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The Cause Marketing Script

Current theory from Professor Ronald K. Mitchell at Texas Tech suggests that the people most likely to be a success at entrepreneurship are those who understand that there is an ‘entrepreneurship script.’

I contend that there is also a script in cause marketing.

In entrepreneurship the script, says Mitchell (who like Bob McDonald, the CEO of Procter & Gamble, and yours truly is an alumnus of the University of Utah) is “commonly recognized sequences of events that permit rapid comprehension of expertise-specific information by experts; mental representations of the causality-connected actions, props, and participants that are involved in common activities.”

I’ve cherry-picked from Professor Mitchell’s paper to come up with a list of attributes that I think characterize the best cause marketers:
  • They have a great base of domain knowledge of cause marketing
  • They are predisposed to action
  • They are deliberate network builders
  • They recognize changes and know how to exploit them
  • They have a great deal of cause marketing experience
  • They possess a schema about the way cause marketing works which comes from extensive experience
  • They have better and less biased recall of relevant information
  • They have and effectively use strategic resources
  • They efficiently translate problems into solutions
  • They understand how value is built
Agree? Disagree? Please comment below.

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