here are six business benefits to cause marketing: Cause-related marketing can directly enhance sponsor sales and brand. Cause-related marketing is respected and accepted business practice. Cause-rleated marketing can heighten customer loyalty. Cause-related marketing can boost a company's public image and helps distinguish it from the competition. I would add that it can also give corporate PR officers a new story to tell. Cause-related marketing can help build employee morale and loyalty. Cause-related marketing can improve employee productivity, skills and teamwork. It's also my opinion that the exchange that ta...