Batting Your Eyelashes at Prescription Drug Cause Marketing

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 Viagra or Propecia are. That is, no one’s going to die (except, perhaps, of embarrassment) if their erectile dysfunction or male pattern baldness or thin eyelashes go untreated.

Which means the positioning for a product like Latisse is a little tricky. Allergan could have gone with the sexy route as with Viagra or Cialis and showed lovely women batting their new longer, thicker, darker eyelashes. But I’ll bet that approach didn’t test well with women.

(I’m reminded of a joke about the Cialis ads from a comedian whose name I can’t recall. He said, “Hey if my erection lasts longer than 3 hours I’m not calling my doctor, I’m calling every one of my friends!”)

Instead Allergan plays it pretty straight with Latisse. But by itself that’s not very sexy. So Allergan brought in actress/model Brooke Shields, who…um… suffers from hypotrichosis, as the face of Latisse.

Allergan, which also makes Botox, took it a step further and added a cause marketing element in support of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. This is not transactional cause marketing, which has the potential to run afoul of the FDA.

Instead, Allergan made a $500,000 donation to Make-A-Wish and offers an additional $5 to the charity for each person who signs for Latisse LashPerks. Allergan’s total potential donation is capped at $1 million and the sign-up period ends Dec. 31, 2009.

LashPerks is a loyalty program. Since Latisse is prescribed by medical doctors, LashPerks is way for Allergan to maintain an unmediated relationship with Latisse users.

A 30-day supply of Latisse starts around $120 but, of course, your price may vary. And naturellement some doctors will require more frequent office visits than others.

I’m not sure what to make of this campaign. Make-A-Wish certainly has plenty of heart, but the strategic fit between Latisse and the charity isn’t clear to me. Women who are spending north of $1,400 a year for longer eyelashes might be dismissed simply as the vain. I don’t know this about Latisse’s audience, but my gut tells me that vain or not they probably are 'aspirational.' That is, I think maybe they would want to do something charitable in addition to seeing a charitable donation made to a charity like Make-A-Wish. It would be fun to test that premise.

The donation amount, $1 million, seems generous except when considered in context of the fact that Allergan is banking on Latisse being a $500 million a year product line.

All that said, I consider this a breakthrough campaign since...so far as I know... it’s the first cause marketing campaign on behalf of a prescription drug.

Pharmaceutical companies, take note.

Campbell's Rebrands Labels for Education

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 Grammy Foundation.”

(The logo on the left is the old one. When I get the new one I'll share it).

With this new ‘open source cause marketing’ approach Campbell is doubling down in the bad economy. “In a troubled economy, being able to collect and win any free stuff in places where they’re taking things away [works],” says Salzberg.

Now in its 36th year, Labels for Education has generated more than $110 million in goods and supplies for the nation’s schools. About 75 percent of the nation’s schools participate in Labels for Education.

Campbell’s renewed effort underscores something I’ve written about before. For companies with a generous impulse but a smaller philanthropic budget now is the perfect time to expand (or try) cause marketing, especially transactional cause marketing.

Exploiting the Faces of Need

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 in a series of experiments, including a behavioral test where they showed subjects randomly-selected charitable appeals and gave them money to give.

In the other tests researchers tried to zero in on the emotional state of the test subjects.

The paper, called ‘The Face of Need,’ was authored by Professor Debora Small of The Wharton School and Nicole Verrochi, a PhD candidate, who openly wonder why charities don’t use sad faces of children more often.

I’ve got a few answers.

1. It’s potentially exploitive. For years some charities have been willing to say, in effect, ‘donate or this child will die.’ It may be true, but it’s still emotional blackmail. Pictures of sad children will deliver that message without having to say it.
2. The pictures of children in heart-wrenching situation might quickly lead to donor-fatigue. I’ve got pictures of my youngest when she was in the hospital on her third birthday and desperately ill with pneumonia. While it was quite an ordeal at the time, she’s better now. Still, I can’t bring myself to look at those hospital pictures. Imagine, then, getting nothing but sad pictures of children from every children’s charity that solicits you.
3. It could lead to a ‘race to the bottom’ of bad taste. It’s not hard to find children in really miserable states and snap a photo. My daughter, for instance, was miserable in one of the best children’s hospitals in the United States. But if a goodly number of children’s charities decide to apply the Wharton findings, we’ll almost certainly see children in ever more desperate situations. It will become a kind of sad-kid porn.

Disagree? Agree? Feel free to weigh in.


Tip of the hat to Jeff A. for suggesting the National Lampoon cover art.

Orkin's Fight the Bite is Cause Marketing that Fits the Cause and the Sponsor

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 make a $10 donation to Nothing But Nets. One hundred percent of each $10 donation will go to purchase and distribute insecticide treated mosquito nets to people in Africa.

In 2008 Fight the Bite generated $135,000. Orkin has guaranteed a minimum of $150,000 in 2009. Malaria, which is transmitted by mosquitoes, infects 350-500 million people each year, and more than 1 million people die each year from the scourge. Ninety percent of deaths due to malaria happen in Africa, with a disproportionate share of the deaths occurring among young children. Estimates put the loss of GDP in Africa due to malaria at 1.3 percent.

Children who survive a bout with malaria are at greater risk of learning impairment and brain damage. University of Minnesota researchers found that one strain of the disease… cerebral malaria… causes cognitive impairment in one in four survivors.

While there are malaria treatments, there is not yet a vaccine. And African strains of malaria are increasingly resistance to drug treatments. For now the most successful strategy is to spray the insides of home walls with insecticide and ensure that everyone at risk sleeps under an insecticide-treated net. Combined those two measures are about 90 percent effective at stopping malaria in the home in Africa.

Malaria has long since been eradicated in the United States and Europe and much or Asia. But mosquitoes in the United States do carry the West Nile Virus, which sickens tens of thousands but kills relatively few compared to malaria.

Orkin’s pitch is that by ordering up its mosquito service you thereby eliminate the threat of West Nile in your yard and help preserve lives in Africa. And that’s not an exaggerated or inflated claim.

There’s plenty to like about this campaign. The logic of the campaign is persuasive and the relationship between Orkin and the net campaign is clear. It also has the appeal of helping to save the lives of young children. And, as I’ve pointed out before, in the developed world children are the universal cause.

If anything, Orkin undersells the fact that malaria kills many more children than adults. In Africa, 90 percent of those who fall victim to malaria are children. The lives the nets are most likely to save therefore are those of young children, and there’s no reason not to make that clear visually and in the text.

Finally, it would be a disservice not to mention Orkin’s partner Nothing But Nets. Nothing But Nets is a grassroots effort run under the auspices of the United Nations that had its start when sportswriter Rick Reilly wrote about malaria in Africa in a May 2006 issue of Sports Illustrated. In the time since some 2.7 million nets have been purchased for distribution in Africa.

Tip of the hat to Kate L for suggesting this post.

Help Me Name the New Cause Marketing Index

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 cause marketing.

But first I need a name.

So you'll notice at the top of the column to the right a poll to help name the cause marketing index of stocks.

I've listed basically the first four ideas that came to me:

1. The first is a play on the standard-bearer of stock indexes, the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The DJIA... aka 'the Dow'... is named for two of the founders of the Wall Street Journal; Charles Dow and Edward Jones. Since my name is Paul Jones the first option is a sort of guerilla marketing play on the DJIA, only nicknamed 'the Paul.'
2. The second is a play on my company name, Alden Keene, which spins off the tongue at least as easily as NASDAQ.
3. The third and fourth options are more generic.

Please vote for your favorite option.

Two last things:

• If you don't like the options, by all means e-mail me your choice to me at aldenkeene at gmail dot com. But be aware that I will almost certainly favor options that feature my name or my company's name. I am a marketer, after all.
• Lastly, I haven't figured out how to feed the index into the blog. But I expect that Yahoo Pipes can probably do what I need it to do. If you can offer help on using Yahoo Pipes in this way, please let me know. For that matter, if you know of a better way to do this I'm all ears.

Warm regards,
Paul

Professor Eikenberry, I Respectfully Disagree

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 openly told us that they found the practice gauche.

We finished our presentation with some Q&A, which lasted past our appointed time. So we took the discussion into the hallway. I remember in particular one fellow from Rome. He was the executive director of a children’s charity that he felt had potential popular appeal but which had fallen out of favor politically and had lost funding. Domestic charities in Italy and much of continental Europe are funded directly by local and national governments. He needed a new fundraising approach that could make up for some of the funding that was no longer coming from the government and thought that maybe cause marketing could help fill the void.

I thought of that Italian executive director as I read Professor Angela Eikenberry’s censure of cause marketing in the Summer 2009 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review.

(That's Professor Eikenberry on the left. Read Joe Water's well-considered response to Professor Eikenberry here.)

Called ‘The Hidden Costs of Cause Marketing,’ Professor Eikenberry’s thesis is threefold.

That cause marketing:

• “Individualizes solutions to collective social problems, distracting our attention and resources away from the neediest causes, the most effective interventions, and the act of critical questioning itself.”
• “…devalues the moral core of philanthropy by making virtuous action easy and thoughtless.
• “…obscures the links between markets—their firms, products, and services—and the negative impacts they can have on human well-being.”

Professor Eikenberry also openly wonders if cause marketing doesn’t negatively affect the donations of time and money to worthy charitable organizations.

I’ll address that first. All of the evidence Professor Eikenberry cites is anecdotal or impertinent. It would be a simple matter to compare Americans’ donations to charities before the age of cause marketing (say 1983) versus giving after the age of cause marketing. The necessary data is available from The Center on Philanthropy at the University of Indiana and from IEG.

My bet is that even though the funds raised by cause marketing is a flyspeck compared to total charitable giving in the United States, that overall giving has increased since the coming forth of cause marketing.

I’m not implying causation here. Quite the opposite. I expect it’s likely that modern Americans are more attuned as donors of money and time than their cohorts were in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. My guess is that instead of driving charitable fundraising up or down, cause marketing is just enjoying the ride.

But on to Professor Eikenberry’s main points.

I confess I don’t understood what Professor Eikenberry means when she writes that cause marketing ‘individualizes solutions to collective social problems.’ Or, at least, I don’t understand how cause marketing is any more guilty of individualizing solutions than normal charitable giving when something north of 80 percent of all charitable donations in the United States come from individuals and bequests.

If I buy a carton of Yoplait, send in the lid and thereby make possible a 10 cent donation to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, how exactly is that gift more individualized than when an annual donor, say, writes a check for $200 to a hospital, or a ballet company, or a church, or the scouts, or a food bank, or a disease or relief charity? Especially since that annual donor was almost certainly solicited for that gift. Nevermind that the solicitation didn’t take place in our modern temples to consumerism, the grocery stores, which Professor Eikenberry evidently deplores.

Cause marketing today is lot like the American form of the democratic republic. It’s loud and brassy and more or less effective. Would that we could be ruled by the benign but well-born and ethical king or queen that Aristotle famously endorsed. But, alas, this is the government we have.

Likewise, American charities that can’t make their case to their stakeholders are in a world of trouble. Our system of funding charities, as constituted, has all the pity of Darwinian natural selection. Cause marketing is a reflection of that reality, not a cause of it. Certainly our system does not feature a benign tyrant whose job it is to assign the public’s resources to the neediest of causes.

Is it regrettable that St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is effective not only at its mission, but at cause marketing (and, really, all elements of fundraising)? I don’t see how.

And as my Italian friend demonstrated, even in the advanced welfare states in Europe, where government officials do decide what resources go to which charities, good causes get defunded because of politics. It’s not my specialty, but I’d be surprised if in fact there aren’t scads of state-supported charities in Europe that are popular with government officials and bad at their missions.

Finally, my American colleague, the fellow who I had co-presented with in Italy is now a university fundraiser. About 18 months ago the third oldest university in England brought him and another fellow-countryman, to inject a little American-style fundraising savvy into the university’s sleepy development office. This in a country where government funding has always underwritten the entire higher education system.

Even during the current economic climate he’s killing his fundraising goals there. That’s because his donors recognize what Professor Eikenberry seemingly does not. So long as it’s not ill-gotten, it’s not where the money comes from or who the upstart fundraiser is that counts. It’s how the money is used.

Prostate Cancer Foundation Bunts a Blooper Into the Infield

In baseball, a bunt is a small hit that goes no farther than the infield.

And bunt is what the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) did with this ad that I’ve seen recently in Newsweek and BusinessWeek magazines.

The ad’s call to action is that you go online and pledge “as little as” $1 for each home run hit during Major League Baseball play between Thursday, June 11 and Father’s Day, a holiday celebrating fathers that falls on Sunday June 21 this year.

Why? Well 186,500 men in the United States are stricken with prostate cancer each year. And, “in the time it takes to play nine innings” nine men die of the disease, about 30,000 men a year.

The PCF estimates that 143 home runs are likely to be hit over the 11-day period between June 11 and June 21. But while the body copy says you can pledge as little as $1 per home run, in fact, you can pledge as little as $0.25 cents.

While these kinds of scoring-linked promotions are common enough, they’re usually set up so that a sponsor makes a donation whenever a pre-designated number of three-point shots are made by the home team in basketball, for instance. In such cases, at the end of the game the announcer inside the arena intones that “the insurance agents of Allstate just made a $500 donation to Big Brothers and Big Sisters.”

It’s satisfying to hear that some sponsor is on the hook for another donation to a worthy cause. But when it’s you who’s on the hook, as in this promotion from the PCF, are you hoping for a lot of home runs or relatively few?

Given that, this would be a better promotion if there was some kind of match from a fat cat corporate sponsor, whereby for every dollar you pledge the sponsor matches all or part of it.

I don’t see what the headline or the illustration has to do with the call to action. If PCF wants to trumpet its researchers that’s fine. But it’s self-defeating to force a relationship between prostate research, MLB, and a donation plea in one ad.

Moreover, I ask myself why the illustration draws equivalency between an unnamed hitter from an unnamed team and unnamed researcher in a white coat, both of which look like stock photos.

PCF has secured the support of 10 big leaguers. Why not feature a picture of big-leaguer Ken Griffey Jr., one of PCF’s supporters, and recount a scenario that describes how teamwork won an important game?

I’m puzzled also by how Major League Baseball is treated in the ad. The language makes it seem like the MLB is a hesitant participant at best.

It seems like PCF is trying to brand Father’s Day. It would make sense. The breast cancer charities have successfully branded October and the heart charities have branded February. June is probably open to be branded for prostate cancer. But Father’s Day is just one more element in an ad that is already too cluttered.

I question why the body copy leads with a question, which is almost always a weak approach. For readers it’s too easy to respond to such questions with a question of their own: “Who cares?”

Then there’s the callout quote in orange, directly above the logos: “When everybody does their part, the whole team wins.” True enough. But I don’t think ‘team guilt’ really works for people who aren’t yet part of the team.

Finally, this campaign cries out for a contest element. I imagine something like when you make a pledge, you enter to win a trip to the All Star Game or even the World Series. These kind of contests require an alternate (read: free) form of entry. But that’s OK because those entries can be the start of a mailing list.

This ad and this campaign could be home runs. Too bad the PCF decided to bunt.

Funnyman Will Ferrell Wants to Lather You Up With Cause Marketing Sunscreen

The awkwardly-named Cancer for College is selling three varieties of sunscreen that strongly feature actor-comedian Will Ferrell. One hundred percent of the proceeds from the sale of the sunscreen benefit Cancer for College, which is a scholarship charity for cancer survivors and amputees.

The three varieties are ‘Sexy Hot Tan,’ ‘Forbidden Fruit,’ and ‘Sunstroke.’ Pricing is $11.99 per 6 ounce bottle.

All feature cheeky shots of Ferrell’s head on someone else’s body. Some of the shots are …ahem… more cheeky than others. The Sunstroke variety, seen on the left, has a double-meaning that also makes reference to Cancer for College’s several annual fundraising golf tourneys.

Cancer for College was founded in 1993 by Craig Pollard, a double-amputee and two-time cancer survivor himself. Pollard learned that many of his peers… kids who had also fought and won their battles with cancer… wouldn’t be able to attend college because of the financial toll cancer takes on families. He determined to do something about it. During his senior year at University of Southern California he wrote the business plan for Cancer for College.

Pollard and Will Ferrell were fraternity brothers in Delta Tau Delta fraternity at USC.

With his access to the media, Ferrell is a powerful friend to have, of course, and his participation has generated a respectable amount of publicity. Just Google ‘Will Ferrell sunscreen.’

Dame Anita Roddick, the founder of The Body Shoppe, proved that it’s possible, if not easy, to build a valuable worldwide brand without advertising if your cause resonates and you’re good at seeking and getting publicity.

But if the folks at Cancer for College want this to take off…and it could… they’re going to have to get the lotion into some other distribution channels. Roddick, of course, had retail channels.

The Cancer for College website seems hastily thrown together. But all the elements are there; there’s plenty of Ferrell, a good mix of the emotional appeal of Pollard’s own inspiring story and the kids who’ve received scholarships. It just need to be put together in a more logical and appealing way.

Why the End of the Recession Could Bring Hard Times to Cause Marketing

The end of the recession could bring new challenges to cause marketers.

I don’t think I’m looking too far ahead, either. The Index of Leading Indicators turned slightly positive in April, suggesting the economy has troughed. If history holds, economic growth is somewhere between one and four quarters away Stateside.

Although I think I can make a good case for cause marketing now while still deep in the recession, I believe we may emerge from the recession with a different environment for cause marketing.

Here’s the reason: America has too many retail stores. Retail analysts say that more than 200 of the nation’s 210 DMAs (marketing speak for 'designated market areas') were ‘fully stored’ in 2007! For most chains growth by adding stores has long since ceased to be a prudent strategy.

A number of retailers, unable to secure credit terms, are giving off a death rattle including Barneys, Blockbuster, Eddie Bauer, Claire’s Stores, Guitar Center, Michael’s Stores, Rite Aid. Blockbuster, notably, is doubly-cursed since it not only faces a cash crunch, but a broken business model. Even Starbucks has eased off its store on every corner strategy.

Many other established chain stores, trying to save their very business, are closing individual stores and shuttering line extensions, among them Liz Claiborne, Ann Taylor, and Talbots.

To give those statistics some dimension consider that right now in America there is 5.7 square miles of empty retail space, about six times the size of Monaco.

In April retail sales overall were down 4 percent from March 2009 and 11 percent over April 2008. [For my part, I’m not worried about what the nation’s municipalities are going to do with all that empty retail space so much as I’m concerned about the shrinking tax base.]

At the same time e-commerce as a percentage of overall retail sales has grown every year since 1999, a result not so much of a lower cost environment, as much as the capability the Internet gives online merchants to endlessly segment audiences. Since the fourth quarter of 2000, e-commerce retail has grown faster than overall retail, suggesting that growth in e-commerce is cannibalizing bricks and mortar retail sales.

Part of this is technology-driven. With outfits like Doba, a PayPal account and the right Wordpress theme, you could be running an e-tail business by tomorrow. The barriers to entry into retail sales have never been lower.

In the same breath, I should note that the largest general e-merchant, Amazon, has seen sales almost double from 2006 to 2008 to $19.1 billion.

Worse, from a retailer’s perspective, consumers have basically won the retail wars. Consumers have better information, global sources, and patience. Even purveyors of luxury goods have lost pricing power in this new paradigm.

In short:

1. There’s too many retailers
2. The potential for nearly infinite competition
3. A more savvy shopper
4. A depressed sales environment

The first three factors are structural. As the economy improves, only that last factor will change.

If I were short seller, I’d be shorting retail stocks now and for a long time into the future.

To bring this all home for cause marketers, of the 10 troubled bricks and mortar chains listed, I’m seen at least some cause marketing campaigns from five.

More to the point, with a few notable exceptions, cause marketing promotions are overwhelmingly consumer facing. Studies suggest that cause marketing is most effective for companies that advertise. Put directly, cause marketing generally takes place in retail settings.

What effects do I see?

• I see renewed emphasis by cause marketers on restaurant cause marketing. Restaurants are retailers too, but they have the advantage that customers people can’t really ‘place-shift’ their eating they way they can their shopping. It’s either take-out/drive-in, dine-in, or eat at home.
• Because retail will continue to shift online cause marketers are going to have to learn some new tricks.
• While we may yet see some consolidation in online retail, for the intermediate term there’s going to be more operators targeting niche audiences; women’s handbags, outdoor sporting goods, wooden toys, etc. Such niche e-tailing relies overwhelming on Google Adwords which are 8-12 words. In that formulation, there’s not much space for cause marketing.
• I expect we’ll see more affiliate cause-marketing, like the one made possible by the bookmarklet developed by Tal Ater.
• For the time being offline retailers need to put a face on their stores, something cause marketing is built for.
  

Finally e-tailers, in my view, could benefit from getting serious about cause marketing, philanthropy, and corporate social responsibility. E-tailers benefit enormously from not having to charge sales taxes to their customers. Currently bricks and mortar retailers sell nearly 300 times as much as e-tailers. But as that ratio changes in favor of e-tailers, the pressure to require collection of sales taxes will grow.

During the public debate on the issue of taxing sales from e-tailers, the bricks and mortar retailers will claim… with some degree of truth… that they are generous donors to charity. Right now, the best that Amazon can counter with its sponsorship of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and the PEN American Center. That’s not going to be good enough for the 800-pound gorilla of e-tailing when pressure is brought to bear.

Lack of Integration Hurts Lilly Pulitzer Cause Marketing Jubilee

In celebration of her fiftieth year in business, fashion designer Lilly Pulitzer... in conjunction with eight celebrity moms... is conducting a cause marketing campaign benefiting the Epidermolysis Bullosa Medical Research Foundation. EB is a rare and especially heartbreaking genetic skin disorder.

The celebrity moms include Gwyneth Paltrow, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon, Angie Harmon, Debra Messing, Marcia Cross, Bridget Moynahan, Catherine Bell, and Brooke Shields.

When you buy outfits from Pulitzer’s ‘Colorful Cause Jubilee Collection for Summer 2009’ proceeds benefit the EBMRF.

The mom and me swimsuit collection illustrated to the left is from the Gwyneth Paltrow collection.

I have my usual qualms about the ‘proceeds’ language. But more than that I think Lilly Pulitzer missed some tricks here, almost all related to a lack of integration.

The pronouncement was made in mid-April, yet the Pulitzer blog has only two posts, including the announcement itself. There’s a few more in Facebook and a smattering in Twitter. On the Lilly Pulitzer website the promotion itself is obscured by the title in the menu board “Jubilee.” If you weren't looking for the word 'Jubilee,' you'd never know to associate it with the cause marketing promotion.

If you come to any of the pages for the celebrity designs any way except through the Jubilee area of the website, you’d be hard pressed to conclude that there was a cause marketing promotion in place.

Lilly Pulitzer’s colorful clothing has a fan base. But for customers in nearly 2/5ths of the States in the U.S., the only place to buy the clothing is online. So if individual product pages that are part of the promotion don’t draw the connection between the product and the cause, there’s a meaningful number of customers who are unlikely to learn about it on the Lilly Pulitzer website itself!

Nowadays you just can't presume that visitors to your website navigate their way to individual pages of your site starting at your home page and proceeding in a linear fashion. Every page of a website must ... to some degree... stand on its own.

Moreover in a case where the company has picked a charity that isn’t well known, like EBMRF, it’s crucial that there be a note or two of explanation about the why of that support. If it’s personal, say Lilly Pulitzer herself has a grandchild or one of the employees at Lilly Pulitzer has a nephew or niece with the condition it would help the promotion if customers knew that. And, rest assured, that could be communicated without exploiting any kids.

Even if it’s not personal, customers need to know the why of it to make sense of it in their own minds. It's not enough to say it's a 'good cause.' I, personally, know of hundreds of good causes. Perhaps the cause was persoanlly affecting to Lilly Pultizer herself. Maybe the cause itself is wonderfully efficient. Or their research approach is especially innovative. Customers want to know the why of a company's support for a charity that is featured in this way.

Two parting thoughts: A limited number of the celebrity designed outfits are available. More could be made of that scarcity in the promotion. Lilly Pultizer might have considered making at least one item of each celebrity’s line super exclusive and sold it at a premium price with correspondingly higher percentage of the proceeds going to EBMRF.

It might even be fun to encourage a sense of 'competition' between the celebrity moms over whose line sells the best. Imagine Brooke leading but then falling behind Angie Harmon's line. She might tell her agent to book her on Ellen or Tyra to make up the lost ground.

Finally, I know it’s part of Lilly Pulitzer's branding, but the pastel-colored type on the website combined with mice-type sized font, made some pages hell for me to read.

DIY Cause Marketing Gone Horribly Wrong

Cause marketing is pervasive these days in part because the simplest transactional campaigns are so easy to understand and not too complicated to execute.

But there are times… plenty if you ask me because this is how I make my living... when companies shouldn’t be allowed to do their own cause marketing. For an example, look to the left.

If you conclude, as I do, that this is not a bad April Fool's Day joke, your mind automatically starts trying to draw connecting lines. My first reaction was that maybe the sub rosa meaning was that by using the product it would obviate the sexual drive and the children that often result when it’s not…um… obviated.

But, in fact, there is no such connection here, and that suggests that this campaign’s chances of success are limited. If I can coin a phrase, children are the ‘universal cause’ and it appears the promoters defaulted to it.

What would have been more fitting? The estimable author and nonprofit consultant Nedra Weinreich, who brought this to my attention, suggests Planned Parenthood, or an AIDs or STD charity. Good thinking.

For that matter, the promoters could have simply polled their customers and stakeholders and asked what they’d respond to.

Profile of Cause Marketing Veteran Joe Lake

Blogger's Note: What follows is a profile and interview I wrote of Children's Miracle Network co-founder Joe Lake, who was recently installed as the CEO of the Starfish Television Network. This originally appeared in the Salt Lake Enterprise on Monday, May 11.

Lining the walls of the office of Joe Lake, the new CEO of the Starfish Television Network, a 501(c) (3) public charity and television network founded in 2006 and headquartered in Midvale, are pictures of the many celebrities he has worked with.

There are pictures of Joe with Goldie Hawn, Sidney Poitier, Jeff Bridges, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Rob Lowe and Walter Cronkite, and affectionately-autographed publicity stills from Bob Hope and Rich Little.

It’s something you’d expect in the office of a Hollywood agent, or at a celebrity hangout in Manhattan, or Chicago or Vegas. But the Starfish Television Network, whose mission is to tell the stories of nation’s nonprofits in a way that educates, entertains and inspires its audience by airing television and video programming for and about the nation’s nonprofits, isn’t in any of those places.

It’s not in Los Angeles or even Atlanta. It’s in Midvale, Utah. And while he grew up in Salt Lake City and lives in Draper, Utah, Joe Lake is no Zelig sneaking into all those pictures.

Along with Mick Shannon, the Osmond family and actor John Schneider, Lake was a co-founder at Children’s Miracle Network (CMN) more than 25 years ago and spent many years in executive positions there before retiring in 1998. Since its founding, CMN has generated more than $3.4 billion for children’s hospitals in the United States and Canada.

That’s big-boy money, to be sure. To give some perspective, last year CMN raised more than $300 million, about what Utah tech superstar Omniture grossed in 2008.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that there are “no second acts in American lives.” That’s because he didn’t know Joe Lake.

Since his time at CMN, Joe’s retirement has basically had two speeds: Fast and faster. Joe Lake was, for instance, the guy who helped Larry King grow the Larry King Cardiac Foundation, built up its board, broadened its fund-raising approach and then left it in the hands of other professional managers.

So a few minutes before he walked The New York Times bestselling author and Starfish supporter Andy Andrews into an interview on Good Morning America, I put a number of questions to Joe about Starfish, nonprofit fundraising in a recession, and how companies and nonprofits can help each other out in these tough economic times.

You were on the board at Starfish. What induced you to take the CEO job?

“I wasn’t looking for a full-time position and certainly wasn’t ready to take on a CEO role. When I was asked to serve as chairman of the advisory board, I said yes because it was a great concept— the nation’s first charity channel— and because I went back with the founder and other staff to the early years of Children’s Miracle Network. We all worked the Children’s Miracle Network telethons together. Over the course of that year or so as board chair, I saw amazing things happen — getting a channel on DISH, receiving programming from hundreds of nonprofit organizations, a start in original programming. As the board of trustees decided to move forward in this third year, they asked me to come in as CEO. One of the biggest reasons I said yes was this: If we could do what we did for Children’s Miracle Network with just a 21-hour telethon once a year, then how much good could we do with 24 hours 7 days a week of airtime?”

Starfish has a really big mission, doesn’t it?

“Starfish Television Network is the nation’s first charity channel. We are dedicated solely to bringing you programming which can make the world a better place for all of us. We want to bring stories of organizations and individuals that are making a difference, in their communities and around the world. There is so much good going on in the world — so many people giving their time, energy, resources — so many people who want to create a positive change in the world for themselves and future generations. Starfish shows those stories.”

Starfish is now entering in its third year and has thereby already succeeded. What’s it going to take to get it to the next level?

“We really want to become a true network — not just in television terms but in terms of being a resource for our member organizations. We want to partner with them to help them get their message out and raise more money to do more good. We want to partner with organizations on original programming, provide fundraising ideas and new dollars, and collaborate on best practices. To take Starfish to the next level will require more funding, more sponsorship and more people. The more we can do, the more we can help.”

More than 25 years ago you personally pitched Bill Marriott on the benefits of supporting a cause. In a sponsorship relationship, what can charities offer businesses that they can’t get elsewhere?

“The opportunity to have a third party acknowledge the social good works that corporate America does that goes unnoticed and unsung. In this season of tough economy, every company is looking for an edge, charity offers that advantage. I think the biggest thing to remember is that, all things being equal, consumers are more likely to select a brand that they see tied to cause. Use every available opportunity to recognize the support of sponsors.”

I can’t think of another charity in the States that has a mission and capability to broadcast television the way Starfish does. The flip side is that Starfish can offer sponsors benefits they couldn’t get anywhere else, isn’t it?

“We can offer sponsors recognition with multiple and ongoing airings of programs on Starfish. For example, one organization has an eight-minute program about their mission and cause. Since receiving that program, it has aired 96 times. If that program were to be sponsored, a business would be tied permanently to that program. Therefore would have already been seen as ‘this program brought to you by XYZ’ nearly 100 times on a national network! If a business has a particular cause they want to align with, Starfish has programs to fill that need. If a business has a specific program they wish to sponsor, we can discuss that too. There are so many ways for businesses to show that they are good corporate citizens and that they care about making a positive difference. Really, where else on television would a program receive more than two to three airings total? Because of our mission, we are able to share messages and re-air programs at a higher frequency than other networks. In addition, while Starfish Television Network is not allowed to sell advertising time, we believe strongly in enhanced donor recognition. Depending on their level of support major sponsors of Starfish receive produced acknowledgements of their support several times each month, week and day. These announcements thank companies for their sponsorship and allow us to recognize them in the best possible public light for their support of not just one organization but all 500+ charities featured on Starfish.”

The New York Times ran a story earlier this month about how the big fundraising galas are having hard time finding people to honor because the companies the honorees work for don’t have the money to spare. It’s pretty tough out there for nonprofits right now. You’ve been through recessions before as a fund-raiser. How does this one compare?

“You mention fund-raising galas. It’s true. Charities that do fund-raising galas need to approach them in a different way in these challenging times. The days of honoring a CEO or executive because their company will put up the bulk of the sponsorship money is thing of the past right now. These galas can still be done and can still be successful, however charities need to provide events that are more fun, maybe a unique experience, an event that can draw on attendance — not sponsorship or honorees —for funds raised. The key is to spend less and raise more. Work with vendors to underwrite the hard costs. Don’t pay celebrities for appearances and entertainment. It is possible to have a first class event without spending a ton of money. Recently, I was involved in a gala for St. Rose Dominican Hospitals in Las Vegas. It was their 52nd Annual Mardi Gras Ball. Despite the economic challenges, we saw their attendance double and they raised over $1 million.”

You keep a file of fundraising ideas for nonprofits that have crossed your desk, cite one or two that you think would be perfect for right now.

“You want to make the ‘ask’ easy on the donor as well as the person asking. Most of Children’s Miracle Network’s money was raised one dollar at a time, from selling Miracle Balloons paper icons or grass roots fundraising. Work with your sponsors on getting their employees and the community involved. Do just ask them for money. The key with paper icons is to ask, every person, every time. You’ll get a lot of ‘noes’ but you’ll be surprised at the ‘yeses.’”

Anything else you’d care to add?

In 1982, when Mick Shannon, Marie Osmond, John Schneider and I launched Children’s Miracle Network, we often encountered people asking why someone hadn’t thought of this idea before. Well, in 2009, Starfish Television Network is in the same position. People constantly ask me, ‘Why hasn’t this been done before?’ I don’t know, but I’m sure glad they didn’t.”

The Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive Needs to Be Made Remarkable Again

Saturday May 9, is the nationwide Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive in the United States. If you’re Stateside, before you read anything else in this post be sure and put together a bag of non-perishable food items. Then get it out at your mailbox before your mail carrier gets there May 9. Start on paragraph two when you get back

You back? Good. I hope you included lots of high protein items. If not, go find an unopened jar of peanut butter (in a plastic jar, please) and add it to the bag, then come back and start with the third paragraph.

With that out of the way let’s talk about what word of mouth guru Andy Sernovitz calls “The Chocolate Problem.” Nobody, Sernovitz points out, has ever emailed a friend and wrote in the subject line, “Have you ever tried this stuff called chocolate? It’s amazing!”

Whether you like or dislike it, everyone knows about chocolate. And this campaign from Cambell’s, the US Postal Service and the National Association of Letter Carriers has a bad case of the chocolate problem.

Stamp Out Hunger doesn’t need a new look or tagline, it doesn’t need broader media exposure, or better celebrity support, or new relevance; it couldn’t be more relevant than right now. Stamp Out Hunger needs something that makes it remarkable again. That is, something that makes people want to remark about it. It needs better word of mouth.

My specialty isn’t necessarily word of mouth marketing, but here are four ideas that could help make Stamp Out Hunger remarkable again.

1. It could use some really dramatic success stories captured on video. We frequently hear about hunger, but we seldom hear about people ‘graduating’ from hunger thanks to food donations. Yet as sure as I’m writing this there are thousands of people who were once hungry, got help, and are now on the giving instead of the receiving end of this equation. Such a story doesn’t diminish the need. Indeed, framed right, such stories would underscore that the system works. I’d Tweet a story like that.
2. The campaign could certainly humanize the letter carriers even more. Their images are plastered all over the post cards. But imagine something more. I suspect that there are letter carriers out there whose conscientiousness was raised by Stamp Out Hunger and who on their route noticed and personally did something about hunger. I’d post something on this blog about a letter carrier who personally intervened to help hungry children get fed.
3. Or how about this? I’ll bet there are letter carriers who consistently bring back way more food than the average carrier because they personally ask people on their route for help. That’s a nice a story that ought to be told and could go viral.
4. What about a contest element? What if on the postcard I received on Wednesday, May 6 there was a promotion for a contest of some kind. Nothing grandiose mind you, which would undermine the purpose. But suppose if you donated, say, 15 or more cans of food that you were entered into a contest to meet President Obama at a food bank in Washington, D.C., where you would work together for some period of time sorting donations. That would be pretty cool and it would attract good and appropriate media attention.
   

Someone like Andy Sernovitz could certainly come up with better ideas than these. But the point is this; Stamp Out Hunger is drifting right now. Someone needs to make it remarkable again.

Cause Marketing Advice to a Small E-tailer

LimeRicki.com sells modest swimwear that is meant to be cute and colorful without sacrificing comfort. They currently donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the tankini top to the left... called 'Gabby'... to benefit breast cancer research.

LimeRicki.com was started by three sisters, one of whom is a breast cancer survivor. The company is headquartered here in my home market, and so in the spirit of bonhomie I offer LimeRicki.com six suggestions to make the most of their cause marketing efforts.

First off, I commend you for including the reason why you support breast cancer research. That's good. One small suggestion, consider identifying which sister is the breast cancer survivor. She doesn't need to bare her soul, but this small change makes the promotion even more immediate.

1. Name the breast cancer charity you’re supporting. Your customers love that you’re doing cause marketing. But they want and need to know the specifics before this can influence their purchase decision. As far as the mechanics of this you can name the charity, but don’t refer to your donation as a sponsorship or use the organization’s logo. You’d need permission to do that. I’d even discourage you from linking to the organization’s website.
2. Specify how much the donation will be. Experience and research demonstrates that your customers are more likely to be moved to action if they know what the amount of the donation is.
3. Use the pink breast cancer ribbon on the product page. As I’ve written before, no one owns the pink ribbon. You can therefore freely put the ribbon in close proximity to the product whose sale benefits breast cancer research.
4. Explain the promotion on the product page. As it stands, we learn in the About Us section, but not the product page itself, of LimeRicki.com that the Gabby line benefits breast cancer research. That’s too far removed to be helpful. Place the specifics of the promotion directly on the product page. Also, link to the Gabby page from the About Us page.
5. Activate the promotion. You have a blog, a Facebook page and a Twitter account. Promote the donation there first and then send a press release out announcing the donation. If you have a newsletter, publicize it there, too. Where should you send the press release? Check your sales records to find the zip codes where your product sells best. Send the release to the media that makes the most sense in those zip codes. Since you also sell in retail, add a paper tag to the Gabby line in that explains the promotion.
6. Court the ‘mommy media.’ Find the influential mommy bloggers, mommy portals, mommy TV, and other mommy media and court them unashamedly. Cause marketing on behalf of breast cancer research is a wonderful opportunity to tell the Limericki.com story in these markets. Better still, they can link directly to your site when referring to Limericki.com.

The Cause Marketing Blog Jumps on the Star Trek Bandwagon

The day was March 9, 1967 and NBC had a challenging ratings failure on its hands called ‘Star Trek.’

The conundrum for network executives was that bad ratings notwithstanding, the people who loved the polarizing series loved it with the fire of a 1000 Vulcan suns. And so after threatening to cancel the series after the first season, NBC executives felt obliged at the end of the show that March 9, to make an odd live announcement. “‘Star Trek’ will be back in the fall,” it went. “And please don’t write any more letters.”

Fans had in engaged in an adhoc letter writing campaign that buoyed the series through that first season and through three more. In total, just 79 Star Trek episodes had aired. But to the degree that Star Trek has become a science fiction franchise it’s because in 1974 a group of 10,000 like-minded geeks gathered in at the Americana Hotel in New York City to dress up like their favorite Trek characters, screen individual shows and extol all things Trek.

People with single minded devotion to a topic are called ‘fanboys.’ Every year fanboys of all stripes gather to celebrate everything you can imagine and a few things you don’t want to imagine. But the International Star Trek Convention was the Alpha fanboy convention.

To my readers who work at nonprofits and to marketers everywhere I ask, what would you do to generate fanboy-like devotion?

Increasingly one logical answer is social media.

A new survey of 980 nonprofit professionals shows that nonprofits have taken to social media with a vengeance.

The survey (registration required) asked respondents three groups of questions about their use of social media, their ‘house social networks,’ and the demographics of their firm.

The respondents came from nonprofits small and large and included charities, labor unions, associations, churches, and mutual banks. The survey was the work of the Nonprofit Technology Network, Common Knowledge, and ThePort.

Among the findings:

• 74 percent have a presence on Facebook, 46 percent on YouTube, 43 percent on Twitter, nearly 33 percent are on Twitter and 26 percent are on MySpace.
• Average number of followers: Facebook 5,391; MySpace 1905; Twitter 291; LinkedIn 286; and, YouTube 268.
• On which social network are respondents fundraising? 38.9 percent said Facebook; 12 percent said MySpace; 8 percent on Change.org; 6.7 percent said Twitter; 5.6 percent said YouTube; 1.9 percent said LinkedIn.
• 30.6 percent said that they have in-house social networks. The networks are mainly used for marketing and most have 10,000 or fewer community members. Nearly ¾ say they don’t use their in-house social network for fundraising, and more than 85 percent don’t allow advertising on it.
  

Social networks may not turn your charity into raucous scene like that first Star Trek Convention at Americana Hotel circa 1974. But they do give you an extraordinary way to reach our and connect with would-be fanboys.

Use social media well and your nonprofit or company might just “live long and prosper.”