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Office Depot's Back to School Cause Marketing

August 27, 2013 Add Comment Edit

For a second year in a row Office Depot is successfully using cause marketing to increase its profile. It would appear that the efforts are paying off as sales from this year's campaign are already out-performing last year's effort. Office Depot has been a business leader through its anti-bullying effort. Last year Office depot's We Supply Kindness' campaign partnered with Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation and provided a one million dollar donation. This year Office Deport continued its anti-bullying campaign and partnered with the boy band One Direction offering another million dollars for anti-bullying education in schools.

According to David Hessekiel, President of Cause Marketing Forum, here are three lessons to be learned from Office Depot:

Lesson #1: Link Core Products

Last year's effort showcased limited-edition, specially branded products such as sticky notes and Sharpies. This year's campaign goes back to basics with over 10 items that are primarily back-to-school essentials such as notebooks and page dividers (each band member has their own branded line resulting in over 50 SKUs total). According to Skolfield, product sales are "much better" than last year's cause products and more importantly, customers are increasingly adding other items to their carts when purchasing One Direction-branded products.

Lesson #2: Go Where Your Customers Live

Engaging with a socially-prolific and well-followed celebrity entity turned out to be a smart move for Office Depot in 2012. Venturing back into the social media universe where students orbit around celebrities was a must-do for Office Depot again this year. "The social media component has been enormous," Skolfield shares. According to Mashable, One Direction's combined 75 million twitter followers helped an Office Depot-promoted tweet to generate more site referrals during the campaign than the amount of referrals Office Depot saw in the entirety of 2012. Additionally, Office Depot Facebook fans have grown more than 67,000 - a 19% increase.

Lesson #3: Celebrity is to Cause as Teen is to Mom

The cause+celebrity combo works well in a back-to-school market where teens and tweens are focused on cool products and mom's paying the bill. Controlling the narrative by focusing on an empowering, positive message reinforced by authentic celebrity spokespeople is a win-win for teens and parents and aligns well with the Office Depot's desired brand positioning.

For other examples of back-to-school cause marketing go to 2013 Cause Marketing Campaigns on Pinterest.

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Event - Sustainable Brands London Conference

August 11, 2013 Add Comment Edit

Sustainable Brands London Conference on November 18 and 19, 2013, at the Lancaster London, Lancaster Terrace, in London, UK. This event continues the sustainable brand community’s global conversation about the collective journey From Revolution to Renaissance in brand building for an abundant future.

At this event participants can explore quickly-evolving opportunities and challenges in creating, measuring and communicating brand value, customer trust and reputation; new forms of creating shared value within your supply chain; imaginative social innovation in response to economic gloom and high unemployment, brand led positive behavior change; and new bold visions of restorative, 'net positive' business models with profit, as well as environmental and social benefits baked in by design.

They will also be looking at emerging impact investing trends and strategies, and the impacts of EU legislation on tomorrow's brand marketing landscape. And to top it all off, we will gaze at the developing landscape of ROI models you can use to translate these new forms of value to your CMO, CFO, CEO and the rest of the C-Suite.

To register click here. sustainable, environment, economy, business, corporate, corporation, company, companies, commerce, trade, industry, approach, climate change, global warming, green, forecasts, trends,

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Canadian Taxpayers Money to Promote Fossil Fuels

August 07, 2013 Add Comment Edit

The Harper government has launched a $16.5 million PR campaign to promote Canadian fossil fuels but refuses to provide details about how it is spending taxpayers money. What is known is that the campaign will sell the "benefits" of the tar sands, oil, gas, pipelines as well as other Canadian natural resources.

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver would not answer questions from opposition MPs who pressed the minister for details.

Oliver is providing a training program to instruct his department’s scientists and other officials as to what they can and can't say to the press and the public. As explained by Oliver, it is “designed to help them communicate with the public.” The propaganda program will cost Canadian taxpayers half a million dollars.

Oliver said a key part of the latest advertising was aimed at promoting the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. No doubt Oliver and his cohorts in the Conservative party see the writing on the wall as US President Obama and the US Department have made a number of comments of late that are not favorable to Canadian oil interests and the Keystone XL in particular.

This PR campaign has not been well received by Canadian opposition parties the NDP and the Liberals. NDP natural resources critic Peter Julian said that the new spending represents a 7,000 per cent increase in advertising budgets at Natural Resources Canada since 2010.

Julian called the campaign “political advertising,” and decried spending taxpayer dollars on training scientists to be mouthpieces for the government, particularly in light of the Conservative's efforts to silence its scientists from speaking publicly about their research.

Liberal MP Marc Garneau criticized the ruling Conservatives for providing information to sell the pipeline without doing proper oil impact assessments. Rather than fact based science the government is engaged in pro-oil propaganda. “This is irresponsible,” said Garneau. “First you do your science.”

© 2013, Richard Matthews. All rights reserved.

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Video - Green and Sustainable PR Best Practices

June 20, 2013 Add Comment Edit