Who came up with the idea for the Random House-Celestial Seasonings partnership?
Vaughn: Burson-Marsteller, Celestial’s public relations agency, came to us with the idea for the book club in October2007. What are your goals/expectations for the partnership? Vaughn: We hope that it will increase awareness and sales for the featured titles. It’s also a relatively new kind of promotion for us, so we’re interested in the levels of online and offline activity the book club generates—how much it drives awareness, engagement and sales. How do you come up with the featured books for the book club? Vaughn: … We discussed the kinds of books that Celestial was interested in with Burson-Marsteller, and then reached out to [our] divisional marketing managers for suggestions of titles that would work. The marketing managers came back with a lot of great ideas, which we’ve passed on to Burson-Marsteller and Celestial. They’re reading the books now, and we’re looking forward to discussing [the] prospective title selections [they’ve chosen] for the spring.
