The Clean and Green Club, March 2024

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Having trouble reading this as an email? Please visit thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: March 2024

Before we get to this month’s tip, an important and limited chance to really up your green/social equity business game:


Five Weeks to Set Up a Profitable Green/Social Justice Business—Only Eight Spaces Available

If you’ve always wanted to run a business that makes the world better, this is your chance to get personal guidance from Shel Horowitz (me, your newsletter writer), an internationally recognized expert in environmentally and socially conscious business (bio below). In just five weeks.

Format:

Five 75-minute interactive and participatory online group sessions, plus a private 45-60-minute consultation with Shel: you get to choose either a single session or splitting it into two half-hour sessions at the time they’ll be most beneficial for you (I’d recommend scheduling at least one session after the final class, but that’s up to you). And a mutual-support private group on LinkedIn just for those who are currently enrolled in or have gone through this program.

Each group session will consist of

  1. Attender check-ins on how they moved forward/what they’re pleased about/new challenges (for the first session, we’ll have introductions instead that follow a specific format to keep the discussion moving and focus on the important parts)
  2. A learning unit presented by Shel
  3. Facilitated discussion and brainstorming on the day’s topic
  4. Wrap-up and next steps

Members will have access to recordings and informal transcripts, to the best of our ability. You’ll probably find it helpful to replay the sessions or review the transcripts.

Topics:

  • Session 1: Identify your green and social equity opportunities.
  • Session 2: Rough out products or services that your organization (a business, sole proprietorship, nonprofit, educational or medical institution, government agency, etc.) can develop to address those opportunities.
  • Session 3: Use Shel and the group to evaluate your ideas and choose your first green and/or social equity offering.
  • Session 4: Understand the basics of marketing your first green/social equity product or service to three different populations—vastly increasing your potential market and giving you a significant competitive edge.
  • Session 5: Outline your personal path to move your idea from conception to completion: what steps you’ll take to make it real. Opportunities to continue receiving support.
  • One-to-one Consultation: 45-60 minutes total, in one or two sessions at the point in the five-session program that will provide YOU with the most value. Shel can help you see the unique strengths of your operation and guide you toward possible offerings, help you list and implement your next steps, steer you toward very helpful resources, and more.

April 2, 9, 16, 30, and May 7, 2024 (skipping April 23 so as not to interfere with Passover Seders). Click if you’re ready to sign up

Is This Program Right for You and Do You Qualify?

You will benefit from the program if you can say yes to at least three of these questions:

  1. Do you currently own or run a business, nonprofit, or department OR have one you’d like to start or manage?
  2. Are you interested in achieving a higher good and a better world?
  3. Do you have a mission that focuses on at least one particular environmental or social justice issue—something you feel called to do?
  4. Have you ever wondered if your business could be a vehicle to make progress on that goal?
  5. Have you ever considered what kind of a difference your organization could make on the issues that matter to you most—if you focused some energy on those issues within a business framework?
  6. Do you see potential for business to be a factor in co-creating a better world?
  7. Are you eager to discover how your specific business can thrive by combining profitability with environmental and social good?

How to Apply:

With only eight spaces available and to make sure everyone has a fair chance at a slot, here’s the easy application process: You start by making sure you can answer yes to at least three of the questions above. Then fill out the simple questionnaire online. If your answers fit the program, Shel will schedule a quick 10- to 15-minute one-to-one call to explore a bit more. After the interview, you’ll be notified quickly whether you’ve been accepted, waitlisted, or asked to wait until you’re more ready.

Note from Shel, Your Presenter/Facilitator, on Enrollment, Pricing and Scheduling:

This first round is a pilot program, limited to eight people. A minimum of four is required to run the program. Future programs are likely to be more expensive and accommodate up to 12 people, so this is a time you can get more in-depth attention from me at a more affordable cost. I was advised by multiple experts that I should be charging $1500-$2000 for this program, but I want to keep it affordable—and I recognize that you’ll be road-testing it with me and helping me refine future versions. So, pricing for this first round will be just $675 in one payment or two payments of $375. The next iteration of this mastermind will likely be in the $995-$1195 range. This initial bargain price will not be repeated.

Tentatively, I will schedule for Tuesday afternoons at 4 pm US Eastern. If you are seriously interested but Tuesday afternoons aren’t good for you, reach out to me (after March 27–I’ll be off-grid until then). If I can get a minimum of four, I’m willing to run a second group concurrently. We will do our best to provide recordings and transcripts.

April 2, 9, 16, 30, and May 7, 2024 (skipping April 23 so as not to interfere with Passover Seders). Fill out and submit the brief application if you’re ready to sign up.

Your Instructor/Facilitator, Shel Horowitz

With more than 20 years at the intersection of profitability and environmental/social good and more than 20 additional years in small business marketing and in activism, Shel’s “superpowers” include:

  • Finding your social change sweet spot: how you and your organization are uniquely positioned to create and market profitable products and services that address crises like hunger, poverty, racism/othering—even “unsolvable” ones like war and catastrophic climate change (the answers will be different for every business or nonprofit). Your offering will be based on your skills, interests, and capabilities.
  • Creating compelling ways to tell “the story behind the story” that generate interest, empathy, and engagement—in a press release, on a web page, in interviews and speeches, etc.
  • Writing informational and marketing materials that make a compelling case for you, your products and services, and your focus on higher good: reasons for your prospects to choose you!
  • Helping you write, publish, and market a book that establishes your expertise and credibility while helping to influence others toward a better world (Shel has published ten books under his own name and ghostwritten others, through big NYC publishers, small presses, his own publishing company, and a subsidy house, so he has expertise in whichever model will work best for you).
  • Suggesting win-win-win partnerships that broaden your market, add more capabilities to your offerings, and increase revenue opportunities. Shel can also write powerful introductory letters to your potential partners like the one that enabled one of his clients to do script consulting for Hollywood director Ed Zwick. Doing two books in the Guerrilla Marketing series with the legendary Jay Conrad Levinson was Shel’s best partnership in his own career.
  • Helping you secure knock-it-out-of-the-park endorsements and positioning those blurbs for visibility and sales. He wrote the letter that got one client a testimonial from basketball superstar Bob Cousy. Shel’s latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has 22 endorsements including Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, green living and green business experts Alicia Bay Laurel, Jacquelyn Ottman, and Joel Makower, social media gurus Chris Brogan and Brian Solis, Go-Giver Bob Burg, BNI founder Ivan Misner, and other prominent people.

April 2, 9, 16, 30, and May 7, 2024 (skipping April 23 so as not to interfere with Passover Seders). Fill out and submit the brief application if you’re ready to sign up.

When “If You Build It” Actually Works (it does once in a while)

Photo Credit: Jason Renfrow Photography via Pexels

Most of the time, the famous advice from “Field of Dreams,” “If You Build It, They Will Come,” is total nonsense. The market rarely rewards innovation for its own sake and almost never rewards innovation when it’s priced way higher than the market leaders unless you’re specifically targeting the luxury market (where high price is seen as a status symbol)—or a market whose needs were not well met by previous, cheaper competitors.

In the computer world, the original Apple Mac is an example of that second category. The Mac carved out a significant set of niches (music, publishing, computing for people with disabilities, visual arts once it had color), but it never really took off in the mainstream until Microsoft re-engineered a Mac-like interface for the PC (Windows 95). It might have come out of the gate a whole lot faster if it hadn’t been about a thousand dollars more than a more powerful but harder to use IBM PC clone. Steve Jobs’ next big innovation, the NeXT, went absolutely nowhere, just like the earlier Lisa that offered most of the features the Mac offered but with a $10K price tag that was simply not acceptable to the market.

Most truly innovative cars were failures, like the 1937 Cord, the 1955s-1975 dolphin-shaped Citroën that could raise and lower on demand (which sold well in its native country of France but poorly elsewhere), the 1930s Chrysler Airflow, and the half-car/half-boat Amphicar that croaked out just 3878 units in four years. I can think of two wildly successful exceptions: The Model T Ford, whose rampant market penetration was because huge innovations in production enabled pricing at about 1/20 the price of competing cars. The actual car was old-fashioned even for its time, though—still requiring a hand-crank start even in its late incarnations more than a decade after the introduction of electric starters, for instance. And then there’s the Prius—not the first generation based in the boring and ugly Tercel body, but the classic hatchback of the second generation. It targeted the eco-conscious market, could hold four passengers and a considerable amount of gear, and it was relatively reasonably priced. It wasn’t the first hybrid on the market (as noted, not even the first Toyota hybrid)—but it was the first to make driving a family-friendly hybrid cool and sexy.

Let’s look at a few other times when “If You Build It, They Will Come” actually worked: when does something actually go viral?

  • Google Search went viral because it offered a vastly better experience on multiple counts: easier to use, better interface, way faster, and best of all, far more relevant search results—at zero user cost. As far as I can tell, Google wasn’t even accessible outside Stanford University’s private network until 1998. By July 1998, Google had become a verb. But it wasn’t until 2000 that Google began to monetize its search tool by soliciting ads, at which point it was already the default search tool for most people. I usually start my searches at ecosia.org so that my searches plant trees (and so Google doesn’t have even more of my data). 80-90 percent of the time, I’m ok with those results. But when Ecosia falls flat, I copy my search into Google.
  • McDonald’s became ubiquitous because it delivered on a promise of cheap family meals, rapid service, and consistency across whole countries (they localize their menus and vary quite a bit from country to country, though)—and because often, you could spot those golden arches from the highway before approaching the exit. It was never about having a great experience with the burger (which I loathed even as a meat-eating pre-teen and early teen; I did not miss McD’s at all when I went vegetarian at 16).
  • While European-style coffeehouse culture’s been easy to find in cities like San Francisco and NYC since at least the 1950s, Starbucks brought a watered-down/sugared up version to middle America. They made it not about getting a caffeine-energy shot but about the experience of being coddled (including customization). Starbucks proved people would pay several dollars instead of a dollar or less for a superior experience—and that sugar-laden frozen drinks could be marketed as coffee. What I find most interesting about Starbucks is the thousands of independent and unique coffeehouses that sprang up world-wide once Starbucks proved the market—offering, usually, better coffee and a better experience.
  • Chat GPT exploded unbelievably quickly following its public unveiling in November, 2022—because, like Google, it made users’ lives easier while being easy to use (unlike many of the AI tools that preceded it)—so easy that in some circles (like academia and journalism), it’s considered a cheat. As a writer, I see uses in research and planning, but my final drafts will be human-created, thank you, and my references will be verified. Some worries about overreliance on AI include its tendency to spew authoritative-sounding nonsense (including distortion through omission)—and the way its programmers largely ignored copyright.
  • Amazon succeeded in part because its founders were unusually patient and well-resourced. They were willing to lose vast amounts of money: $3 bn in the first ten years as a public company. Remember that they started in just one niche: their slogan was “Earth’s Largest Bookstore” and their user proposition was the then-unique long-tail ability to get pretty much any title, quickly. They were a boon to micropublishers closed out of physical bookstores because their sales numbers would never justify shelf space—and their practices such as charging less to buy a book than bookstores had to pay to obtain it and forcing those small publishers to pay a wholesaler rather than a retailer discount were a menace to physical bookstores, which closed in huge numbers. (These practices are among several reasons why I do nearly all my book buying in local independent stores.) Founded in 1994, the company only had its first profitable year in 2003 and continues to swing between wildly profitable and wildly unprofitable—it $2.7 bn in 2022.

Looking at these five examples, it’s clear that virality is hard to create, or even predict. It helps if your offering is superior, your price is low or zero, if it makes people’s lives easier or fills a niche. It also helps if you’re good at marketing. But none of this is a sure thing. Still, if you want to create one of those success stories, I hope you find this analysis useful.

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.

Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy

Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational AdvocacyBy: Sam Daley-Harris (Rivertown Books, 2024)

The author has been an activist leader for many decades and has started several national groups and consulted to many others. Most of the book is stories from member activists, focusing on how to win a campaign—and how empowering it is to participate meaningfully. The final 80 or so pages are Daley-Harris’s practical advice on the nitty-gritty of carrying out these campaigns.

Daley-Harris is a great advocate for “transformational advocacy”: empowering volunteers to go deeper into the process, get out of their comfort zone, make an actual difference, and feel really great about themselves and the difference they’ve chosen to make. In other words, these are ordinary people who’ve come into their power through active participation.

Much of the book comes out of Daley-Harris’s first group, RESULTS, formed in 1980; the first edition of this book was published in 1994, when those efforts were recent/ongoing and the activists’ memories were fresh. His activists from around the country and around the world share their own empowering journeys of learning not just to contact elected officials and media editorialists but to do so in ways that create victories—not just from those already predisposed to support an effort, but also from those who started on the other side. The relationships may take a long time to build, but when activists are both well-prepared and respectful, progress can be made.

Daley-Harris has little use for “checkbook activism” organizations (my term, not his) that don’t want to train and supervise an active core of dedicated volunteers but simply want to raise money and collect petitions or form e-mail submissions:

When someone deeply cares about an issue and they are offered the opportunity to add their name to an online petition, they feel that they’ve done what they can and move on…But they have been robbed of an opportunity to make a difference, and the issue has been robbed of a voice. (p. 277)

He wants activists to actually be active—to take action and get out in the trenches: write letters, meet with influencers and lawmakers, train others, etc. And he’s worked really hard to create infrastructure that trains and supports these activists, including ongoing conference calls, democratized trainings that allow people to quickly get up to speed on an issue and learn how to effectively speak publicly about it, and more.

Even Daley-Harris didn’t start as an activist. He was a symphony percussionist! But he attended a meeting organized by The Hunger Project and saw that he could make a difference—and oh, what a difference he made! He organized chapters, formed coalitions, recruited celebrity spokespeople, and learned how the system worked and how to work within that system to make real change. And these actions, done properly, can dramatically shift national policies over time. The book chronicles several major victories, among them:

  • Making Oral Rehydration Therapy—a simple mix of common ingredients that costs pennies per dose and has saved tens of thousands of lives in developing countries—an integral part of US foreign aid policy as part of a new emphasis on child survival (pp. 86-105)
  • Saving the International Fund for Agricultural Development (pp. 106-121)
  • Passing the Universal Child Immunization Act and tripling the original budget for life-saving immunizations from $25 mm to $75 mm (pp. 122-142)
  • Revolutionizing foreign aid to incorporate microlending and address the very bottom of the economic pyramid through the Self-Sufficiency for the Poor Act (pp. 143-166)
  • Co-organizing and publicizing—and pressuring world leaders to participate meaningfully in—annual World Summits for Children (pp. 188-210)
  • Rescuing funding cut by President Clinton for global child survival programs (pp. 211-218)

Daley-Harris loves to share the methodology and works hard to train activists from other organizations. Several groups have adopted the RESULTS tool kit, most notably Citizens’ Climate Lobby. And groups in countries with parliamentary governments such as the UK, Canada, and Australia have adapted these methods (pp. 219-230).

The book makes frequent reference to 18 activist commitments, but oddly enough, there’s no list of all 18 together and they are not spelled out in a group until pages 256-271, which lists them all but interrupts the list with commentary. You won’t have to work so hard to find them because I’ve gathered them for you:

  1. Provide a Powerful Structure of Support
  2. Know Your Why and Share It
  3. Overcome the Fear of Making Big Asks of Volunteers
  4. Create a Focused, Inspiring Agenda
  5. Embrace an Expansive View of Who People Are
  6. Cultivate Inspiration and Idealism
  7. Enroll Others
  8. Select the Right Staff
  9. Increase Your Skills Through Practice and Learning
  10. Embody Integrity
  11. Overcome Fear and Catalyze Breakthroughs
  12. Nurture Authentic Relationships
  13. Be Vulnerable
  14. Practice Partnership, Not Partisanship
  15. Move People Up the Champion Scale (from opponent to neutral to supporter to advocate to leader to champion, p. 269)
  16. Be Unreasonable
  17. Make Time for Humor, Joy, and Celebration
  18. Engage a Great Coach

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.

————–

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The Clean and Green Club, February 2024

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Having trouble reading this as an email? Please visit thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: February 2024

Sorry to be a few days late this month. The fault is all mine; in the midst of a health crisis with my dad and a trip to Florida to help sort it out, I neglected to move the main article from my stay-at-home computer to the one I travel with. I asked my housesitter to send it to me, but I think it sounded too complicated for her.

The good news is this issue is a really good one, starting with your chance to get some awesome skills in developing/expanding your own green/social change business, continuing through a guest main article on one of my favorite topics, and including for the first time in a while some chances to hear me on podcasts and read recent press coverage. It concludes with a review of a wonderfully thorough and deeply optimistic climate crisis book focused on ACTION: of individuals, organizations, and citizen groups.


Enjoy! And please feel welcome to comment on any or all, either by leaving a note online or by replying to this email.


Warmly,

Shel

Before we get to this month’s tip, an important and limited chance to really up your green/social equity business game:

Five Weeks to Set Up a Profitable Green/Social Justice Business—Only Eight Spaces Available

If you’ve always wanted to run a business that makes the world better, this is your chance to get personal guidance from Shel Horowitz (me, your newsletter writer), an internationally recognized expert in environmentally and socially conscious business (bio below). In just five weeks.

Format:

Five 75-minute interactive and participatory online group sessions, plus a private 45-60-minute consultation with Shel: you get to choose either a single session or splitting it into two half-hour sessions at the time they’ll be most beneficial for you (I’d recommend scheduling at least one session after the final class, but that’s up to you). And a mutual-support private group on LinkedIn just for those who are currently enrolled in or have gone through this program.

Each group session will consist of

  1. Attender check-ins on how they moved forward/what they’re pleased about/new challenges (for the first session, we’ll have introductions instead that follow a specific format to keep the discussion moving and focus on the important parts)
  2. A learning unit presented by Shel
  3. Facilitated discussion and brainstorming on the day’s topic
  4. Wrap-up and next steps

Members will have access to recordings and informal transcripts, to the best of our ability. You’ll probably find it helpful to replay the sessions or review the transcripts.

Topics:

  • Session 1: Identify your green and social equity opportunities.
  • Session 2: Rough out products or services that your organization (a business, sole proprietorship, nonprofit, educational or medical institution, government agency, etc.) can develop to address those opportunities.
  • Session 3: Use Shel and the group to evaluate your ideas and choose your first green and/or social equity offering.
  • Session 4: Understand the basics of marketing your first green/social equity product or service to three different populations—vastly increasing your potential market and giving you a significant competitive edge.
  • Session 5: Outline your personal path to move your idea from conception to completion: what steps you’ll take to make it real. Opportunities to continue receiving support.
  • One-to-one Consultation: 45-60 minutes total, in one or two sessions at the point in the five-session program that will provide YOU with the most value. Shel can help you see the unique strengths of your operation and guide you toward possible offerings, help you list and implement your next steps, steer you toward very helpful resources, and more.

April 2, 9, 16, 30, and May 7, 2024 (skipping April 23 so as not to interfere with Passover Seders). Click if you’re ready to sign up

Is This Program Right for You and Do You Qualify?

You will benefit from the program if you can say yes to at least three of these questions:

  1. Do you currently own or run a business, nonprofit, or department OR have one you’d like to start or manage?
  2. Are you interested in achieving a higher good and a better world?
  3. Do you have a mission that focuses on at least one particular environmental or social justice issue—something you feel called to do?
  4. Have you ever wondered if your business could be a vehicle to make progress on that goal?
  5. Have you ever considered what kind of a difference your organization could make on the issues that matter to you most—if you focused some energy on those issues within a business framework?
  6. Do you see potential for business to be a factor in co-creating a better world?
  7. Are you eager to discover how your specific business can thrive by combining profitability with environmental and social good?

How to Apply:

With only eight spaces available and to make sure everyone has a fair chance at a slot, here’s the easy application process: You start by making sure you can answer yes to at least three of the questions above. Then fill out the simple questionnaire online. If your answers fit the program, Shel will schedule a quick 10- to 15-minute one-to-one call to explore a bit more. After the interview, you’ll be notified quickly whether you’ve been accepted, waitlisted, or asked to wait until you’re more ready.

Note from Shel, Your Presenter/Facilitator, on Enrollment, Pricing
 and Scheduling:

This first round is a pilot program, limited to eight people. A minimum of four is required to run the program. Future programs are likely to be more expensive and accommodate up to 12 people, so this is a time you can get more in-depth attention from me at a more affordable cost. I was advised by multiple experts that I should be charging $1500-$2000 for this program, but I want to keep it affordable—and I recognize that you’ll be road-testing it with me and helping me refine future versions. So, pricing for this first round will be just $675 in one payment or two payments of $375. The next round of this mastermind will likely be in the $995-$1195 range. This initial bargain price will not be repeated.

Tentatively, I will schedule for Tuesday afternoons at 4 pm US Eastern. If you are seriously interested but Tuesday afternoons aren’t good for you, reach out to me. If I can get a minimum of four, I’m willing to run a second group concurrently. We will do our best to provide recordings and transcripts.

April 2, 9, 16, 30, and May 7, 2024 (skipping April 23 so as not to interfere with Passover Seders). Fill out and submit the brief application if you’re ready to sign up.

Your Instructor/Facilitator, Shel Horowitz

With more than 20 years at the intersection of profitability and environmental/social good and more than 20 additional years in small business marketing and in activism, Shel’s “superpowers” include:

  • Finding your social change sweet spot: how you and your organization are uniquely positioned to create and market profitable products and services that address crises like hunger, poverty, racism/othering—even “unsolvable” ones like war and catastrophic climate change (the answers will be different for every business or nonprofit). Your offering will be based on your skills, interests, and capabilities.
  • Creating compelling ways to tell “the story behind the story” that generate interest, empathy, and engagement—in a press release, on a web page, in interviews and speeches, etc.
  • Writing informational and marketing materials that make a compelling case for you, your products and services, and your focus on higher good: reasons for your prospects to choose you!
  • Helping you write, publish, and market a book that establishes your expertise and credibility while helping to influence others toward a better world (Shel has published ten books under his own name and ghostwritten others, through big NYC publishers, small presses, his own publishing company, and a subsidy house, so he has expertise in whichever model will work best for you).
  • Suggesting win-win-win partnerships that broaden your market, add more capabilities to your offerings, and increase revenue opportunities. Shel can also write powerful introductory letters to your potential partners like the one that enabled one of his clients to do script consulting for Hollywood director Ed Zwick. Doing two books in the Guerrilla Marketing series with the legendary Jay Conrad Levinson was Shel’s best partnership in his own career.
  • Helping you secure knock-it-out-of-the-park endorsements and positioning those blurbs for visibility and sales. He wrote the letter that got one client a testimonial from basketball superstar Bob Cousy. Shel’s latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has 22 endorsements including Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, green living green business experts Alicia Bay Laurel, Jacquelyn Ottman, and Joel Makower, social media gurus Chris Brogan and Brian Solis, Go-Giver Bob Burg, BNI founder Ivan Misner, and other prominent people.

April 2, 9, 16, 30, and May 7, 2024 (skipping April 23 so as not to interfere with Passover Seders). Fill out and submit the brief application if you’re ready to sign up.

Build Your Spirits and Your Business with this One Shift

Photo Credit: fauxels via Pexels

Why Kindness Builds Success

Guest article by Rob Hatch

[Editor’s Note: I was introduced to Rob by the legendary Chris Brogan, his colleague at Owner Media, several years ago, and I read both his newsletter and Chris’s faithfully. Their styles are extremely different—Rob is the grounded, practical one while Chris is the big dreamer—and both give solid advice with a very personal touch. I’ve also corresponded with him repeatedly and find him to be every bit as much a mensch as this article suggests. This post originally appeared in his November 23 newsletter. You can read his bio and subscribe at the link in his byline, above –Shel]

“Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true. The kindest person in the room is often the smartest” – J.B. Pritzker.

This quote was from the Illinois Governor’s commencement speech at Northwestern University.


Too often, we excuse behaviors that are…well,
unkind. When discussing the achievements of remarkable individuals, we sometimes overlook lousy behavior. We may even cite their insolence as a critical element of their success or, worse, attempt to emulate it.


However, being a jerk is not a requirement for success. In fact, it is kindness that conveys strength and instills confidence.


You can be kind and still have high expectations.
You can be kind and still hold people accountable.
You can be kind and still be honest and direct.
You can be kind and still make difficult decisions others disagree with.
You can be kind and still be firm in the face of challenging situations.


I can’t promise it will make you the smartest person in the room. However, when I consider how to
frame my success, I want kindness as the foundation.

Have a great week.

Rob

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
Profiled by Green America at https://www.greenamerica.org/story/going-beyond-sustainability on life as a green/social; change entrepreneur—and how I got there (lots of background on my early life).

My op-ed on the US’s broken immigration system was published on Common Dreams (and also in two daily print newspapers here in Western Massachusetts):
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/biden-trump-immigration-policy

Profiled by at
https://copywriting.org/interviews/shel-horowitz/, on copywriting in general and on social-change/environmental business copywriting in particular.

Mari-Lyn Harris, who has interviewed me several times for various summits, taped a great interview with me that was scheduled to air on February 12 as part of her Change-Maker Summit. Then she had to postpone her whole summit for health reasons.


And Kevin Lee has had to postpone two tapings for his Power Marketing podcast.

I will post the links to both of them on the archive page for this month’s newsletter (click on any of the Read More buttons in this email) as I receive them.

It’s been a while since I had this section in the newsletter–but this year, I will be actively pursuing podcast interviews once I get back from a trip to China at the end of March. So hopefully this will be a more-or-less regular feature again.

The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming

The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming
By: Guy Dauncey

Actually, Dauncey presents far more than 101 solutions. Each two-page “solution” covers a broad topic, and within that framework, he might include a dozen or more. As an example, I opened randomly to solution #58, “Build a Smart Grid” (pp.192-193). Those two pages begin by pointing out issues with the old-fashioned grid and challenges that will render it obsolete. Then it presents a vision of the many improvements a smart-grid world would offer, from evening out the consumption highs and lows to eliminating the need for “peaker plants” to lowering homeowner electric bills—and notes potential overall savings in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Then it provides three action steps for electric utilities before concluding with six methods to address storage of renewable energy in the short term. It also includes a photo with caption, a sidebar with 15 websites to learn more, a quote from an expert, five reference citations to the extensive endnotes (22 pages’ worth)—and, amazingly, about two column-inches of white space.

Other solution spreads include charts and graphs, sidebars with citizen action steps (nine of these at solution #62 fill almost half a page), and many more resources (solution #32’s resource box includes 26 websites instead of a photo). The book designer did an amazing job of making everything except for the single-page final solution #101, which basically just tells the reader to get involved in whatever way is meaningful to them, fit exactly two pages.

And before we even get to the solutions—grouped into 11 economic sectors such as farming, governments, communities, activism, manufacturing, transportation, etc.—the first 75 pages are devoted to an overview that looks deeply at how humans have altered the earth’s current status—and what that means for our future.

I found quite a bit to agree with here, including several points I’ve been making for years in my speaking and writing. A few examples:

  1. Mindset is key. We have the technology to solve many of the biggest human-created problems, but the biggest battle is convincing others that yes, we can—and, in fact, we must.
  2. When you scrape away the superficials, war is usually about competing claims for resources such as energy, which he focuses on. I would also consider water, minerals, harbor access, etc. And because resource issues are solvable, peace actually is possible.
  3. The business case for addressing these issues (not just climate but the many related slices like hunger, poverty, and various kinds of discrimination) is so strong that executives should be asking managers why they are missing the enormously profitable opportunities in being part of the solution.
  4. We’re all in this together. While business and the profit motive can be significant movers toward the better world we’d all like to envision, government needs to use its regulatory power as well. And activists need to pressure both business and government. And academics, engineers, and scientists need to research cutting-edge solutions. And NGOs need to create the awareness not just of the problems, but of the solutions.

Because it was published back in 2009, many statistics in the book are probably obsolete. Even back then, his numbers showed an overwhelming case for shifting to clean energy. But the good news is the performance of clean-energy technologies compared with fossil and nuclear is likely to be even better, because prices of renewables have plummeted while fossil fuels have fluctuated wildly but tend toward higher prices (and are more expensive now than they were in 2009).

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.

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The Clean and Green Club, January 2024

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: January 2024

How to Change the World Without War or Weapons—and Three Reasons Why This Works
Photo Credit: RDNE Stock project via Pexels

In the video I review below, Bill McKibben of 350.org and Third Act cites Erica Chenoweth’s finding that when just 3-1/2 percent of a population engages in disciplined nonviolent resistance, it can be enough to topple a government.


He doesn’t mention that Chenoweth’s research also showed that
nonviolent resistance was 10 times more effective than violent insurrection. Those who used it were more likely to achieve even “impossible” goals, even when facing the most repressive governments in history, such as Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. AND they were more likely to achieve lasting change that didn’t just swing back with the next change in government. Other researchers including the late Gene Sharp have identified literally hundreds of nonviolent tactics. Sharp’s list of 198 nonviolent tactics predates the Internet and the Covid pandemic. Those two phenomena alone probably doubled the list.


Chenoweth was not originally an advocate of nonviolence. In fact, she was quite skeptical at first—until her own statistical analyses proved that nonviolence works better. This validates what lifetime pacifists like Stephen Zunes, George Lakey, Barbara Deming, Harvey Wasserman, Anna Gyorgy, Gene Sharp, my late friends Dave Dellinger, Frances Crowe, and Wally and Juanita Nelson, and many others have said for decades. It also validates the strategic commitment to nonviolence by people like MLK, Gandhi, and Mandela (none of whom was originally pacifist in principle).


The Three Reasons

I think I can shed some light on why this is true:

1) You can’t outgun the state. They have tanks, WMDs, and lots of person-power. Engaging in violence is letting them choose the battlefield and the tools. You probably can’t outgun the Oath Keepers either, unless you ARE the state. But
vigilante groups (sorry this article is so difficult to parse), predatory employers, and even governments (see citations above) don’t tend to be successful against disciplined massive resistance, even if they inflict damage against the nonviolent resisters.


2) When the state attacks unarmed civilians, it has a jiu-jitsu effect of creating sympathy for those who are attacked, not just locally but across the world (as is happening in Ukraine and Gaza right now). But when armed radicals attack the state or civilians or even destroy the property of the middle and upper classes, that rebound effect creates support for the government, who can then marginalize and isolate the opposition as “terrorists”–and have an excuse to clamp down further on civil liberties. We see this in the wildly disproportionate Israeli response to the (brutal and completely unacceptable) Hamas murder of 1200 and taking 240 as hostages.

Because of the Hamas brutality, Israel felt justified in killing tens of thousands (mostly civilians and including thousands of kids) and making millions homeless. But Israel’s government does not seem to realize that they have just sewn the seeds for another generation of embittered radicals to rise up against them. And just as the US, which had the moral high ground and support of the global community in the immediate aftermath of 9/11/2001 but lost it in the twin wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, found itself a pariah, so does Israel. (I’m writing this on December 23, 2023. The situation I describe is current as of that date.)


3) When a government falls by force of arms, the conquerors want to make sure they aren’t taken out next. Thus, the pressure to become more dictatorial, which erodes popular support. I am old enough to remember when thugs like Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and even the Iranian mullahs were welcomed as heroes by the local population, until they turned out to be just as vile as their predecessors, if not more. So the violence ends up blocking the transition to a better society, causing resentment and apathy.
Bonus Article: 12 New Year’s Resolutions for a More Ethical, Ecological, Profitable, and Successful Business

Normally, I only have one main article and a review of one resource. I’m doing this extra one as a gift to you to help you start your year off while you’re still thinking about this new beginning.

–Shel

Remember: businesses based on ethics and quality actually work better. With that in mind, here are twelve easy resolutions to inspire your business to achieve a very profitable 2024. This is not coming from God, just me, your newsletter writer. Accept and honor what’s useful to you. Modify or discard what’s not. 


1) I will base every aspect of my business on honesty, integrity, and quality.


2) I will make sure every employee, from janitor to CEO, is trained to view every interaction with a customer as a key step in the marketing process and to always give the customer respect and attention.


3) I will train and empower every employee to let the customer go away feeling good about the entire interaction.


4) I will stand behind my products and services. It is better to refund the money and create a positive buzz.


5) Understanding that it costs an average of five times more to bring in a new customer as to keep an existing one, I will see that the entire organization exceeds customer expectations.


6) Recognizing that my competitors can be my strongest allies, I will initiate at least one joint venture (after all, if FedEx and the Postal Service, Apple and IBM, and General Motors and Toyota can cooperate, surely I can too).


7) If my company is not the best answer to prospect’s needs, I will refer that prospect to the company that can best serve, if I know of one. 


8) I will devote business resources to make the world a better place.


9) I will volunteer on a community project and set up incentives for my employees to volunteer on the projects of their choice.


10) I will base decisions on the Abundance Principle that there is enough to go around, and not on market share.


11) I will reduce my firm’s use of water and energy, and reduce my family’s use at home, and inform others of the easy changes I’ve made. (See
my ebook, Painless Green, for 111 suggestions)


12) I will grow by marketing the advantages of doing business with a socially and environmentally conscious, ethical company.


Four of marketing and profitability consultant/copywriter Shel Horowitz’s 10 books cover marketing for green and social equity businesses. Three of those have won awards, including his most recent book,
Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson).

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

History of Nonviolence: From Thoreau and Tolstoy and Gandhi towards the present

History of Nonviolent Action: From Thoreau and Tolstoy and Gandhi towards the present
Narrated by Bill McKibben

If you’ve been on my list for a while, you probably know that I consider my two careers of activism and marketing to be inextricably braided together. I’ve brought lessons from the business world into my activism, and lessons from activism into business. The synergy makes both far more effective than either on their own. And on the activist side, I’ve been a proponent, practitioner, and publicizer of nonviolent social change. I’ve read a lot of the research, and it all proves that nonviolent struggles are more likely to win, less likely to result in mass civilian death (though it does happen sometimes, at the hands of particularly brutal opponents), and more likely to create lasting positive change. Think about the US civil rights, feminist, safe energy and LGBTQ movements, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and Arab Spring.


Bill McKibben, founder of both 350.org and Third Act, narrates an hour-long history of nonviolent civil disobedience going all the way back to Thoreau, who influenced Tolstoy, who in turn corresponded with a very young Gandhi, whose work both in South Africa and pre-partition India in turn influenced MLK. The video doesn’t explicitly say so, but MLK clearly influenced Mandela, and so the circle came back around to South Africa. And MLK and Mandela have certainly impacted every nonviolent campaign I’m familiar with in our own time. Because I’ve been studying this movement since the 1970s, I knew much of the history he narrates, but I hadn’t seen most of the wonderful archival footage it includes, such as Gandhi standing with his Muslim counterpart Abdul Ghaffar Khan and a movie clip of the Salt March.


Of course, activism is not only, or even mostly, about charismatic leaders. These are people’s movements and some of them involved tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. This video is the first of a four-part series. If you change the number at the end of https://thirdact.org/events/direct-action-series-webinar-1/ (to 2, then 3, then 4), you ought to be able to watch them as they become available. The second one is available now and the third one will air at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, January 18. You can register on the ThirdAct.org site.

And if you’re not yet an activist, I hope watching this series may help you find a passion for changing the world through nonviolent action. If you think you can’t make a difference, consider these blog posts: the second and fourth parts of a five-part series I wrote reflecting back on the 40
th anniversary of the 1977 Seabrook Occupation (which was a life-changing event for me):
https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-2-outside-the-armories/

https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-4-shifts-in-the-culture/

(If you want to read the whole series all the way through, start at
https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-1/ and click the link to the next part at the bottom of each segment.)

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.

————–

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The Clean and Green Club, December 2023

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: December 2023

How Would YOU React if you Received This Note?

Photo Credit: Christina Morillo via Pexels

This email from GlobalGiving, a UK-based nonprofit, might be the best letter to donors I’ve ever seen—and it’s not even a direct fundraising pitch. My reaction was to immediately write to them asking permission to reprint their letter and analyze it in my newsletter. As you can see, they responded with a yes (in a gracious and warm brief note).

First their message, then my analysis in the footnotes:

[Subject line] Thank you for your generosity, SHEL
1

Hi SHEL,


As we approach the end of the year and reflect on the many moments that defined it, I am in awe of people like you.
Your support of organizations like The Nyaka AIDS Orphans Project2 has touched so many lives, and I want to take a moment to express my profound gratitude for your generosity.3

Your gift hasn’t just funded a project, it’s uplifted a community. 4 Across the globe, locally-led organizations are pillars of change and innovation.5 They understand their communities’ unique needs and dreams, and thanks to your support, they can continue their invaluable work and grow their impact.6

This year, many communities are facing heartbreak and conflict. The circumstances under which local nonprofits are working are truly unfathomable7 and yet they inspire me with their ability to hold onto hope.8 I strive to hold them in the light, to stand beside them, and to send a deep desire for healing.9

Your generosity has touched countless lives.10 As we move into the season of gatherings and gratitude, know that you’ve made a difference.11

May your holidays be a reflection of the hope and joy you’ve given to others.12

With heartfelt gratitude,

White middle-aged womanVictoria Vrana
CEO, GlobalGiving13

1
Here and in the salutation, they use personalization, which is a good thing when not done to excess unless there are typos—but I would have run the mail merge through a case changer so regardless of how the subscriber entered their name, only the first letter was capitalized
.
2 Mentioning a specific charity with a link to that charity’s page on the GlobalGiving site is brilliant. It creates a direct connection with the results of donors’ gifts. Right at the top, the landing page lists the year that organization was founded, the total raised for this charity on the GlobalGiving platform, the years the two organizations have partnered, and the number of projects funded. Then a 22-word mission statement, followed by clickable listings of 22 funded or fundable projects with donation links to the ones that haven’t been fully funded yet.
3 This sounds sincere. It’s grateful, but not obsequious.
4 A perfect way to pull in the bigger goal of sweeping transformation. You’re not just funding one project. You’re uplifting a community.
5 And now it’s gone global, and it’s about massive transformation.
6 But then it circles back to the people on the ground, doing the work. So we have local to global, to local someplace else.
7 Yes, she’s tugging on a pain point—but it’s not the focus of the letter.
8 And she moves immediately to hope and optimism rather than trying to dig a “misery hole” (as far too many nonprofits do).
9 She includes a prayer—without calling it a prayer, which can be a divisive label—for those dedicated workers she just cited. I found that a lovely touch.
10 Another pat on the back for her donors.
11 This is as close as she comes to a fundraising pitch. She states explicitly that the recipient of this letter has made a difference. She implies that the donor could continue to make a difference by giving again, but she has too much respect for her readers’ intelligence to come out and ask. And this, to a person who sees a gazillion fund appeals, especially in the last six weeks of the year, is really refreshing. I happen to be writing this on Giving Tuesday and I received about 50 fund appeals today. I didn’t even open them. Too many and not a good way to quickly tell the good organizations apart from the lesser ones. Her letter arrived on US Thanksgiving Day. I’m betting that a lot of people might be motivated to give because she DIDN’T ask! And yes, I am aware that this is heresy in the marketing world.
12 Another really sweet touch, and again, something that could have turned saccharine in the hands of a less skilled copywriter. She reflects back the light and good that the donor has done—right back to the donor.
13 She’s literally putting a face on the organization by including her picture. The email also used a template to add color and visual interest (I would guess Constant Contact). And she DOESN’T include a PS—another marketing heresy. So don’t be afraid to break the rules. Know what you’re doing and why, know why these rules have been developed over time. But then don’t be afraid to violate them and follow your heart.

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

Heart Centered Business: Healing from toxic business culture so your small business can thrive

Heart Centered Business: Healing from toxic business culture so your small business can thrive
by: Mark Silver (Wildhouse Publications, 2023)

How I wish someone had given me this book 41 years ago when I was brand new in business, very unsure of myself, and confused about how I would fit in to a business culture I had learned to despise! Of course, it was only published this year. But I hope it finds its way to many progressive and holistic people who are starting or struggling with heart-based businesses.


The book is a treasure trove, mixing conventional business wisdom (e.g., the crucial roles of business systems, marketing, and financial literacy—and some really excellent advice (p. 84) on pricing) with very UNconventional approaches such as:

  • It’s totally understandable that you might worry about participating in a business culture that has embraced some really icky stuff—but there’s absolutely no reason you have to embrace the ick. It is possible, and in many ways actually easier, to run an ethical, heart-centered business that exists to serve (and he infers that maybe we who follow this path can eventually help change that culture).
  • Marketing, as far too many businesses practice it, is responsible for quite a bit of that ick factor—using disinformation, pressure tactics, pain-point hyping, and attempting to funnel customers into ever-larger purchases whether or not the offer is right for them. But again, there are plenty of ways to market that are in total alignment with the purpose and mission of a heart-centered business. Silver devotes a lot of space (pp.123-165) to marketing the right ways while rejecting the slimy approaches. 
  • Overnight success is not only uncommon, it’s undesirable. Much better to let your business gain traction organically, and it’s fine if it takes a few years to really get solid. He suggests having the resources to let the business evolve toward viability, when possible. I recognize, and I’m betting he does as well, that sometimes we don’t have that luxury.

Silver is strongly influenced by decades studying and practicing Sufism. His 12 chapter titles give a great introduction to his philosophy, including, among others, “Healing Your Relationship with Business”, “Healing Your Relationship with Money”, “The True Purpose of Marketing”, “What Your Heart Needs So Your Business Can Succeed”, and a powerful two-page unnumbered final blessing just called “A Blessing.”

Silver divides a business lifecycle into four stages: Creation (pp. 76-89); Concentration (pp. 89-100; Momentum (pp. 102-109); and Independence (pp. 110-120). Interestingly, he doesn’t see Stage 4 as seen desirable for many businesses, and spends most of those pages helping business owners evaluate whether they actually would benefit from embracing Stage 4 or if they’re better off hanging out in Stage 3. He also cautions that it could easily take two to four years to move from Stage 1 to Stage 3, and it might take just as long to move from Stage 3 to Stage 4 (p. 122). For many of us with very small businesses, attempting to scale, and to create a business that can survive our own involvement, is simply not worth the effort—and as someone who has stayed a one-person shop with some freelance help for four decades, I really respect him for being willing to say this in public.

Marketing also has different stages in Silver’s view—he calls them journeys: Becoming Known; Nourishing Those Waiting; and Supporting Referrals. They’re less linear than the business stage; sometimes, they even overlap. And instead of the worn-out funnel metaphor that assumes everyone will take the same path and arrive at the same destination, he praises the “garden path,” where everyone can determine their own route, their own sequence, and their own destination within a larger whole.

In discussing the Third Journey, he points out something obvious and true but ignored by far too many businesses: if you’re seeking referrals, make sure you have the systems in place to handle them. In my own referral handling, I take this very seriously. If people are spending some of their precious social capital to do you a good turn, you need to follow up properly, explore whether there’s a fit, express thanks, refer to others if appropriate, etc. Otherwise, your existing client’s good experience will be damaged by their referral’s poor experience, and neither is likely to patronize or endorse you again. It’s pretty easy to do this correctly, so be ready when others come knocking.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.

————–

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The Clean and Green Club, November 2023

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: November 2023

Don’t Let ANYONE Tell You This is a Good Idea

Photo Credit: Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels

I tried to watch an SNL skit sent to me by a marketing colleague. First, a hoodie ad at 2:49–so I went and did something else. I have plenty of sweaters and almost never buy from online ads. Then they hit me with a 49-minute ad for some nutritional thing. No way to fast-forward to the end, so I exited immediately. And I never got to see the skit.

Good morning, YouTube. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that pissing off your customers is not a smart business strategy?

Never mind the mismatch of message and market (I don’t purchase nutritional supplements other than vitamins)—you don’t hit ANYONE with a 49-minute infomercial when they want to watch a three-minute video. The only thing YouTube accomplished with this was that henceforth, if people ask what video platform I recommend for their content, the answer will be Vimeo. And if I were running that nutritional company, I’d be hiring a different Chief Marketing Officer. It’s totally desirable to offer a 49-minute infomercial to those who are seeking detailed information—though it would be much better to offer a dozen 3-minute videos covering specific aspects plus an overview. But it’s totally counterproductive to jam it into the eyes and ears of people who weren’t even looking for that type of product. This unfortunate company actually paid YouTube to piss me off. Ugh!

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want

 From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want
by: Rob Hopkins (Chelsea Green, 2019)

When I did my TEDx talk several years ago, I called it “‘Impossible’ Is A Dare!” So I was primed to love a book that looks at possibility as both an open door—and a door opener. And indeed, I loved it!


Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Towns movement and of Transition Town Totnes (the community in the UK that created the concept), envisions a world where it’s always OK to ask questions, to try out new ideas, and to think holistically at local, regional, national, and global levels. He envisions societies that embrace—and democratize—the arts, follow patient-centered/student-centered health and educational models (including Reggio Emilia, p. 93, which was the educational model used by the elementary school my own kids attended), use biomimicry to harness nature’s wisdom develop over eons, and more.


While many of his examples are drawn from either the Transition Town movement or living experiments around the UK, he goes well beyond these sources, drawing on currents as diverse as comedy improv, art therapy, temporary takeovers of town squares and other public spaces—all leavened with a lot of play and humor—in locations as widespread as: Bolivia; rural Iceland; Jackson, Mississippi; Mexico including both extremely rural Chiapas and extremely urban Mexico City; Bologna, Italy; both modern and ancient China, to name a few. His thinking is influenced by practical visionaries from speculative fiction authors Moshin Hamid of Pakistan and Ursula LeGuin of the US to today’s Extinction Rebellion global youth movement.


Some of it we’ve heard before, like making sure to get away from our screens and devices and out into nature, get off social media and into real-world human-to-human connections. And some might be new, like the idea that “boredom is your imagination calling you” (p. 79).


A lot of it is telling the stories of people who dared to think and feel differently—and then build new and different kinds of experiences, institutions, and even entire communities out of those new thoughts and feelings—from the movement to declare all of London the UK’s first city-wide national park (pp. 62-64, 126-128) to a school system that supplies its cafeterias with student-grown organic food (p. 155) to asking the kinds of questions that create longing and wonder (p. 126).


Hopkins himself asks great questions, including how would we need to evolve democracy to replace “the imagination-devouring dragon of endless growth and economic development…with something more humane, more interesting, and better suited to meet the needs of the people and the planet?” (p. 142, and his answer posits the creation of a national Ministry of Imagination that would be involved in all aspects of governance).


Each chapter title is actually another sweeping question:

  1. What if we took play seriously?
  2. What if we considered imagination vital to our health?
  3. What if we followed nature’s lead
  4. What if we fought back to reclaim our attention?
  5. What if school nurtured young imagination?
  6. What if we became better storytellers
  7. What if we started asking better questions?
  8. What if your leaders prioritised [he’s British] the cultivation of imagination
  9. What if all this came to pass?

For Hopkins, imagination in all its forms, and the art across many disciplines that it generates, is essential—and he says it’s long past time for the educational system to acknowledge its importance. After noting that creative pursuits generate more jobs than aerospace, automotive, fossil fuels and life sciences together, he continues:

     Being involved in art at school can increase cognitive abilities by 17 percent and           improve attainment across all subjects. Students from low-income families are               three times more likely to get a degree and twice as likely to vote if they do art in           school. They are also more employable. (p. 88)

Ask yourself—and your government—the sorts of questions Hopkins does. And read this book. It could change your life.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.

————–

Links in this newsletter may earn commissions. Please click here for our privacy and endorsement policy.

 

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The Clean and Green Club, October 2023

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: October 2023

Products that Should Have Been
Photo Credit: Fauxels via Pexels 
One cool way to get the juices flowing AND have quite a bit of fun is to make stuff up and then write promotional material for it. The first time I remember doing this was in 1978 or 1979, when I worked as a manuscript reader for a New York City literary agency. A particularly bad manuscript led to this poem (copyright 1979 by Shel Horowitz, all rights reserved):

Advertisement (Melodramamine)
And now, from the makers of Dramamine, for motion sickness…
an exciting new product,
Melodramamine, for EMOTION sickness.
Yes, this special formula will overcome that nasty, nauseous feeling
from indulgence in overwritten books.
Let Melodramamine return YOU to the world of literary enjoyment.
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My 2000 book Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World had a few examples, too. One was a series of six radio commercials for a fictitious Armenian grocery: five illustrating how the same business could target different market segments on different shows—and one demonstrating how they could get too clever and forget that the purpose of an ad is to get people to buy (that one involved singing apricots and the arrest of their importer). While Grassroots Marketing is officially out of print, I still have copies for sale, with the price reduced all the way from the original $22.95 down to just $10 before shipping for the paperback, $10 and no shipping cost for the PDF ebook. (And while you’re on my shopping cart, why not pick up a copy of my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World? It’s all about building environmental and social good into profitable products, services, and mindsets. You’ll save on shipping costs by getting both at the same time.)

And sometimes, I make up products without writing copy for them. Anyone who wants to start a Chicagoland heavy metal festival called Illinoise or a nonsmoking vegan casino in (guess what city) called Las Vegans—you have my blessing. My daughter enjoys this kind of game too. Years ago, she came up with L’Auberge d’Aubergine, which translates as The Eggplant Inn. So, besides a few laughs, what do you get from doing this sort of exercise?

Most of all, you get a creativity jumpstart. It gets your brain thinking in different ways. You think about what’s missing in the marketplace and what niche you night fill (not with your imaginary product but with a real product that you imagine and then create)—and you think about what makes a good name for a product, service, company, or even an idea, which is a very good skill to have. I actually have a section of Grassroots Marketing covering eight factors to consider in choosing a name. And for those doing social change and planetary healing, it’s a way of expanding what’s possible. Conceiving of something can be a first step to achieving it. For every invention that happened through serendipity, a lot more showed up by doing the work.

Of course, if you’re in the market for a new business name and would rather not do it yourself, drop me a line. While I’m not a professional naming consultant (and I don’t charge like one either), I have named a fair number of things over the years.

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

The Sustainability Scorecard: How to Implement and Profit from Unexpected Solutions

The Sustainability Scorecard: How to Implement and Profit from Unexpected Solutions
by Urvashi Bhatnagar and Paul Anastas (Chelsea Green, 2022)

Yes, another book brimming with examples of companies that re-imagined and then reinvented, piloting initiatives that if widely copied would go a long way toward greening the planet. I’ve reviewed plenty of those, and this will not be the last one, I’m sure. A few things make this one different:

  • Anastas’ expertise in green chemistry
  • A data-driven, quantifiable scorecard that companies can use or adopt to drive innovation, working on the principle that before you improve something, you have to measure it
  • Emphasis on large corporations
  • A proposed shift in the sustainability conversations at those corporations—from risk management to strategic opportunity (first introduced on page 14 and a theme throughout the book): “We can achieve superior performance, convenience, efficiency, and profitability not in spite of a focus on sustainability but because of it” (p. 28)

In my consulting, I personally don’t generally begin with the data, preferring to start with the vision and then figure out how the engineers can get us there—but I don’t think either approach precludes the other. And while I run a one-person business and don’t ever expect to be an employee of a huge corporation, I still found significant utility in this book. The writing is clear, and the data-driven outcomes are impressive. Small businesses and solopreneurs have to think differently about implementation, but can still draw many useful lessons.

Bhatnagar and Anastas design their whole-lifecycle scorecard around four principles: waste prevention, maximizing efficiency and performance, supply chain renewability, and safe degradation at the end of a product’s lifecycle—and measure three categories of impact: environmental, employee, and community (p. 16). One key takeaway is to design safety and end-of-life considerations in from the beginning—preferably by turning waste into monetizable inputs for other products (pp. 48-50, 81-83).


As a marketer, I find it odd that their scorecard aims for the lowest possible score: a zero in each metric. I would have designed it to give points for good initiatives so that a higher score provides companies with a clear and obvious marketing benefit. But even though it gives the book its name, the instrument is only a small portion of the content.


Much of the rest is examples of companies jumpstarting eco-friendly and socially just innovation. To list a few among many: design electronic chips WITHOUT generating 600 times the product weight in waste (p. 63); sequester not just whatever carbon you create but some of the backlog (p. 65); lower not just carbon footprint but water footprint (pp. 73-74); eliminate toxic chemical flame retardants by switching to non-flammable materials (p. 80); extract and recycle the water in human waste while turning urine into electricity (pp. 116, 118); replace forever chemicals including poisonous plasticizers such as phthalates with safe, degradable alternatives (p. 133) and chemical insecticides with yeast-grown non-toxic ones (p. 144); change pharmaceutical packaging so extra doses can be used instead of thrown away (p. 136); eliminate hunger by approaching food waste differently (pp. 147-149); extract and reuse materials like nickel and cobalt from used batteries (pp. 151-152); fund more expensive green and social justice initiatives through the savings in health care costs (p. 174)…


A few organizations get extended case studies, some including their full scorecards:

  • Electronics giant Philips (pp. 106-112; 191-197) already generates 70 percent of revenue from green products and services and is aiming for 100 percent.
  • Hospital system Gunderson Health (pp. 159-161) parlayed a $2MM investment into annual savings of $1.2MM—that’s an astounding 60 percent annual ROI— including slashing the cost of managing pharmaceutical waste from $151,000 to less than $10,000 per year.
  • Janitorial products company Coastwide Laboratories (pp. 161-170; 177-185) re-engineered its product line to combine functions in fewer products, marketed its private-label solutions to some of the largest manufacturers in the country, and brought distribution in-house, allowing them to market honestly as the lowest cost solution even while increasing the product price (because the customer only needed one product to replace two or more).
  • P2Science, maker of eco-friendly silicones for cosmetics and hair products, boosted yield to 95 percent while simplifying the production process.

The book is also full of sets of principles and steps that would be useful to companies of any size. And it has a terrific index, which I wish more publishers would model.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.

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The Clean and Green Club, September 2023

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: September 2023

To all those, like me, who are entering the Jewish year 5784 tonight: Shanah tovah!
This Month’s Tip:
Rule-Breaking Wordless Ad Convinces a Word Nerd
Home being sold by singer Ray LaMontagne

Home being sold by singer Ray LaMontagne

Spend six minutes with this video, designed to sell a 104-acre estate belonging to the singer Ray LaMontagne, with an asking price of $5.25 MM. What did you notice?

Here are a few things I spotted:


1. It breaks a rule of mine that text is more important than visuals. There is not one word spoken, and almost no text displayed—just the property address in the first frame and a slide of contact info for the agents at the very end.

2. It breaks a well-known real estate rule to show rooms empty, so prospects can imagine their own furniture and taste imposed on the property. These rooms are lushly furnished and one of them prominently includes a full-size hand-loom, before we’ve even seen the kitchen.

3. Nearly the entire first minute is focused on the setting, most of it emphasizing an almost tactile immersion in the natural world. We don’t get to go inside except for one brief early glance until 1:25, almost a quarter of the way through. And the natural theme is carried through into the house by the presence of plants and flowers, the capturing of sunlight, etc., and returns in the quick tour of outbuildings and grounds at the end.

4. Subtle reminders sneak in about LaMontagne’s career—the mixing board, the beautiful piano—reinforcing that this house belonged to a celebrity.

5. It’s EFFECTIVE! I tend to be a hard sell, but if I were in the market for a multimillion-dollar historic home/estate/retreat center, I’d be setting up an appointment. Admittedly, falling in love with this property is easy for me because I live three towns away and am familiar with the area, happen to love the town where it’s located, and already live in a (much more modest and significantly older) historic home. I see the negatives: excessive reliance on open fireplaces (highly polluting and not efficient—and for me, a health irritant); no green features highlighted anywhere in the video—which means the house is probably an energy nightmare; possible absence of a two-base kitchen sink; lots of buildings and acreage to maintain, meaning a payroll. But they wouldn’t keep me from making a bid if I had a reason to own such a property.

With LaMontagne’s fame and celebrity friends, and an asking price that will seem really cheap in those circles for those used to California or New York prices, I’m expecting this house will not be on the market long and the video will probably be taken down once a deal closes. If it’s already gone when you go to look, you can see if a copy shows up on Archive.org’s Wayback Machine, or at least view still pictures on Zillow.

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

Recommended Book: The Blue Economy 3.0: The Marriage of Science, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Creates a New Business Model that Transforms Society

The Blue Economy 3.0: The Marriage of Science, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Creates a New Business Model that Transforms Society
by Gunter Pauli (Xlibris, 2017)

What can termites show us about zero-energy air conditioning and heating, or zebras about keeping cool outside on a hot day by turning themselves into air current machines?

How can coffee farmers create a new high-protein, high-profit crop that regenerates forests, protects oak trees, and has an economic return far greater than just the coffee bean—from the 99.8 percent of the plant that’s usually thrown away?

How can mosquitos teach the medical world how to make injections painless?


These are some of the many questions Pauli asks and answers in his amazing book. Pauli’s solutions are rooted in both biomimicry—learning from the plants, animals, fungi, microbes, and even rocks around us—and replacing invasive chemistry with eco-friendly physics. And he has decades of practical experience designing, funding, and implementing these systemic, holistic solutions and helping small communities build whole new economies from these insights.
I heard him speak at a conference about 20 years ago and was blown away, so I was thrilled to get my hands on his book.

Right from the beginning, pages 2-3, he lays out four principles (with several subsections):

  1. Be Constantly Inspired by Nature
  2. Change the Rules of the Game
  3. Focus on What is Locally Available
  4. See Change as the Only Constant

Taking inspiration from nature starts with understanding nature’s own principles: everything has at least one purpose—and usually several purposes, nothing is wasted, solutions are very efficient and use the least possible energy and materials, everything is interdependent and part of a complex ecosystem with many parts, and course-correction happens automatically.

Pauli’s solution set—much of it tested in real-world projects—includes circular systems where “residue” (he prefers not to think of it as waste) becomes input for the next link in the loop. So the 99.8 of the plant that coffee processors now pay to get rid of becomes fertile ground to grow shitake mushrooms (p. 10, p. 135, and many other references) as well as provide several other benefits including odor control (pp. 137-138); medical supply companies can mimic the mosquito’s conical penetrator to reduce injection pain; HVAC designers can copy termites’ ancient zero-energy temperature control for buildings (pp. 53-56)—or the way zebras’ stripes create convection currents and vortices that keep them cool outdoors in the hot African summers (pp. 56-57). Architects can design inexpensive earthquake-proof bamboo homes and regenerate the bamboo far more quickly than a forest (pp. 253-255).

Pauli envisions a world where we no longer need toxic batteries, health-hazardous radio-wave-based Internet (he prefers to use light), or even solar and wind farms. Innovations with cascading benefits across multiple industries will make them obsolete while raising living standards, health outcomes, local self-reliance, and connection with community. And much of this is stuff we already know how to do. Three among many examples:

  • Seaweed-based (p. 112) or even maggot-based antibacterial protection (p. 162) can replace antibiotics
  • Tomato processing residue can be turned into sunscreen and lipstick (pp. 181-182)
  • Mining, that traditionally dirty industry, can create paper from stone tailings (pp. 214-215), as well as pure drinking water as a byproduct while chelating bacteria can detoxify the metals that used to pollute that water (pp. 218-19).

He’s posted 109 more at https://www.theblueeconomy.org/en/project-library/
Pauli says we humans were designed to live in alkaline environments, yet many human constructions create an acid world that’s not healthy for us. Since this was the first time I encountered this idea, I checked with Terry Cline of Dwellright. Terry is an architect and Feng Shui practitioner who pays a lot of attention to the interaction of human factors with spaces. He and I are each other’s clients and friends. Terry agrees that our lives would be better if they were more alkaline.

One caution: while Pauli’s ideas are brilliant and his/his colleagues’ implementations are astonishing, his writing is less approachable than it could be (one more pass by a skilled editor would have helped a lot). He’s Austrian and he writes with the dense syntax of his first language (German). He’s also a non-linear thinker, so the book’s organization is a bit rough (and made worse by the lack of an index in a book that cries out for one). And I wish he would not revisit the same examples over and over again. But it’s worth the struggle. I took 9 pages of notes and feel that my life is better for reading it.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.

————–

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The Clean and Green Club, August 2023

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: August 2023

Do You HAVE to Kaizen Your Headline? Why Not Try This Instead?

Image Credit: Mikael Blomkvist via Pexels 

In 40+ years as a student and practitioner of copywriting, I’ve often come across the advice to only test one variable. But some people might be taking that too far. In my email recently, I saw someone assert that the variable has to be tiny, like changing a single word in a headline.

You might remember that I most recently discussed the difference between Kaizen (continuous improvement, usually through small steps) technology improvements and technological Great Leaps in my October newsletter. Just like any other culture change, I think copywriting changes can be Kaizen—or they can be Great Leaps.

Let’s say there was such a thing as a haircutting robot, and you’re a copywriter assigned to write headlines for that device. Sure, you can test a single-word Kaizen variable like New Instant Salon Cuts Your Hair While You Sleep vs. This Instant Salon Cuts Your Hair While You Sleep–but I think it’s also fine to test a big-leap variable like New Instant Salon Cuts Your Hair While You Sleep vs. Wake Up Tomorrow Morning with the Hairstyle of Your Dreams.

I’ve always understood the one-variable rule to mean that if you’re testing the headline, don’t change the body copy, the layout, etc. in the same test. But the change could be as small or as bold as you want.

And why not test three or even four headlines in an A/B/C or A/B/C/D test? As long as it’s emailed to the same demographics and the same list on the same day, we can track a lot more things now than we could in the old days, so why not? We can even test for things like how response translates into long-term customer value. One version may get more clicks but fewer buys or lower total purchases. Make sure your testing gives you the metrics you need to properly evaluate your efforts.

By the way, I’d argue that there may be good reasons to violate the one-change rule, and strategies for understanding the data when you do. As an example, if you’re dealing with a time-sensitive offer that’s going to be worthless in a month, you may want to test a whole lot of stuff all at once. Go ahead, call me a marketing heretic!

And if you want a heretic’s fresh thinking in YOUR marketing, especially if your firm makes a positive difference in the world call me: 413-586-2388 (8 a.m. to 10 p.m. US Eastern Time—or email me with the subject, Your Marketing Services—Newsletter Reader. (Note that I’ll be away with very limited email through August 22. I recommend writing your email right away but scheduling it to arrive a few days after I get back.)

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

Living a Committed Life: Finding Freedom and Fulfillment in a Purpose Larger Than Yourself

Living a Committed Life: Finding Freedom and Fulfillment in a Purpose Larger Than Yourself
by Lynne Twist (Berrett-Koehler, 2023, with Mary Earle Chase)

“The greatest threat to creating the future we want is fear, discouragement, and cynicism. People are dis-couraged because they’re disconnected from their own courage. They think somebody else is supposed to fix things…Once you get back in touch with your own courage, you realize, ‘Oh, I can do something about this. I care. I have heart. I have power. I can act!’ It is only in action that we can find hope; active hope becomes a beacon for our lives.” (pp. 196-197, hyphenation of “discouraged” is in the original and is deliberate)

Lynne Twist knows a thing or two about finding the power and creating action. Starting as an ordinary housewife in an acquisitive, suburban lifestyle, she has focused since the 1970s on creating a better world. She started and nurtured several major organizations including Pachamama Alliance and played a key role in several others, among them The Hunger Project. She’s helped organize female Nobel Laureates to harness their celebrity to increase their impact. She’s helped remote indigenous communities in Latin America and Africa seek justice from the corporations exploiting their land and undermining their traditions—while, at the same time, finding ways to work respectfully within that culture to drastically improve health outcomes (especially around birthing) even when that meant changing millennia-old patterns. She’s even taken on the demon of creating a positive relationship with money: overcoming scarcity mentalities (personal, regional, global) while setting boundaries of sufficiency instead of always “needing” more. She’s also a warm and accessible human being, as I found out when I attended a conference several years ago where she was presenting.


Twist was lucky enough to be directly mentored by (and built personal relationships) with quite a few luminaries including Buckminster Fuller, Mother Teresa, and various indigenous shamans—and much of their wisdom is also in these pages.


And she’s written a wonderful memoir/how-to manual on how to create meaning through social and environmental justice. It didn’t take me long to read this well-written, very accessible, and super-inspiring book.


Twist tells us not to worry if we don’t know how we’ll accomplish whatever lofty goals we’ve set. We take a stand for something positive, make the commitment, and the pieces to enable it begin to come together (p. 23).


Twist’s own five key commitments are:

  1. Ending world hunger
  2. Preserving the Amazon rainforest
  3. “Changing the dream of the modern world” (away from materialism and hoarding and toward recognizing the enoughness around us)
  4. Transforming how people relate to money
  5. Empowering women (p. 38)

All within a larger purpose of “creating a world that works for everyone with no one and nothing left out—what I call a you and me world” (p. 56, emphasis in original). Some of that happens when we change the narrative and the context, for example, talking about resilient “survivors” rather than passive “victims” (p. 85)—whether the person has survived directly-experienced violence or abuse, fraud at the hands of the Bernie Madoffs of the world, environmental catastrophe, a health crisis, etc. Another reframing (pp. 90-91) is that events happen FOR us, rather than TO us, and there are gifts to be found in even the tough experiences. She describes finding her own resilience after setbacks throughout the book, particularly pp. 104-106, 135-139, and 157-160.

You need to read the rest of the book for full context, but don’t neglect the action-focused final chapters 13-15 and the brief conclusion. Think of them as a short-form guide to effective activism. Chapter 13 shines a light on the crucial but often-ignored steps of self-care so as not to burn out, forgiveness (in both directions) to avoid strangling on your own hatred, and always seeking the new possibilities that arise from the wreckage. Chapter 14 is about discovering your big dream, taking your stand, and nine different ways to stay energized as your commitment begins to manifest. Chapter 15 uses the metaphors of hospicing the dysfunctional society we inherited and birthing not only new systems and institutions, but “a new kind of human being” (p. 193). And the conclusion is a quick pep talk, recognizing not only the contributions of the full-time activists and the famous, but the power of ordinary people to make change:

“Living your commitment does not mean you have to do something big and global. People who live their commitments are kindergarten teachers, nurses, firefighters, entrepreneurs, mothers—anyone who sees their life as a gift that they feel called to give in service. What is different is that your work and your life are now held in a larger context. You are focused not just on yourself and your job, but on the bigger picture—seeking to bring about systemic or transformational change…It is not the size of the commitment, but the intention and focus: What is the fulfillment of your       life’s purpose—your ‘splendid torch’ to hand on to future generations?” (p.201)

Pick up this book and read its life-changing contents in full. Take notes, and look for—and implement—the ways YOU can make a difference!

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.

————–

Links in this newsletter may earn commissions. Please click here for our privacy and endorsement policy.

 

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The Clean and Green Club, July 2023

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: July 2023

What Got Left Off His List?

In a recent newsletter, Ian Brodie discusses having a signature style for your public-facing writing: the stuff that you write to draw an audience specifically to YOU (or, fellow writers-for-hire, for your client). You might have to subscribe to see it; I had to subscribe (again) to get into the archives so I could share the direct link. He describes several possibilities in some detail:

  1. Cause-motivated maverick
  2. Serious expert
  3. Charming and funny
  4. Angry ranter
  5. Experienced friend

Brodie recognizes that his list is not complete. And here’s one I’d add: Passionate purveyor (PP).

I think a lot of you are probably PPs: you run some kind of artisan business where quality and craftsmanship matter far more than volume. Maybe you make the product, maybe you sell or service it. Maybe you run a retail store that showcases your curation of those kinds of products, and you don’t just put stuff on the shelves but work with your customers to understand their needs and help them sort through the offerings to find the perfect one for them at that exact moment.


Two days before writing this, my wife and I spent $2000 on a bed set from someone who did just that. Yes, we probably could have saved a few hundred dollars elsewhere—but even as frugal as I am, I wanted the guidance. (And I bought the floor model, which knocked the $3800 price down by $1800). We went to three bed and mattress stores that day, starting with the one that got the sale. The other two convinced us that we had made a good choice not just in what we bought, but in whom we bought it from.


You want to be the best so your customers and clients will fall in love with what you do (and, perhaps subconsciously, by extension you want them to fall in love with you—nothing wrong with that!). You might do this through your sales floor personnel (as the bed store did), but also with personal touches in your signage: the way you describe a certain cheese, or an incisive book, or the comfort and quality of the all-natural fabrics you use—in short, telling the product’s story in a compelling way.


My first understanding of the power of the PP approach harnessed to story-based copywriting was through
Drew Kaplan’s DAK catalog in the 1980s. I think he could probably have fascinated me into wanting to buy a cardboard box. While I would only buy a few items a year from him, I would eagerly devour the catalogs, reading about products that didn’t interest me at all just to catch his enthusiasm—his passion. The link above takes you to an archive that allows you to download any of the catalogs just by clicking on the cover, no charge.


If this is what you do, make it very clear in your marketing. People will pay more to do business with experts who understand how to find the best match for each and every buyer—who understand that one size never fits all, who can make them feel special and send them home with exactly the right thing.

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
I consider this one of my best interviews ever, and we covered a lot of ground I don’t normally get to in interviews. Aveline Clarke of the 6 Star Business Podcast (all the way in Australia) is a terrific interviewer! You can read details in a much more thorough summary on my recent interviews page.

Audio only with transcript:
https://podcast.6star.business/1743080/13106695-profitable-sustainability-balancing-business-success-and-positive-impact-with-shell-horowitz/

Or video without transcript:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mibStVs0MiY

Fantastic Fungi (Movie)

 Fantastic Fungi
 Directed by Louie Schwartzberg

I’ve been fascinated by the intricacy of nature for decades and began to pay attention to non-animal natural systems around 1971, when I took high school electives in ecology and field biology. I remember discovering the book The Secret Life of Plants a few years later—and listening to Stevie Wonder’s album with the same title when HE discovered the book. At the Bioneers-by-the-Bay conference in 2005, I heard the late Dr. Lynn Margulis give a
fascinating slide talk on the secret life of bacteria (the link will take you to her section of my report; only rough notes on the beginnings of her talk, as I couldn’t take notes in the dark when she ran the slide show). I’ve known for several years that trees not only communicate with each other but act in ways that benefit the forest even if that collaborative action puts the individual at risk—just as people sometimes do. And for at least a few years I’ve known that the primary inter-tree communication system is the underground mycelial network: in other words, fungi.


Neither plant nor animal, fungi are the most diverse kingdom in nature, with something like a million species. About 20,000 of those species produce mushrooms as their reproductive organs. And this movie tells some of their astonishing story—including (and this I’d never heard before) that the evolutionary tree of mammals branched off from mycelium. If it was
controversial even as recently as 98 years ago to claim that humans are descended from other primates such as apes, imagine the backlash when people start hearing that we’re descended from mushroom networks!


“Fantastic Fungi” would be worth watching for the cinematography alone. Time-lapse movies allow us to see the opening and blossoming of dozens of mushrooms, often in clusters and sometimes accompanied by plants opening right next door. The natural landscapes run the gamut from dense forests to arid canyons. It’s as visually stunning as a Jacques Cousteau film.


But there’s so much more in this roughly hour-long movie (the YouTube version I saw was an hour and twelve minutes and included material before and after the actual film). The filmmakers interview a number of leading-edge scientists across several disciplines such as ethnopharmacology, as well as food writer/chef Eugenia Bone and natural wellness celebrity Dr. Andrew Weil. They also interview two cancer patients who were part of a clinical trial involving psylocibin, both of whom described the experience in deeply spiritual terms.


Are you wondering, why is Shel reviewing this movie—what does it have to with environmentally- and social-equity-friendly business or how social change happens? I would make the case that it’s directly relevant. Understanding the natural world, the complexities of interdependent species across different kingdoms and the threat to civilization if these networks are destroyed is crucial to preserving them, and thus preserving humans on Earth. And it happens that the day I watched the movie and wrote this review, I also became aware of an attempt to pass a law in Brazil that would trash the Amazon basin and evict indigenous people so the whole thing could be industrialized—cutting off the regenerative system that is probably keeping our planet alive. Understanding the fungal world seems like an important first step in protecting that natural heritage, in the Amazon and elsewhere.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.

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The Clean and Green Club, June 2023

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Having trouble reading this as an email? Please visit thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: June 2023

 Will Your Packaging Make the SECOND Sale?
Smart business owners recognize that present and previous customers (clients, patients, students, etc.) are gold. Studies say it costs anywhere from five to ten times as much to bring in a new cold prospect as to bring back an old one. So when you succeed in bringing that person back, you’ve cut your marketing cost by up to 90 percent—and increased your profit by the amount you didn’t need to spend on marketing. And when that person tells a friend, your customer acquisition cost is a very happy zero.
Last month, we discussed some tips to design your packaging so it helps prospects select you. Can that packaging also turn the one-time buyer into a repeater, and maybe even an unpaid ambassador for your brand?

Yes, you can! The same kinds of talking points that got them to take your product off the shelf or click the buy button the first time (
see the list in the May newsletter) can also reinforce your brand’s relationship with them. And it works even better if you can make them feel special and honored because they’ve already purchased from you.

How do you make a customer feel special while reading a box printed in a run of thousands? Here’s one idea: use messaging in parts of the package that you can’t see until you open it. In the picture, you see a mild example: the inside flap from a box of Celestial Seasoning Bengal Spice herbal tea. I happen to love that tea blend, so I saw this because I bought the product.

But Celestial missed a chance to go much deeper to engage its customers. Why not use part of that inside space to create a VIP program or customers club? Give them reasons to join in community for a higher good? Provide them with even more ways to engage others and bring them into the fold?

Here’s how another premium natural-foods company, Equal Exchange, grabbed this ball and ran with it
. The outside wrapper offers some hints: “Grown by small farmer co-ops” on both the front and (in small letters above the barcode) back panels; organic, worker-owner, and kosher/pareve certification seals—and a relatively large “Join Us in Changing the Food System” slug with a picture of one of their farmers, a description in very small type with not one but two emotional outreaches: it begins “With your support” and concludes with “puts power back in the hands of small farmers, workers and chocolate lovers (like you).” Most importantly, the “Join Us” banner ends in an arrow directing readers to the inside of the label. That in itself is a subliminal call to buy—because the only way to see what’s on the inside is to buy and open the bar.

Once opened, the entire inside is a well-designed, informative magazine-style page. It starts with a call-to-action banner with three small graphics declaring a partnership of the small co-ops, the company, and its customers. The three paragraphs under the banner layout their philosophy and history, describe the challenge of doing this work amid climate change and greedy multinationals, and then another call to action with both a URL and a phone number to get involved. Then, wrapped around drawings of the cacao plant and a photo of the product, a puff paragraph about co-ops and a description of the sources, followed by another photo of the same farmer and a description of his coop.


I’d only change a few things if they’d been my client:

  1. Tighten up some of the copy and make it more benefit-oriented (especially the part about the online community)
  2. Add more reasons to click through (maybe a special offer like a newsletter with coupons)
  3. Most importantly, I’d acknowledge the disability issue they’ve created by adding, in larger type, something like “Is the print here too small for you? Don’t worry—we’ve got your back (and your eyes). Visit [URL] to read it comfortably online. There’s not much room on a chocolate bar wrapper, but online, you can make the print as big as you like.” While I’m 66 and can read it easily, I’m aware that many people in their 40s and beyond have trouble reading small print.

So, if you sell stuff in a package, think about how you can grab the opportunity they missed. (And if you need someone to write those messages, talk to me (email or phone): https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/aboutshel/#contactus

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.
View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

Leadership By Example by Frank Sonnenberg

 Leadership By Example
 by Frank Sonnenberg

I don’t usually review books that tell us what most of us already know—but I have a good reason to make an exception for Leadership By Example. This book can make a real difference in the life of someone who has not been raised to pay attention to ethics or character. It provides tons of guidance and easy checklists to determine if you’re living your best life, or betraying yourself and others. Plus, it’s designed to be easy to read and not overwhelming, with short chapters, lots of white space, bold all-capitals for chapter headings and subheads. It doesn’t surprise me that Stephen M.R. Covey, author of The Speed of Trust (one of my favorite business books), endorsed it. (Disclosure: he also wrote a wonderful Foreword to my 2010 book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.)

And while most of the advice is very familiar (and in harmony with how I’ve chosen to live), quite a few pieces stand out as more unique and thought-provoking. A few examples:

  • Others’ good fortune is NOT your misfortune (p. 8)—and others’ success doesn’t threaten yours (p. 97)
  • Every time you complete a task, evaluate the positives, negatives, and what you could have done differently (pp. 43-44); poor results provide great lessons (p. 89)
  • Short-term desires often interfere with long-term success (p. 80)
  • If you ignore small issues, you risk turning them into emergencies (pp. 152-153)
  • Rewrite your negative programming and self-messaging. Example: change “why them and not me?” to “if they can do it, so can I.” (p. 176)
  • Instead of asking kids what they want to be when they grow up, ask what they want to accomplish (p. 189) [I think this is also a great question to ask grownups, by the way]
  • “When writing the story of your life, don’t let anyone else hold the pen” (p. 200)

I’d love to see a movement to buy this book for people graduating high school, college, or MBA programs. And I sure wish someone had given a copy at the right moment to the 45ththth US president, whose life has been the exact opposite of how Sonnenberg would have us live ours.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.

————–

Links in this newsletter may earn commissions. Please click here for our privacy and endorsement policy.

 

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