Made in America Cause Marketing

Liberty Bottleworks fabricates rugged water bottles in brand-new factory in Yakima, Washington of recycled aluminum and using America-made machinery. Liberty is the only company making metal water bottles in America today.

While that sinks in a little consider that Liberty also has a strong cause marketing component with its partner Big City Mountaineers (BCM), a Denver nonprofit that gives urban kids a wilderness experience that often proves to be life-changing.

The night before my interview with Alex Strickland of Liberty at the 2012 Outdoor Retailer trade show in Salt Lake City the company hosted a beer bash that raised $2000 for BCM.

During the Summer Outdoor Retailer show in August 2011, Liberty released a bottle designed by Yakima graffiti artist Bernardo Boeragor and sold in stores to benefit BCM. This year Boeragor produced the bottle that Alex shows in the video and which also carries BCM’s logo.

Liberty pledges to do a new benefit bottle for BCM every year.

The company also produces a series of bottles with topographic maps on the bottle. For each topo bottle sold, Liberty gives 1% of the profits to the Conservation Alliance.

Art and design is a big part of the appeal of the Liberty bottles. And because the company has a proprietary printing process that allows it print directly on the bottle, they can do designs no one else can. Boeragor's BCM bottle, for instance, has a cool raised texture that’s eye-catching and impossible not to touch.

Smart design. Cool art. A strong desire to help causes and Made in America of recycled materials. Liberty Bottleworks gets it.

Marketing Automation Roundtable

I participated in a great round table discussion at the Mass Technology Leadership Council this morning. The group discussion touched on a wide range of issues related to deploying marketing automation systems. Some of the key success factors are summarized below by stage:

Planning

Executive buy-in and expectation management: To be successful, marketing automation projects require integration with other enterprise systems and repositories. Getting top level support for cross departmental cooperation is critical to long term success. However, project leaders must also be very concerned about executive expectations in terms of how quickly they will see measurable improvements in revenue. This is a function of your sales cycle and executives must have a clear vision of the time it will take to get hard numbers to report on.

Data management: MA systems are only as good as the fuel you put in them. Data quality measured by consistency, accuracy, and freshness will determine the fate of your MA project. Typical challenges include: de-duping contacts and accounts, harmonizing account hierarchies (who owns whom), enterprise standards for customer data, ongoing resources for data governance.

Cross departmental support: In the long run, MA systems, unlike other enterprise systems such as CRM, billing, support, etc. are wholly dependent on how well they are integrated with other systems. Specifically, the extent and efficiency of the closed loop reporting process from response to revenue. This requires cross functional support in terms of:

Data standards

SLAs between groups regarding issues such as:

Definitions for lead advancement

Engagement commitments (how long and how many touches to accept, reject, claw back, etc.)

Transparency and visibility of customer touch points from marketing to sales, finance, service, and support.

Scoping and Roadmap: Defining your marketing automation project vis-à-vis business objectives is critical for success. The project leader, business users, executives, as well as your implementation partner and vendor all need to have a very clear vision of where you will start and how you will build over time. At each stage of the roadmap It is important to scope, define, and communicate:

What processes are being automated

What metrics will be used to measure the success of the project and the performance of the system

What resources are necessary to implement, support and use the system

What output is expected from the system

Staffing and skills: MA systems require new skill sets and approaches to marketing. Technical skills with MA tools and analytics, as well as good process mapping are in high demand. They are difficult to hire, and once trained will raise the market value of your staff so be prepared.

Deployment

Campaign workflows: The key is not to get too far into the weeds in terms of nurturing workflow models. MA tools are capable of designing incredibly complex routing - marketers should err on the side of simplicity when getting started and build based on business drivers not just technical capabilities.

Integration: System level integration with the CRM is a must out of the gate. If not available from the start, integration with other systems should be planned on the roadmap for the MA implementation.

Training: MA requires new skills in terms of campaign design, execution, and analytics. This is a lot to ramp up on for the novice MA user. Training programs should be designed specifically for each type of user as they will have very different use cases with respect to system functionality.

Post Implementation

Measurement and reporting: This remains a commonly cited weakness of most MA implementations. All leading providers have decent reporting capabilities built into their solutions. But it can be confusing about what to report to whom. This gets more complicated the higher you go on the marketing org chart. The needs of a campaign managers can be met with data that is germane to the system , but marketing executives need a perspective that goes beyond the marketing department. They need metrics that show influence on the sales pipeline, into deal size and velocity, and customer lifetime value. Marketing has a key role to play in all stages of the customer experience.

Social/inbound marketing activity is another common point of disaggregation. IDC expects that to see new tools to better assimilate unstructured social data into the formal lead management process so that, at least retroactively, marketers can measure the outcomes related to social engagement.

Overall, the marketing automation landscape continues to be highly fragmented with new media, channels, and tools cropping up daily. While there has been some consolidation over the past three years, IDC expects to see much greater M&A activity over the next three as major tech players look to build infrastructure offerings that integrate all customer facing functions.

Nike Vet Keeps Bike Inner Tubes Out of the Landfill and Benefits the Humane Society

Paul Fidrych left a promising career at Nike to start a business with his wife that takes old bike inner tubes and upcycles them into useful things like dog collars, chew toys and water dishes. All while benefiting the Humane Society chapter in Portland. The company is cleverly named Cycle Dog.

To me that business model sounded like the much-heralded company TerraCycle, which upcycles juice pouches, for instance, into brightly-colored messenger bags.

When I suggested that analogy, Paul politely told me that Cycle Dog positions itself as the leading US recycled pet supply company. Cycle Dog is laser-focused on the pet market.

Listen now to this interview with Paul at the 2012 Outdoor Retailer Show in Salt Lake City as he talks about Cycle Dog's products, how they keep inner tubes out of the landfill, how they benefit the Humane Society, and how to crack open a cold one with man’s best friend.

Teva’s BOGO Cause Marketing Returns Company's Philanthropy to its Watery Origins

Teva, the footwear company, started out making sandals for Colorado River Guides. And at its founding in 1984, Teva supported the nonprofit Save the Colorado, as it still does today. But as the company grew the footprint of its corporate philanthropy got ever-wider and more diffuse.

No one likes to say to worthy causes with compelling stories, after all.

But in this exclusive interview on the topic with the cause marketing blog, Jaime Eschette, the company’s long-time public relations manager told me that with the company’s current cause marketing effort… called A Pair for a Foot… the company returns to its watery heritage.

With every pair of Teva’s purchased in 2011 and 2012, the company and its partners will protect a linear foot of river, lake and ocean waterways, with a goal of protecting 4.3 million linear feet of water. It's a Buy One, Give One (BOGO) with a twist.

The effort includes employees, retailers, and volunteers as well as cash donations to the partner causes. The key partners are the Waterkeeper Alliance, Ocean Conservancy and Save the Colorado. Other capable charities will also participate.

Watch now to learn how Teva refined its corporate philanthropy efforts by interacting directly with its customers.

Cause Marketing Your Athletic Performance

In the 1926 World Series Babe Ruth heard about 11-year-old Johnny Sylvester, a New York boy who had been hurt in an accident and was in the hospital desperately ill. The Babe rushed to the hospital to visit Sylvester and promised to hit a home run on his behalf. The next day the Sultan of Swat hit not one but three home runs for the youngster. Sylvester rallied, went to Princeton, served in World War II, had a successful business career, and died in 1990 at the age of 74, a lifelong Yankee fan.

(That's Johnny and the Babe at the left).

Good causes, it seems to the founders of New York City-based company Charity Bets, can be a terrific performance enhancers.

Now Charity Bets is betting that people are willing to wager their athleticism against their friends' scepticism!

Here’s how it works: You set a performance goal for a race event; triathlon, marathon, bike race, 10K, etc. Then you solicit pledges from your network of friends that you’re willing to bet them that you’ll hit some performance measure; finish in the top three, say.

Charity Bets calls that a progressive donation.

After you certify the results, Charity Bets duns the people who made a pledge and pays the charity. They currently work with more than 50 charities.

Charity Bets also takes over/under donations, and rep-based donations. A rep-based donation is based on the number of reps you do; say bench presses. An over/under donation pays more if you achieve some high mark. For instance, an over/under donation might generate $100 if you break the 3-hour mark in a marathon but only $5 if you run it in more than 3 hours.

In a sense, this is a more democratized version of one those promotions your local pro sports team does whereby a local sponsor offers $50 to the children’s hospital for every three-pointer hit during the season. Or $100 to the Ronald McDonald House for every touchdown scored during a game after the first 30 points.

Except that it’s hard to imagine that when Tom Brady is slinging touchdown passes that he cares whether or not the local State Farm Insurance agents group has to pony up a few hundred extra bucks to the Jimmy Fund.

But if you’re running along in a marathon and you hit the wall, the knowledge that if you can beat your performance goal that your buddies will have to pay a steeper price to your favorite charity might just be enough to help you power through.

Performance incentives really do work.

Tom Brady almost certainly has performance incentives of his own: games won; number of touchdown passes versus interceptions; fourth-quarter comebacks; number of times he and his wife model Gisele Bundchen show up in GQ magazine; etc.

One thing glaringly missing from Charity Bets is an easy way to contact and solicit your network. You could cobble together something with Crowdrise, the focus of yesterday’s post.

But Charity Bets’ business model would be greatly enhanced by the addition of social networking platform.