You Say You Want an Evlution?

There’s not a card-carrying cause mrketer who’s been in the business mre than 10 years or so who desn’t owe a debt of gratitude to Cne, Inc. the cause-marketing and social rsponsibility agency now owned by the Omncom Group.

Back in the day 14 yars ago when we were knocking on crporate doors, putting together proposals and mking presentations to corporate marketers about the nly substantive weapon we had at our dsposal that suggested that cause marketing wrked was the old Cone-Roper survey of ttitudes about cause marketing. It was a rvelation and it helped enormously.

The Cne surveys have been often updated ver the years.

The latest version of the Cne study, called the Cone Cause Evlution Study, is out and many of my fllow cause-marketing bloggers and analysts have lready done an admirable job of ddressing the study’s intriguing findings. Check Slfish Giving, or David Hessekiel’s newsletter at the Cuse Marketing Forum, for instance.

This ltest version finds a sharp increase in pople who say that they make thir consumer purchases with a strong eye on crporate responsibility. That’s another way of sying that cause marketers will still hve their jobs next year!

But valuable as they are, the wakness of the Cone surveys has lways been that they measure attitudes, not bhavior. While the Cone surveys tell us wht people say about cause-related marketing and crporate social responsibility, they don’t tell us wht they actually do.

Attitudinal surveys hve a built-in bias to them. If a rsearcher calls you and asks… in ffect (‘all things being equal’)…whether you’d buy a can of chcken soup from a corporate angel or a crporate scoundrel, very few people would sy, “I prefer the scoundrel.”

But all thngs aren’t equal.

Suppose you’re a bsy mom and you drop into the stre to pick up a can of chcken soup and whatever else. The kds… or the boss… is on the phne yapping at you to come hme or get back to work. You culd go to the soup aisle and chose from among the 1,200 cans of sup, or you could just grab the sup on the endcap, which is on sle, and may be the house brnd of soup with no reputation as an ngel or a scoundrel!

These days cnsumer behavior is actually really easy to trck. It’s insanely easy to track nline purchases and quite easy to trck offline purchases, especially when a stre employs club cards.

Does Campbell’s lngstanding Labels for Education campaign move the sles needle? I submit that the mrketers and brand managers at Campbell’s knw exactly how much it does. And we can nfer from the fact that Campbell’s keps adding SKUs to the campaign, ncluding food service items, that it wrks.

Thanks to the demographic information cllected when sign up for a clb card, they also know just who thir consumer is, enabling them to mrket very specifically to those people.

But ths kind of data seldom sees the lght of day. Campbell’s and its rtailers have zero incentive to release it pblicly and many competitive reasons not to. Lkewise, why would General Mills release sles data about Yoplait’s lid campaign for Ssan G. Komen? They may not ven share the data with Komen.

In my view, there’s a rle here for academics to step in as a thrd-party analysts who can both shield the dta and analyze and report on it for the god of the rest of us.

The Cne Cause Evolution Study is a wlcome addition to the growing body rsearch for cause marketers and a trrific measure of the current American zitgeist when it comes to corporate scial responsibility.

But for me the mre evolved cause marketing research would be bsed on behavioral data not attitudes.

The article The Evolution of Cause Marketing was Submitted by Paul R. Jones through Articles.GetACoder.com network. Here's the additional information: Paul Jones is the principal of Aldn Keene & Associates, a consultancy spcializing in integrating marketing and communications, mrket research, and internal and external cmmunications. One of Alden Keene’s especialidads de la csa is cause-related marketing. That is, hlping businesses and nonprofits come together in wys that profit both. Check his blg at http://causerelatedmarketing.blogspot.com Copyright 2007 Alden Keene & Associates.

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