Cause Marketing to Men

Last Summer results starting coming out from the Dynamics of Cause Engagement study and among the headlines was that women are generally more responsive to cause marketing than men. Big surprise, right?

So are men AWOL from cause marketing? I asked the Center for Social Impact Communication (CSIC) at Georgetown University, which published ‘Dynamics,’ to parse out men’s responses on key issues.

Cause marketing targeted to men is a topic of some interest to cause marketers. Cause marketing is a form of sponsorship. Its biggest rival for sponsorship dollars comes from sports, which as a whole is about seven times larger than cause marketing. Men constitute the usual target market for sports. Men participate in sponsorship in a big way when it comes to sports. But cause marketers are still learning what attracts men.

I’ll list the question the CSIC asked first, followed by the top 5 answers from men, along with the best-finishing ‘cause marketing’ answer in bold. The answers are intriguing and in some cases suggest new entres into the psyches of men when it comes to cause marketing.

The CSIC study asked, “How men first get involved with a cause?”

•    Talking to others about it 39%
•    Donating money 38%
•    Learning more about the issue and its impact 35%
•    Signing a petition for the cause 25%
•    Donating personal items (clothes, points, hair, etc) 23%
•    Buying products/services from companies who support the cause 14%

The CSIC study demonstrates that men are as willing to practice checkbook philanthropy as they are to support a cause by doing.

This is confirmed specifically in the CSIC study’s second question: “How men most often get involved with causes.”

•    Donating money 41%
•    Talking to others about it 34%
•    Learning more about the issue and its impact 20%
•    Signing a petition for the cause 19%
•    Donating personal items (clothes, points, hair, etc.) 18%
•    Buying products/services from companies who support the cause 10%

Finally, “How Men Are Most Likely to Display their Support of Causes:”

•    Wear a cause ribbon pin 18%
•    Wear clothing or other attire displaying the cause logo 16%
•    Wear the color of the cause on a special day 15%
•    Put a cause bumper sticker on your car 15%
•    Use a reusable bag showing the cause logo 14%
•    Purchase specially designed products to support the cause 14%

In this last one the cause marketing approach is the sixth most common answer. In the prior questions there were other answers in between the fifth response and the highest-finishing ‘cause marketing’ response.

Because of the low percentage of the responses and the tightness of the grouping, there’s two self-evident  conclusions. Either men don’t often display their support of causes or the responses provided by the study didn’t capture the way men are likely to display their support. I suspect the former.

If cause marketers are serious about targeting men, they need a better understanding of what men are about when it comes to supporting causes.

Thanks to the data from the Dynamics of Cause Engagement study we have a much better idea than before.

Simple E-tail Cause Marketing

There’s a lot of fundraising going on at retail these days, oftentimes the easy to execute paper icon campaigns. But what’s an e-tailer do that’s painless for them to put together and quickly understand and appreciated by the customer?

A lot is at stake for cause marketers. E-tail in the United States alone amounts to $327 billion, according to Forrester, with the rest of the world coming in at more than twice that. Worldwide e-tail represents no less than a $770 billion business.

Newton Running, a Boulder, Colorado company that sells its own make of high-end running shoes in electric colors to marathoners and Ironman racers, takes a straightforward approach to its cause marketing.

As you check out, Newton asks you to add $1 to one or more of three causes; Athletes for a Cure, a prostate cancer charity, Trickle Up, a microenterprise charity, and One World Running, which provides shoes to the needy in Africa. See at left.

Between the three causes, Newton spends a grand total of 37 words, plus a logo for each. 

I know webmasters are loathe to do anything that might gum up their checkouts or increase checkout cart abandonment, but I’d suggest that they tell a little more. Like the direct mail folks say, ‘tell more, sell more.’

For instance a clickable video could explain how the founders came to support these three smallish causes and where their commitment comes from. They might speak about the good work they’ve seen done by them. And, if they’re also personal donors, they would certainly want to challenge customers to join them in their support.

This being the web a split A-B test to see what performs better for both the causes and the Newton would be simple to undertake. And if it... or some variation... doesn’t work, no big deal. They simply default back to the current approach.

Finally, Newton also sells through retailers. I couldn’t find any evidence that they do any cause marketing with their retail partners, but those kinds of campaigns are a good way for Newton to stand out from its competitors.

Hair of the Dog Cause Marketing

Texting or updating your Facebook status, posting to Twitter or even talking on the phones while driving hs at least as dangerous as drunk driving, according to research from Professor David Lee Strayer at University of Utah. So how do you get kids to disconnect while on behind the wheel?


An annual public awareness campaign from the National Organizations for Youth Safety is trying a hair of the dog remedy. Called Million Messages in May, the celebrity-studded campaign asks that teens send out a million driving safety messages during the month of May.


The press release says that just the celebrity portion of the campaign has already generated 5 million messages via social networks. So mission accomplished, right?


Well, kinda.

Across the globe, traffic accidents are the number one killer of teens. And social networking is a notable contributor to the carnage. Who among us hasn’t either texted while driving or turned to the next car over and seen that driver texting? A number of state and local laws specifically outlaw texting while driving.

So using social networks...that is, the hair of the dog... to get the word out is like using the packaging on food products to promote hunger relief.

Trouble is, while texting or Tweeting an update are many times more distracting to drivers than just talking on a mobile device, Professor Strayer’s research clearly shows that just talking… whether hands-free or not… is as dangerous as drunk driving.

The message from NOYS has to be put your phone away while driving.

Money Can't Buy Love. But It Can Buy Happiness!

Can money buy happiness? As a matter of fact, it can. But not in the way you might think.

Professor Michael Norton at the Harvard Business School did a series of fun experiments that found that if you spend money right, it can indeed lead to happiness. To come right to the point to be happy spending money, you can’t spend it on yourself.

But let’s back up and explain how Norton and his colleagues Elizabeth Dunn and Lara Atkin at the University of British Columbia figured this out.

They asked students at the University of British Columbia if they wanted to be in a study. If they said yes they tested their baseline happiness and gave them an envelope with cash in it. Some were instructed to spend the money on themselves by 5pm that day. Others got instructions to spend it on others by 5pm that day. Some got $5, some got $20.

They called the students that night and found that they had spent the money the way they were asked. They also asked what the students had spent the money on and again asked them about their state of happiness.

What did they spend it on? The ‘personal’ spenders spent it on earrings, makeup, and coffee.

“If you give undergraduates $5 it looks like coffee to them,” Norton says, “and they run over to Starbucks and spend it as fast as they can.”

 That held true also for the ‘pro-social’ spenders who bought gifts for friends, gave money to the homeless and bought friends coffee at Starbucks!

Norton and colleagues found that people who spent their money on others got happier and people who spent the money on themselves were unchanged; neither happier nor unhappier. The amount of money also had no bearing on the happiness quotient of those being studied.

Norton and colleagues then replicated the experiment in Uganda. After all, maybe these findings were valid only for relatively affluent Canadian college students.

Although how the money was spent by each group varied by country, that didn’t matter so much to the results as that you spent it one someone else rather than yourself. The results from Canada, in other words, proved to be pretty much universal.

They then piggy-backed on Gallup Polls taking place across the globe, asking people if they had given recently to a cause and, if so, how happy they were as a result. Almost everywhere around the world giving and happiness were positively correlated. In fact, Gallup found only one country were there was no correlation between charitable giving and happiness; the Central African Republic.

Norton also replicated the Canadian study with drug salespeople in Belgium. Some were asked to spend the money on themselves, some on their teammembers. This time they found that the ‘prosocial’ teams sold more stuff than the ‘personal’ spenders. The return on the 15 Euros was 78 Euros. Astonishing!

Then is a sublime twist, they repeated the experiment with dodgeball teams. I kid you not. The teams that spent money on themselves maintained their existing winning percentages, but the teams that spent it on their teammates became dominant in their leagues.

I suspect that part of the reason that cause marketing works is because it can make people happy. Cause marketers therefore, would be smart to personalize how their cause is benefited by a campaign.

Don’t make it about buying a much-needed new van for the food bank. Make it about buying a van so you can improve services to specific people.

Give people a compelling reason to participate in your cause marketing campaign and when they do you might make them happier!

Global Cause Marketing

Edelman’s 2012 Global GoodPurpose study is out and it finds a world increasingly responsive to cause marketing and expectant of the virtues that come from the practice.

GoodPurpose surveyed public opinion of 8,000 people in 16 countries: Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Netherlands, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, & the United States.

Across the 16 countries 76 percent believe that it’s OK for brands to support good causes and make a profit at the same time, an increase of 33 percent since 2008, when the first GoodPurpose survey asked the same question.

Likewise, across the globe 53 percent said when quality and price are equal social purpose is the most important factor in selecting a brand, up 26 percent since 2008.

Seventy-two percent are more likely a brand that supports a good cause compared to those that don’t, 71 percent say they’re more likely to promote such a brand and 73 percent are more likely to switch to a brand that supports a cause. Those percentages are up 39 percent, 34 percent and 9 percent respectively over the corresponding figures in 2008.

I’m always interested in the numbers of people who will pay a premium for brands that support a cause and 44 percent say they’ll do that.

In the summary I saw, Edelman didn’t break out many of the results by country. That’s probably reserved for paying customers.

But Edelman did reveal that it is the Rapid Growth Economies (RGE) of Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and United Arab Emirates that are the most responsive to brands that cause market. Edelman refers to the RGEs as ‘bull markets’ when it comes to brands that support causes.

For instance, 83 percent of people in the purpose bull market countries say they have more trust in brands that are ethically responsible versus 66 percent in all the rest of the countries, or what Edelman terms as purpose ‘bear markets.’ Edelman doesn’t venture an opinion on why this is so other than to suggest that growth in purpose is mirroring economic growth.

Writes Carol Cone in the introduction, “Purpose has assuredly claimed its spot as the 5th P in marketing and, increasingly, as a business imperative.” When Carol ran her eponymous agency, that was true basically only of the Commonwealth countries… UK. Canada and Australia… and the United States. What an amazing transition that it can now be said to be true for the rest of the globe.