*supercollider

In October of last year I wrote about cause marketing driving sales growth, and agreed with Faris Yakob that marketing by doing good would be one of the most important trends of 2009.

2009 hasn’t disappointed, and one of the biggest sub-trends has been the mashing up of crowdsourcing with cause marketing. Pepsi has just taken that idea dialed it up to 11.

Pepsi Refresh Project - cause marketing instead of the Superbowl

At first blush the Pepsi Refresh Project looks like familiar cause-marketing x cause-marketing territory. People submit and select community-based projects to receive funding from Pepsi. What’s new is the scale. Pepsi have allocated $20 million to fund these projects.

The Refresh Project will be the biggest and most ambitious cause marketing crowdsourcing initiative yet by far. And as a sign of just how much Pepsi believe in it as a brand statement and a primary marketing vehicle, they are doing it instead of doing a SuperBowl TV ad. This is the first time in 23 years they will not have a commercial in the SuperBowl, and instead of that big-bang 30-second spot, they are taking that production and media money and putting it into action, involving their target audience in the process.

Funding will be provided in tiers from $5k to $250k, allowing thousands of ideas to be funded across categories such as Arts and Culture and Neighbourhoods. Submissions and voting will roll throughout the year, for a solid 10 months.

It’s a huge bet, but in order for their Refresh Everything proposition to have legs it needs to be based on real action from the brand, and this is as big a commitment as they come. And instead of spending that money on one big moment, they are spreading it into a participatory experience that will last through the year, hopefully creating real and lasting impact in the world as a result.

Pepsi isn’t the first to have the idea of crowdsourced cause marketing, though they are committing to it on a much bigger scale. Here’s a few other examples of brands with similar ideas:

Chase Community Giving - $5m on Facebook

Chase Community Giving launched in November with the premise “what happens when you put $5 million in the virtual hands of over 300 million Facebook users“? Starting with 500,000 charities, users vote in the top 100 that will receive $25k each, with one charity receiving a cool million. The genius of the idea is making the database that large, ensuring that every charity has the chance and motivation to rally their friends and supporters on Facebook to get involved.

And how are they doing? Round one of the voting has just finished, and they already at over 1 million fans on their Facebook page as well as over 2 million installs of their Facebook app. Their wall posts are also consistently getting over a thousand likes and hundreds of comments. Pretty amazing results for a big financial institution on Facebook.

Interestingly Chase give $100 million to charity a year already. Chase Community Giving is simply about giving people a chance to decide how that gets spent, and raising awareness of their charitable actions in the process. Smart marketing of an existing service.

American Express Members Project - crowdsourcing cause marketing pioneer

American Express’ Members Project was the pioneer in crowdsourced cause marketing space. At the Members Project website, card holders could suggest projects to make a positive impact in the world, discuss them on a forum, and ultimately vote and decide which five projects would split $2.5 million in funding.

Although the project ran in 2007 and 2008, with the latter receiving over a thousand ideas and 200,000 votes, it wasn’t pursued for 2009, leaving the opportunity for Chase to step in and tweak the concept, taking it to another level using Facebook.

Target Bullseye Gives - original crowdsourcing cause marketing on Facebook

Chase wasn’t the first brand to use Facebook for crowdsourcing cause marketing either. Target’s Bullseye Gives campaign invited Facebook users to decide how to divide up $3 million amongst 10 selected charities, allocated by percentage of votes those charities received.

The campaign resulted in 97,000 new Facebook fans for Target, a daily page view increase of 4,800%, 167k users voting and 3,000 wall posts.

Google Project 10^100

Google Project 10^100 is a “call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible”. It’s a perfect example of the democratising power of the internet, to allow anybody to put an idea forward and have a chance for a company with the clout, brainpower and resources of Google to bring it to life.

The power and reputation of the Google brand is enormous, as is their reach, and the response was overwhelming: 154,000 submissions from 172 countries.

After a long delay while they sifted through the much-greater than anticipated number of entries, Google chose the finalists, the public voted, and soon we can expect to hear which projects are receiving funding from Google to become real. Check out the 16 shortlisted ideas.

Fad or trend?

So, is this a fad? Or do people really care about their world and want their brands to play a bigger role in doing good in it? Maybe I’m an optimist, but I’m trending towards the latter and would agree with Contagious that we’re witnessing the evolution of “Goodvertising“.

We’re in a new era of transparency, where every day there are new ways to see whether we are making the “right” brand choices based on a whole matrix of factors, from customer satisfaction to ethical sourcing to environmental impact to contribution back to society. These are now key factors to brand image, and in some categories serve as a real differentiator. Companies will need to innovate across this entire spectrum in order to stay one step ahead of their competition in the 2010’s.