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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: March 2024
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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
- 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)
- A learning unit presented by Shel
- Facilitated discussion and brainstorming on the day’s topic
- 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:
- Do you currently own or run a business, nonprofit, or department OR have one you’d like to start or manage?
- Are you interested in achieving a higher good and a better world?
- Do you have a mission that focuses on at least one particular environmental or social justice issue—something you feel called to do?
- Have you ever wondered if your business could be a vehicle to make progress on that goal?
- 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?
- Do you see potential for business to be a factor in co-creating a better world?
- 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.
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When “If You Build It” Actually Works (it does once in a while)
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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.
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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. |
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Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy
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Victoria Vrana
