Cause Marketing

The American economy is in the doldrums, although still, apparently, not in a recession. And, according to a new survey from the Better Business Bureau, the result is that Americans consumers have lost trust in 13 of 15 business industries. Simply put, the love is gone. How can industries including the auto industry, car dealers, gas stations, banks and financial institutions raise their numbers and get the love back of the American Consumer? Well Dr. Paul is here for you. And Dr. Paul wants to help you feel the love again. The good news is, it’s a simple 2-step program. But the first one’s a doozy. Not to be flip, but if you’re a mortgage company and a big part of your business plan was to fudge the numbers and get people into mortgages they couldn’t afford… assuming you’re still in business…you need start by learning how not to screw your customers! Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on to step two. You need some insurance. Among the industries whose negative numbers have ri...

Lately one of the great things about the Cause-Related Marketing blog for me is that I don’t have to go out and ‘enterprise’ my blog posts the way I did in the early days. People have started to pitch me ideas to post on. We have a name for these people. When they send helpful pitches that are pertinent to this blog I call them PR angels. When they pitch me ideas that are off-topic, over-long, just plain dumb, or addressed to “Dear Alden,” I just call them idiots. (I think it’s clear from reading the blog that my name is Paul Jones. My company’s name is Alden Keene.) And I’m not talking about spam here either. Everybody on earth with an email account gets spam. Editors and reporters have started to out the idiots. Heck, even PR people are outing the idiots. It's very chic to complain about PR idiots right now, and who am I to resist a trend? I’m not going to out any idiot PR people by name. Although I reserve all rights to do so in the future. But to prove my point, here is a sho...