Cause Marketing

Cause marketing sponsors might have several reasons for engaging in cause marketing  including boosting sales, building brand, and bolstering PR, among others. One of those goals might also be to give customers a good reason to come back after supporting a cause. Informally, it’s called a bounceback and you’ll see it commonly in retail settings for food and other consumables. At the left is a current cause marketing campaign from Arby’s on behalf of a fundraiser called Happy Not Hungry that benefits childhood hunger fighting efforts from the Arby’s Foundation . Make a donation to Happy Not Hungry during the month of September and you’ll get a coupon for a free item from Arby’s value menu, when you also purchase something else. Although the flyer doesn’t mention it, the money passes through the Arby’s Foundation to No Kid Hungry campaign from the anti-hunger cause Share Our Strength. There’s two elements to get right in a bounceback offer. The first is that it has to both move pe...

If you’re a cause marketer, especially if you’re a consultant like me or come from the nonprofit side of the equation, and if you stay at it long enough someone’s going to come to you with a cause-related marketing scheme that will… they tell you… somehow manage to put a little scratch in everyone’s pocket. Frequently this involves a private foundation that they control or that they hope to start. And, commonly, it also involves a product or service that they sell or manufacture and which will, according to the plan, benefit the charity that they control or want to control. If they don’t know much about charitable tax law in the United States, they’re also hopeful that the cause-related marketing promotion will spin out a charitable tax deduction somewhere in there for them, too. I smile broadly, tell them that I’m not a lawyer and therefore can’t render a legal opinion. If they don’t know any nonprofit lawyers, I’m happy to provide a referral. And then I tell them what they’ve describ...

Joanie Loves Tchotchkes It’s September and next month is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so magazines across the United States are filled with breast cancer goodies. The ad above is from Successful Promotions magazine, a kind of in-house organ/catalog from the Advertising Specialty Institute, a trade group for the advertising specialty industry. Successful Promotions frequently weighs in on the business value of imprinted promotional products for cause campaigns, which I’ve never found entirely persuasive. In March 2007 Successful Promotions highlighted a campaign to draw attention to Merck’s controversial vaccine for the human papillomavirus that causes cervical cancer. The tchotchke utilized was a bracelet-making kit targeted at teen girls. Also in the March issue was news of the Florida Grand Opera in Miami which gave away real stone beverage coasters on the occasion of the premier of Verdi's opera Aida . In November 2006 the mag gave some pub to the Verb campaign f...

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...

If you really want your cause-related marketing to break from the pack, you better have a strong media component . The big boys of sponsorship in the U.S. like the NFL and NASCAR know that. That’s why they’re on TV. “Fair enough,” you say, “but I don’t exactly have a network clamoring to put my nonprofit's content on television.” Well now you do. The Starfish Television Network , which launches in March 2007, has 24 hours a day to fill and they’re anxious to help your broadcast-quality programming find a broader audience. Best of all, it’s free . The Starfish Network is itself a 501(c)(3) whose mission is give voice to the many nonprofits whose capacity to do more and do better would be enhanced if more people knew about them and their mission. What kind of programming are they looking for? Almost everything’s appreciated, but long-form programs are in high demand. What might that include? Everything I can think of; appeals, documentaries, award shows, galas, sponsored events, athl...

Celebrities and Social Marketing, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly Tuesday’s posting talked about MacGuffins, devices that impel your target market to action when you're doing cause marketing or social marketing. One MacGuffin is the use of celebrities. In the illustration World Vision , an international Christian relief and development organization, is working with Hannah Teter, the Olympic gold medalist for the snowboarding halfpipe at the 2006 Winter Games in Torino. Teter commissioned the Mapleside Sugar House in Mt Holly, Vermont (Hannah’s home state), to create Hannah’s Gold grade A Vermont maple syrup. A portion of the proceeds goes to World Vision. Celebrities bring public and media attention. For instance, Teter’s work for World Vision has won the 20-year-old acclaim as the ‘ Sportswoman of Year’ award from the U.S. Olympic Committee. Some of that attention has devolved to World Vision. Certain celebrities can lend your campaign credibility. Some will actually donate mon...

It Was a Pretty Good Year Since my first posting on October 17, I have reviewed about 20 cause-related marketing campaigns or promotions. As it turns out about third have come in for criticism and third for praise and I’ve been neutral on the final third. For this last post of 2006, I review the five best and the five worst cause-related marketing campaigns. To be fair, I haven’t directly reviewed the Red Campaign, which seems to have sucked from the atmosphere all the cause-related marketing oxygen. A few more I just haven’t gotten to yet; for instance, Circuit City’s Firedog service, for instance, as well as an interesting campaign from the electrical utility Rocky Mountain Power. Montblanc did a campaign with opera starlet Katherine Jenkins that was so like the one they did with Nicolas Cage that I choose not to address it. And there are some others. In other words, it’s not an exhaustive list. Nonetheless here is top-down and bottom-up the best and the worst cause-related marketing...

Why Company-Named foundations Benefiting from Cause-Related Marketing Rub Me the Wrong Way. Just this month I’ve seen cause-related marketing campaigns for McDonalds and the Ronald McDonald House Children’s Charities; PETCO, and the PETCO Foundation; and, JC Penney and the JCPenney Afterschool Fund. Two other general merchandise retailers, Kohls and Mervyns, run ‘charity-flavored’ campaigns through their community relations departments. The Kohl’s program, called Kohl’s Cares for Kids, supports child injury prevention and immunization programs, and children’s hospitals. Kohl’s Cares for Kids is not an actual charity, although like JCPenney Afterschool Fund it uses the sales of plush toys to fund their campaigns. I don’t want this to be a 2,000-word post, so I’ll concentrate on the JCPenney Afterschool Fund . The organization, a 501(c)(3) public charity was formed in 1999 and “dedicated to ensuring that every child is safe and constructively engaged during the afternoon hours,” says t...

Hello folks: This is an invitation to join Cause-Related-Marketing@googlegroups.com. When you join, each new posting to Cause-Related Marketing comes direct to your email box. As an inducement, everyone that joins receives a copy of the "Five Flavors of Cause-Related Marketing" which explains Cause-Related Marketing in an easy-to-follow matrix and includes examples. To join, simply send me your name and your email address to aldenkeene@gmail.com Your privacy is imprtant to me, so be assured that I will never sell your name or email address. Warm regards, Paul Jones

Certification Exhaustion A few years back a would-be client came to me with an interesting question: would people in the first world support cause-related marketing that served people in the Third World? In their case, they were building children’s hospitals in Africa, Asia and Latin America. That sounds like a mountainous undertaking, but the fact is, you can build and equip a pretty darn good children’s hospital in Uganda, India or El Salvador for pennies compared to what it would cost in North America or Europe. I didn’t have a ready answer for these folks, but I told them there were two ways to test the idea. Either they could commission a rock-solid probabilistic conjoint survey for $25,000 más o menos , or they could hire me to build them a campaign for the same amount of money and we’d test it in the marketplace. I’m still not sure of the answer, but increasingly it seems that companies are willing to test in the marketplace the idea of cause-related marketing in the First World...

Seeing Through The Wicker Man Darkly It’s almost impossible to overstate how much transparency matters in cause-related marketing. It’s more important than the campaign's creative. It’s more important than the offer in the campaign's advertising. It’s more important than the appeal being made. Here’s why. Americans are a ridiculously generous people when it comes to charitable giving. Much of that generosity is directly attributable to our tax laws, which encourage charitable giving. Part of it is attributable to the thinness of the public welfare net in the U.S., as compared to Europe or Japan. Some it can be attributed to our native “communal self-government,” first highlighted in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America back in 1840. What powers all that is trust. Americans trust charities almost implicitly. Even when they’re skeptical they trust that the Congress and the IRS, along with state and local regulators, will keep charity noses clean. And the IRS and the state...

Remember What You're Paying for This Free Advice All right, you’ve had your fun, you say. You’ve teased the folks at Crystal Geyser with yesterday's posting , so what would you do if your water was being sold in the discounter stores for pennies, Mr. Smart Guy? I’m glad you asked. First, a disclaimer. I’ve never worked for Crystal Geyser or any of its competitors, although I did put myself through school working at a local Coca-Cola bottler. But this was before the days of Dasani. I’ll also say that I have no special knowledge of the bottled water industry and I don’t know anything specific about how they target their markets. However, if my brand had lost so much traction that I felt obliged to sell my products at Big Lots, I would take that as a sign that it was time to rethink my brand. I hereby offer four ‘strategeries’ for rehydrating the Crystal Geyser brand, free of charge. It’s my pleasure. After all you’ve given me an awful lot of budget-priced water. Really embrace t...

Buck Up, Guys! Some day I'm going to write the ultimate case study of the greatest cause-related marketing campaign ever. It raised hundreds of millions of dollars for a terrific cause and it went on for years with no fall-off in support. It generated tons of positive publicity and, if you're an American, chances are you physically handled it more than once. The most intriguing part of that campaign, however, was that it raised money by charging more money for the product. Imagine that! (Email me at aldenkeene@gmail.com if you want to know what the campaign was). But I'm not reviewing that campaign today. Instead I'm reviewing a cause-related marketing campaign by Crystal Geyser , the bottled water people. Their chief selling point is that their water is bottled at the source, not trucked to a distant bottling plant. Their cause campaign is a tree-planting program in conjunction with the American Forests , which has several of these kinds of relationships. Crystal Ge...

Let Us Now Praise Good Cause-Related Marketing So far there are six posts at causerelatedmarketing.biz and everyone of them has been critical to one degree or another. The point of this blog isn’t to flame every cause-related campaign I see as bad or inadequate. I expect there’s more to be learned more from good campaigns than bad ones. So, on All Hallow’s Eve I want to back off my criticism to praise a cause-related campaign from a company that consistently gets cause-related marketing right, Proctor & Gamble. This cause-themed FSI for UNICEF, which dropped circa September-October 2006 is one of Proctor & Gamble’s monthly “brandSAVER coupon booklets.” I haven’t kept count, but the cause-themed brandSAVERs seem to appear at least quarterly. They’ve done a year-end FSI for Special Olympics for many years and I’ve seen special versions for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, VH-1 Save the Music, and others. They’ve done an FSI for UNICEF for at least four years. Dur...

Coulda Woulda? Shoulda Imagine an existing event with a successful 30-year history aimed at women in business. Imagine a well-known celebrity pundit and mother as the keynote. Now imagine a nice cause ‘overlay,’ as we used to call it at Children’s Miracle Network : maybe a donation is made to a local kids cause with every early registration. Maybe there’s a silent auction at the event benefiting single moms in poverty . Maybe there’s an incentive for bringing usable professional women’s clothes that would go to Dress for Success . Or maybe there’s a breakout session that explains to attendees how to add the power of cause-related marketing to their companies or businesses. (All modesty aside, yours truly could help with that). Well in this ad for the Annual Women & Business Conference and award luncheon you’re going to have use your imagination, because neither the sponsors… American Express, Wells Fargo, the Salt Lake Chamber, and others… nor the organizers included a cause-relate...

Cute Ad. And Not Terribly Useful. Austin Minis are so doggone cute, when I see one in a parking lot I just want to pinch its little bottom. I feel much the same way about their ad for Meals on Wheels that runs in the November 2006 issue of Fast Company . We’re giving over some ad space for a needy cause, “to red light hunger,” the ad says, and that's good. The Meals on Wheels Association of America in Alexandria, Va., helps enable meals to the nation’s elderly in local cities and towns, and can make good use your donation. No doubt any of the nation’s dozens of Meals on Wheels affiliates, where the rubber actually hits the road, would say the same. But the ad strikes me as a one-off, and... if so... that would be too bad. I couldn’t find anything about a deeper relationship on either the miniusa.com website or at moaa.org. God bless Mini USA and their ad agency Sausalito, California-based Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners for thinking of a charity to support in this way, but I’d be...

Made by a Man? But is it Strong Enough For Women? This ad for Dial’s antiperspirant/deodorant Soft and Dri, appeared in an FSI during October 2006, National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I like the ad, but I wonder if that isn’t because I’m a man. The copy and design are quite clean, in a way that men tend to like. The headline is spare and the call to action straightforward, as is the offer. The product is wrapped by an iconic pink ribbon. The ad size was just 7 x 5.387... half an FSI page... so I suppose the designers would claim that they didn’t have the space to take the ad in another direction. And they'd certainly be right. But research suggests that women like (or at least will read) ads with more copy. Considering what Y-Me does, it might have been preferable in this case. Among other things, Y-Me National Breast Cancer Organization runs a hotline… staffed exclusively by breast cancer survivors… that answers the anguished calls from women who have learned that they or a lo...

An Ad that Tries to Do Too Much and Fails Charities… even sophisticated and well-funded entities… are often guilty of trying to make their marketing collateral do too much. But in this ad for a multipart cause-related marketing promotion, it is the sponsor who muffs it by trying to do too much. Here’s the list of vendors or corporate partners: * Linens ‘n Things * MasterCard * Gund * Homedics * Yankee Candle * + 2 unknown brands. Here’s the list of potentially benefiting charities: * National Breast Cancer Foundation, Inc. * Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation * Val Skinner Foundation for Breast Cancer * Breast Cancer Research Foundation * + other potential but unnamed beneficiaries. Here are the elements of the promotion: * Add a dollar to your Linens ‘n Things purchase between October 1-31, 2006 (October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month) and: - Linens ‘n Things will match the donations up to $100,000 - MasterCard will match the donations up to an additional $100,000 - Th...

Time Warp Cause Marketing from Hamilton Collection is Potentially Deceptive and Certainly Less Effective Than it Could Be Hamilton Collection’s “Breast Cancer Charity Collectible Shoe Figurine: Hope” (whew!) is cause-related marketing at its finest, circa 1989. This product, advertised in an FSI that dropped in September or October of 2006 would have been cutting edge 17 years ago. Now it appears, at least outwardly, to be deceptive. Why? Several things are conspicuously absent from this ad. The first, of course, is mention of which organization(s) will benefit from the sale of the “Hope” shoe. The second is any suggestion of how much donation will devolve to the unnamed organization(s) from each sale. When that information is missing, it’s easy to wonder if the promotion’s legit. Worse, the first sentence of the body copy “…share in the hope for the future with this inspiring sculpture designed to help increase breast cancer awareness…” does little to dispel any doubts. Because you co...

Barely a day goes by that I don't see some kind of cause-related marketing, some good and some not so good. With this blog I will examine in detail those cause marketing promotions, advertising and campaigns; when they get it right, and where it goes wrong. Cause-related marketing has been around for more than 20 years now. Even people who don't know the term, understand what it's all about; send in the Yoplait lid and 10 cents goes to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. But, according to IEG , while cause-related marketing is growing faster than sponsorship as a whole, cause-related marketing currently represents less than 10 percent of the larger sponsorship market. That sounds like a positive, but cause-related marketing has been as high as 10 percent of sponsorship. For all its heart, cause-related marketing is still settling for the sloppy seconds left over from the NFL, NASCAR and the like. I think that's because while those big guys understand that spo...