Cause Marketing

KFC, a unit of Yum Brands, is testing a new quick-serve restaurant version of the fried chicken outlet and among the changes is that its cause marketing efforts will be much more local, according to Anne Fuller, senior director of development for KFC eleven. The KFC eleven test store is in Louisville, Kentucky, KFC’s headquarters. When it opens August 5, 2013, it will feature rice bowls, flatbreads, salads, KFC original recipe chicken among other items, plus sides. A second test location is set to open in Louisville before year’s end. The 11 in KFC eleven is a salute to the 11 herbs and spices in their original recipe chicken. The trade-dress for the test store includes lamp lighting, digital signage with community news, and artwork from local artists. Why step into the quick serve space? Fuller answered a reporter from QSRweb.com this way: “People love KFC but it's not a frequent choice for many guests for some reason. We wanted to create a broad and balanced menu that could...

Last Monday, July 22, 2013, March of Dimes released the annual results of its campaign with Kmart... now in its thirtieth year... and thereby begged the question, what does it takes to have a multi-decade cause marketing relationship between a cause and a sponsor? In the most recent year, Kmart,the discount retailer, donated $7.4 million to the March of Dimes, bringing the 30-year total to nearly $114 million. March of Dimes works to improve the health of mothers and babies. Too many cause marketing relationships, in my estimation, resemble speed-dating more than long-term marriage. There can be good reasons for short-term cause marketing relationships. But most causes and sponsors benefit more from long-term marriages than short-term hookups, the main benefit being continuity. Cause marketing trades on the trust that people, usually consumers, put in the cause and the sponsor. The longer the relationship lasts the more trust is evidenced. There's also a sponsor finding cost ...

Today my adopted state of Utah celebrates Pioneer Day. It’s a founder’s day celebration that commemorates the day when a hardy band of 151 settlers from the distant east first landed in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, not even a year behind the star-crossed Donner Party, which had traversed basically the same route. Pioneer Day is a state holiday that we celebrate like a second ‘Fourth of July’ with pancake breakfasts, parades, BBQs, and fireworks after dark. From July 24, 1847, when the vanguard party arrived, until the time when the rails were linked by the transcontinental railroad at Promotory Point Utah in 1869, about 70,000 people made the trek to Intermountain West. They rode in wagons, pushed handcarts and walked, driven largely by religious faith and fervor. And while the the settlement of the American West was accomplished by tens of thousands who made their way along the Oregon or Sante Fe Trails, only the Utah Pioneers built fords and ferries and roads, and planted...

When translated into English, the Japanese word Kaizen is typically rendered as “continuous improvement.” That is, to keep working on your processes… implementing small and oftentimes cheap improvements… to make them better and better. Few companies or nonprofits… in Japan or anywhere else… are likely to survive if they don’t practice some version of kaizen. And it’s precisely the word to describe what Toyota’s marketing department practiced with its cause marketing effort called “ Meals Per Hour ,” which is a video about the people of Rockaways, New York in the wake of Superstorm Sandy in October 2012. Rockaways is a thin peninsula in Queens, New York that faces the Atlantic, sorta like a barrier island. As the crow flies, it’s only five or six miles from the center of Brooklyn. But unless you’re a crow it’s a little remote for New York City. And so when Sandy hit, the Rockaways were devastated, what with all that ocean frontage. And getting food relief to them was a challenge. It...

New research released this week finds that women are more price sensitive than men on almost every product and service category. Since cause marketing has been shown to help companies preserve pricing power , and since women are more responsive to cause marketing than men, the research is a virtual punch list for charities looking for sponsors who need help. The research… called Women, Power and Money … comes from FleishmanHillard and Hearst Magazines and was conducted by Ipsos. Among other questions, Women, Power and Money asked women and men to rate how important getting low prices is to them in 12 broad categories of goods and services: automobiles, household supplies, food/groceries, household appliances, personal care items/toiletries, vacations, fashion apparel and accessories, technology, watches or jewelry, household furnishings and décor, financial services/investments, beauty/personal grooming items. You can plainly see the influence of Hearst Magazines on this list of...

Two professors at the Ohio State University have a new take on the benefits of cause marketing; it helps keep supplier pricing in check. Their paper, called “ A Supply-Side Explanation for the Use of Cause Marketing ” by Anil Arya and Brian Mittendorf, starts with the proposition that, “firm profits under simple(non-strategic) corporate philanthropy wherein the firm pledges a donation amount to charity. The paper then demonstrates that the firm can achieve the same donation level while also cutting supplier costs by tying donations to sales. Such a cause marketing tie-in intrinsically undermines the per-unit profitability of each product by adding a new marginal cost of sales. As such, the cause marketing pledge makes the firm's input demand much more sensitive to supplier pricing. This increased sensitivity to pricing persuades the supplier to charge a lower price so as to boost demand for its input. In effect, by engaging in cause marketing, the firm is able to make the supplie...

In March 2013, Jennifer Maher of the Cause Academy in Phoenix lowered her standards and invited me to be part of the Academy’s senior retreat. It was a veritable who’s who of cause marketing superstars. I was frankly in awe of the other attendees. But they were all so affable and fun my awe quickly turned to respect and warmth. Two things distinguished the senior retreat from other cause marketing conventions. For one, there were no prepared presentations, just wide-ranging discussions on topical themes. The second thing that stood out was that wasn’t all just talk. Jennifer and her able director of operations, Nicole Buratovich, distilled all our ponderings (and a few vigorous debates!) into two useful and pertinent white papers: “Future Trending of Corporate Relations,” and “Words of Wisdom.” The second white paper was premised on the questions “if I knew then as a noob what I know now as a grizzly veteran what would I do differently and what would I pass on to those new to cause mar...

Tubbs, which makes snowshoes, recently announced the result of its 11th annual cause marketing event called Romp to Stomp, which benefits breast cancer charities in the United States and Canada. This post is part of an occasional series when I announce the results of cause marketing efforts that I have posted on in the past. You can read that post here . For the 2012-13, Romp to Stomp generated $369, 203 for Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. Since 2003, Romp to Stomp has raised more than $2.5 million. This year 6,000 people took part in nine Romp to Stomp events in the United States and Canada, including 355 breast cancer survivors. Romp to Stomp is basically a series of races, including Lil Romper Dash for kids 12 and under. The press coverage I saw said that 1/4 of participants tried snowshoeing for the first time at the event. It also said that the dollar amount raised was higher than the goal. Introducing new people is almost certainly another o...

In the May 2013 and June 2013 issues of Outside magazine CamelBak ran an ad for its new All Clear water-purifying bottle that looks for all the world like cause marketing. But it isn’t. It depicts a photojournalist-style picture of Garrett Means, wearing scrubs and identified in the body copy as a humanitarian aid worker. To his left is a black woman holding an All Clear bottle. The body copy continues; “the Tanzanian village that Garrett visited didn’t have any potable water. He used the CamelBak All Clear for all his personal water and taught the locals how to use it before he left.” CamelBak All Clear bottles use UV light to treat .75 liters of water. You fill the $100 bottle with clear water, press the button for two seconds which activates the UV lamp and then shake it for 60 seconds so that the UV light gets to all the water in the bottle. The bottle has a lithium-ion battery in it that’s good for about 80 cycles before it has to be recharged. You can recharge it using a U...

In another case of cause marketing mashed up with games, GoodGames offers a fraction of a cent to charity every time you play a game like Mahjongg Dimensions or Pyramid Solitaire on their website. Play three games and the cause of your choice…from a list of nearly 110,000 registered charities…gets one penny. These aren't hard-core games, just versions of familiar favorites for casual online game-players. The games come from Arkadium and the donation comes from advertising revenue on the site. Each game played generates about a penny in advertising revenue, which is split between your charity, Arkadium and GoodGames . In the past we’ve talked about gamified cause marketing, which can take several approaches . GoodGames is from the same company that brought us GoodSearch, GoodShop, and GoodDining, which together have generated a little bit less than $10 million for affiliated causes. The GoodSearch search engine generates a penny for your cause when use it. GoodSearch’s sear...

The King Salmon or Chinook is the largest species in the Pacific salmon family and in some parts of Alaska the population is weak , leading to restrictions on sport and commercial fishing in some areas of the Kenai River fishery, for instance. A fishing lodge on the Kenai Peninsula called Alaska Hooksetters thinks that might be partly a marketing problem, and so it just started promoting a catch and release approach to King Salmon called “ Spawn On ” that features its own logo and Facebook page. Catch and release is common among sport fisherman going after trout in the U.S. Catch and release means that when the fish is landed the fisherman removes the hook… usually a barbless hook… and allows the fish to swim free. Most, but not all, fish survive the ordeal. I’ve got a brother-in-law who spends maybe a quarter of his weekends every year fly-fishing the blue-ribbon trout rivers of the Western United States. I mention this because he and his fly-fishing buddies are strict catch and relea...

One of the old reliables in service journalism is the “How to Avoid a Timeshare Scam” story. I typed that phrase in Google and got 444,000 results. The words “timeshare ripoff” generates another 78,000 results in Google. ‘Timeshare hard-sell” turns up 78,700 results. “Timeshare nightmare”? 229,000 results. I’m sure there are legitimate and above-board timeshare operators, but they seem to be a pretty well-kept secret. And so I’m not surprised that an online timeshare sales service is trying cause marketing to dress up its reputation. Because if you were a good operator in disrespected sector, one way to get past public cynicism would be to align with a cause that prospective customers could care about. Public cynicism about market sectors that have been broadly tarred isn’t just a problem for companies. A friend of mine used to be an executive director for a nonprofit that specialized in wilderness therapy for teens. Their results were very good and they never had any deaths or any nea...

A new study finds that “true believers” are more likely than non-believers to increase in status and influence, especially at organizations that are ideologically-oriented. So stow away that cynicism. The research comes from the paper called “Status and the true believer: The impact of psychological contracts on social status attributions of friendship and influence,” published in the May 2013 issue of the Journal of Organization Science . “Those who were true believers in this company’s cause were considered idea leaders and influenced how other employees viewed their work,” said John Bingham, the lead author of the study and a professor of organizational leadership and strategy at BYU Marriott School of Management, but like yours truly, a alumnus of the University of Utah. “If the mission is a legitimate part of an organization’s identity, that tends to be the case,” he says. Bingham and his coauthors, James B. Oldroyd, Jeffery A. Thompson, Jeffrey S. Bednar, and J. Stuart Bund...

Two surveys out this week uncover new insights about the push and pull of cause marketing. In the first, the Cause Marketing Forum looks for million-dollar cause marketing campaigns at checkout and finds 63 of them generating a total of $358.4 million. That’s an average of $5.6 million per campaign. But the average is pulled up by the first five donations that total more than $150 million by themselves. The Cause Marketing Forum is meeting in Chicago so I haven’t had the chance to talk with them, but I suspect that in the years to come this survey will turn up much bigger numbers. The big winners are children’s charities. Forty-seven percent of the total raised went to the name-brand children’s charities; Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, Easter Seals, March of Dimes, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, etc. One surprise was eBay’s number. The online company generated $54 million for 22,000 charities, the most of any company on the list. The other surprise was Safeway, which ge...

Selling cause marketing sponsorships… like selling radio or television airtime… means selling the intangible. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have inventory. Races have space on t-shirts and signs, telethons and radiothons have airtime, packaged goods products have packaging. Keep brainstorming and other cause marketing inventory will become plain. I advised a friend, a New York Times best-selling author with his own charity, to auction off the rights to name a character in one of his upcoming books. Shortly before I left Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals I was working on adding a kind of behind-the-scenes tour to my sponsors who achieved certain fundraising levels; never underestimate the degree to which people love to pull back the curtain on how “Oz” manages his acts of magic. A really fun kind of alternate cause marketing inventory came across my desk recently. In Raleigh, North Carolina Terramor Homes does a BBQ in support of the Duke Children’s Hospital Radiothon. The BBQ in...

Today is Memorial Day 2013 in the United States. Memorial Day is a federal holiday, but also a day to do a little cause marketing. CSK, the big railway company is doing just that with their campaign on behalf of the Wounded Warrior Project called, Drop and Give Them 10 . It’s a fun campaign that just happens be on the wrong holiday. Drop and give me ten is an American colloquialism that means to do ten pushups. When you do 10 pushups and visit the campaign website and affirm that you did yours, CSX will donate a dollar to the Wounded Warrior Project. Post it on your social network and CSX will donate another $1. The total donation is capped at $50,000. The campaign started Monday, May 20 2013 and runs through Wednesday, May 29. Why pushups? “All service members have a few things in common:” says the campaign website, “bravery, sacrifice and, of course, the pushup. This Memorial Day, to honor the men and women of the military, CSX is asking all Americans to do 10 pushups.” ...

On Monday I posted about five good habits of great cause marketers. But cause marketers... good and bad... can have bad habits too. In his terrific 2012 book The Power of Habit Pulitzer prize-winning-reporter Charles Duhigg tells about the three phases of habits: the cue; the routine or behavior; and the reward. To change bad habits to good habits, Duhigg writes, you have to transform the routine / behavior. That’s how Alcoholic Anonymous works and the means by which Tony Dungy turned the Indianapolis Colts into Super Bowl champs, to cite two examples from the Duhigg’s book. I recommend The Power of Habit highly. Here, then, are five bad habits that too many cause marketers have. Analyzing the Data Badly. Immature people, like immature cause marketers, almost always struggle with what scientists call ‘confirmation bias.’ That is, they tend to want to shape the data to their conclusions and prejudices, rather than the other way around. Confirmation bias leads to bad science an...

Aristotle wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Of course, that’s true. There are a whole host of things that are challenging the first times we do them, but become easier as we repeat them. Scientists call it “automaticity.” I’ve been driving for more than 25 years and notwithstanding all the cognitive effort it took when I was 16, it’s pretty easy for me to drive safely now. William James, the first real American psychologist, said that habits are like the crease in a man’s suit pants or the channels set by the water that came before. “Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state,” James said. Warren Buffet, the avuncular billionaire, told Caroline Ghosn , cofounder of women's careership startup Levo League, that you should look at the qualities you most admire in others and cultivate those habits in yourself.  "Ju...

In Feb 2013, I got an email from a remarkable student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who had an intriguing question: why isn’t there more cause marketing between sponsors and faith-based nonprofits?   It’s a question I’d wondered about myself so it was fun to be asked to think about. Marshele Carter Waddell and I talked about it several times in the intervening months. Marshele is a grad student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC, the executive director of a faith-based nonprofit, the author of four books, the 28-Year Wife of a U.S. Navy SEAL Commander (ret) and mother of a U.S. Marine Infantry Officer who received the “Bronze Star for Valor for things sons don't tell their mothers,” as she puts it.   With her permission I publish the conclusion of her analysis which is one section in a report of a larger project called, "Corporations, Creeds and Cause-related Marketing Campaigns: Defining the Graces that Save and the Sins that Sink C...

Years ago I read a book by a man who had been the public defender in the bad old days of Soviet Russia. There were horrors aplenty, all worthy of a Kafka novel. One of the things that has stuck with me ever since was his belief that he wasn’t defending his clients against just the Soviet apparatchik. He also had to defend against the expectations of jurors who ‘knew’ what the government wanted; even when there was no communication from any level of the Nomenklatura. Such kangaroo courts didn’t require any direct intervention from Soviet officials at all, he wrote. That is during a trial jurors didn’t need to get something like a telegram from the Politiburo to know how to rule. They convicted defendants based on what they thought the Politburo and the Party would want them to do. These memories came back to me over the weekend when I learned that Internal Revenue Service (IRS) officials in the Cincinnati offices in charge on non-profit were giving unwarranted scrutiny to applicatio...