Digital CPG Blog

A new brand of fruit and nut snack bar, “Kind,” is trying to live up to it’s name and offer a new twist on cause marketing. Stu Elliot of the New York Times reports:

Kind’s approach to doing well by doing good is a campaign carrying the theme “Do the Kind Thing,” which plans to donate, in stages, $100,000 to organizations deemed worthy of assistance.

“Do the Kind thing” asks consumers to perform acts of kindness — deliberately instead of randomly — that are tracked through Kind cards bearing code numbers. A participant in the “Kind Movement” links his or her card and code to a charitable organization or other “redeeming” cause, as the campaign’s rules describe it; performs a kind act for someone else; and then passes the card and code on to that person.

That someone can repeat the process, and so on and so on and so on — just like in that vintage Faberge shampoo “And they told two friends” commercial. Points accrue for the causes at each step of the pay-it-forward journey, and the causes with the most points receive the donations.

More information about the campaign is available at various Web sites, among them kindsnacks.com, kindmovement.com, kinded.com and the Kind Facebook page .

It’s a race for your favorite charity and word of mouth for the success of Kind’s brand. People want to spread good, but as the founder notes, Kind will have be careful to not over-commercialize the goodness of deliberate acts of kindness for the purpose of selling the brand. And the fruit and nut bars have to be really tasty and good to begin with.