Haagen-Dazs’ social media “cause marketing” creates a buzz – literally

Haagen-Dazs has recently been running a campaign called Help the Honey Bees. This kind of marketing is often called “cause marketing” where big brands team up with charitable causes for mutual profit.

This particular campaign, created by San Francisco’s Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, is about saving honey bees (apparently, bee colonies in the US are declining rapidly).

The company’s target for the first phase of the campaign, which ran in August and September, was 1 million impressions. It generated more than 13 million impressions.

The second phase of the campaign will rely heavily on social media. Haagen-Dazs teamed up with ExperienceProject.com and used their TwitCause site to promote the campaign, offering to pay $1 per tweet generated (up to a maximum of $1000 per day).

Whether the social media phase is as successful as generating impressions as the first phase remains to be seen but if a Twitter storm gathers around the honey bee cause, which seems likely judging by the campaign’s initial success, Haagen-Dazs will have created quite a buzz for the bees – and their brand.