Cause Marketing

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...

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...