Cause Marketing

I’m delighted to offer a guest post today by my friend and cause marketing colleague David Hessekiel, the founder and president of the Cause Marketing Forum and the co-author of the new book on cause marketing called Good Works , out as June 5, 2012. David co-wrote Good Works with marketing legend Phillip Kotler and Nancy Lee. Today David tackles the issue of just how big cause marketing is and how we can get to a more meaningful measure of its size and dimensions. For years the only calculation we’ve had is IEG’s annual projection of how much companies plan on spending on cause marketing in the year to comes. As a gauge of cause marketing it’s a little determining the health of your car by measuring how much air pressure is in the back right tire. It’s inadequate and not very telling.  One of the fabulous yet sometimes frustrating aspects of cause marketing is its diversity.   Some campaigns focus on raising funds (buy this and we’ll give a dime), others concentrate...