Last time I introduced the first of five elements in the Open Source Marketing Circuit Questionnaire, You and Your Brand. In these posts, I’ll show how to adapt the circuit questionnaire to marketing a cause. Most organisations market a cause, often obscured by a focus on products and services. In each of these five posts, I introduce the element and show how to use it to market a cause and use my business as an example. This second post covers the full range of offers you can make, covering causes, products and services.
The circuit includes five elements …
- You and Your Brand
- Products and Services
- Proposition
- Problem
- Market
… and this post is about the second: Products and Services. You will note the title of this post includes causes as well as products and services.
Marketing a Cause
The circuit questionnaire aims to help businesses find commercial opportunities. My interest is in organisations marketing a cause. Their priority is to find support for their cause. Their cause may be accompanied by products or services or it can stand alone.
Just as third sector organisations promoting causes can offer products and / or services, so a local business may find their products or services support a cause. For example, home insulation can be promoted as an environmental cause or to cut household bills (or both!).
I suspect more product and service promotions benefit from a cause than may seem likely. Next time I’ll show how a cause can work as a proposition to market a product or service. I have no problem with businesses who discover a cause researching their marketing, so long as the cause is genuine. If there is a genuine cause, you may become aware of it as you work on your branding in-depth.
Causes, Products and Services
This section of the circuit questionnaire covers what the business or organisation delivers and is not to be confused with what it sells. For example, a sweatshirt is clearly a product. With a screen-print or embroidered motif, it could be sold in support of a cause. The motif may increase sales of sweatshirts and indeed may be the reason for the sweatshirt. With or without a motif the sweatshirt is a product.
So, a cause is a commitment that leads to a transaction where the benefit is directly or indirectly to the cause. The transaction may involve money but not always. This may be frustrating to the purist but I don’t want to rule out the small business, for example, set up at its owners risk to sell products or services associated with a cause. No-one would object to sales of home insulation, for example, benefiting the business that promotes and sells it. Avoid implying direct third-party benefit where finance raised goes solely to the business.
Transactions that don’t include money might be: signatures on a petition or action in support of the cause, eg writing to an MP, joining a demonstration, attending a meeting. Online such transactions might include joining an email list and participating in an online forum. Commercial marketing campaigns use some of these activities, eg joining an email list.
Financial transactions that benefit a third-party include donations to charities, political parties and the like.
Example from My Business in June 2015
So here’s my single sentence description of my service:
“I offer 3 and 6 month non-directive consultancy packages to leaders who want traction between their online and real-life presence, need to address real-life and online problems and to maintain a work / life balance whilst focusing on their vision for local marketplace regeneration.”
It’s a few months since I wrote this it seems a bit long. More important it barely touches on my cause. When I completed this I was focusing on questions about my service and so that is what I have described. Many organisations and businesses have several product / service descriptions. So, here’s one for my cause:
“I’m inviting people to join an online community who share experiences, insights and ideas about regeneration of their local economy in neighbourhood, city or region.”
This does not replace the first sentence but together they offer a better description of my business activities. This element in the circuit questionnaire asks the question: what are you selling? The next helps clarify: why are you selling it?
Do you market a cause when selling products or services? What are the benefits and pitfalls?
