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Jim Calhoun is the CEO/Founder of Popular Media and a Silicon Valley veteran. Before founding PopularMedia, Jim was a co-founder of CustomerClick LLC, a multi-million dollar direct marketing firm whose clients include Yahoo!, UnitedHealthGroup, and ABC Television. Previously, Jim served as Vice President of Products at NetObjects, Inc. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

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Teaching Values in Viral: How To Instill Cause-Related Marketing in the Viral Space

Written on
October 10th 2006
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by Jim Calhoun  |
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Conspicuous consumption is over, and “ethical consumerism” is shaping up as a major force in the marketing industry. People of all types are choosing products and brands that support their values. This means social responsibility is more important to a company’s success than ever — and that goes double in the viral space.

Shopping for a Cause
Let’s look at American Express RED. Instead of cash back or other rewards, a percentage of every purchase made with the credit card goes to The Global Fund, which fights AIDS in Africa. With the help of Product RED co-founder Bono, the card quickly became one of the hottest consumer accessories of the year in the UK, where it was launched earlier this year.

This isn’t charity on the part of American Express — offering the card makes good business sense. The primary driver is the donation — which costs the company no more than the rewards or cash back offered by competitive cards. And while typical card reward offers differ mostly in terms of cash-back percentages, the RED card enjoys a unique (not to mention celebrity-studded) position in the market.

Why has the American Express RED card launch been so successful? Because it creates a perfect alignment between what consumers want and what American Express wants. It pairs shopping — often a guilty pleasure — with support for a good cause: a guilt-relieving behavior. The eye-catching red design gives cardholders recognition for their generosity every time they open their wallets. The combination gives consumers a feel-good rush every time they use the card, giving American Express® RED an edge over the other cards in that Louis Vuitton wallet.

The Rules
The basic guidelines that make American Express® RED a success hold true for anyone looking to do cause-related marketing in the viral space. First, drive conversion rates by making it emotionally rewarding for people to follow your call-to-action, whether that means making a purchase, signing up for a service, or some other marketing goal you might have. Second, drive virality by making it easy and socially rewarding for people to share your cause-related offer with their social circle — particularly those folks they’d like to impress, or whose acceptance is valued.

Define Your Call-to-Action
First, consider your call-to-action. What do you need consumers to do? What positive feelings and other rewards do they get from interacting with your brand or offer? What negative feelings and other obstacles prevent them from taking you up on your value proposition? Now, how can you tie your marketing objective to a cause-related action in order to alleviate the negative and emphasize the positive?

Cause-related marketing is most effective with “guilty pleasures” like chocolates, designer shoes, and spa weekends — cases where the pleasure of consumption is offset by a nagging sense of consumer guilt. Bundling the purchase with an altruistic behavior, like a donation to a good cause, alleviates guilt and legitimizes the purchase. (In fact, both guilt and pleasure tend to make people more altruistic, at least in the short term.) At the same time, the feeling of doing something good for other people creates a warm glow of self-satisfaction that makes ethical consumption more pleasurable than its conventional counterpart.



Reader Comments.

It is exceedingly difficult to stomach an item like this one that explains some of the thinking behind “ethical consumerism”.

This, by the way, isn’t a criticism of Mr.Calhoun, who seems to have inadvertently exposed the idea of “cause related marketing” for what it actually is, which is corrupt.

I won’t quibble with the idea that social responsibility, the latter which I understand to mean an “ethic” in and of itself that transcends and subordinates the self-centered business imperatives of the bottom line to that of the “common good”.

But, “teaching values in viral…”? Let’s have a look at what’s going on here with delusional language such as this.

First off, let’s not confuse “values” with “attitudes”. The only “attitude” made explicit in marketing is the ideology of the empire of business, which in itself is neither here nor there.

Let’s simply refuse to confuse attitudes with values, since the two of them are intractably opposed.

To be fair to Mr. Calhoun, “shopping for a cause”, as he rightly points out, “isn’t charity”. To be sure! It’s the opposite of charity.

And, double talking nonsense such as the notion that “ethical consumerism” somehow amounts to alleviating acquisitive “guilt” by trying to link it with support for a good cause — is a downright silly attitude, even from the standpoint of marketing.

“Driving virality by making it easy and socially rewarding for people to share [one’s] cause-related offer with their social circle”? Hello? What planet are we on?

Public and private interest accommodations, whether the interest is publicly self serving, which is always the case in business per se; or privately self-serving, as in “feel good” charity of the kind that makes us feel better at Christmas by throwing a buck at a bum on main street, simply does not amount to the common good.

And “values”, writ large in the sense of religious, political and personal views about “what’s important” and “what matters” can never be reduced to cynical and self-serving “attitudes” such as that which, in the name of marketing, attempts to extract surplus value even from the core of the very things such as religion and politics that actually define the common good.

Corporate social responsibility stripped down to its bones, simply means that in exchange for profits derived, those who have profited “give back” to the societies that support them, in a way that most of us would likely agree amounts to the common good.

However, this business about trying to somehow invest cause related marketing with anything other than what it actually is, meaning “cynical marketing”, is useless not only in principle, but also in practice.

The reason for this is that anyone with even an ounce of common sense will quickly see through the likes of American Express and the others who would, for example, “jump on the breast cancer bandwagon”. Is that what marketing has finally become?

If such is the “attitude” toward so-called “viral marketing” in American Express, then I am sure that it and the others if its ilk, will quickly experience the kind of consumer backlash that Mr. Calhoun refers to.

Which is to say their delusional viral marketing strategies will quickly be given the boot by the public.

So much for “cause related marketing” in the viral space.

Posted by Derick Harrris | 4:35 pm on October 10, 2006.

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