Dave Matthews Band is slated to release a new online album of live performances this month (name yet to be announced in early September), and his concertgoers this summer voted to choose the tracks. A nice bit of audience engagement meant to grow fan loyalty and sell more downloads? Yes, but it did something else, too.
Fans had to turn in trash to earn a chance to vote or be upgraded to front-row seats at DMB concerts. It was an incentive from Matthews for them to clean up the parking lots where they’d partied before his concerts, and it’s a small window into a process for which the Minneapolis firm MusicMatters has pioneered techniques and coined a phrase: effect marketing.
If Matthews worried about the environmental impact of his tours, he could have donated some of his profits to environmental groups, or promoted those groups by displaying their logos on tour merchandise.
“We call that ‘cause marketing,’ where you pay a fee to the nonprofit, but you don’t really have to do anything beyond that to ‘staple’ your product to a cause,” says MusicMatters President Michael Martin. The band might gain a little halo effect from cause marketing. Effect marketing, by contrast, “creates quantified environmental or social change while it’s marketing the product,” Martin says.
MusicMatters promoted the recycling effort as the “So Much to Save” program. (For a DMB “Cool Tour” against global warming in 2003, it arranged carbon offsets for tour-bus emissions and asked fans to buy offsets along with concert tickets.) In September, with data in from 19 shows, fans had diverted 20,651 pounds of recyclables from landfills, says Todd Troha, MusicMatters’s general manager, equalling 2,195 gallons of oil not needed to produce new materials.
Some gains for Matthews are also quantifiable. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District joined with the band to promote California concert dates, purchasing about $60,000 in radio ad time for a public service announcement recorded by Matthews. “The ad promotes green power, but it also promotes Dave’s show,” Troha says.
Dave Matthews Band paid a similar amount for MusicMatters’s services—making the free ad time in California essentially a wash. But Troha notes that Sacramento was a test case. For future tours, other regional advertisers will have a chance to affiliate with the band, which will pick up more than just free air time.
Research done by Cone, a brand strategy firm in Boston, shows that 87 percent of consumers will switch brands (all other factors being equal) to be associated with a good cause. And as they get more sophisticated about whether a company is really doing good or just doing a PR exercise, “the principles of effect marketing hit every hot button when it comes to . . . what’s motivating and believable for consumers,” Troha says.
Music industry clients are 30 percent of MusicMatters’s portfolio. The other 70 percent are makers of natural and organic products, including Cascadian Farm, a subsidiary of Twin Cities–based General Mills.
“We’re working to provide farmers’ markets with Cascadian Farm–branded, corn-based, biodegradable bags,” Troha says, replacing the petroleum-based plastic that many markets use now. “Cascadian Farm gets their name associated with removing petroleum-based products from the waste stream,” he says, in a move that benefits both the company and the planet.
