Category Archive for Clean and Green Marketing Newsletter

The Clean and Green Club, May 2022

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: May 2022

Test Drive This Powerful Green Business Certification—No Cost

I’ve been telling you about the Green Business Bureau and the many benefits they offer, including the GBB EcoAssessment™, a very spiffy self-guided software-driven certification process that is very easy to use and much more friendly to small businesses than other certifications I’ve looked at.

GBB will be happy to let you play with that assessment tool. You don’t have to be a member to see how it works. All you have to do is fill out this 1-minute form with your name, company or organization, email and phone. Your request will be forwarded to a member of the Green Business Bureau staff.

You do have to be a member to actually go through the assessment and obtain certification. Membership is quite affordable, starting at just $212.50 (10 employees or less) once you factor in the 15 percent off I’ve arranged for you no matter how big your business is. To claim the lower price, just visit https://greenbusinessbureau.com/membership-purchase-options/ , choose the number of employees that describes your business, and enter the code Shel15 (no space between the lower-case L and the number 1).

Yes, I will get a commission if you join—and YOU get 15 percent off.

If HE Can Make the Transition, Anyone Can!

Schematic of a Passive House. Licensed under Creative Commons

I had a half-hour phone call recently with a very interesting man, a former oil and nuclear control systems engineer who had gone green not only in his engineering work but in his personal life, even designing and helping to build his own Passive House on a challenging, steeply sloped parcel here in Massachusetts. Like all Passive House buildings, his home puts more electricity into the grid than it uses. And because much of the land is forested, it stores more carbon than his family releases in all their activities. He has a much lower carbon footprint than I do, and mine—heating our house and hot water with recaptured heat from a methane digester, lighting mostly with super-efficient LEDs and a few CFLs (no energy-hogging, carbon-emitting incandescents), returning nutrients to the soil with our organic garden, reusing, recycling or composting everything practical, etc.—is better than most.

Listening to him, I had an insight: I realized that many people see the use of fossil and nuclear as ends, rather than means. With that mindset, many people in the business world are asking “how do we possibly keep our high standard of living (and our profits) if we don’t burn fossil fuels or process uranium?” But when we recognize that those power sources are means to a larger end, those turn out to be the wrong questions.

I’ve talked for years about money not as an end in itself, but as a means to other ends: the things it can be traded for: goods, services, social impact, environmental mitigation…why not view our fuel sources through that lens?

In other words, let’s look at those polluting technologies as merely one route among many to powering our buildings, vehicles, and machines and building/maintaining our infrastructure projects. Once we do, we open ourselves up to a much better question: “What’s the best way to meet the power needs of our society, with both the most bang for the buck and the most positive impacts on job creation, poverty elimination, achievement of equity, and protecting the environment and our health?”

The strengths of coal, oil, and gas derive from energy density: these compact, energy-dense fuels are easy to store, transport, and use. And through a lens of short-term corporate profit, they have the added advantage of being consumable: people, companies, and organizations have to keep buying them over and over again—just as Gillette made its real profits not on the razors themselves, but on the disposable blades. But these come with enormous social and environmental cost, leading to pollution- and workplace-safety related health crises, growing economic disparity, and of course, global catastrophic climate change.

Nuclear does not share the fossil-fuel advantages of compactness and ease of deployment in small quantities; while atoms are tiny, the facilities needed to harness them are not. Its apparent main advantages are elimination of dependence on foreign petroleum reserves and ability to produce large quantities of stable electricity without adding to the carbon footprint—but these turn out to be chimeras when we look closely at the entire fuel cycle, with its eco-destructive mining, milling, refining, fuel rod assembly, and plant construction; its inability to safely store waste; thermal pollution and radioactive discharges from operating plants; and many other issues—including the all-to-real experience of more than 100 catastrophic (Chernobyl, Fukushima) and near-catastrophic (Three Mile Island, Enrico Fermi, Browns Ferry, at least one earlier Fukushima incident, and many more) accidents (Note that this article lists 99 through 2009—before the 2011 disasters in Japan).

By phrasing the question like that, we see clearly that fossil and nuclear are not good answers—but that there’s quite a bit of work to do before green energy technologies can address those needs of storage, transportation, and compact, energy-dense deployment.

But when we take this holistic deep-dive, we also discover the BEST thing we can do to address our dependence on fossil and nuclear: doing more with what we have! Efficiency and conservation, reimagined holistically, can probably save at least 60 and maybe 90 percent of our energy, just by wasting a whole lot less. As one example, consider the Deep Energy Retrofit that saved the Empire State Building $3.4 MM per year with a three-year payback–and that was when fossil energy prices were much lower. It’s probably at least $5 MM per year right now.

Side Note: He called me because I’d left a voicemail inquiring about his upcoming conference, where I thought I might be a fit as a speaker. That turns out not to be a fit, but we’re talking about at least doing a webinar, and possibly even collaborating on some new directions in consulting that could combine our skills. Which proves another of my truisms: new challenges and opportunities can arise from unexpected places.

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.

Paradise Lot

Paradise Lot: Two Plant Geeks, One-Tenth of an Acre and the Making of an Edible Garden Oasis in the City by Eric Toensmeier (with a few sections written by Jonathan Bates)

This month’s featured reading is not a business book, though it has a small amount of business content. It’s a back-to-the-land book that takes place on a lot most people would think is too small, in a densely populated and economically depressed area of Holyoke, Massachusetts that always reminds me of a smaller version of my native Bronx, NY.

I’m reviewing it here because you and I, as active or would-be green and socially conscious business leaders, have to spend some of our time on highlighting ways to develop and market attractive alternatives to the carbon-intensive, chemical-laden, soul-killing business and living practices that have become the norm. And leading by example, as Toensmeier has done, is a great way to present those alternatives.

In 2004, Toensmeier and his semi-co-author Bates bought a two-family house on a nearly lifeless 1/10-acre lot about a mile from the downtown of the first planned industrial city in the US (and two towns away from our house in a much more rural area), a city where poverty is rampant and the infrastructure has seen hard times. While most permaculture farms have considerably more space and many are located in more temperate areas, Toensmeier and Bates spent 18 years creating a mini-permaculture farm that could survive the harsh winters of the northeast, on a lot where every square inch had to count—starting with rebuilding the badly abused soil, moving on to annual vegetables, and then beginning to build long-term viability with perennials, including many kinds of berry bushes and fruit trees.

Because their goals were not only to achieve a measure of food self-sufficiency but also to create replicable models for small-scale urban permaculture projects in the US northeast (p. 203) and to eventually minimize the work of caring for it, they kept careful notes: what they planted, what they pulled out when they planted something different, how and when it bore, whether they liked eating it, which parts were edible, and more.

One aspect directly relevant to my own work is the way they paid attention to social justice and neighborliness—something that more people are talking about now than when they started, and something that’s particularly important for two white males from the suburbs moving into an urban community of color where many people are under economic stress. They found many ways to involve the community, and particularly the neighborhood children. For example, they would have kids over to talk about what they were doing and experience it hands-on, and gave out berry starters and other plants for their neighbors to have some fresh food of their own (p. 61). Eric eventually took a day job managing a local community farm where the predominantly Puerto Rican or Puerto Rican-heritage farmers in the area had a place to raise their crops.

They called the project (and the book) Paradise Lot. I first found out about it this past October 9 (which happens to be Dina’s and my official wedding anniversary), when we were invited to an event there. Eric gave us a tour that included lots of tastes. I was blown away. I took some pictures that day and posted them at https://www.facebook.com/shel.horowitz/posts/10159709970249919 . Then Dina gave me his book for Chanukah.

Eric is also the author or co-author of several other food self-sufficiency and permaculture books including Edible Forest Gardens, and is a scholar of permaculture’s history in the US and elsewhere. And he has come to respect the positive impact that well-thought-out human intervention can have on the landscape. He was awed to realize that the pre-Columbus Native civilizations in the Americas constituted “the largest example of permaculture the world has ever seen” (p.178). And bringing this movement back into the mainstream has major implications as a hedge against fossil-fuel price chaos (pp. 201-202).

The book is a decade old, and Eric has just purchased a much larger farm. I hope his little urban dreamstead continues to flourish, I’m sure that the new farm will once again be a meticulously documented laboratory of agronomic innovation, and I wish him and his wife Marikler much happiness.

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 for, too.

————–

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The Clean and Green Club, April 2022

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: April 2022

Test Drive This Powerful Green Business Certification—No Cost

Last month, I told you about the Green Business Bureau and the many benefits they offer, including the GBB EcoAssessment™, a very spiffy self-guided software-driven certification process that is very easy to use and much more friendly to small businesses than other certifications I’ve looked at.

GBB will be happy to let you play with that assessment tool. You don’t have to be a member to see how it works. All you have to do is fill out this 1-minute form with your name, company or organization, email and phone. Your request will be forwarded to a member of the Green Business Bureau staff.

You do have to be a member to actually go through the assessment and obtain certification. Membership is quite affordable, starting at just $212.50 (10 employees or less) once you factor in the 15 percent off I’ve arranged for you no matter how big your business is. To claim the lower price, just visit https://greenbusinessbureau.com/membership-purchase-options/ , choose the number of employees that describes your business, and enter the code Shel15 (no space between the lower-case L and the number 1).

Yes, I will get a commission if you join—and YOU get 15 percent off.

The Sweet Spot Where Marketing Meets Social Change

I love this post from the Changemaker Institute, How to Change The World By Meeting People Where They Care. I love it because it approaches social change through a marketing lens. It starts by revisiting the famous Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court Case of 1967, which struck down longstanding bans on marrying across the color line. Pointing out how Richard and Mildred Loving got people to care, the post goes on to ask how to get people to care about what you’re doing—and answers with a business-oriented focus on outcomes of your social change action, which you arrive at through these questions (quoting directly from the post):

  • What does it take to get an investor to believe in your business and invest in your mission?
  • What does it take to get customers to believe in your product or service and invest in it?
  • What does it take to get your employees to believe in your company’s mission and invest time and energy in supporting it?
  • What does it take to get people to support your vision for a better world? [end of quote]

This intersection is so important to me that on the wall behind my computer monitor, where I see it many times a day, I have a poster that reminds me, “I help businesses find their unique sweet spot where profitability meets environmental and social progress.” It’s important enough that I’ve written four books making the profitability case for business to deeply embrace social change and planetary healing, and have also written about the success lessons activists can take from thinking entrepreneurially. It’s the basis for much of my consulting and speaking.

To take it a step further: I see getting out of the silo, rubbing shoulders with people who are not like you and examining different ideas from different industries or different sectors of the same industry as crucial. It’s a way of testing your own ideas, sharpening them enough to really get inside someone’s head and cause enough discomfort with the status quo to embrace the brighter future you propose. Whether you’re marketing a business or a movement, that’s a pretty important thing to do.

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 Beautiful Business

The Beautiful Business by Steven Morris

More of a meditation/inspiration than a how-to manual, Morris leads us through plenty of general guidance on how to build a business that makes the world better both in its attempts toward justice and in its attempts at art. While there’s certainly plenty of instruction, other books will be more useful if you’re looking for someone to hold your hand and steer. This one emphatically celebrates “your weird, your crazy…what makes you uniquely you” (p. xiii) and notes that “all edge-pushers are considered crazy by those who fear change (p. 4).Morris carries this artistic energy forward into the design of the book, which is set in an attractive unidentified modern sans-serif typeface that might be Avant-Garde, in various sizes—with the text augmented by numerous (mostly quite striking) black-and-white photos.

Morris sees purpose and profit supporting each other in a “both-and” (p. 8); in his “world of possibility” (p. 135), your win doesn‘t mean someone else has to lose. And in this world, it makes sense to play the long game that understands how abundance wins over scarcity. “Moral highlights” exist, but they are not binary (p.18); the truth is nuanced. Pages 33-34 provide a concise three-paragraph manifesto.

Art is integral and leadership is an art (p. 9) that can be beautiful. Creating something beautiful, value-laden (p. 51), and life-changing, even in something as traditionally unbeautiful as business, says Morris, is the path to immortality. He lists seven criteria (p. 52), 12 questions to guide growth (pp. 62, 64), and four tenets of the beautiful business (p. 67). And, like Apple’s designers, he sees simplicity as a form of beauty (p. 208).

Higher purpose flows throughout the book. I love his addition of Justice to the traditional Diversity, Equity, Inclusion acronym, turning DEI—which I’ve always found a bit too similar to DUI (driving under the influence) into the beautiful JEDI warrior a conscious business can become (p. 72). And I’m delighted that he sees that process, not just outcome, has to be beautiful: respectful and inclusive. Better process yields better outcomes, as he demonstrates by comparing actual command-and-control-style vs. inclusive meetings (pp. 112-117).

Morris freely acknowledges the shoulders he stands on. He quotes frequently from Brené Brown, Toni Morrison, Carl Jung, Buckminster Fuller, Peter Drucker, and many others. I love Brown’s differentiation between belonging—being where you want to be, with people who want you as you are—“I get to be me”—and fitting in—conformity (p. 74). I love the sweeping systemic thinking of Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard: to change government, we have to change corporations, and to change corporations we must change ourselves (p. 249).

He devotes a big section (pp. 216-229) to psychologist Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. You’re probably already familiar with Maslow’s five stages: biological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. But I didn’t know that he later added three more: cognitive, aesthetic (#5 and 6)—and self-transcendence (#8).

The book is published by Conscious Capitalism Press; Morris concludes by describing four tenets of conscious capitalism and the BCorp assessment process (pp. 288-295). Then there’s a glossary (partially alphabetized and partially random, which is confusing). No index, unfortunately. To me, user-friendliness is also a form of beauty, so those two anomalies are surprising.

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 for, 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, March 2022

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: March 2022

Exciting News: A Chance to Get a Powerful Green Business Certification and More

If you’ve followed me for a while, you probably remember me talking about the power of third-party credibility in your marketing. When someone else says you’re the real deal, people listen much more carefully than if you sing your own praises.

Over the past month, I’ve been building a relationship with the Green Business Bureau. They offer a number of benefits, including the GBB EcoAssessment™, a very spiffy self-guided software-driven certification process that is very easy to use and much more friendly to small businesses than other certifications I’ve looked at. (They will be glad to set up a demo for you.) Other benefits include:

  • The GBB EcoPlanner™ library of hundreds of green initiatives that you can implement with their step-by-step guidelines
  • Member directory as well as an online networking community
  • All sorts of marketing aids besides the certification, including membership seals, educational resources, social media, and more
  • Access to industry-specific and general green business analyses, webinars, and more

I joined up right away and expect to go through the certification process when I come up for air after a rather busy time. Small-business memberships range quite reasonably from $250 to $550 per year depending on how many employees you have—and I’ve arranged you a 15 percent reduction. To claim it, just visit https://greenbusinessbureau.com/membership-purchase-options/ , choose the option that describes your business, and enter the code Shel15 (no space between the lower-case L and the number 1).

Just in the first two weeks of March, they’ve also put up five new blog posts, covering topics from carbon accounting to remote work to wealth management, and featuring several members. Please use this link to explore their many offerings (and join, if you’re so inclined): (yes, I will get a commission if you join—and YOU will get a reduced price—15 percent off).

Brands that Create Fans

Licensed under Creative Commons

As promised last month, we’re going to look at some brands that create such a positive user experience, they turn their customers into not just fans, but ambassadors: an unpaid sales force that sings their praises. Most of these stories have been widely told, so I’ll just list and link a few:

  • Harley-Davidson, the only brand I’m aware of that gets thousands of customers to tattoo themselves with its logo (this link also concisely summarizes five benefits of that kind of loyalty)
  • Ritz-Carlton (I love their idea of the “empowered apology,” where employees can do pretty much anything to make it right for the customer)
  • Apple, whose customers will stand in line for hours to be first on their block with another visionary, game-changing product (this article in Forbes is several years old—but the key takeaway about thinking not so much about marketing products but building movements is directly relevant to you, the socially and environmentally conscious entrepreneur)
  • Southwest Airlines, not surprisingly the only airline to stay profitable after 9/11 because it was the only one that customers cared about. I have a personal experience here: We were scheduled to fly from Hartford (our local airport) to catch a cruise ship in Tampa. Our airport closed because of a snowstorm, but because we had booked on Southwest, we shifted to arrive a day later in Fort Lauderdale, rented a car to drive to the first port of call (Key West), board the ship, and save our vacation. Zero cost for the re-route. Since then, if the price and itinerary are anywhere near the competition, they get our business. Unfortunately, the last few years, their itineraries have been far from convenient, and we often end up on a different carrier—but we always check.

OK, so this stuff works in the general market. Does it also work in the green and social justice world? Yes! It’s harder to come up with national brand examples, but they do exist. Consider:

  • Ben & Jerry’s: Upstarts with no ice cream OR business experience, they succeeded with a quirky message and a deep focus on environmental and social justice. As this article eloquently demonstrates, many people think that this focus on equity and environment is WHY they were successful. In my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, I spend 4 pages on this company, and mention them in several other parts of the book.
  • Patagonia: The only company I’m aware of that ever voluntarily told its customers not to buy its products if they could get more life out of what they already own, this outdoor apparel company continues to raise the bar on environmental and social justice approaches.

I’m aware of dozens of smaller companies that have succeeded BECAUSE of their people- and planet-centered values. In fact, I help companies figure out how to create and market profitable products, services, and MINDSETS that do this. Please get in touch if you’d like that sort of help.

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.

Catalysing mass commitment to transformational change

Catalysing mass commitment to transformational change by Andrew Gaines

Not many authors begin by citing Donella Meadows (of Limits to Growth fame) and segue directly to body-mind scientist Moshe Feldenkrais (pp. 1-2, as numbered in the footer—which doesn’t count the front matter). So Gaines, with his comprehensive and holistic perspective and commitment to nonviolence, hooked me right away.He urges us to “shift from individualistic ‘I do my own thing’ to working together to inspire mainstream commitment to transition to a life-affirming culture.” His prescription involves training citizen-educators, framing our work that way, and bringing ordinary people into a new kind of social change movement based on helping people improve their mental and emotional functioning as together we create this new paradigm (p. 6).

For Gaines, the change requires personal lifestyle/activity changes AND organizing for wider social and environmental change.

A public stance helps, too. He urges businesses to announce “This business contributes to the evolution of a life-affirming culture…Our goal is to transition to a life-affirming culture, rather than continuing on our present course of ecological self-destruction.” (pp.10-11). I added this at the bottom of my GoingBeyondSustainability.com home page.

He asks us to enlist the army of members of national environmental groups to get much more deeply involved than signing petitions and sending money: to become advocates, educators, and conversation catalyzers for this life-affirming culture. He suggests direct invitations like “Jim, would you be willing to spend an hour with me having a deep conversation?” (p, 12). I am mixed about this approach. If someone asked me that question, I’d ask, “about what?” If the answer is climate change, a climate denier would probably choose not to have the meeting. But if the response is “on how to build a life-affirming culture,” perhaps a higher percentage would say yes—because we all want that, in some way.

The ebook provides teaching and conversation facilitation guidance, aimed at helping participants connect the dots of what they already know—making the connections among the various environmental crises and the way the system is rigged to benefit the upper elites without much regard to the environmental crises—to reach the conclusion that economic growth should certainly not be the central thing we strive for, and to look at additional factors such as the very deliberate manipulation of psychology to foster even more consumerism (e.g., “retail therapy,” p. 17). An example of Gaines’ holistic approach is the mention of “gentle birth” (p. 18).

To foster those conversations, Gaines even includes links to the slide deck that contains all the illustrations in the book (one of which in particular keeps showing up every few pages, which I found tiresome), a demo video of a sample conversation, and even a webinar (pp. 23-24) and a sample LinkedIn outreach letter (pp. 25-26). More tools for facilitating these types of conversations are at Gaines’ website, http://inspiringtransition.net .

Recognizing that we often get in our own way if we try to do deep world-changing work before working on our own areas of hurt and blockage, Gaines spends pages 28-33 giving a quick intro to several inner-healing modalities. I’ve often seen similar tools used in the personal wealth category, but much more rarely in the activist world.

Then he finishes with a section on the big sweeping social changes we need, and some clues on how to bring that about.

Obtain your no-cost copy at https://app.box.com/file/768328744375?s=lircbkap14ycjx5f28dskf4mp9tuc3ea

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 for, 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, February 2022

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: February 2022

A Marketing Lesson from Bad TV

Licensed under Creative Commons

So many times, I hear some buzz about a TV show that some of my friends are raving about. But when I watch the first episode, I’m either not moved, or moved to disgust. My friends tell me, “Give it a chance, it gets better.” They tell me that it takes time for the writers, actors, and directors to work the kinks out and figure where the story is going.

Here’s the thing: my time is valuable to me and I don’t find watching TV physically comfortable in the first place (I get headaches, tired neck and upper back, and tired eyes). So, if you want me to keep watching, you’ve got to make it worth my while in the first episode, and keep it worth my while. TV is never going to be a have-to for me. I lived completely without it from age 10 to 12. When my mom finally got a replacement set, I watched constantly for about a month and then went back to watching almost no TV. The exceptions were “All in the Family” and occasionally, “Laugh-in.” I would have liked SNL, but those were the days when you had to watch in real time, and as a morning person, it was too late in the evening for me.

Three things happened that brought me back to TV: first, in December, 2019, my son-in-law gave me a Google Chromecast device, letting me display anything I can see in the Chrome browser on my laptop on the single TV we own, with a bigger, clearer screen and better speakers than any of our computers. Next, the pandemic hit, and all of a sudden, we weren’t going to concerts, plays, or parties—and I finally started using the Chromecast: watching London theatre, archival superstar rock concerts, and European orchestras on the big screen. And third, after living with us for a few weeks in May, 2020 (and turning us on to the first series we watched all the way through), our other child’s partner added us to his Netflix subscription. So now, typically, we turn on the tube once every week or two.

TV has improved enormously since I last watched regularly (when my kids, now 34 and 29, were toddlers). We were enchanted with “The Good Place” and watched all four seasons, despite my skepticism of the big plot flip after the first season. We watched a fascinating four-episode show called “Unorthodox,” about a Chassidic woman who leaves her community in Brooklyn to create a secular life in Berlin. And we made our way through “The Queen’s Gambit,” with its feminist/youth empowerment themes and window into the very odd world of professional chess. Now we’ve just finished the second season of “Orange is the New Black,” with its deeply psychological and sociological approach to the diverse characters within a women’s prison. It took us about a year to get through the first two seasons.

But even though I knew they’d get better, after just one episode, I rejected “West Wing” because even as a politics junkie, I found the situations dated and less-than-intoxicating, and “Schitt’s Creek” because I didn’t want to waste one more minute hanging around with an unpleasant, dysfunctional, narcissistic family of formerly wealthy people in a retelling of “Green Acres.” I rejected several others after one or two episodes.

I recognize that many people are more patient than I am about this, and will invest time into four or five bad episodes to start getting the good ones. Outside of the TV world, I’m actually a very patient person. I’m the one who will scrape the last bit out of a jar or out of the food processor. And that same patience underpins my huge faith in the transformational power of business and in the ability of ordinary people to create a society that works well for everyone—beliefs that require extreme patience!

But despite my impatience with bad TV, I’m actually the kind of viewer that producers and broadcast outlets should woo. I am considered an influencer. I write books, publish newsletters, and give talks. I’ve just told 4,000 of you about four TV shows you might want to watch and two more that I didn’t feel were worth my time.

So maybe TV producers should spend a bit more effort providing an experience that people like me not only will sit through, but enthuse over. Next month, we’ll look at some brands that figured that out and created such a positive user experience that it built their entire brand.

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.

Influence People

Influence People: Powerful Everyday Opportunities to Persuade that are Lasting and Ethical by Brian Ahearn

Because Ahearn is only one of 20 people in the world who’ve been personally trained and certified by Robert Cialdini, I was attracted to this book. Cialdini is considered one of—and possibly THE—world’s leading experts on influence. I’ve known of his work for many years. But his book has a reputation for being a challenging, slow read, and I’ve never gotten around to it. The promise of a much more easily digested version was persuasive.

Ahearn starts right in on page 3 by turning PEOPLE into an acronym: Powerful, Everyday, Opportunities, Persuade, Lasting, Ethical. In Chapter 2, he introduces seven influence principles: Reciprocity, Liking, Authority, Consensus, Consistency, Scarcity, Unity (pp. 12-25). These two groups of words provide focus points throughout the book. Much later, he introduces a third: PAVE—Public, Active, Voluntary, Effort (pp. 128-130).

Some of my favorite tips and insights:

  • Likeability is reciprocal; the things you like about someone help them like you as well (first introduced on p. 16 and brought back several times including the very end, on page 144).
  • Asking rather than ordering someone will often achieve better results (pp. 21-22) and creates a sense of commitment, of buy-in (p. 122).
  • Shared identities, interests, actions, or experiences lead to feelings of unity, consensus, and likeability (first introduced on pp 24-25).
  • In pricing negotiations, the person who makes the first offer is in a position of strength, provided that person has a better offer already prepared (p. 28). Interestingly, this is the opposite of the advice in much sales training.
  • Consistency is about THEM; authority is about YOU (p. 29).
  • If we lead our persuasion attempts with research, we have much more authority, and better odds (p. 49).
  • Right and wrong ways to respond to a thank-you, and why (p. 52).
  • Different synonyms are treated differently: people are more likely to say they’d like to buy an inexpensive rather than a cheap car—and I remember a real-world video survey that asked people if they’d rather have the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. ACA won out by a large margin—but they were two names for the same law (p. 70).
  • An advance gift, even a nearly worthless one (like address labels in a charity mailing) stimulates reciprocity more than a promise of later, much greater benefit (pp. 75-76).
  • The cost and value of advice depends a lot on who is giving the advice; expertise builds authority (p. 85)—but so does social proof (p. 90).
  • Our careers are central to our identity; we don’t believe a back-stabber who tells us it’s just business, nothing personal (p. 99).
  • There are techniques to “armor plate” your customer’s loyalty to you, based on the seven principles (pp. 100-101).
  • Living up to our personal branding raises the bar and forces us to be better people (p. 105).
  • Acknowledging weakness/mistakes and apologizing can be very powerful (he tells a great story of a personal experience of this) (p. 106).
  • If you want results from social proof, frame things positively. My extrapolation, which Ahearn stops short of, would be to focus on the bravery and foresight of the small minority—make them feel special (p. 110). He also brought in a great interpretation of a study that showed older people more honest than younger cohorts. Instead of dissing the later generations for their lack of honesty, he wryly notes that as people age into more wisdom, they trend toward more honesty (pp. 138-139).
  • Do the groundwork: what Cialdini calls “pre-suasion” (p. 124).
  • When creating products, bring in the demographic of your target market; if you’re writing a book for teenagers, have a teen co-author, for example (p. 127).
  • Reinforce good outcomes by focusing on what the person is doing RIGHT (p. 139)

I have issues with some of Ahearn’s advice and conclusions. He, an insurance salesman, derisively described a pair of canvassers who knocked on his door, got him to sign a petition, and then to his apparent shock, used Cialdini-esque social proof strategies to try for a donation. Perhaps he didn’t realize that canvassers are usually commissioned salespeople who get paid based on what they collect for the organization—and that they were using the very techniques he extolls. Similarly, I was shocked by his suggestion not to make eye contact on the streets. I make eye contact and I SMILE at people, and most of them smile back. It brings light into the darkness and fosters a human connection, however brief. Inferring from context, he’s talking about situations in which eye contact is likely to lead to an unpleasant interaction—but he neglects to clarify that and could be misinterpreted.

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 for, too.

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The Clean and Green Club, January 2022

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: January 2022

Correction

Oops. The second sentence of the December main article should have read “Animals breathe oxygen in and breathe out carbon dioxide, which plants breathe in and convert back to oxygen.” Thanks to sharp-eyed reader Julie Takatsch for spotting the error. I had written “monoxide,” and neither I nor my assistant caught it. This is why people say you should always have someone else proofread your stuff–because often, you will read what should be there, and not necessarily what actually is written.

Greyston’s Hiring Slashes Cost, Brings Jobs

U.S. Army photos by Bryan Williams, licensed under Creative Commons

Maybe you’ve heard of Greyston Bakery, brownie baker for Ben & Jerry’s, Whole Foods, and some fancy NYC hotels. I’ve been a long-time fan of Greyston’s open hiring model for years, and have written about them several times, including a brief profile in my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.At Greyston, you put your name and contact info on a list, and when you’re next on the list (typically about six months), you’re hired as an apprentice. It doesn’t matter what your past looks like. You could be an ex-addict, ex-mental patient, ex-felon, ex-welfare parent, ex-unhoused person…as long as you’re willing to get trained, show up when you’re supposed to, and do the work.

When I’ve written about the company, I’ve focused on the good they do in the community by hiring people widely considered unemployable. But recently, I listened to Greyston CEO Joseph Kenner discuss the bottom-line business advantages of open hiring.

Kenner pointed out that open hiring lowers costs and time while massively boosting employee loyalty. But Greyston maintains high standards for the work output, and terminate employees who don’t work out—and they have a social worker on premises to help these often-first-time employees adjust to the environment (and cope with whatever problems they’re facing outside the workplace). They partnered with a North Carolina distribution center for The Body Shop that saw open hiring slash turnover by 60 percent and boost productivity 13 percent. When they rolled it out to the whole company, they reduced turnover 63 percent in the US/17 percent in Canada and saw a massive increase in employees switching from seasonal to permanent (24 percent in the US and 50 percent in Canada).

These numbers are huge, and will eventually percolate up into much larger corporations, because not to do so is leaving a big chunk of money on the table. And Kenner says that if just 40,000 open-hiring jobs are created in the US, we will see a $3 bn positive impact without any government involvement. Think of the impact if 1,000,000 ex-addicts, ex-mental patients, ex-felons, ex-welfare parents, ex-unhoused entered the workforce, received the training they need to succeed, and went from depending on the state and social service agencies to productive, employed, heads of households that can stay together!

Then he brought on two co-panelists from companies that have partnered with Greyston to implement the model. Addressing a room of CEOs, one asked who would interview someone who had vastly increased revenue at software and media companies—and who would interview a pimp/drug dealer who read at a 5th-grade level. The show of hands was what you’d expect. Then he said, “They’re the same person. I am both of those.” He pointed out that Bernie Madoff and the Enron guys had terrific resumes.

The other panelist talked about where it makes sense to use the model and where it doesn’t. He looks at resumes when hiring senior managers and C-suite execs, but is happy to do open hiring for line employees. Right now, about ¼ of his ~200 employees came on through open hiring.

This is really validating for the view I’ve been promoting that doing the right thing is GREAT for business—that they can build social change and environmental healing not just into philanthropy but into core products, services, missions, policies, etc. I’ve been singing this particular song for almost 20 years now.

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’ve gotten quite a bit of media coverage recently, though only the first two links are about green and social justice business practices. But hey, I’m eclectic ;-).Share2Seed quotes me in a long piece about how Elon Musk has made it more OK to be a successful eco-entrepreneur https://medium.com/@Share2Seed/how-to-be-an-ecopreneur-and-get-paid-well-like-elon-musk-463a0e3eaed7

They seem like an interesting support venture for eco-businesses; after you read the article you might want to visit their home page.

Included in this roundup story about making seasonal businesses more sustainable. https://www.incfile.com/blog/how-to-make-seasonal-business-sustainable

Profiled in this article about how I as a rural business owner and activist use broadband. https://www.explorebeyond.org/stories/broadband-powers-entrepreneurship-in-rural-new-england/

I presented a brief gallery talk on the stunning posthumous show of my stepfather, Michihiro Yoshida, a painter whose bright colors and surrealistic images earned him the title, “The Mythic Modernist.” His site is http://artbyyoshi.com, and the slide talk is at https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/3qKcWmG8nEb8FMYIHTpf8AVYILof-xfJtxP5MfxKEQegkkhcTlZwHCDbyGKxBuhH.-9D0QrXxeZDB4lZi Passcode: BtAUz?Y3 (the presentation starts at 2 minutes, eight seconds into the video).

My tips on traveling like a local lead off this article on traveling internationally for newbies: https://arreh.com/planning-a-trip-heres-what-you-need-to-know-10-pieces-of-advice-for-new-travelers/

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.

Holonomics

Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter by Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson

Holonomics is a portmanteau of Holistic Economics. The central metaphor reminds that every part of a plant knows how to grow a whole plant; the whole is embodied in every leaf, stem, and root. And similarly, any piece of a broken hologram contains the entire original image, in miniature.

This was a challenging book for me to get through. With its long digressions (into the poet Goethe’s mathematics and plant science, among other things), wandering writing style, and gems of wisdom buried in the long riffs, I found myself picking it up, reading a few pages, putting it down for a few weeks, taking it on trips and reading 30 or 50 pages, and finally giving it a long push and finishing in December what I started in August.

But it was worth the slog because this book offers lots of those gems. Here are a few:

  • For maximum results, co-create your products, services, and processes with your customers (p. 27).
  • Holonomic thinking combines mental, systems, and business models to see the whole picture of complex systems (p. 33, p. 37).
  • Studying the thinking processes of scientists and watching their consensus shift over time provides great insight; scientists often tend to marginalize creative thinkers, but these outliers create much of the real progress once their ideas gain acceptance (p. 45).
  • Be careful of ambiguous language: do you mean “normal” as in what usually happens, or “normal” as a social behavior pattern? (p. 66)
  • Plants are always reinventing themselves. It’s about the becoming, the process, adapting to their changing environment (pp. 74-75).
  • Gregory Bateson: Our problems result from the difference between how nature works and how people think (p. 93).
  • Looking at how a species organizes itself internally can tell you a lot. Mice, in constant fear of predators, focus on their nervous systems, while bison, big enough not to fear many predators, are organized around digestion (p. 116).
  • We are not the only species that can engineer our environment. Certain types of termite mounds have the equivalents of heat, air conditioning, and gardens—but only when the community reaches critical mass and gets “excited”; as individuals, termites don’t build those things (pp. 135-137).
  • The new science of complexity studies has a lot to teach us about what happens when individual actions stop dominating and the community takes over—and why chaos and order (combined into “chaord” on p. 187) are both necessary (pp. 138-140); in fact, the optimum condition for adaptability is living “on the edge of chaos” (p. 142). Gaia, the entire earth, can be seen as a single giant and very complex system that self-regulates and incorporates both living and non-living elements—the more complexity, the greater stability, and the more diversity, the less chaos—but you need some chaos to avoid stagnation. Gaia has even been able to maintain appropriate temperatures for life even as the sun has gotten 25 percent brighter and despite periods of significant heating or cooling (pp. 145-150).
  • Just as nature combines collaboration and competition, so does a holonomic, eco-friendly business environment, constantly amalgamating into a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts (pp. 156-165).
  • Valuing the earth/ecosystem has monetary benefits, too; the earth provides $33 trillion per year in services, vastly outstripping the $18 trillion human-generated world GDP (pp. 181-182).
  • It’s better to buy fewer things and use them well than to buy lots of things, just to have them (p. 220).

The final 50 pages or so are full of great case studies in the business world. Companies profiled include obvious ones like Toyota, but also many we don’t necessarily think of as holonomic: VISA, Kyocera, Nextel, the Brazilian auto service shop chain DPaschoal, and many others—with interviews of many leaders from these companies. It also lists the nine factors that make up Bhutan’s National Happiness Index (p. 223), and two amazing quotes from mythicist Joseph Campbell: “All money is congealed energy” (p. 221) and “I don’t think [a meaning for life] is what we’re really seeking…what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive…” (p. 224).

Holonomics includes extensive endnotes, bibliography, and an index.

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 for, too.

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The Clean and Green Club, December 2021

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: December 2021

Find the Beautiful Symmetry: Are You Properly Closing Your Loops?

Holistic thinking works in circles, not straight lines. In nature, waste products of one species are inputs for another. Animals breathe oxygen in and breathe out carbon dioxide, which plants breathe in and convert back to oxygen. Each needs the other, and the process is circular. We can learn from watching and emulating nature, as Biomimicry guru Janine Benyus consistently points out.

Most of the loops have more than two steps: A bird eats an insect, and is in turn eaten by a coyote, which, when it dies, decomposes and attracts insects. Or water evaporates into a cloud, which releases water in the form of rain, which allows plants to grow, and the water evaporates again. Some loops might have many more steps than that.

In my most recent book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, I cite a number of examples of humans mimicking nature and creating similar looped systems. For example, The Intervale, an industrial park where brewery waste grows mushrooms, the mushroom waste supports tilapia, and the fish waste fertilizes grain for the brewery—and in the process, this integrated agricultural loop anchor an enjoyable downtown biopark.

In other words, a green or socially conscious business can benefit by thinking holistically.

Unfortunately. far too many businesses take a step in the direction of the better world we all want and then leave it hanging. Think about a coffee shop that uses compostable single-use cups, lids, and cutlery—but fails to separate them in the trash and sends them into the landfill. There’s no benefit to the earth in that, just an unnecessary extra cost (last time I priced them, compostable cups ran about 25 cents apiece versus five cents for landfill-designated cups).

What other loops should be closed? Here are a few to get you started (some about going green, some about social justice or employee empowerment):

  • What happens to your waste? Is it something to dispose of, or something you can reuse or even sell?
  • Are there energy, materials, or water supplies being squandered in leaks or inefficient processes? If so, how can you fix them?
  • Do you have convenient collection stations for reusable or recyclable packaging and products? Are the collected materials successfully reused or recycled?
  • Is your DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) commitment successful? Are you reaching out to the target populations in hiring (including execs and senior management, not just line employees) AND in your user base? Are you letting the target communities know what you’re doing? And are you actively partnering with organizations that serve these communities to spread the word, identify candidates, coordinate services (e.g., sign language interpretation at an event)
  • Have you set up feedback systems to early-alert any HR problems, evaluate and (when appropriate) implement employee suggestions and potentially reward those suggesting, and monitor their effects? How else is innovation rewarded and soul-killing bureaucracy discouraged?
  • How are customer and vendor complaints handled?
  • Do you cross-train employees and otherwise prepare them for advancement?
  • Do they have a way to notify friends and family of appropriate vacancies?

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.

Collective Visioning

Collective Visioning: How Groups Can Work Together for a Just and Sustainable Future, by Linda StoutWhether you’re in business or activism, you probably have a lot of meetings to go to. And while there are plenty of books on running effective meetings, I’m not aware of many that focus on the meeting as a form of empowerment. Stout brings years of organizing successful cross-racial, cross-cultural, cross-class community organizations and coalitions that built on her experience as a working-class rural white woman working mostly in the Deep South, who never thought, growing up, that she could be a leader.

Yet, she’s led several organizations, including at least one national group. And her engagement of working class people and those of color long predates the current embrace of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in both the business and social change worlds; her book has a 2011 copyright and draws on work she’s done for decades.

For Stout, organizations work best when they create a process to collectively create a vision, not just for a particular organization or campaign but for society as a whole—and then figuring out how to implement that vision. One of her most powerful case studies describes school children in post-Katrina New Orleans who designed a whole new model of education (pp. 22, 27) and got big pieces of it adopted by the school system (though some parts were casualties of other factors like the crashing economy of 2007-09).

In today’s walking-on-eggshells time when many on the left are super-worried about offending people from various historically oppressed groups, Stout offers an example of a white group that hosted an event in a church known to have KKK connections and then wondered why their outreach to communities of color didn’t bring turnout (p. 48). But she says even an event in very white places like Iowa can attract participants of color, if organizers thoroughly understand not just their messaging but how it’s received in targeted communities. [This is true in the business world, too. Chevrolet brought the Nova to Latin America without noticing that the name translates as “doesn’t go”—and then wondered why sales were terrible.] You may have to work at inclusion. If you want young moms to attend, you’ll need childcare and perhaps transportation; if you want people with physical disabilities, meet in a barrier-free space. And if you hire an ASL interpreter, reach out ahead of time to deaf communities and let them know (p. 47). And even a space with a problematic history can be used if the history is acknowledged in the right way (p. 49).

Meetings accomplish more, Stout says, if they reach agreement on process and behavior right from the beginning and to accept that others in the room have good intentions, even if that takes some time (pp. 54-55).

While she loves the group visioning process, Stout recognizes that not all gatherings are ready to plunge in. Particularly if your attendees are feeling hopeless and powerless, some personal visioning (pp. 69-86) might need to happen before the group brainstorms a collective vision.

Once the collective vision is in place, the work is far from done. Pages 107-115 address the challenge of agreeing on strategies for action and implementation. One way is phrase goals positively (pp. 127-129). Another is to have participants look back to the present as “ambassadors from the future” from a time down the road when the goals have been met or exceeded (p. 131). And another is to make a point of celebrating even small victories (p. 135). She mentions several others. One I particularly like is a set of strategies for involving the whole community (not just the organization’s members and activists) to accomplish goals like closing a prison or challenging segregationism in local media and government at the same time (pp. 155-165). It isn’t easy, but she reminds us that repression and censorship are signs the other side thinks you’re winning, that languaging and messaging are really important, and that the culture can be changed.

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 for, too.

————–

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The Clean and Green Club, November 2021

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: November 2021

Guerrilla Customer Service as Marketing

I listened to a webinar by John Livesay, who brands himself as “the pitch whisperer.” And I found it interesting that a lot of his pitch secrets had to do with extreme customer service, something I’ve been a fan of for years.John led off by describing Banana Republic’s free secure/guarded phone charging while shopping. Sales went up 15 percent, because people hung out until their phones were charged!

It reminded me of listening to the amazing Jack Mitchell, author of one of my favorite books on extreme service, Hug Your Customers. He describes having a staffer get on a transatlantic plane to deliver a suit the customer needed at an overseas conference. His whole book is full of great examples. It was one of the first books I reviewed in this newsletter, way back in November, 2003.

Brands at the top end, from Ritz-Carlton to Mercedes to Neiman Marcus, have offered legendary customer service for years, and are very aware that their efforts there are part of their overall marketing. But unlike many of companies famous for outrageously customer-centric service, Banana Republic is not a high-end luxury brand. It’s not the bottom end, but the typical middle-class person would be comfortable shopping there.

Another non-luxury brand that offers above-industry-standard is Southwest Airlines—which, interestingly enough, began as a price-leader but built amazing service in from the get-go. It’s not just the only US airline I’m aware of that doesn’t charge for a stowed bag or a ticket-change, and possibly the only one whose flight attendants are encouraged to have a sense of humor. The company also empowers its gate and phone/online agents to make the customer happy. They earned MY loyalty when the one-day closure of my local airport for a snowstorm, somewhere around 2009, meant we would not be able to get on a cruise ship in Tampa. Southwest allowed us to reroute and fly one day later to Fort Lauderdale, the ship’s first stop—so we were able to salvage the cruise. So even though it’s often no longer the price leader, if we can get close to the price and convenience of a different itinerary via Southwest, that’s how we usually fly.

In my one-person service business, I often look for opportunities to help. Sometimes that means sending a media lead to the perfect source—whether or not that person is a client (and I don’t charge for that). Sometimes, it’s looking around a client’s website and making notes on what I could improve (and while I don’t charge for taking those notes if the client hasn’t requested it, I do charge for making the improvements). And sometimes it’s a quick call to answer a client’s or prospect’s question, just as a favor. And I believe this is one reason why I have some clients for years at a time.

How can you up the level of service in your business—and harness the marketing power of the positive impression you make?

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.

My interview, How to Write a Book for Social Change, is live on Dan Janal’s Write Your Book in a Flash podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPUoVPp2yP4 . I had a short-term physical issue that day, which explains some of the weird pauses—but the information is really good, and because it’s focused on authors building movements, it’s significantly different material from many of my other interviews.

  • How books have ALREADY changed the world (with examples)

  • How to research to support the point of view you want people to adopt

  • How to leverage your book to widen the audience for your point of view

  • How self-publishing can give you leverage to get a traditional publisher

  • How to use YOUR book to create a movement

It’s worth noting that a lot of my social change consulting practice is book shepherding and book marketing for authors with socially conscious books. In other words, if you’re looking to get a change-the-world book done, published, and/or marketed, please get in touch: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/

Profiled in this article about (of all things) how I as a rural business owner and activist use broadband. https://www.explorebeyond.org/stories/broadband-powers-entrepreneurship-in-rural-new-england/

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.

Seducing Strangers

Seducing Strangers: How to Get People to Buy What You’re Selling, by Josh Weltman

Real-life ad man Weltman was a co-producer of the Mad Men TV show for several years. And this book has a lot of good advice for marketers, especially those whose strategies rely heavily on advertising. More importantly, Weltman leads off with excellent lessons in consumer psychology—and to me, those are some of the best insights in the book. A few examples:

  • Happiness is not about what you have, but what you EXPECT to have—and how closely that matches reality (p. 10)
  • Forget “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” The reality is that once you build that mousetrap—and whether it’s better is subjective—you have to TELL the world (p. 11). For every example like Google, where the world actually did beat a path to its virtual door, thousands of businesses foundered with excellent products strangled by poor marketing.
  • Never do a good promotion for a bad product; it will kill your business (p. 12)
  • Solving customer problems is more about DISCOVERY than invention; we’re more curious than creative (p. 13)
  • (My favorite) Advertising (which I would broaden to include marketing generally) is about CONFIRMING, not changing, prospects’ minds (pp. 14-16)
  • Engage both adrenaline (emotional response) and dopamine (explanation); if the main headline confuses, the subhead must explain—or vice-versa (pp 25-28). Emotion cements the brand, while facts cement the sale (pp. 38-40).

Weltman also provides the recipe for a successful advertising developer: keen observer; good listener; endlessly curious; and, interestingly, “pathological inability to lie” in their ads (pp. 15-16, emphasis added). He noted that even Mad Men’s Draper wrote truthful ads, even though truth in other aspects of his life was often lacking.

Advertising [or marketing] is a strange business because different companies (or parts of a company) are responsible for making the brand promise (the agency or marketing department) and for keeping or exceeding that promise (design, manufacturing, distribution, etc.). Both are required to build a brand (p. 33).

For Weltman, successful marketing answers one of four questions, each used at a different stage in the customer lifecycle—and each requiring different ads (or other marketing messages):

  1. What is it? (aimed at prospects who don’t know the product or company)
  2. Why do I need it now? (creating scarcity or urgency or bargain-frenzy among those who are wavering or not yet committed—with these, be careful not to cannibalize the 20 percent who would buy anyway without a discount or other incentive)
  3. What makes it different? (why they should choose you over a competitor)
  4. Who else thinks it’s good? (social proof and community building—these ads are aimed at your existing customers, to turn them into raving fans)

By far the biggest portion of the book explores these four types, the situations to use them in, and what you can expect to happen. The important thing is that each marketing piece should only address one of the four, because the different messages aim at different market segments with very different needs.

I’m a long-time believer in segmenting the market; if you’ve heard me speak, you’ve probably heard me discuss marketing differently to Deep Greens, Lazy Greens, Non-Greens, and Green-Hostiles. But for me, the big insight of this book is to also segment by stage in the buying process and the lifetime customer cycle. And I like the idea of using tag lines that unify these different stages (p. 61).

The market also shifts by demographics and psychographics, of course. In one of many case studies, Weltman goes through the process of advertising an SUV specifically to communitarian Generation Y, with a brilliant spot where sequential users do something cool with the car, then toss the keys to the next user (pp. 75-77). That’s useless to individualistic, antiauthoritarian GenXers but sings to digital natives Millennials who create their own participatory Internet daily (pp. 147-148).

Another counter-intuitive case study involves setting expectations low enough that a shaky brand can keep its promise (pp. 91-93)—an advertising heresy! And a refreshing admission that not all marketers believe in the products they’re hired to pitch. (Personally, I turn down assignments that go against my values or my quality standards.)

And I love his focus on the power of the right words, noting again that persuasion requires both fact and emotion. That means ruthlessly going over copy drafts to change weak words like “hungry” into powerful ones like “voracious” (p. 120). And remembering that once your prospect agrees to your key principle, persuasion is happening.

Unlike most marketing authors I’ve read, Weltman sees online as fundamentally different than offline marketing. The final nine chapters focus on online: how to demonstrate values and vision through empathy, what stories to tell to whom (pp. 161-162), four key strategic questions (p. 165), and why to change people’s sense of what’s possible (167-168).

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 for, too.

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The Clean and Green Club, October 2021

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: October 2021

What Chris Did—And What I Thought of It

Last month, I shared a conversation with Chris Brogan about his salesletter rewrite project, including the changes I suggested to him and his response. I also shared the revised salesletter done by the copywriter he hired to “shiny it up.” And I told you I’d come to you this month with my reaction to the rewrite.

Unfortunately, I hated it. And here’s why:

The previous version of the letter clearly identified an audience: People who want to earn more customers, create fast, effective media, find better productivity tools, receive guidance, be more known, be the authority, get more attention. They may or may not already consider themselves a part of Chris’s tribe, but they respect him enough to visit his website. And some portion of them could consider going deeper with him and might enjoy the option of a continuity program.

But what happens in the rewrite? The headline is just “Owner Media.” Some people may know that’s the name of one of Chris’s businesses. Others might just be confused. What does that even mean? Not only is there no call to action or audience clarification in the headline, it loses any promise of something to help the prospect—even the fairly week “Small Business Owner Tools and Support” of the original.

And the subhead that follows those two words is “WAIT, WHAT? THERE’S A MEMBER COMMUNITY AT OWNER MEDIA?” (emphasis in original)

Let’s keep in mind that for most people, a continuity program in the form of a membership site is not a goal. It’s a tool: a way of getting fresh thinking, new insights, and access to other tools that someone they trust has already vetted. Yet this copy assumes that:

  1. The reader will already want Chris’s membership community and just has to be informed that it exists
  2. The community is a desire, not a means; the reader knows the benefits without being told
  3. “We” language about Chris and his partner Rob will work better than “you” language about the prospect’s wants and needs

I disagree with all three assumptions. Let’s look at the third one: I think language like “we’re not telly-tell lecture-y people who create a curriculum and never want to hear sass from the audience. No, that’s not how we do our best, and we know it’s not how our Insiders do their best” is all about them, not about the benefits, and counterproductive.

Then the letter starts addressing the objection of not enough time. But it hasn’t really addressed why the person reading even needs this. Then there’s a long digression about pricing before getting to the actual pricing. Instead of building confidence in Chris and Rob’s considerable skills—they’re two of the smartest people I know—it makes Chris and Rob sound flaky, disorganized, and narcissistic.

I could go on, but I’ll stop here. I already laid out the strategy I would have used in my first response to Chris’s newsletter.

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.

Northampton, MA, Friday, November 12, 6-8 p.m., Anchor House of Artists, lower Pleasant Street across from the bowling alley. A rare chance to meet me in a non-marketing, non-activist setting. My late stepfather, Michihiro “Yoshi” Yoshida, was an incredible painter. Known as The Mythic Modernist, he combined natural landscapes, real and fictional/famous and ordinary people, and mythic images from around the world in vividly colorful canvases, some quite large. He was killed three years ago at age 88 by a distracted driver as he was on his way to his daily 3-mile jog. His work is stunning and original.

You can get a taste at http://ArtByYoshi.com –but really, you want to see the actual paintings, which are a much deeper experience. Yoshi and another deceased artist friend have a joint exhibit November 10-27 in the main gallery, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday from 3:00 p.m to 6:00 p.m.,with a reception as part of Northampton Arts Night Out, Friday, November 12, 6-8 p.m. The Real and the Imagined: The Legacy of Two Passionate Painters, Michihiro “Yoshi” Yoshida and Harriet Graicerstein. There will be a live violin/piano klezmer duet at the reception featuring Rafael Natan (my younger child, who has two degrees from New England Conservatory) and Nick Beary. Light refreshments will be served, several other interesting exhibits will be open in other parts of the gallery (which consistently features some of the most exciting art in the area), and there’s even on-site parking. Yoshi’s paintings for the show were selected by my wife and me. The gallery website is https://www.anchorhouseartists.org/

We also expect to do a virtual event, but I don’t have the details at press time. We’ll do it in the second half of November, so I can announce it in the next newsletter.

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 Folk Singers and the Bureau

The Folk Singers and the Bureau by Aaron J. Leonard

Most of us are familiar with the general outlines of US anticommunist hysteria from the 1930s into the 1960s, and particularly Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). We know that entertainers were blacklisted, workers lost their jobs, quite a few people were imprisoned, and at least two (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) were executed.

But Congress was only one slice of a much deeper attack on freedom of belief. The FBI was another big prong. I, for one, didn’t know that the FBI actually drew up lists of people who would be rounded up and detained on command—and those lists included some of our best-loved entertainers, among them Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, and Bess Lomax Hawes (co-author of the MTA song, a/k/a “Charlie and the MTA”). Interestingly, Leonard argues that longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, though a virulent anticommunist, disliked McCarthy and opposed his methods.

In a year that started with an armed coup attempt inside the US Capitol against the elected US government, it is worth remembering three key points:

  1. All but one of the mass domestic terrorist incidents I can think of were conducted by right-wingers: the January 6th insurrection, of course–but also Oklahoma City, 9/11, Pulse Nightclub, El Paso, Las Vegas, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church… (The exception is the 1954 Puerto Rican Nationalist attack on the Capitol.) Yet the government has historically focused its energies on the little sliver of far-left agitators.
  2. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have clean hands in suppressing dissent or in harnessing state terror just to show power. Though they continued into the Eisenhower administration, the FBI abuses against suspected Communist Party members and sympathizers mostly took place under Democrats FDR and Truman. FDR’s other shames include authorizing the Japanese internment and turning away Jewish refugees, while Truman’s including deploying two atomic bombs against a Japan that was already about to surrender—with the apparent purpose of telling the USSR not to mess with us. And of course, LBJ and Nixon were both in charge during the suppression of leftists in the 1960s. This makes it even more urgent to organize and make sure Biden keeps his progressive campaign promises (as I write this in September, he’s failing badly on several, including immigration justice, climate change, and voting rights).
  3. It is absolutely important to curtain domestic terror. However, there are plenty of ways to do it that don’t involve “othering” and repressing a portion of the population. We are all entitled to our beliefs, no matter how far outside the mainstream. But none of us are entitled to wage violence in the service of our beliefs, and the government needs to keep those elements in check.

Personally, I’d love to see the government embrace alternative strategies to war and violence both in containing terrorism and in furthering democracy around the world. A good first step would be establishing a Cabinet-level Department of Peace, as proposed by former Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio.

The book is impeccably researched, with a seven-page bibliography and discography, 50 pages of end notes(!), and a 15-page index. However, the writing is less than stellar, and the editor or proofreader should have been fired. Still, I will put up with bad writing to get important information (or a good story). I didn’t plan to review this as I read it, and only realized as I finished the main text and began going through the notes that there was relevant wisdom to my newsletter readers. Thus, no page citations this month.

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 for, 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, September 2021

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: September 2021

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Are You Confusing Your Market and Audience? BIG Mistake

In a recent newsletter, Chris Brogan wrote, “The other day, I tweeted out something like, ‘Hey, who here can help shiny up a sales page for me?’” and then went on to list the responses and his process of choosing who to work with. I realized even as I was writing back to him that I wanted to share my thoughts with you, too. Here’s the relevant part what I sent him. You can see the archived sales page we’re discussing (since he has indeed replaced the copy) at https://web.archive.org/web/20210507210632/https://ownermedia.leadpages.co/insider/

I L O V E “shiny it up”–nice addition to the language. I missed the post where you made that request, or I probably would have responded.

I say “probably” because your existing sales page is quite strong–at least for a word nerd like me. I love replacing the “new normal” with “New Better”–especially since I’ve been thinking hard about the opportunities to make a better world as we emerge from the pandemic. I’m sure you’ve heard that it’s too long, but that’s an audience thing. If I and people like me are your target audience, it’s not too long because it got me to read all the way through. And it felt much less lengthy when I switched from reading it on my phone to re-reading it on a computer, BTW.

I will be very curious to see what magic Sandy works. Three changes I would make would be:

  1. A MUCH stronger headline than “Small Business Owner Tools and Support”–something focused on the benefit (goal made easier and/or problem solved or at least helped) and an action step
  2. Change the five “I” bullets to “You”
  3. Spread the testimonials out instead of grouping them together (and possibly add more)
  4. Since you used Cyndi’s testimonial as a teaser early on, I’d use her entire blurb there and not repeat it later

It got me thinking more about the difference between audience and market, though–because I AM your audience, but I’m NOT your market.

I’m your audience because I love good copy, I run a microbusiness (a solopreneurship, in fact), and I encounter some of these issues in my business. But I’m not your market, because 1) I historically haven’t reacted well to online courses and tend to abandon them; 2) I can’t keep up with the firehose of information already coming my way; 3) I tend to multitask while listening to webinars and teleseminars, and if I’m paying for the content, that means I have to not multitask to get my money’s worth, and therefore there are fewer computer hours in the day to get everything else done; and most importantly, 4) I’ve already developed a bunch of support systems and networks of people I can bounce stuff off–ranging from online communities to 1:1 peer masterminds where we mentor and help each other.

Until now, writing to you, I really hadn’t thought very much about the truth that [audience and market] don’t always align even when it looks like a fit. Since I’m thinking about it now, this note is likely to evolve into my monthly newsletter main article.

Other places where a market and an audience might not match–these, I *have* thought about before–would include:

  • K-12 and college-following-right-after-high school educational settings, where the market is parents or teachers but the audience is kids
  • Services for elders, purchased by younger caregivers
  • Services provided by nonprofits working in poverty situations; their market is donors in wealthy countries, but their clients (the audience) are individuals with zero disposable income and little infrastructure
  • Corporate B2B sales where the decision-makers are not the users

What’s new and different about *this* conversation is the situation where the audience is almost the market, but non-obvious factors get in the way. So thanks for the insight ;-).

And here’s the relevant part of his reply to me:

There’s quite a lot of food for thought in here so thank you for that. We both agree that a new better might be much better than a new normal.

If you’re curious about what his copywriter did, visit https://ownermedia.leadpages.co/insider/ . The version I’m looking at begins,

Owner Insider

“WAIT, WHAT? THERE’S A MEMBER COMMUNITY AT OWNER MEDIA?”

If you’re seeing something different, you can see if Archive.org has that one (paste the above URL into the search field on that site). As of the day I’m writing this in August, the most recent Archive copy is the May 7 version that begins “Small Business Owner Tools and Support.”

Next month, I’ll give you my response to Chris’s “Shiny up” new sales page.

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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.

Are you ever stuck on the hamster wheel, just barely getting by? What if I told you there are always ways to create more impact, more income, and more freedom?

>Maybe you’ve seen others thrive and asked yourself, “Why can’t I create those kinds of results? How do I figure out what the cutting-edge experts are doing?”

Well, if you’re like my friend Christine Schlonski, you get a bunch of these super successful, heart-centered experts and authorities together and ask! She won’t even charge you to hear our answers, if you listen live to her Profitable Coach Summit. But it’s not just for coaches. Any entrepreneur will benefit.

You might recognize some of the speakers’ names–Milana Leshinski, Jeannie Spiro, Dan Janal, and many others–and, of course, Christine herself. She is not only brilliant, she’s also a lot of fun to be around. Plus, all of these strategies are heart-centered; they’ll feel right from the get-go.

Get your complimentary ticket to The Profitable Coach Summit here: https://ci340.isrefer.com/go/PCS/shelhoro/

The best part is, these sessions will give you guidance and insights on how you can become a profitable coach with the impact and freedom you desire.

Here’s just a taste :

  • How to Create a Business That Feeds Your Soul and Your Wallet
  • The World’s #1 Media Coach Will Show You How To Generate Top-Tier Media Coverage (without paying anything for it)
  • Turning Webinars on Their Heads: How to increase interaction and conversion with shorter, story-based presentations.
  • Converting LinkedIn Content and Connections to Conversations
  • The Four Sales Languages
  • Small Events, Big Back End: How To Build a 7–Figure Business With Retreats & Mastermind Groups
  • How To Triple Revenue In One Year With 3 Simple Steps
  • MY TALK: Finding the Profit in Purpose and the Purpose in Profit: The Sweet Spot Where Profitability, Social Change, and Healing the Planet All Intersect
  • And many more…

==> https://ci340.isrefer.com/go/PCS/shelhoro/ for your no-charge ticket, then tune in September 21-26.

PS–if you can’t make all the sessions, there is an upgrade package to get all the recordings.

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.

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Sell with Authority: Own and Monetize Your Agency’s Authority Position

Sell with Authority: Own and Monetize Your Agency’s Authority Position by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner (BookPress, 2020)

Don’t be put off by the subtitle if you don’t happen to run an advertising or marketing agency. While the book markets itself to ad agency owners, the authority strategy is far broader. I actually tried to think of an industry vertical where an authority strategy couldn’t work, and I failed. When I think of toilet paper, I think first of Marcal and its authority strategy around forest preservation…when I think of transportation, I think about the way Toyota and Tesla made electric cars a status symbol in vastly different markets—by positioning their customers as authorities in combining functionality (Prius) or performance/luxury (Tesla) with environmental responsibility: customers who were smart enough to be pioneers in our brave new path to a clean future. In agriculture, I think of the hundreds of organic foods businesses that use their packaging to educate consumers and position themselves as authorities on healthy eating and healthy land use.

So…what’s an authority position? According to McLellan and Woessner, you pick a niche, which could be driven by your industry slice, your audience, or the problem you solve (p. 31). In a Venn diagram, your niche is the intersection of several circles, as on the cover and on page 36, where the intersection is agencies—we’ll substitute “businesses”—with your expertise, those who “give a rip,” and those with your unique point of view. That intersection is tiny slice of a huge pie, and if you define it properly, it may only have one dot in the intersection: YOU! People who need your exact expertise, benefit from your point of view, and see that you actually care will discover that hiring your company is the only choice.

But I’d a add a caution: make another Venn diagram to establish market viability: One circle for who needs your expertise (and your solutions), another for who is aware of you or can become aware after minimal exploration, and a third for who is willing and able to pay for that expertise. THAT intersection is your actual potential market, and it should be a lot bigger than a single pinpoint.

I made the mistake of not doing this research 25 years ago when I released my book on how to have fun cheaply. It turned out the frugalists who wanted information on how to legally and ethically see entertainment for no-cost, travel for a fraction of the usual place, and find dating options that cost little or nothing didn’t want to pay for that information—and despite consistent national publicity (including ABC News, the MSN home page, and Redbook, among many others), it took me 8 years to sell through a 2000-copy print run of a $17 book.

You develop a detailed and unique point of view on the issues in that niche (pp. 37-43), perhaps asking how your clients are missing the mark (p. 41). Next, you develop a single content “cornerstone”: a central marketing strategy including the six building blocks on page 51. Something like a book, a regular podcast or blog—that consistently gets you in front of prospects who welcome those messages, that plays the long game—that both helps your audience (of actual prospects) get better at their task and deepens your connection with them. Once one cornerstone is firmly established, you can add a second.

From the cornerstone, develop “cobblestones”: little drips of enticing content that engages, informs, and brings people into your orbit.

In other words, everything should be strategic. As you develop your cornerstone content, you get to play journalist. Call your prospects, invite them to be interviewed, and then turn snippets of the conversation into cobblestones that promote them—and you.

Strategically maximize your efforts with everything from adding captions to all your videos (p. 70) and loading them natively into not just YouTube but other platforms including LinkedIn and Facebook (p. 137) to turning clients and prospects into marketing partners (p. 112), to detailed rinse-and-repeat recipes for getting the most exposure from every effort (pp. 156-165), and even a list of software tools they use.

Each chapter has one author, by the way: a very easy way to collaborate on a book.

Connect with Shel

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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 for, too.

————–

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The Clean and Green Club, August 2021

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: August 2021

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Live Events Are Back…But Zoom Isn’t Going Away

I am quite sure there will be online options at many formerly offline events. As I write this, I’m currently attending my first hybrid conference. It took place in Paris a month earlier with some in-person speakers, and I am watching from Massachusetts, slowly, over a few weeks. And no travel costs, no travel fatigue.

As an attender, advantages include being able to spread out the sessions, watch multiple programs that took place at the same time, and catch them at my convenience. Remote events also provide many advantages to event planners. Direct mail guru Brian Kurtz listed a few:

“Many of the events I’m referring to (pre-pandemic) ranged from 500 to 2,000 attendees live…and when they had to go 100% virtual, attendance increased as much as 50% to 200%. Along with increased stick rates (i.e. how long the audience stayed online).”

Of course, attending a replay has disadvantages too. Since I’m attending after-the-fact and have no access to any chat rooms that may have been going on, the networking value is close to zero. I could, if I wanted to, network with speakers by tracking them down (so far, no one has blown me far enough out of the water at this event, but I’ve reached out to other speakers at other virtual conferences)—but reaching non-presenting attenders isn’t an option. When I’ve attended live over Zoom, I actually have done some good networking and made new friends, got speaking opportunities and even some paying clients. For instance, last year, I dropped in on an inventor pitch meeting in virtual San Diego. There was a 16-year-old inventor/entrepreneur presenting (I guess he’s probably 17 by now) who I reached out to, have nurtured a friendship, done a bit of mentoring, and brought him in as one of the other guests when a radio producer told me to bring two guests to my segment. In a different meeting, someone expressed frustration in the chat about a business situation. I gave her some immediate advice, asked if I could follow up with her, and she gave me her contact information. She’s turned into a repeat client with several small jobs.

There’s also a whole new category of events: ongoing Zoom salons where some of the same people show up every week, and we get to know each other over time—kind of like a Chamber mixer but MUCH more substantive. These have become a favorite activity for me and vastly expand my circle.

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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.

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.

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Risk Forward: Embrace the Unknown and Unlock Your Hidden Genius

Risk Forward: Embrace the Unknown and Unlock Your Hidden Genius, by Victoria Labalme (Hay House, 2021)

This isn’t the sort of book I typically review. It’s motivational, very brief, with sometimes only a word or two on a page, followed by a page or two with a single phrase up to a couple of hundred words expanding on the opening word or phrase. But I liked this one enough to share.In part, this is because like me, she combines many worlds: in her case, she has a background in multiple performing arts—including studying with Marcel Marceau—as well as business and teaching/coaching.

She’s also obviously very persuasive; she got her publisher, Hay House, to spring for color printing throughout the book (an expensive undertaking, and one that isn’t obvious to the casual reader, because many of the pages have just a dab of color in one of the little critters that say wise things at the edges of the text). And she got me to review it (and subscribe to her newsletter) after hearing her present on a Zoom call some months ago.

Starting by reinventing the contents listing as a “circle of contents,” she makes an adamant case to be yourself, to risk embarrassment or failure, to let your light shine even if it shines on a path no one else is taking—and to allow ideas to sprout even in the places you aren’t comfortable and can’t guess the outcome. That’s where the extraordinary might be hiding: “It is in this very gap between what is and what could be that we find our way; it is here that some of our best ideas are born” (p. 5).

She gives a lot of guidance on nurturing your intuition, including a page each of feelings that demonstrate you are or are not on the right path (pp. 25-26)—and nurturing others, even asking what single piece of advice you would give a mentee if you were dying on a desert island (p. 31).

That kind of twist on the familiar is something she does a lot; she’s a delightful contrarian. So many business and self-help books go on about goals, while Labalme proclaims, “you don’t need a goal to justify a pursuit”—and you don’t need to know where it’s going, how you’ll use it, or even why you’re following this passion (p. 48). Similarly, you don’t need to select a single focus; be like the spreading canopy of an oak or maple, not the narrow needle of a cypress (p. 115). And I love “Don’t just do something! Stand there!” (p. 102). If others are pressuring you to act prematurely, demand more time (pp. 104-106). Risking forward is about courage, not speed (p. 117); it’s an adventure (p. 129).

It also doesn’t have to be a choice. Often, you may discover an “and” instead of an “or” (pp. 72-74)—but you may have to take it apart before you can put it together (p. 75). And you may draw from a completely different vertical.

And even while recognizing the huge benefits of collaboration, ultimately, you may have to build your own road. As her husband Frank Oz put it in a series of visual diagrams (pp. 88-93), if you let creativity be shaped by consensus, your idea may get so skewed that it no longer works.

Connect with Shel

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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 for, too.

————–

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

 

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