Cause-Related Marketing

October 16th, 2010 • Uncategorized

Cause-related marketing can sometimes lead to great things. We see clear examples every day like the one we saw in class where the NHL worked together with the pink ribbon association to promote breast cancer awareness, and in a way to introduce the NHL in a different market. It’s a clear win win.

My concern is with the approach given to this donations. It seems the campaign reaches enough people, and a lot of people is buying cause-related items,  e.g. Pink campbell soup, or any (RED) product.  Is it really worth spending that much money promoting this campaigns? Just to give an example, it seems (RED) campaigns are extremely pricey and if you look at the (RED) t-shirts for example, they are not that pretty anyways (a mon avis). Why not donate directly to the cause instead of shopping something to donate. I don’t think, unless we are talking about items everyone buys in a weekly basis, it is really worth it to spend all this amount  of money to promote a company doing a good thing. I read about a campaign that was held in England in 2006 between Pampers and UNICEF where they promoted that for every pack of diapers sold by pampers they where going to fund tetanus vaccines for mothers-to-be in the developing countries. At the end of the campaigns they announced that the promotion had resulted in over 7 million vaccines. Translating that into money it is about CAD$ 0.04 for every package of diapers they sold atCAD$ 13.00. In the end they donated  about $330000 from sales over 95 million dollars. 1

I think donations have to be more direct, we don’t have to consume to help!

1 Pampers example extracted from the green marketing manifesto by John grant