Cause Marketing

Pizza Hut would like to do some cause marketing with your charity. I know this because a flyer pasted on top of the box of the Big Dipper pizza we ordered the other day said as much. What Pizza Hut has in mind is discount card promotion. You can find plenty of similar efforts from other food retailers. If Pizza Hut’s is compelling to your audience, consider calling the number listed. But instead of this rather standard issue campaign, what if instead Pizza Hut offered a donation to your charity of choice… say $0.25… plus the opportunity to donate a much larger amount when you respond to customer satisfaction survey? The idea was waiting for me when I turned over the self-same flyer. When you complete the customer satisfaction survey on the phone or online, you are entered into a drawing for a free iPod along with 10 chances to win a daily prize of $1,000. These kinds of offers are commonly printed on the back of receipts (see below). If you read the fine print, it appears that Pizza Hu...

The Times they are A-Changing The bottled water industry generated $15 billion in revenue in America in 2006. It will top $16 billion this year. That’s more than Americans spent on movie tickets or iPods. And while 50 percent of Fijians don’t have access to clean, reliable water, millions of gallons Fiji Water is shipped most of the way across the Pacific and then trucked from the coast to chi-chi hotels or otherwise sold at a premium across the country. This even though almost every American could walk to the closest tap and draw out clean, safe and often good-tasting water. These and other choice facts come out in Charles Fishman’s well-wrought 6,000-word piece on water in the July Fast Company . At a time when the bottle watered business has never been better, I predict that the only direction it can go from here is down. The times they are a-changing. Fishman concludes: Packing bottled water in lunch boxes, grabbing a half-liter from the fridge as we dash out the door, piling up ha...