Cause Marketing

At the risk of being immodest, your's truly was quoted several times in a recent article on cause-related marketing in the January issue of Western & English Today , a trade magazine for the Western and English equine industry. Also quoted were Carol Cone , cause-marketing grandee, and David Hessekiel, the founder of the Cause Marketing Forum and a subscriber to this blog. Follow this link to the excellent article by Carol Gustafson and read it online. It begins on page 58. You can also read all the questions Carol Gustafson posed to me last November along with my answers here .

Last week I did “email interview” on cause-related marketing with Carol Gustafson, a writer for W&E Today , a trade magazine for the western and English equine industry. She asked me five questions. I’ll post the answers to the first two questions on today’s post, and the remaining on next Tuesday’s post. Carol’s questions are in italics, followed by my answers. 1. With money tight and ad budgets shrinking, why should a business, especially a smaller one, include cause-related marketing in its promotional mix? Old time marketers used to lament that the average person saw perhaps 250 commercial messages a day. Nowadays, the estimates range from a few hundred to perhaps 3,000! I expect there’s a lot of shock value built into these estimates. But as Seth Godin puts it in his landmark book Permission Marketing , the biggest challenge for marketers today isn’t the number of commercial messages per se. Instead, it’s the number of messages combined with the fact that most commercials are ...