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Sacke & Associates in the News
HOW CAN YOU GET THE MOST MARKETING VALUE OUT OF CSR
From the Counter Strategy section of Strategy Magazine, June 30, 2003
by Sara Minogue
John Sacke, president and founder,
Sacke & Associates,
Toronto, Ont.
“If companies want to increase the business value of CSR then, number one: they must engage the customer. If you’re going to support the Children’s Wish Foundation by doing a dance-a-thon, engage your customers. Invite them to come along, and encourage them to bring their wives and kids. Make it worth their while. Have a gigantic barbecue first. Make a scene about it. Make it fun for your customer to join in. That will definitely translate to business benefits because first you can engage with your customer, and plus, you're not in a business environment.
“Secondly, your initiatives must come from the top down and be embraced by everybody in between. The president must embrace the initiative and spend the morning in the soup kitchen or at the pride parade.
“Our counsel is, by all means, support charity. But you’ve got to leverage the heck out of that. People have to know about this.
“Say you’re sponsoring the Run for Heart. Why not challenge your top customers? Put together your team of five and say, ‘If you beat us, I’ll throw in another $500 bucks.’ It may be a very small amount! But try and involve your clients and try and involve the media. Maybe a simple thing, like a news release to 20 of our key media, with a Dr. Seuss hat, and that’s going to be our uniform.
“I like a little bit of a crazy kind of shenanigan, that’s partly tounge-in-cheek. There’s no use sponsoring a charity and not telling anyone about it.”
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