Duct Tape Marketing

You've heard of cause-related marketing.... send in the lid from a carton of Yoplait yogurt and a dime goes to fight breast cancer. You seen big companies like General Mills and Target weave it into their marketing plans and budgets.

But should your small business undertake cause-related marketing?

Getting the right answers depends on asking the right questions. So where should you start?

Let’s just stipulate that you’ll search the Internet. Maybe check the entries at Wikipedia.org or About.com. You’ll almost certainly come across my blog or the Cause Marketing Forum. If you go a little deeper you may find Cone, or other agencies that specialize in the practice. You may find IEG, which has a long history with cause-related marketing, but considers it to be a subset of sponsorship. Maybe you’ll go to Amazon.com and check the available titles. You’ll almost certainly find Business in the Community in the UK, which takes a very holistic approach to cause marketing.

Scratch the surface a little deeper and you’ll certainly find criticisms of the practice; usually variations on the theme that the money is tainted. I’m familiar with most of the criticisms. But I cut my cause marketing teeth in the charity world where the saying goes about donations: “‘taint enough.” It’s a fact that even Mother Teresa (a saint by my definition) cashed checks from Charles Keating.

Okay. So after an Internet search, what questions do you need to answer?

Questions for Small Businesses. Ask what nonprofit do you match well with? Do you want your campaign to have the support of rank and file employees? Are you prepared to make a long-term commitment to the cause? You’ll get more bang for your if your relationship lasts for years. What are your goals? Do you have the sophistication to accurately measure a cause marketing campaign’s value? Are you good at events? Do you have special access to the media? Can you devote the resouces necesssary to make the campaign effective? Do you have PR chops? More cause-related marketing in the States is driven by PR than advertising. Do you speak or can you learn guerilla marketing? What are your goals? Are they to raise awareness? Develop prospects? Increase sales? Move some item? Upsell? Or some combination of the above?

Pay special attention to the last two questions: Are you good at events? Do you have special access to the media?

Cause-related marketing relies frequently on events. That’s as it should be. When well executed, events build stronger relationships with prospects and customers than anything besides interpersonal communications. And more than the mass media, PR, direct mail and even the Internet, events allow you to effectively move from awareness and interest into commitment and action in one fell swoop.

As for the media question, cause-related marketing is little more than a parlor trick for marketers who don’t make good use of the appropriate media.