Zen and the art of cause-related marketing - Panel Discussion

Chief Executive, The, Oct, 1998 by J.P. Donlon

We don't look at it as being about money. We put more emphasis on people getting involved with the management of the philanthropic society, because we believe our people can deliver much more than the dollar can deliver.

Donlon: So where's the marketing in this?

Vandewalle: That all comes through in your value statements, and in theirs. It comes through when you create programs where you're there as a company and your values come through in your corporate name and your corporate image.

Donlon: Does this nonprofit have the same audience you have?

Vandewalle: They might or they might not. They may have the same audience if it's the community that your firm is established in. But the values have to be shared.

Carol Evans (CE): When I was working on finding sponsors for arts, the impetus often came from the CEO's heart - what he thought was an important cause or something that had affected his family or his community. But Oldsmobile came to us just looking for customer relations programs. Whether we had been selling the WNBA or Lincoln Center at the time wouldn't have mattered.

We created a program at Carnegie Hall for them, where if you had bought an Oldsmobile that year, you would get two tickets worth $1,000 each to an opening night event. It had nothing to do with the CEO or with the passion of the corporation, it was strictly marketing. And it was a revelation to the people at Carnegie Hall about how they might commercially sell - sell, rather than promote - their product.

John Whitmore (Bessemer Trust): My brother-in-law's company provided the skin for the Bilbao Museum. And he claims that his firm lost $1 million doing that.

Heitmann: Wow, that's intelligent marketing. [Laughter]

Whitmore: Their product - titanium - is used in aircraft and other places, but it's not used in construction. And he thinks that getting world-class attention in a museum as the product that covers the museum, should result in every architect in the world thinking about whether to use this product in architectural things.

There's an example of a firm making a product available that is quite successful in making this a unique building and at the same time the building comes to the attention of almost any architect in the world.

Tom Krens (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum): But the problem is how do you identify in advance where the opportunities and the value are located? For example, it's customary for the museum to take full responsibility for the cost and for organizing the event. But with the recent retrospective of Rauschenberg's work, my guess is that that project will net Rauschenberg an additional $2 million a year in sales.

I was given an award last week by the American Motorcycle Association as the person who has done the most in 1998 to advance the cause of motorcycles. People came to the podium and talked about the fact that many people perceived this motorcycle exhibition as a breakthrough in the public's acceptance of motorcycles. With the tremendous publicity this exhibition has gotten, from my standpoint, I think that BMW was the lucky beneficiary. [Laughter]