tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6923212526777386552009-12-15T22:43:17.170-08:00Dedicated to highlighting and dissecting the best and the worst cause marketing promotions and campaigns.Paul Jones is the president ofhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18140565081821496777noreply@blogger.comBlogger357125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-692321252677738655.post-16909156983046468942009-12-14T06:41:00.000-08:002009-12-14T07:06:16.111-08:00

Five or six years ago the term 'co-branding' was one of those hot marketing buzzwords. Nowadays co-branding is so commonplace as to be mundane. The point of co-branding is for brands to combine such that they create notable synergy.There are several kinds of co-branding, including cause marketing itself.This article, from Tiger Woods' previous sponsor, Accenture, names six:Promotional/Sponsorship

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Tuesday evening, Paul Nelson, a local radio reporter called to ask about how to keep up employee morale during the downturn.(Here's his finished story.)He'd seen on Slideshare a presentation on the topic I'd given in September to the Utah state convention of the Society for Human Resource Management.Between the presentation and my comments, I'll bet I gave him a half-dozen studies demonstrating

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In my ongoing quest to highlight cause marketing efforts large and small, here’s a smaller one.The Skinner family is facing not one, but two liver transplants. Their two children, 2-year-old Claire and 4-year-old Benson both suffer from primary hyperoxaluria, a genetic disorder that causes their livers to produce too much oxalate. Claire’s case is the more acute, requiring her to spend as much as

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On October 23, I posted about Ulta's Windows of Love campaign for the Breast Cancer Reseaerch Foundation.Earlier this week Ulta sent out this recap email to supporters.Thanks to Kate L. for sharing!

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We see evidence of big cause marketing all the time.You know, cause marketing so massive… like the Red campaign or Boxtops for Education… that it seems to create its own gravity.Plainly, when properly designed, cause marketing scales up very well, thank you very much.But what about the little guys? Does cause marketing scale down as well as up?Here’s why this is an important question. In the

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Research shows that when there is asymmetry in cause marketing between the sponsors and the cause, the entity that gains the most from the relationship is the smaller brand.But there’s an asymmetry continuum of sorts.For instance, when Yoplait yogurt and Susan G. Komen for the Cure link up, the brands which are arguably equivalent in their respective spheres, the benefits confer

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Clients ask me all the time: have the breast cancer charities sucked out all the oxygen out of the atmosphere for cause marketing during October? That is, can anyone else do cause marketing during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month?I can't give a categorical answer, but here are three quick takes on cause marketing campaigns going on in this month that aren’t about breast cancer, plus a forth

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Successful cause marketing appeals not only to your head, but to your heart as well.The head part comes easier for me and probably for many of you as well. So how do you inject heart into a cause marketing campaign?Ulta’s answer is to ask people to write their breast cancer stories in a letter and then post them in the front windows of their stores.They call it 'Windows of Love.'Ulta supports The

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It has been my pleasure (and, occasionally, my displeasure) to work with celebrities in cause campaigns over the years. Shannon Miller, the most decorated US female gymnast ever, told me scary stalker stories on a long drive together on the Gulf Coast of Alabama. Baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson was not quite lucid the night I escorted him through a charity cocktail party. I once put $5,000

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GamesThatGive.net allows you to play common video games like Solitaire, Sudoku, and Blackjack for free, while making a sliver of a donation to one of 13 nonprofit charities. Here's how it works. Behind each of the games a static advertisement runs for sponsors like Domino's Pizza, Dial, Pepsi or others. GamesThatGive.net donates 70 percent of ad revenue to those charities, including the United

Paul Jones is the president ofhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18140565081821496777noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-692321252677738655.post-13398881371968774352009-09-16T11:27:00.000-07:002009-09-16T11:35:00.390-07:00

Hi Gang:What follows is my 9-15-2009 presentation to the Crossroads Conference, the annual conference of Utah state chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management.Warm regards,PaulHow Corporate Citizenship Can Help HR Build a Better WorkforceView more presentations from Alden Keene and Associates, Inc..

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Last night at dinner, a long-time reader and a new friend asked: 'How important is alignment between cause and sponsor? What about CEO passion?Here's how the discussion went.For years the best conventional wisdom in cause marketing has been that you choose a cause based on ‘strategic philanthropy.’ If you’re an oil company, you pick environmental causes. If you make ladies purses, you pick women’

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Faithful readers:The following is from my periodic column in the business weekly, the Salt Lake Enterprise. In it I profile how a fast-growing company and a innovative charity connected five years ago in a way that has greatly benefited both parties. Warm regards,PaulSince its founding a little more than five years ago, Ragnar Events LLC, which produces the super-sized Ragnar Relay Series, has

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In June I profiled Orkin's Fight the Bite campaign, which benefits the UN's effort called Nothing But Nets, a cause that purchases insecticide-treated mosquito nets for people in Africa so as to stave off malaria, a vicious killer on the continent.In the wake of that post, I asked Martha Craft, the VP of public relations and communications at Rollins, Inc., Orkin's parent company, to 'open the

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If cause marketing is to really grow, I'm increasingly coming to the opinion that cause marketing needs the equivalent of an ‘open standard.’ When speaking of software especially, the term ‘open standards’ means an agreed-upon convention that is free and unconstrained in how it can be used.Open standards are enormously valuable to you and me. HTML and XHTML are open standards. PDF is an open

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Back in 2003 I was working for a company that was considering a relationship with Dr. Laura, the no-nonsense radio show host famous for kicking her listeners in the pants. Part of relationship was to be with her charitable foundation, which at the time was best known for handing out ‘My Stuff Bags,’ which were bags of essential items for kids being removed from homes and taken into shelters;

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One question I am frequently asked is: "just what is the best amount to set the donation at in transactional cause marketing?" What percentage should the donation be in cause marketing?As a rule of thumb, academic studies have found that more is more when it comes to setting the amount. That is, the greater the donation the better the sales boost. But that’s not terribly helpful in this age when

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…which explains why the World Food Programme changed their ad campaign to include color images.In June 2008 I flayed the World Food Programme’s ad that depicted Drew Barrymore feeding hungry African kids. The photograph was in black and white save only a small red cup.Here’s what I wrote then:I can see it now. In the wake of a string of natural disasters and skyrocketing food prices in the

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You can’t swing a corded mouse online without running into the daytime double-threat actress/talk show host Kelly Ripa and her work on behalf of the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund.I get, it seems like, weekly email notices from Electrolux telling me to visit the ‘Lemonade Stands,’ of OCRF supporters. The Lemonade Stands are the charity part of a broader Kelly Ripa-powered promotion for Electrolux

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I’m a little chary about making sweeping pronouncements, but I believe I've just seen the first cause marketing promotion in the U.S. involving a prescription drug.The drug is from Allergan and it’s called Latisse, “the first and only FDA-approved prescription treatment for inadequate or not enough eyelashes.” The medical name for this condition is hypotrichosis.Latisse is lifestyle drug the way

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Following General Mills’ lead, Campbell’s Labels for Education is rebranding so as to be more appealing to would-be partners.“The logo was very heavily Campbell-branded,” Mike Salzberg, president, Campbell Sales, told Brandweek. “We’ve never gone outside as far as sharing it or getting partners. But now we believe there is an opportunity for partnerships, starting with the one we formed with the

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A recent study, published in the Journal of Marketing Research, finds that children’s charities would receive greater donations if they depicted sad-looking children in their appeals.Their working theory was that people ‘catch’ one another’s emotions…something that’s been shown again and again in many other studies… but which had never been applied to charitable appeals.They tested their thesis

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Research and experience demonstrate that cause marketing works best when customers can easily see and understand a logical fit between the company and the cause.Too often when I tell audiences this, I struggle to find good examples, although I can always think of really bad examples.Orkin’s Fight the Bite is a good example.When you buy Orkin’s mosquito service, the pest control franchise will

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Kind Readers:On Monday, June 15, the NASDAQ OMX Group Inc. stock exchange announced that it had developed a new index of stocks meant to track corporate sustainability performance.Called the 'The NASDAQ OMX CRD Global Sustainability 50 Index' (TNOCGS50I), the index tracks the triple-bottom line of 50 global companies.I read this and thought: I need to develop a stock index of companies that do

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A few years back a colleague and I wangled a trip to northern Italy to speak on the topic of cause marketing. One of the other presenters was an American like us, but all of the attendees were European, predominantly Italian. We were there preaching the big, bold cause marketing of the type practiced at Children’s Miracle Network and it plainly made a few of the attendees uncomfortable. Some

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