Cause Marketing

Not long ago I took a call from an entrepreneur who had tried to do a deal with a prominent children’s charity that does a notable amount of cause marketing. He loved the cause… still does… but after two years time spent on the project it didn’t pan out, mainly because the minimums and the upfront fees the charity required to participate were two high for the entrepreneur’s budget. I understand why cause marketing charities have participation minimums or up-front fees. It’s partly a management issue. How do you manage a bunch of $10,000 (more or less) cause marketing campaigns and still make money? To a lesser degree it’s about keeping the cause's image in the main channels of the branding river. And, of course, it’s about harvesting some hard-won brand equity. But I’ve taken a lot of calls like this over the last 20 years, as a consultant and as a nonprofit executive and staffer, and it’s been frustrating almost every time. I think it’s time for the big cause marketing ch...

Imagine every time someone buys one of your paper icons at retail that the printed receipt spits out a bounce-back coupon for a sponsor. That idea occurred to me when I was at the grocery store the other day. I got both a custom-printed coupon and a coupon for a free smoothie with purchase at McDonalds. I did a little research and found that there are basically two players in the grocery store receipt market with two different approaches. Both claim high levels of penetration in the largest markets. But either would work for the retail promotion I have in mind. Catalina Marketing offers stores little printers… separate from the cash register printers… that spit out a coupon, oftentimes for a product that competes with the one you just bought. So if you bought a can of Campbell's soup you might get a coupon for a can of Progresso soup. Register Tape Network preprints the back of paper cash register tape with ads or coupons for chiropractors, fast food, hair salons, an...

It’s probably fair to say that more cause marketing campaigns are activated by public relations than by advertising. You my readers are a sophisticated audience so there’s no need to detail the differences between advertising and public relations. Suffice it to say that while PR has greater credibility, it’s challenging to get the frequency using PR alone that you can get with advertising. Advertising offers frequency and repeatability, but it can be expensive and it’s less credible than PR. So how do you activate your cause marketing story using public relations? One answer is that the story you tell the media have a boy and a puppy, like the story above in People magazine about 7-year-old Evan Moss who wrote a picture book called “My Seizure Dog” about an epilepsy-detecting dog that he wished his family could afford. In the book Evan imagined he and his seizure dog in various settings, including going to outer space together. The book… sold at a local café and on Amazon …...

On the heals of Joe Waters and Joanna MacDonald’s fine book Cause Marketing for Dummies …which dives deep into cause marketing at point of purchase… I came across this paper icon campaign from Whole Foods that benefits gardening in schools. Called the Garden Grant Program, the goal is to raise $2,000,000 so as to be able to offer 1,000 schools a $2,000 grant to either create or expand an existing school garden. The nonprofit partner is New York City-based FoodCorps , a subset of AmeriCorps so new the ink on the logo isn’t yet dry. FoodCorps is a service corps of young people…think early post-college age kids… who committed to a three-fold mission: “Deliver hands-on nutrition education" “Build and tend school gardens" “Bring high-quality local food into public school cafeterias" The first 50 fanned out across the USA early this month. You may have read Mark Bittman’s column on the rollout in the New York Times 23 August 2011. Bittman writes that the inaugural gr...

On 14 June, 2007 I posted on the problems I had with Mandarin Oriental’s cause marketing campaign featuring various celebrities and their cause of choice. Now, 4 years later, if anything the campaign is worse because it still does the same thing; a celebrity’s charity of choice gets a mention and a $10,000 donation, and nothing more. Here’s what I wrote back then: There are two kinds of celebrities in the world; those that are in the Mandarin Oriental ad campaign running right now and those whose agents are trying to get them in. It’s an image ad campaign for the 17 (now 23) hotels that are part of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group. In it celebrities including I.M. Pei, Zubin Mehta, Helen Mirren, Elle McPherson, and Dame Edna-Barry Humphries are photographed in settings of their choice and they name their favorite Mandarin property. Dame Edna-Barry Humphries got to name two! (Now there’s a new set of celebrity ‘fans,’ with a few holdovers including Mirren, Neeson [see below] and...

Charities that do a meaningful amount of cause marketing probably need an advisory board or group whose sole job is to help the organization expand its cause marketing footprint. At first blush you might think that all you need is a handful of Rolodex warriors willing to do battle on your behalf. But in fact, once corporate types reach a certain threshold they probably all have a hefty enough Rolodex that any competent cause marketer could effectively mine it, to mix the metaphor. Instead, in homage to Guy Kawasaki and his fine book The Art of the Start , I suggest that are actually five types of people you want on your cause marketing advisory board (CMAB). Industry Heavy Hitters. If your cause marketing takes place in different settings, you need a representative number of people from each of those principal industries on your CMAB. Captain Rolodex. This guy/gal has more than just a list of buddies from his/her rise in rank and power. This person could get the president of t...

Henkel, the large German consumer products and adhesives company has come in for some criticism in these pages for stingy cause marketing payouts and even bad copyediting. I’ve got more criticism this time out, only of the constructive variety. Through the end of September 2011 Henkel is running a contest to find the best ideas to improve school fitness in America and get a shot at three $10,000 prizes awarded to one elementary, one middle, and one high school. Here’s how it works: Enter your school at Henkelhelps.com. Then work your social network to get the most votes from the public. The cause is called Alliance for a Healthier Generation , founded by the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation. The mission of the Alliance for a Healthier Generation is to “Help cultivate a healthier generation of children today so that we will have a healthier America tomorrow.” The Alliance keeps a database of fitness approaches on its website. Large cash prizes...