Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from May, 2010

Be Glad It’s Called Cause Marketing and Not 'Marketing Related Philanthropy'

Back in the 1980s, at the behest of Jerry Welsh, American Express trademarked the term ‘Cause-Related Marketing.’ Welsh, who was then executive vice president worldwide marketing and communications at Amex, coined the term ‘cause-related marketing’ to describe the legendary campaign to fund the restoration of the Statue of Liberty in 1983. In a Feb. 2009 interview with Welsh, he told me that the wording of this new term was purposeful. “I believe in the deliberate use of language, so I was careful in crafting the term ‘Cause-Related Marketing.’ CRM is not philanthropy; it’s rather marketing through an artful association with a charitable cause. Otherwise, I would have called it something like ‘Marketing-Related Philanthropy.’” Despite Welsh’s fastidiousness with language, one of the wonders of the term cause marketing is that it’s flexible enough to permit efforts for causes that aren’t officially-sanctioned charities. In my hometown of Salt Lake City, there’s a cause marketing campai

Ditch or Keep Your Embarrassing Cause Marketing Celebrity?

Uh-oh! Your A-list celebrity supporter just pulled a Tiger and embarrassed himself and his family on a tape first seen on TMZ and now airing on every screen on the planet. It seems like everywhere they point a camera, someone new is coming forward to say that they, too, did something appalling with your alpha celebrity. (Cue Karl Malden VO) “ What will you do? What will you do? " Fire him? Disavow? Stand by her for as long as you can stand the heat? A new study by Harris Poll suggests that maybe you do nothing. Although there is a veritable cottage industry of celebrity trackers waiting for them to step outside without any makeup, or look less than flattering in their bikini, or utter a drunken calumny, or run over a paparazzi in their Mercedes, maybe none of that matters. An Adweek Media/Harris Interactive Poll published Monday finds that three-quarters of Americans don’t impute any of the blame or think negatively of your brand as a result of your endorsers’ indiscretions. Conc

How to Start a Million-Dollar Social Enterpprise

For the last 10 years or so it seems like every other business leader I talk has an idea for a business that will funnel profits to a charity, while every charity leader I know wishes s/he had a for-profit venture that spun out loads of cash. Examples of both abound. National Geographic Magazine is a benefit of membership in the not-for-profit National Geographic Society. But almost everything else—their catalog, their television shows, their travel tours—are for-profit business enterprises; enterprises on which National Geographic pays taxes. A recent example of a company meant to funnel profits to nonprofit endeavors comes from my own hometown. Members of the billionaire Jon M. Huntsman family have acquired the high-end Sotheby’s real estate franchise in the luxury enclaves of Sun Valley , Idaho and Jackson Hole , Wyoming . (The splendid photo of the Grand Tetons comes from JT Palmer Photography). Profits from the franchise will go to the Huntsman Cancer Center he