Cause Marketing

So how should a corporate sponsor go about sniffing out a cause marketing partner? There are several… oftentimes opposing… schools of thought on the subject. One is that you should pick causes that have some sort of link to your business. For instance, a food business should pick a food charity. Why? So that your customers prospects don’t have to spend too much cognitive energy figuring out what the link is between the two organizations. Because customers just won’t do it. If it doesn’t make sense, they’re not going to pull out their phones to Google the question ‘Why does Acme Axel Manufacturing Company sponsor bone cancer research?’ Instead, it will seem like 'cause-nitive dissonance' and they’ll just ignore it. The opposing view holds that customers see such links as cynical. In this view, a Consumer Packaged Goods that makes canned spaghetti sauce and links up with a network food bank network during the Christmas season is plainly just playing on their customer's em...

The youngest person ever to attempt a solo crossing trip to the South Pole on snowshoes, the bass player for Kanye West’s touring band, Tony Stewart’s left side tire changer, a participant at a Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure event and OK-GO all share something in common; they want to be or are being sponsored. Each of these examples offers lessons for a charity that wants their cause marketing to get sponsored, too. OK-GO is sponsored because it brings a wild amount of creativity to its music and music videos. Chevrolet sponsors OK-GO’s latest music video of its song, x, because the band consistently turns out the most downloaded music videos on the Internet. And we all go to watch their videos because of OK-GO’s wonderful power-pop sensibility and a visual approach to music videos that you can’t find anywhere else. These guys are both rock and roll and nerds. The result is that their videos are the craziest kind of eye candy you’ve ever seen in a music video. And all of us respond. ...

In Zen Buddhism there is the notion of a koan, often a riddle, but sometimes a statement or question or dialogue that can’t be understood through strictly rational thought. A koan is meant to help train the mind to better access intuition, especially through meditation The most famous koan, says Wikipedia , might be ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping?’ Here’s one for cause marketers; ‘when is cause marketing not a partnership?’ The rational mind says that, of course, cause marketing is always a partnership. The riddle makes no sense. Except in cases where the sponsor is the cause there’s always at least two parties. Boom. That’s a partnership. But meditate on it a little longer and you can see when cause marketing might not be a partnership. When one party benefits in gross disproportion to the other. Or when one party doesn’t work to make sure that the putative partner benefits to his or her satisfaction. There’s no partnership in cause marketing unless all parties to the agreeme...

Every day my RSS reader sends me a fat email with all the day’s listings of the word cause marketing. I see cause marketing campaigns advertised on TV, in magazines, or Facebook and the myriad other social media. My friend and fellow blogger Joe Waters has a Dummies book, for crying out loud, coming out in July about cause marketing. Every business day I add my own content to all the rest with this blog. Today, I celebrate the 600th post on the Cause Marketing Blog. One of those posts , from a few years back, declared that we are in the golden age of cause marketing, quoting the old Carly Simon song Anticipation , which features the lyrics, “these are the gold old days.” So far as it goes, I believe that’s still the case. But the current state of cause marketing, I think, could be summarized in the U2 song sung by that old cause marketer Bono , ‘ I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For .” That’s because for almost as long as I’ve known about cause marketing, nearly 20 years now, I’v...

Tuesday found me in a meeting with a new client. We were talking about cause marketing and I asked if they would like to see any data or research on the value of cause marketing in your marketing mix. I keep a digital portfolio of such information at the ready. “For who?” he asked. “For your sales group or your management team,” I said. “Nope,” he replied. “We don’t need it.” Now my client is a sophisticated marketer with gray at his temples and decades of experience at strategic and tactical marketing. For my part, I’ve been involved with cause marketing to some degree or another for coming up on 20 years now but on Tuesday I realized for the first time that cause marketing has reached its tipping point. Cause marketing has become ‘the man.’ I use the catchphrase ‘tipping point’ deliberately, if reluctantly. Before Malcolm Gladwell popularized it, it was pretty much reserved for use by epidemiologists to describe the point at which a viral outbreak becomes an epidemic. Still, that’s w...

This post is endorsed by 'President Barack Obama,' 'Oprah Winfrey,' 'Hillary Clinton,' 'Coldplay' and other high-ranking search terms in Google. The hope-filled inauguration of President Barack Obama yesterday morning means that 2009 is still dewy enough that we can talk about New Year’s resolutions. Professionally I set a series of goals each year including sales and profitability goals. I’ve also set a grand total of one professional New Year’s resolution. I resolve to spend more time evangelizing the advantages and benefits of cause marketing.  In the past I have contented myself to talk about the many positives of cause marketing with clients and on this blog. The blog is easy to find if you know the word ‘cause marketing.’ But not that many people know the expression or the ideas behind it. Google’s keyword search tool says that in December 2008 the search volume for the term cause marketing was 14,800 with another 4,400 for the search ter...

In this second half of my online interview with Laura Goodman, Director of Corporate Relations at Reading Is Fundamental, we peel back the curtain a little bit to learn the particulars about the “Fly With US. Read With Kids” was developed, coordinated, and built. Read the first posting here . RIF has decades of experience engaging with its audience, how does this compare? This campaign leveraged the communication and marketing channels of a corporate partner to excite parents and community members to read to their children. Communicating through in-flight magazines, in-flight videos, airport lounges and displays and other methods helps RIF to message the importance of reading in places we would never otherwise be able to use to support our message. It’s a one-of-kind opportunity to extend our message! How long have you had a relationship with USAirways and what has been its nature in the past? RIF and US Airways have been working together since 2007. US Airways supported our 2007 Gift ...

What responsibility, if any, does a charity have when a faithful sponsor faces bad press or worse? The last charity I worked for as an employee…Operation Kids… was a startup children’s charity organized as a federated nonprofit. A little more than eight years after its founding, Operation Kids is now on solid ground. But like all startups, there were some moments when it was touch and go; when the charity could have as easily failed as succeeded. It’s fair to say that say that Operation Kids would not be in same the place were it not for an early corporate sponsor, itself a startup called XanGo . XanGo is a multi-level marketing organization (MLM) that sells a supplemental juice drink made from the Asian fruit called mangosteen. It’s beyond the scope of this blog to talk about the relative merits of the MLM business model or of XanGo as a health elixir. Suffice it say that XanGo has hundreds of thousands of adherents worldwide who have made their choice. Let me also stipulate that by a...

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...

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...