Local company shifts community service to marketing

July 14, 2016 at 12:05a.m.

YOUNGSTOWN

For most companies, their usual, best way of getting branding would be through advertisements on various media. But a local company has decided to use an additional, nontraditional marketing strategy.

Eric Wright, president of Gasearch, said the natural-gas company has decided to take a new direction by coordinating community service and marketing to benefit one another.

Gasearch has donated about $3,700 and hours of volunteer work to organizations, events and institutions in the Mahoning Valley.

Recently, the Northeast Ohio company donated paint for 20 classrooms, a monetary gift and six volunteers to the Boardman Center Middle School’s Makeover Project.

“We’re using our marketing efforts more intentionally, weighing them over to the charitable side and the community-service side and supporting local events in Youngstown, as opposed to having more of a separate marketing budget that we used for ads and things of that sort,” he said.

For almost 16 years, Gasearch has provided local donations and volunteer work. But in the past four months, the company’s marketing team decided to be more intentional with its community outreach. Chris Baum, the business development manager, stressed that its motivation for community service is a byproduct of the company work ethic and philosophy.

“We don’t necessarily want to be put on a pedestal; that’s not why we do things,” Baum said. “We do things the way we do them, really, because that’s who we are as individuals. We’re more of a team-oriented, family-oriented company.”

Though Gasearch hasn’t dropped advertisements completely, Wright said, about half the money usually used for marketing and advertising has been shifted over to community and volunteer work.

“We still have marketing that we need to do as a company, but you can see a significant difference between what we’ve been doing charitably versus what would be considered more of a marketing thing,” Wright said.