Taking Flight For The Fight

Delta Airlines is a major airline that is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is know as the world's busiest airport and this is mainly due to the traffic Delta Airlines provides.

Since it is Breast Cancer Awareness month, I wanted to spotlight Delta Airline's support for The Breast Cancer Awareness Research Foundation (BCRF). Delta has paired up with (BCRF) and produced several different campaigns that have all made a huge impact on raising awareness for Breast Cancer.

Delta's support of BCRF is a great example of cause-marketing, if you don't know what that is it is easy to explain. Cause-marketing is when a "for-profit" business and a "non-profit" organization combine efforts and decide to work together. They co-brand their products and advertise them together. For example, Delta  painted one of their large commercial planes pink to help raise awareness for breast cancer. The aircraft has carried nearly 266,753 customers and flown nearly 10,600 hours (or 1,300 trips) around the world since being painted pink in May 2010. This is a brilliant idea. Delta ans BCRF and joint-advertising

In addition to the pink plane, throughout October Delta's office building will be illuminated in pink lighting in support of BCRF. Delta employees also will wear pink uniforms and sell pink products like pink lemonade and pink headsets onboard their planes. Delta also will donate $1 to BCRF for the first 50,000 new "Likes" on the Delta Facebook page during October. All of these advertisements that Delta produced for BCRF have been very successful and reached many people. Since 2005, Delta employees and customers have raised a total of $5 million for The Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

Now you might be thinking to yourself, its wonderful that Delta is showing so much support for BCRF, but what do they get out of it? What was the goal they were trying to achieve with this joint advertisement campaign? What was their advertising objective? Well I can answer that folks.

It's fairly common for airlines to sponsor charities and to make donations for non-profits. Most major carriers give to local charities in their hub cities and to national organizations. But Delta takes this to a whole different level. Instead of being the type of sponsor that just writes a check to a non-profit and calls is a day, they decided to co-brand themselves with BCRF and advertise as one. Delta’s goal was to demonstrate community support while also differentiating themselves from their competition and increasing customer loyalty. Sponsorship can improve perceptions that the company is gracious and genuine when they see joint advertisement with a non-profit organization. People connect emotionally with a brand they can relate to and admire. By aligning themselves with BCRF, Delta not only supports a good cause, they also boost their public image and helps distinguish it from the competition.

All of these campaigns are done to raise awareness and support for breast cancer research. These campaigns benefit both the non-profit organization BCRF and the for-profit company, Delta.