From the course: Marketing for Social Change

What is cause marketing?

From the course: Marketing for Social Change

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What is cause marketing?

- Cause marketing, or sometimes called cause-related marketing, covers a wide variety of commercial activities that aligns a company or a brand with a good cause. The goal of cause marketing is to generate both business and social outcomes. Now, people sometimes confuse cause marketing with corporate social responsibility and corporate philanthropy. Let me explain the difference. Corporate social responsibility is when a company acts and behaves as you would expect your friends and neighbors to do. For example, the company practices recycling. It avoids polluting the environment. It's law-abiding. In other words, the company acts like any other good citizen in the community. I look at corporate social responsibility, or CSR for short, as a generalized form of cause marketing, because they both aim to do good in the world. For me, though, CSR is an expectation we should have for all companies. Now, corporate philanthropy is simply donating money to nonprofit organizations or other good causes. It's writing a check. Now, don't get me wrong. I think philanthropy is both important and very generous, but what it often lacks is a specific business objective. Like CSR, philanthropy is more of a feel-good approach to enhance the company's reputation. The difference between these two initiatives and cause marketing is all about that last word, marketing. As the famous marketing professor Dr. Philip Kotler puts it, "Social marketing is the use of marketing principles and techniques to influence a target audience to voluntarily accept, reject, modify, or abandon a behavior for the benefit of individuals, groups, or society as a whole." Think about it. Your marketing department is staffed with talented people who understand commercialization of your products and services. They understand strategy, segmentation, targeting. Well, you get the idea. It's a special collection of talent that can be leveraged to create great cause marketing outcomes, while at the same time enhancing your market position. What could be better than that? Now, there's no doubt that cause marketing, corporate social responsibility, and philanthropy are closely related. And the best companies practice a mix of all three. So take a look at your company's programs, CSR, philanthropic, and cause marketing. Make sure you understand which ones are which.

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