Cause Marketing

If you’re a restaurant, even in the quick-service category, it’s hard to imagine a transactional cause marketing campaign you could launch more easily or quickly than a dessert promotion. When a customer buys a slice of cake, pie, a baked Alaska (see at left), or some other dessert, you make a donation of some amount to your cause partner; $1 is a nice round number. In most cases you wouldn’t want to promote a salad or a main course. At a sit-down restaurant most customers come into your establishment to order an entrée and in many cases you probably give them a salad with the entrée. If the goal is to increase you average ticket price, cause marketing the entrée probably isn't the ticket. But with an appetizer, drink or dessert promotion you could quite possibly raise the average ticket price by several dollars. Drinks have very high margins, of course, and consequently they are often featured in cause marketing promotions. Most of the cause marketing around mixed drinks that I’...

Most cause marketing faces the consumer. You can imagine why. The lady who buys, say, printer paper where you work almost certainly is under the obligation to find the best price she can. A pink ribbon on a box of paper almost certainly is unmoving to corporate purchasing types if it also carries a premium price or if it doesn’t meet spec. But business to business cause marketing does take place, even if it’s not common. This is my 890th post, and in nearly six years I’ve mentioned business to business cause marketing less than a dozen times.   Add one more. AmpliVox , an Illinois company which makes and sells portable sound systems and lecterns, does a form of non-transactional cause marketing to benefit the fights against both breast cancer and prostate cancer. Not surprisingly perhaps, this came about when the human element was reintroduced to the B2B equation; AmpliVox’s owner, Don Roth, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2008. Listen for Roth’s part of the stor...

Just last night my youngest asked me what my favorite thing to do was when I was her age. I grew up on the edge of the Sonoran Desert and outside our home near a crossroads was a large mound of brush several hundred feet across that was home to all manner of desert animals, reptiles and insects. Many is the hour I spent watching creatures crawl in to and out of that mound. To this day I remember vividly a grisly encounter between a rattlesnake and a roadrunner, where, as in the Warner Brothers’ cartoon, the roadrunner emerged unscathed. In short, I didn't suffer from what author Richard Louv has called ‘Nature Deficit Disorder.’ But in his 2005 book ‘Last Child in the Woods,’ Louv describes the possible effects: Limited respect for natural surroundings Attention deficit disorders, depressions, mood disorders, and poor grades. Childhood obesity. So far, no medical manual recognizes Nature Deficit Disorder, but the outdoor products company The North Face does and is ...

Two cool new cause marketing concepts from two different Commonwealth countries. From New Zealand Donate your Deskto p invites people to download a little software to their desktop computer. Included in the download is permission to push a different ad to your desktop’s background every day. Proceeds from the ad sales benefit the charity of your choice. “Think of it as renting out your desktop background as an advertising space,” says Donate Your Desktop’s website, “with the proceeds going to charity.” The ads tend to be ‘Bing’-like with big and bold visuals. This is ‘push’ media made palatable by the addition of the cause marketing element. Wikipedia defines push media as, “… a style of Internet-based communication where the request for a given transaction is initiated by the publisher or central server. It is contrasted with pull, where the request for the transmission of information is initiated by the receiver or client.” Ten years ago push media was the ‘once and future ...

The economies in the United States and the United Kingdom and wide swaths of Continental Europe remain stuck in the doldrums. But that doesn’t mean causes have to roll over and take it. That’s the message of a successful cause marketing relationship between UK discount fashion retailer TK Maxx and its charity partner Cancer Research. Cancer Research generated £3.1 million pounds in its biennial ‘Give Up Clothes for Good’ campaign in April, up more than £500,000 than its last effort in 2010. That’s impressive given the funk that so much of the worldwide economy is in. Give Up Clothes for Good asks shoppers at TK Maxx to donate clothing items in store. But if people are holding onto their clothes longer and replacing what they have less frequently, then that’s likely to negatively affect Cancer Research. The charity resells donated clothes in thrift shops. But three things helped ‘Give Up Clothes for Good’ to succeed, even in a sour economy. TK Maxx and Cancer Research illustrated...

Today my adopted state of Utah celebrates Pioneer Day. It’s a founder’s day celebration that commemorates when a hardy band of 151 settlers from the distant east first landed in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, not even a year behind the star-crossed Donner Party, which had traversed basically the same route. Pioneer Day is a state holiday that we celebrate like a second ‘Fourth of July’ with pancake breakfasts, parades, BBQs, and fireworks after dark. From July 24, 1847, when the vanguard party arrived, until the time when the rails were linked by the transcontinental railroad at Promotory Point Utah in 1869, about 70,000 people made the trek to Intermountain West. They rode in wagons, pushed handcarts and walked, driven largely by religious faith and fervor. And while the the settlement of the American West was accomplished by tens of thousands who made their way along the Oregon or Sante Fe Trails, only the Utah Pioneers built fords and ferries and roads, and planted grain...

Janet Jackson, ‘Miss Jackson if you’re nasty,’ has sold more than 100 million records. Now the youngest of the famed musical clan is using cause marketing to help sell Nutrisystem plans and foods. During 2012, every pound Americans lose on the Nutrisystem plan will be matched by $1 of Nutrisystem food that go will hunger relief agencies up to $10 million in food. Jackson and Nutrisystem cofounded the cause Nutribank.org . As of this date, Nutribank.org online presence is no more than a single holding page and details are sparse. But a recent issue of Prevention magazine reports that between the cause and Jackson’s wide appeal, “within two months of signing on as a spokeswoman, first-time orders were up by their highest percentage in four years.” Jackson certainly has enduring appeal. At age 46, she’s been in the public eye since an appearance on ‘ The Jacksons ’ variety show in 1976 and, later, on the TV shows ‘ Good Times ,’ and ‘ Fame .’ In those 37 years her life and career has ha...