Have you ever seen a company commercial with a monologue like this: “This week we’re offering members of our loyalty program a $50 gift card if you make a $25 donation to Feeding America!”
This familiar sound is what’s called cause-related marketing. It’s where a charitable cause is linked to a purchase. Such marketing has grown from a $120 million industry in 1990 to $2 billion today. It’s so ubiquitous we often participate without thinking twice. But have you ever wondered how that $25 donation was distributed? What problems did it actually help solve? What long-term change did it create?
Consumers are being treated like charity-givers. The opportunity is to make them feel part of a life-changing story. It’s time for some innovation in cause-related marketing. We need to move to what I call ‘good’ cause-related marketing.
The Cause-Washing Risk
There is a fine line between cause-related marketing and what informally is known as ‘cause-washing.’ Similar to green-washing, this is when feel-good promises are made by companies without evidence of the impact.
Why don’t we ever get a Tweet back, saying ‘Hey, remember that $25 donation you made? Well it helped feed this family in Troy, Alabama for six months. They were finally able to save enough to rent a home through some financial relief.’ That would be innovative.
The reason why most cause-related marketing can’t provide timely, accurate information on impact is because they don’t know. Throughout 2016, Corporate Citizenship has been having conversations with hundreds of companies and non-profits about measuring long-term change. We call it Impact for Change. The results? Well, most people admit it’s an area they are still struggling to get to grips with.
The Innovation Opportunity
The difference between cause-related marketing and good cause-related marketing is that good cause-related marketing will not only measure the impacts from the campaign, they will report it. This might sound something like this: “We impacted X communities by raising X amount of dollars and X number of people benefited in X way.” This could be reported in a press release, an advertisement, a commercial, on the company website, through social media, or published in the company’s corporate responsibility/sustainability report.
Besides protecting the company’s reputation, relaying the results of your consumer’s good-deeds can solidify relationships. Authenticity is a big buzzword in marketing today. Good cause-related marketing is transparent, and won’t leave consumers wondering: ‘What happened to that $25 donation?’ It can engage consumers beyond purchases, giving them an opportunity to be a part of the company’s cause story, instead of just a mystified charity-giver.
Corporate Citizenship manages LBG – the global standard for measuring corporate community investment. To find out more about how you can use the LBG framework to effectively measure your corporate community investment and its impact, as done by 220 companies around the globe, visit the LBG website.