Page 196 - 100 Great Marketing Ideas (100 Great Ideas)

94 LINK TO A CAUSE

Business—and especially marketing—often gets a bad press.
Marketing is often associated with manipulation, persuasion, and
separating people from their cash—whereas, of course, marketers
see themselves as providing products and services that people want
to buy.

Although marketers talk about putting the customers’ needs at the
center of everything they do, this does not mean that they are Mother
Teresa: customer centrality is simply the best way of getting people
to part with their money, in a world where they have unprecedented
choice. The trick is to get people to spend with us rather than with
someone else, while at the same time looking like decent, caring
people.

The idea

Cause-related marketing means linking a promotion to a good
cause. One of the best-known examples is Tesco’s Computers for
Schools promotion. This has run every year since 1992: for a period
of ten weeks, Tesco stores give a voucher to each customer for every
£10 spent in-store. The vouchers can be redeemed by local schools
against computer equipment—at the time of writing, over £100
million worth of computers had been supplied.

The promotion serves a number of functions. First, it attracts new
customers into Tesco: even if they only stay for the period of the
promotion, this represents a substantial chunk of business at a quiet
time of year. Second, it is good for community relations—because
people give the vouchers to their local school (usually of course their

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