Cause marketing allows a company to align its core values with a consumer passion and positively impact a societal need.
If you're in charge of marketing for a company, then you spend most of your time looking for some tiny advantage, something to generate buzz and differentiate your offering from the crowd of other marketers.
The audience, meanwhile, cares little about who is doing the marketing or even what technologies you use. They're looking online for the most relevant story or entertaining clip, the website that can answer a question they have or the product that meets a specific need.
While your objective is to build a relationship with your audience, have them remember your brand and talk about you with their friends, they want to find the best information, experiences and stuff quickly so they can move on to something else.
But how will you stand out? What will drive the transaction that you want?
More and more, your bag of marketing tricks includes sophisticated social media elements, such as blogs, podcasts, video and social networks. But a company can stand apart in a relatively low-tech way as well by aligning with a cause.
Pioneering companies are showing their support for a relevant social issue and drawing the attention of their audience in the process. Marketing success around causes takes more than just a donation or public announcement. A company's commitment has to be genuine and represented across the total operation of the business. But once a company has achieved that, the challenge simply becomes demonstrating the relationship between your company and a nonprofit or charitable partner in a way that the audience can relate to and appreciate.
Simply put, when that audience sees that the company has a deep commitment to a cause, they are more likely to pay attention to your overall messages.
Don't take my word for it, look at the numbers. The 2007 Cone Cause Evolution Survey showed:
- More than two-thirds of Americans say they consider a company's business practices when deciding what to buy. Moreover, Americans' expectations of companies are at an all-time high, with 83 percent saying companies have a responsibility to help support causes, and 92 percent acknowledging that they have a more positive image of a company that supports a cause they care about.
- Eighty-seven percent are likely to switch from one brand to another (price and quality being about equal) if the other brand is associated with a good cause, an increase of more than 31 percent (up from 66 percent) since 1993.
Not surprisingly, advertising and the internet are the two main ways Americans prefer companies to communicate their social issues and practices (45 percent and 41 percent respectively). Americans are also using technology proactively to learn about and support social issues and causes. In fact, more than one in five (22 percent) have used the internet or other technologies to engage in grassroots activism. Others are searching for information on issues (37 percent) or are forwarding important messages to family and friends (38 percent).
In an age where technology has given the audience near complete access and control over the information they receive and share, no matter where it originates, the challenge for companies in marketing their commitment to a cause has changed as well. Most companies still do the equivalent of simply adding a ribbon to a package: they add some content to their site or make a donation in return for a purchase or other activity a user makes.
To be successful, however, companies need to clearly and consistently share the societal impacts of their efforts; they need to provide hands-on, cause-related experiences that the user can explore and understand, and they need to demonstrate their commitment over time, not just when they think the media will be watching.
Too often, the decisions that companies make when it comes to online marketing are dictated by "shiny object syndrome," a terrible affliction that results in a marketing path based on whatever is newest or generating the most buzz of the moment, instead of what will truly be effective.
For example, when a company learns that 70 million people use MySpace, they say, "Wonderful! We'll launch a profile." Or when a CEO hears that the leadership at another company is starting a blog, she demands, "We must do that too."
These decisions are often made without consideration for what the audience will respond to, and what will help meet your communications goals. Cause marketing has fallen into this category of late as more and more companies tried to tack a charitable component onto a campaign in hopes of attracting an audience.
Take for example a recent promotion by Bayer, which artfully moved audiences through a series of fictional social networking, blog and wiki spaces to promote the painkiller Aleve.
For each person who clicked through to the end of the promotion--a mystery adventure game that takes at least a minute to complete--Bayer said it would make a donation of $5 to $10 to the environmental nonprofit group Conservation Fund. But they didn't tell users until they had completed the game.
"The charitable donation at the end of the game is viewed as a way to get people to stick with it and to share it with one another," Jay Kolpon, vice president for marketing and new business development at Bayer HealthCare, was quoted in the New York Times as saying. "When you got through this kind of consumer engagement, more than 30 seconds, it is really important to have a payoff. We wanted it to be almost a surprise."
In this article, we will look at how organizations can use causes and commitment to provide information about serious issues, and enhance their online marketing. The organizations that we highlight have used a variety of online tools to communicate, resulting in successful marketing for each.
By comparison to what Hollywood marketers, the sports industry, or even major retailers are doing with their creative opportunities online, the efforts of these groups are pretty minimal. But the impact that their campaigns have had were significant as were the lessons that can be gleaned from them for your marketing efforts.
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