Chris Ambler discussed a story he heard recently on a local Seattle morning radio show. The discussion was about Specialty Roast Coffee Company who donates $2 of every bag of coffee beans to a charity of the buyer’s choice. Coffee connoisseurs can visit SpecialtyRoast.com and select from a growing list of local and national charity foundations to donate to.
“We give away, on average, 20% of our gross. It’s counter-intuitive but we’re profitable, adds Warren Sly, founder. “Giving as generously as we do has been good for business. As Benjamin Franklin proved, you can live well by doing good.”
As the story goes the savvy businessman who owns the company has been purchasing additional domain names including the names of the charities followed by the word “coffee.” For example RedCrossCoffee.com, PetCoffee.com (Humane Society). The owner claims that this is one of his best ideas as it brings residual traffic to his business from type-ins. Customers tell their friends that they order their coffee beans at RedCrossCoffee.com and the power of word-of-mouth marketing sets in.
I can imagine that the idea of giving charitable donations can be applied to many products and services on the web. Domain names continue to be a powerful marketing tool. In a related article on DotSauce, Creative Marketing with Domain Names, we see that hundreds of large corporations are turning to domains that do not mention their company name at all to aid in promotion.
The Specialty Roast concept makes being a humanitarian quite easy and I hear the perks are good too.
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