Groupon, CSR, and the Red Cross Japan Earthquake Relief effort
15 Mar
The Japanese earthquake has been a devastating hit on the country. Not least for the resulting Tsunami that is reported to have killed tens of thousands already, but for the resulting damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant in North East Japan, which by all accounts is the worst nuclear incident since Chernobyl 25 years ago.
Cue a faux pas from Bing and the Microsoft crew, but a silver lining (and some genius marketing) by the Groupon camp:
Groupon, as anyone who gets the email will know, send out 2 daily emails with an offer and 3 ‘sub’ offers in the side bar. Each offer follows the format ‘£xx.xx instead of £XX.XX’ - why this was clever is the obvious omission of an actual discount. Not to mention Groupon matched every donation pound-for-pound up to £70,000.
When all was said and done, just over 8000 donations were sold, which while not a huge amount of raw capital, is still a help in the recovery effort. At the end of the day, it’s nice to see (some) companies getting their CSR hat on, but still keeping to the principles of good marketing.
I’m not looking at you, Microsoft.
