Cause Marketing Is On

Cause Marketing, cooperation between “for profit” and non-profit businesses, is the most important “now marketing” idea for small, medium and large companies. Cause marketing’s benefits include:

• Increased relevance (pr news value and word-of-mouth)
• Greater trust from increased transparency
• Recruiting brand advocates (people don’t buy brands they join them)
• Empowering brand advocates (something to tweet, link, blog)
• Rallying employees (employees are powerful stakeholders)
• Increasing profits while lowering costs

Good To Great companies, as Jim Collins pointed out in his 2001 book, understand defining who they are is a “precipitating event”, their first “cause”. Hewlett-Packard created the HP Way, M&M/Mars developed The Five Principles of Mars and P&G gave me a company history “blue book”. In a social media connected Google-enable world with Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) generating brand positioning, informing brand advocates and with customer attention more valuable than money companies must project and share values while connecting to a greater social good. Examples of successful cause marketing:

• Pink Campbell’s Soup cans double Kroger sales and contributed $250,000 to breast cancer
• Pepsi RefreshEverything generates over 45 million votes on more than 7,000 crowdsourced “community good” ideas
• Dell Trade Secrets Program generates over 1,500 “secrets” from B2B partners

Cause marketing is on fueled by a, “Nothing that used to work is working now,” marketing frenzy potentially making lemmings of us all. When a marketing idea works mindless piling on ensues (lately). Are there cause marketing rules or “best practices”? You bet. Cause Marketing’s Good, Bad and Ugly next.

I took the picture of the last beam of the new Duke Cancer Center at last year's "topping off" ceremony.