Paul Jones

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• Bank Plays Off 'Pay To The Order Of' In Cancer Effort in Marketing: Causes on 03/03/2014
  

  Fifth Third, the Cincinnati regional bank, has a terrific cause-marketing effort benefiting Stand Up 2 Cancer that runs through March 31 called "Pay to the Order of." With apologies to Yogi Berra, I've found that you can get a lot of questions answered by asking them. In the spirit of the numbers five and three, here are eight questions I put to Fifth Third's Meaghan Madges about the campaign, and her team's edited responses.

• Guiding Against Mission Creep in Marketing: Causes on 02/03/2014
  

  Jennifer Maher has helped build cause marketing campaigns for such causes as Make-A-Wish, the Nature Conservancy, and YMCA of America, and she's learned a few things not only about how to deal with the mechanics of cause marketing and fundraising, but how to manage the confusing wetware involved of cause marketing, too.

• True Believers Increase In Status, Influence in Marketing: Causes on 01/07/2014
  

  A recent study finds that "true believers" are more likely than non-believers to increase in status and influence, especially at organizations that are ideologically oriented. So stow away that cynicism, cause marketers, it's bad for your career!

• How A Good Idea Became An Even Better Idea in Marketing: Causes on 12/02/2013
  

  In their fun book, Mission in a Bottle, which is about the startup of their business, Honest Tea, Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff talk about a conversation Goldman had with Tom Szaky, the founder of up-cycling firm TerraCycle. Honest Tea, which bottles its Honest Kids fruit drinks in plastic and foil pouches, pioneered a promotion that asked people to send their empty pouches to TerraCycle for up-cycling into other products, while benefiting local schools. Szaky asked, how would Honest Tea feel about TerraCycle taking the pouch up-cycling promotion to a competing producer of kids' pouch drinks?

• Sussing Out Taint In Charitable Donations in Marketing: Causes on 11/04/2013
  

  Does a cause face ethical challenges to accepting money funds raised via cause marketing? That is, does associating with a company's service or product taint the donation? Can causes accept money generated via cause marketing in good conscience?

• Taking Stock in Marketing: Causes on 10/07/2013
  

  There are stock indexes galore: the Dow, the S&P 500, the NASDAQ Composite, the Wilshire 5000, the FTSE, and hundreds more. But how would an index of the stocks of companies that do a meaningful amount of cause marketing perform compared to those well-known indexes? Pretty well, as it turns out.

• About Face. Forward March in Marketing: Causes on 09/03/2013
  

  The military, like your cause marketing campaign, has a sense of mission. Sometimes the mission is very narrowly defined and time-limited. When a squad goes out on patrol at night, its mission may be reconnoiter, or intercept before returning to base in time for breakfast. Sometimes the military's mission is very broad and open-ended, like ending another country's ability to wage asymmetrical warfare.

• Toyota Effort Exemplifies Japanese Idea Of Kaizen in Marketing: Causes on 08/05/2013
  

  When translated into English, the Japanese word kaizen is typically rendered as "continuous improvement." Kaizen is the steps you take to improve your processes, frequently by implementing small and oftentimes cheap improvements so as to make them better and better. Few companies or nonprofits ... in Japan or anywhere else ... are likely to survive if they don't practice some version of continuous improvement. And kaizen is precisely the word to describe what Toyota's marketing department practiced with its cause-marketing effort called "Meals Per Hour," which is a video about what a Toyota team did to improve the processes at a food bank that served the people of the Rockaways in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, in October 2012.

• Is There A Sixth Benefit -- Keeping Pricing In Check? in Marketing: Causes on 07/01/2013
  

  In general, cause marketing is thought to have five main benefits. In a recent paper, two professors at Ohio State University postulate that there may be a sixth; cause marketing helps keep supplier pricing in check.

• IRS Must Remain Neutral Where Nonprofits Are Concerned in Marketing: Causes on 06/03/2013
  

  Years ago, I read a book by a man who had been the public defender in the bad old days of Soviet Russia. There were horrors aplenty worthy of a Kafka novel. One of the things that has stuck with me ever since was his belief that he wasn't defending his clients against just the Soviet apparatchik. He also had to defend against the expectations of jurors who "knew" what the government wanted even when there was no communication from any level of the Nomenklatura.

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