My Case for Cause Marketing

Cause Marketing—good or bad?  Let’s see…

Will Marré, branding speaker, is a strong proponent for cause marketing and in Author Will Marré Says Nike’s Livestrong Campaign is Compelling Case of Why Businesses Worldwide Should Adopt Cause Marketing Today discusses how cause marketing can be beneficial for everyone involved if the cause perfectly aligns with the brand and taps the six sources of brand energy: physical, emotional, mental, social, spiritual, and emotional.  You can see Marré speak on the subject on YouTube.

In Cause Marketing Matters to Consumers Kim T. Gordon also makes a case for cause marketing.  She states, “There’s a strong connection between entrepreneurship and giving.  The challenge is to make your socially responsible efforts a winning proposition for the nonprofit group you support, the community and your business.”  She gives these five steps for a strong cause marketing campaign: 1) Give from the heart, 2) Choose a related cause 3) Contribute more than dollars 4) Formalize your affiliation, 5) Mount a marketing campaign.

One creative website refers to cause marketing as Selfish Giving whose punch line is, “A cause marketer’s musings on doing well and good.”  The website is a great resource and proponent of cause marketing.

While cause marketing can be widely successful and positive for all involved, it’s not without its criticisms.  Referring to cause marketing as consumption philanthropy, Angela M. Eikenberry states in The Hidden Costs of Cause Marketing, “Consumption philanthropy 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. It devalues the moral core of philanthropy by making virtuous action easy and thoughtless. And it obscures the links between markets—their firms, products, and services—and the negative impacts they can have on human well-being.”

Marré even admits to the downside of cause marketing in his blog, Cause Marketing is the First Step in A More Virtuous Business World, stating, “Of course there is a lot of fake cause marketing going on, companies that pretend to be green when they are brazenly toxic or businesses who spend huge sums promoting their connection to a cause and little on the cause itself.  Of course I have found myself rolling my eyes more than once at yet another cause marketing campaign such as Exxon Mobile’s mosquito net commercials during the Olympics.  I have also come across a website, Think Before You Pink, that calls out “pinkwashing,” or companies that are attached to breast cancer cause marketing and actually contribute to the disease they’re supposed to be fighting against.”

Okay, Okay.  So while cause marketing isn’t 100 percent positive, I still lean towards “good.” I guess my attitude is…it doesn’t hurt to try.  I think it’s good to see companies doing something outside their own bottom line, and if it helps contribute to the bottom line in the process, right on.  So even if the motivation is selfish, as “Selfish Giving” infers, it’s still giving, and I think we need to take everything we can get.

I think Marré states it best in his blog, “When I get close to many of my clients’ motives, what I am finding is a genuine movement toward social good.  What may have started as sponsorship or don’t-want-to-get-my-hands-dirty philanthropy is rapidly transforming to well-funded business innovation…Cause marketing is a Trojan horse to get inside the strategic walls and retake the intellectual power of business leadership.”