Marketing That Matters: 10 Practices to Profit Your Business and Change the World (Social Venture Network)

MARKETING THAT MATTERS: 10 PRACTICES TO PROFIT YOUR BUSINESS AND CHANGE THE WORLD demonstrates just how marketing can advance business values while retaining ethical roots. Any company which would promote both values and trust must have MARKETING THAT MATTERS: its simple contentions tells how to build a socially responsible business and comes not from ideals, but from applied tactics.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Eric and Chip are practitioners, not consultants, and you get that sense immediately in this handbook for those who are a little squeamish about how marketing has been used by some companies. They bring a values-based approach with enough examples and to-dos to help any reader more accurately and honestly promote their offerings in today's competitve global marketplace. Enjoy!

I enjoyed this book. Here are some impressions.

This is an excellent introduction to marketing. Even I, a total naïf in the ways of business, learned a lot. Marketing, as I understood it from this book, is an ongoing two-way conversation between business owner and customer. The sooner in the business life cycle that the conversation begins, the more likely the exchange will be successful for both parties.


What was especially insightful was to aim at conventional business owners first. Only in the last portion of the book did it appear that Socially Responsible Businesses were a major part of the audience. A take-home message was that a social mission does not require a compromise of business success.

The title reinforced this thrust: Marketing comes before Matters; Profit comes before world.

Any business owner would benefit from these messages. They might even decide to apply their own social agendas, previously suppressed for fear of compromising profits.

Good layout. Lots of charts, graphs, tables, and bullet points to break up the text. Bold for section headings. Italics for key words. Pages of text were broken into bite-sized paragraphs. Very easy on the eyes.

Good writing. Plain declarative sentences made picking out the key points easy. I felt an urge to grab a highlighter. The style came across as single voice. I had no sense that two authors were writing independently.

Highly recommended.