"Cause" marketing is hot, but beware the flame…

In response to Cathy Harris, Denver Marketing Examiner, for her new blog post:

Columbine: How Tragedy Can Change Marketing

Can/Should you market your brand on the back of a hurting community?

In the days just after September 11, 2001… I was, like most of us, awash with the intense mix of feelings that come of our efforts to sort out how we respond to tragedy. But I also had to go to work, and write marketing copy. At the time, I worked for a catalog-based company in Pennsylvania.

From our own staff, a local volunteer firefighter got the call to go to Ground Zero with his team. Suddenly, the rest of us in that office felt a much stronger, more tangible (and, frankly emotional) connection with the events and people at the center of the World Trade Center rubble. As we worked to get a new catalog off to the printer, our company’s owner suggested that I write a “human interest” story on our connection with the response teams.

For a few seconds, we all quickly agreed it was a great idea. Then… we shuddered to imagine what backlash might be ours if customers took the piece as “glory-riding,” or whatever ugly name we call it when such a connection gets turned into nothing more than a sales gimmick. As a team, we were already “talking each other through” what was on our minds and hearts, so I agreed to write a draft and put it to the group for a gut-check.

In the end, we chose to run this story.
(right side of spread)

We already had a regular “employee bio” piece in each catalog, so it came as no surprise to readers. We also “practiced what we preached,” and created an audiotape message relevant to the issues our customers were certain to face in the aftermath of the events. We offered the tape for free, made it copyright free so anyone could reproduce more, and shipped several thousand copies.

Our next “marketing” strategy: do nothing more.

Rather than risk “going too far,” or simply being seen as–or accused of–doing so, we got back to our own daily lives. To be sure, there were some follow-up touches; many customers wrote and called to thank us for the story about our hometown firefighter (and shared their own), and told stories of how the taped message had made some significant impact in lives around the world for some time. I can’t recall now, but I think we did create a web page to host all that response for a while afterward.

At the time, I assumed our “good luck” with that outreach had everything to do with the fact that our customer base and target prospects were faith-based organizations. But since then I’ve learned that my role as a marketer, in the lives of my customers, can be very touching for all involved, so long as my heart is in the right place.

I guess I’m just saying this: if you do choose to reach out, as a company, to a community in serious need…

Be real, and relevant. Be caring, and careful.

I now live in the Denver, Colorado area. I’ve got family all over the Littleton suburb of this city, some of them just blocks from Columbine high school. Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the massive shootings there.

As I watched a number of moving ceremonial events, my own mind raced back eight years to 2001. I was thinking of the attacks, and the lives lost, not the ROI or brand value gained from that story I wrote. But today–quite unexpectedly–I ran across a good blog post that helped me sort this out again…

Thanks to Cathy Harris, Denver Marketing Examiner, for her article:

Columbine: How Tragedy Can Change Marketing