The Clean and Green Club, May 2023

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

 What Do They Notice FIRST About Your Product?
If you sell a physical product, the first thing someone notices is either the product itself—think of how heads turn when an exotic car rolls onto the street—or the packaging. In a retail environment, online or on a store shelf, it’s the packaging that helps buyers decide whether to pick up your product, or a competitor’s similar offering. If it’s a book, they first judge the front cover, then the title, then the back cover. If your book passes that initial screening, only then will they glance at the content. If it’s a typical household product or food, they search the box/jar/bag/can, seeking decision aids.

What helps people say yes? Here are a few among many—which ones can YOU use in your packaging?

  • Third-party validation: endorsements, awards, certifications, positive media coverage (including reader reviews online), pictures of people using the product, etc.
  • Useful information about the product’s capabilities, especially less obvious ones, like a certain skin product that’s widely used as a bug repellant (important note: if making any claims about improved health, be absolutely sure to research the laws on what you can and cannot claim, and discuss the language you plan to use on your packaging with an attorney before you rev up the presses)
  • Information about how this purchase helps people and planet: how your company is creating social justice, environmental healing, etc.
  • Simple instructions on how to assemble or use the product
  • For food products, easy recipes or serving suggestions
  • What the packaging is made of and how to recycle it

If you don’t think packaging makes a difference, consider Marcal, a household paper products company serving the northeast US. Founded in 1932, the company was bankrupt in the early oughts. Then they made their then-50+ year history of using only recycled paper the centerpiece of their marketing and used their packaging to urge customers to buy their brand in order to help save a million trees. Within about a year, the company was not only out of bankruptcy but became the market leader in recycled household paper products, even though it’s only a regional brand.

While this tip focuses on attracting the first-time customer, packaging is also a powerful tool to keep customers coming back. Stay tuned for next month’s newsletter, where we’ll highlight that.

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.

Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take

Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take by Paul Polman and Andrew Winston (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021)

Typically, when I review a book, I take notes on the blank pages. Most books I review run between three and seven pages of handwritten notes. This one generated an astonishing 18 pages. The book is very well-written, but it took me quite a while to read because I kept stopping to write things down.

For ten years, Polman was the CEO of Unilever, one of the largest consumer-facing companies in the world, with more than 300 brands including Ben & Jerry’s, Hellmann’s, Dove, Lifebouy, and Seventh Generation. Winston is a well-known green business writer whose books include Green to Gold. Many examples in the book are taken from Unilever as a whole and its individual brands.

As soon as he took the reins, Polman began to shift away from the short-sighted typical business “wisdom” that quarterly profits matter more than anything else and that stockholders are the only stakeholders who count. He transformed shareholder value from a goal to a result (pp. 36-39).

And those results are terrific. Companies in the JUST Capital 100 list of purpose-driven companies created 56% higher shareholder returns over five years. Deloitte found mission-driven companies had 30 percent more innovation and 40 percent better employee retention. B Corps in the UK grew 28 times faster than the overall economy. 70 percent of consumers will pay more for more sustainable products (p. 77). 80 percent would make lifestyle changes to stop catastrophic climate change (p. 255).

By ditching this limited mindset in favor of a holistic long-term strategy of protecting the planet and its beings, Polman took a company that was a bit shaky and turned it into an astonishingly adept and handsomely profitable force for environmental and social good. Seven years into his tenure, he was able to fend off a hostile takeover by Kraft Heinz in just nine days, by rallying the allies he’d built through committing to a society and planet that works for all (pp. 1-3).

Those alliances are key for Polman. He regularly reached out to competitors, to NGOs that had protested the company’s practices, to government officials—and joined them in action-focused committees that actually create change on issues ranging from carbon footprint to sanitation (Lifebouy’s hand-washing campaign) to fair wages, to women’s self-image (Dove). He and his successors are often the first to set new and potentially scary goals, then leverage being one of the biggest players to push the rest of the industry along.

While the three goals of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, “help a billion people improve their health and well-being, halve the environmental footprint while doubling sales, and enhance the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people” (p. 101) were implemented throughout the corporation, individual brands had great freedom to choose their causes and specific approaches.

Ten years in, the USLP had helped Unilever save €1.2 billion while switching to 100%-renewable electricity for manufacturing, slashing CO2 in manufacturing by 65 percent and water by 40 percent, and increasing sustainably produced agricultural ingredients from 14 to 67 percent (among eight successes listed on p. 83).

Using the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as benchmarks, Polman and Winston see enormous opportunity for other companies, too. Hitting these global goals, according to one report, “will open up at least $12 trillion in business opportunity and create 380 million jobs by 2030 (in just four sectors of the economy)” (p. 21). They note that the SDGs are designed to interlock with and reinforce each other—and that partnership, the 17
th goal, makes the other 16 possible (p. 138). One example is ELYSIS, codeveloped by aluminum competitors Alcoa and Rio Tinto in conjunction with Apple (which invested $13 million and purchased the first batch). This venture reinvented aluminum smelting to eliminate carbon emissions. Audi is now using this cleaner aluminum for the wheels of its electric sports car (pp.147-148).

Net Positive companies encourage their employees to challenge and question and push. Trane Technologies’ Operation Possible involved 35,000 employees who settled on addressing food waste. 9000 Amazon employees joined forces to pressure Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to focus on climate change (p. 89).

The biggest goals, helping us do the most reframing, typically start with “zero” or “all” and are paired with some sort of “and,” e.g., net-zero energy AND happier, more productive workers (p. 97).

And these commitments really do change the culture. Not only has Unilever continued post-Polman to be a force for good while creating great financial results, but high-level Unilever execs who leave the company either start their own net-positive businesses or take positions at companies where they can bring social and environmental action to the forefront (p. 243).

The book closes with this quote from Wangari Maathai’s Nobel Peace Prize speech:

There can be no peace without equitable development, and no development without sustainable management of the environment in a democratic and peaceful space…In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now.

This review only scratches the surface of this amazing book. Get yourself a copy, dig in, take lots of notes, and implement!

Connect with Shel

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

About Shel

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

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

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The Clean and Green Club, April 2023

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

 THIS Mindset is What Changes the World!
Image Credit: Katya Wolf via Pexels
Years ago, I added the phrase “optimistic creativity” to my signature speech, “’Impossible’ Is a Dare!” I’ve always felt that’s the sweet spot where meaningful change happens. Optimists are motivated to find solutions because we understand that change is possible. Creatives push the limits of what we see as possible, in part because they have an inner voice seeing “possible” as something that can grow and morph—but also because they see change as necessary, even crucial.

Ritchie blames “doomer culture” for disempowering people to the point where too many choose apathy instead of action because they feel they can’t have the impact they need to have. She starts off with a list of eight major positive trends (all of which, in my opinion, stem from optimistic creativity) and then points out why doomer culture itself is doomed to fail: “Scaring people into action doesn’t work…for almost any issue… To contend with environmental crises and make life better for everyone, we need the right kind of optimists: those who recognize that the world will only improve if we fight for it.”

Then comes many consultants’ perennial favorite, a four-part matrix. Her left axis rates the level of optimism, while the top measures people’s perceptions of the ability to make change. The sweet spot is the intersection of optimism and impact: “The future can be better if we work hard to change it.” She dismisses as ineffectual the denizens of the other three quadrants:

  • “The future will be better; it’ll all work out fine” (“complacent optimists” who don’t see the need to do the work)
  • “We’re doomed and need to take extreme action to protect ourselves” (pessimists who nevertheless believe in the power to create impact)
  • “We’re doomed and there’s nothing we can do about it” (pessimists who don’t think they can have impact)

Let’s look at how optimistic creativity has changed the world, in a relative nanosecond across human history. When I was born in 1956, the world was a very different place. The Internet didn’t exist, and the few institutions and businesses that could afford an enormously expensive computer had to devote special rooms to massive equipment operated by special technicians who “spoke” punch card. A day-rate long-distance phone call (on a tethered landline with an actual dial) between New York and California cost $3.70 for the first three minutes—that’s $40.92 in today’s dollars.

It wasn’t just that we didn’t have portable devices that could access the world’s entire base of written or taped knowledge and experience in seconds and also let us call people anywhere in the world at no cost. Hunger and poverty were rampant around the world. In the US and many parts of Europe, most women were denied professional careers and many professions excluded people of color. In the rest of the world, even the lands where people of color were a majority, discrimination was at least as widespread—and in some places, including South Africa, Rhodesia, and the American South, seriously repressive racism was the law of the land and integral to the culture. Vast areas, including the entire former Soviet Union as well as much of Latin America and Asia, strained under totalitarian governments that routinely violated human rights while funneling much of their nations’ wealth to the already super-wealthy.

On energy, renewables now account for 29 percent of global production, according to Ritchie, and she expects that number to increase rapidly, noting the dramatic fall in prices for solar and wind. It’s worth noting that it’s already increasing exponentially, from just 941 terawatt hours in 1965 to 2280 in 1990, and then zooming up in the past 31 years to 7493. That’s 8x in less than 60 years. Even the experts didn’t predict this rapid growth. And Ritchie is one of many experts who expects fossil fuels to wane even more quickly in the future.

Even as recently as 1990, more than a third of the world’s humans lived in “extreme poverty”: less than USD $2.15 per day. Yet, by 2019, that third had dropped to less than 10 percent. While the pandemic set the UN’s hunger and poverty goals back considerably, I would still call that one of the greatest achievements in human history.

We could keep going, discussing sector after sector: medicine, physics, astronomy, agriculture, circular economy (repurposing waste to use again), biomimicry (learning how to solve engineer challenges from nature), and so much more. In all of them, someone—or a bunch of someones—believed that things could be better and took initiative to make that happen.

And how are YOU harnessing or generating optimistic creativity in your life, your work, and your commitment to benefit the world?

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.

Evolution: 2.0 Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design

Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design by Perry Marshall (BenBella Books, 2015)
I almost didn’t bother reading this book. I ordered it thinking it would be another of Marshall’s classic big-think business books, like the brilliant 80/20 Sales and Marketing (read my review at https://thecleanandgreenclub.com/the-clean-and-green-club-september-2014/).

It’s certainly a big-think book, but not a business book. When I realized it was actually about biological evolution, I put it aside for a few years. But I’m really glad I finally read it.
Evolution 2.0 is one of the most important, most provocative books I’ve ever read.

Marshall was raised in a belief system called “Young Earth Creationism”: a literal interpretation of the Old Testament creation story. But he’s an engineer with extensive knowledge of science, and he has absolutely no problem with recognizing that the Biblical timeframe is nothing like what actually happened, absolutely no problem with endorsing evolution, strongly. But he wants to find ways of reconciling the scientific evidence with Christian belief systems, even the Young Earth variety. And he obviously spent many years on this project. It’s incredibly thoroughly researched, with not only a 12-page index and a 5-page annotated reading list, but a 15-page, 9-section, tiny-type comprehensive bibliography referencing each of the hundreds of footnotes, along with a page+ of illustration and photo sources in even smaller print.

While it’s not typical of books I review, I think it’s extremely relevant to modern business. Some of Marshall’s principles even translate directly to actionable insight for social-impact businesses specifically, such as the idea I’ve often espoused about the advantages of cooperating with your “competitors”: collaborating, rather than competing. And
if you’re the first to prove one particular conclusion wrong, Marshall has put together a group of funders who would buy your IP rights for eight figures.

Parts I-IV make a very strong case for rethinking evolution: While traditional Darwinism, and especially neo-Darwinism, say evolution occurs very slowly, only when the occasional beneficial mutation pops up and is advanced by natural selection, Marshall—sharing data from dozens of prominent scientists, mathematicians, and even theologians—convincingly argues that it is not driven by random mutations, which create noise. Noise is destructive, never constructive. In Marshall’s view, DNA is a code, a language of instructions that gets decoded in the opposite order that it was encoded, just like the commands we give a computer or the letters we write on a page. Any cell already contains far more instructions than anything humans have built, and those cells will act to further the entity’s goals such as survival or reproduction.

Evolution can happen in something very close to real time. It may be repeated by cells across different organisms (which simply would not occur randomly). And it typically harnesses one or more techniques that he compares to a five-bladed Swiss Army knife:

  1. Transposition
  2. Horizontal gene transfer
  3. Epigenetics
  4. Symbiogenesis (this is the cooperation principle that I love)
  5. Genome duplication (at speed)

Each of these gets an initial chapter explaining it, and then is referenced many times as he builds a case for a complex system able to create new societies and even new species. It’s fascinating reading.

Marshall casually positions viruses as a potential sixth blade in the last line of his list of recommended book (p. 337). Viruses don’t get a chapter, though they get several mentions. I suspect if he were writing it now, he would elaborate more, as we’ve watched the coronavirus (Covid) spread rapidly and reinvent itself several times in new variants with different behaviors, even though it was only discovered late in 2019.

The second half of the book attempts to reconcile science with Christianity. Marshall believes that any system with coding and decoding, error correction, redundancy, and other features common to languages, codes, technology, and DNA has to have a designer; this much intelligence had to be set in motion, even if it becomes self-evolving later. And it’s true that the natural world (including the bacterial world) has skills we humans only dream about. I often touch on biomimicry—the use of science to imitate nature—in my speeches and writings. The humblest green plant collects and disseminates solar energy far more efficiently than any human-designed system. The GPS of a migrating butterfly or salmon far outstrips human devices. In my TEDx talk, “Impossible is a Dare,” I even say, “if you want to know about bridge-building, ask a spider; they know more than we do.”

Marshall reconciles the calendar issue with something I’ve seen many times before: just because something is labeled a day doesn’t mean it’s 24 modern hours. Each “day” of creation could be millions of years—and by his complex calculation, this corresponds well to both the Big Bang and the Biblical chronology (p. 325). But one insight is new to me: all of human history could be within the 7th day of creation (p. 316)—the day God rested, leaving us critters to figure things out using the codes we were given or that we evolved.” What if we understood God to be an engineer so skilled that he endows cells with the ability to engineer themselves?” (p. 331).

But here’s the thing he doesn’t address: He spends quite a bit of time on the idea that no sophisticated code exists without a designer, and that God’s design skills far exceed our own. BUT—and I don’t have an answer for this and doubt Perry Marshall does either—where did the designer come from? By his own logic, it couldn’t have just appeared.

Because this book is so ambitious, dare I say so “cosmic,” I’ve focused my review on the big concepts. I’ve written almost 1000 words and barely looked at my seven pages of notes. I could easily get into the weeds and write another 1000 or more on specifics that I agree with, disagree with, or question. But I’ll just urge you to read it and draw your own conclusions.

 

Connect with Shel

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

About Shel

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

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

————–

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The Clean and Green Club, March 2023

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

 Where Left and Right Meet—and Where They Don’t

In her book, Orwell’s Roses (see book review, below), essayist Rebecca Solnit writes,

Past and present support for authoritarians and denial of their crimes among those who are supposed to be the left has long made me wonder what, if anything, the term left means, since at other times it means those who support the human rights, freedoms, and egalitarianism that are antithetical to this

Perhaps I have an answer for her: Left and right, libertarian and authoritarian are often thought of as linear: as a journey of static points along a continuum. Some people even see this “linear” journey as age-related: that most people grow more conservative and more comfortable with repression as they get older.

Maverick that I am, I see the world differently. My theory is much more circular. Think of two circles, intersecting at two 90-degree angles at opposite ends of each circle (180 degrees apart)—kind of like this drawing of a hydrogen atom, but with only two circles. One circle embodies points on the left-right spectrum, the other marks degrees of loving freedom or loving repression.

What are those points of intersection? Left and right come together at both libertarian and totalitarian ends. Similarly, along the freedom arc, they meet at both left and right. I see very little difference between Fascist thugs of the Right and Stalinist thugs of the Left; they are both into suppressing dissent and inflicting an all-powerful state. And this, I believe, is how the socialist George Orwell—who fought in the militia against the Franco version of Fascism in the Spanish Civil War until he realized that totalitarians of the Left were equally dangerous—came to write two of the most powerful anti-Communist books ever written.


Finding and Harnessing That Common Ground

On the freedom side of the spectrum, it’s no coincidence that Right- and Left-libertarians have both used the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag from the revolution that created the United States of America. Both value personal freedom enormously, but not necessarily the same aspects of freedom. For someone on the progressive side, it might be the freedom to wear clothing more typical of a different gender, while a conservative might be more interested in reducing regulation of small business. And people on both sides might advocate for various positions on issues ranging from homeschooling to firearms to organic foods to unrestricted speech.

Still, Tea-Party libertarians (the real ones, who actually believe in individual freedom even for those who don’t look like them or share their backgrounds) and civil liberties progressives have more in common with each other than either do with the Fascists and Stalinists.
What this means is that politics can indeed create strange bedfellows. You may find opportunities to coalition with people whom you disagree with on many fundamental issues—but where you agree, you can work together, powerfully and effectively.

Want real-life examples? How about these two:
  1. In 1999, I founded a movement called Save the Mountain, to stop a proposed luxury home development that would have ruined the four-state view at the top of the much-loved state park immediately abutting the site. In the press release announcing the group’s formation, I wrote (as close as I can remember it), “Mr. ___________ [developer’s name] has vastly underestimated the love that people of Hampshire County have for this mountain.”

    And it was true! By using messaging that crossed all demographic and psychographic divisions, attracting not just environmental activists but farmers, store owners, academics, local politicians, and more, we created a near-consensus movement that could routinely bring 400 people out to public hearings in a town of 5000—and we achieved near-total victory in just over a year. Even though I expected to win all along, even I’d thought it would take us five years.
  2. Since 1994, environmentalists and Tea Partiers in the Green Scissors movement have worked in coalition to expose and oppose wasteful government spending on things that aren’t good for the environment. They recognize they’re stronger together than separately.

 

Aging Doesn’t Mean Ossifying

As for people getting more conservative with age, I disagree with that too. From my initial flowering into activism at age 12, I was constantly influenced by my elders—sometimes people who were 60 or more years older than me. I’ve been to two birthday parties four years apart for women who were still passionate activists on their 100th birthdays (the link goes to my blog entry for the earlier one, in 2015). I remember after my arrest during the Seabrook Occupation of 1977 that the largest and most vocal faction inside our armory was the “gray hair caucus,” numbering at least 100 out of the 700 or so gathered inside.

And at 66, I’m still an activist, working on progressive causes such as immigration justice and protection of diversity—but also on showing the business world that addressing the environment and our toughest social issues can be profitable. There have been victories and defeats along the way—but if I make it to 100 like my two friends, I expect I’ll still be doing my part to improve the world.

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.

Orwell’s Roses

Solnit, a well-known voice in progressive politics, shows us a very different side of Eric Blair, the complex bundle of contradictions better known as George Orwell. The world knows him as a dystopian author of Animal Farm and 1984: two scathing novels attacking Stalinist Totalitarian Communism. Academics also know his work chronicling the lives of coal miners in his native UK, the impact of imperialism in Burma (where, as a young man, he was a police officer), and fighters in the Spanish Civil War (where he was a soldier fighting against Franco’s fascists). Solnit knows him as an avid gardener with a special passion for roses—who sought refuge from polluted London first in the small cottage where he gardened in 1936, and near the end of his life on a farm on a remote Scottish island where the last eight miles of the journey could only be done on foot; a fighter for the principle of clear language and opponent of government or corporate euphemisms; and above all, an optimist who maintained hope all the way through his life.

Why am I reviewing this book HERE, in my newsletter? What relevance does this fascinating portrait of a many-faceted man have for my audience of business leaders involved in social and environmental good, with an interest in marketing?

First, because Orwell was incredibly aware of the interplay of humans with the natural world. Second, because he was involved in social causes throughout his adulthood, even putting his own life at risk several times. Third, because he himself was a solopreneur, running a little shop in the cottage with his wife. Fourth, because Orwell, himself an outcast as a working-class student at elite Eton and then as an Eton-educated person seen as trying to be better than his peers (p. 22), understood that history is shaped by people on the margins. Fifth and perhaps most germane, because this book has a lot of relevance in its discussions of messaging, building positive AND negative movements, and influencing culture.

Solnit starts (p. 8) by noting that planting can be a semi-permanent legacy; trees we plant might outlive us by generations, sometimes centuries. A tree in my front yard was planted in 1916, when my oldest grandparent was 11; I’ve eaten carob from the 2000+-year-old tree that sustained Shimon Bar-Yochai when he hid from the Romans in a cave in northern Israel for thirteen years when people who had known Christ were still alive. Orwell suggested planting an acorn for “every time you commit an antisocial act (p. 10).”

Solnit has a gift for lyrical writing. She refers to the Carboniferous Era as “a sixty-million-year inhale by plants, sucking carbon dioxide from the sky, and the last two hundred years as a monstrous human-engineered exhale, undoing what the plants did so long ago” (p. 60). Here’s another of many beautiful passages:

Much of the beauty that moves us in the natural world is not the static visual splendor that can be captured in a picture, but time itself as patterns, recurrences, the rhythmic passages of days and seasons and years, the lunar cycle and the tides, birth and death. As harmony, organization, coherence, pattern itself is a kind of beauty, and some of the psychic distress of climate change and environmental disruption is in the shattering of this rhythm… (p. 189).

Solnit celebrates Orwell’s joy in the natural beauty and simple pleasures around him, decrying the puritan, humorless aspects of the Left (e.g., pp. 91-92). Having been criticized for making space for pleasure travel, daily time in nature, and eating delicious food instead of being an activist every waking minute, I appreciate this celebration, and the third-party validation she offers through people like Emma Goldman. In my 20s, I proudly wore a t-shirt with a picture of Emma and a distilled version of her response to an activist who criticized her for dancing, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.” I still agree, even though the shirt wore out long ago. Solnit gives the complete and accurate quote, in context (p. 114).

So much more to say, but this is already long. Quick highlights:

  • Class perspectives on how we experience nature (p. 163) and beauty—and their interaction with justice/injustice, including visiting a sweatshop “rose factory” in Colombia (pp. 189-219)
  • How authoritarians exploit lies and gaslighting (pp. 222-224)—and the dangers of letting them create and control history (pp. 222-228 and in numerous references to 1984 protagonist Winston Smith’s career expunging inconvenient history from the written record)
  • Orwell’s surprising critique of Gandhi as dogmatic and questioning his tactics (pp. 263-264)
  • Right at the end, a key insight: Orwell wasn’t a prophet of doom but a merchant of hope (pp. 259-264). Orwell issued warnings, not prophecies. Warnings give people the option to change, and avoid calamity. In his own words, “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe [in 1984] necessarily will arrive, but…something resembling it could arrive” (p. 262), “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection” (p. 263), and “Our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have” (p. 264).

Connect with Shel

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

About Shel

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

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

————–

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

 

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The Clean and Green Club, February 2023

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

 This Letter Made Me Cringe!
It happened again. Someone emailed to sell me something. Nothing wrong with that. But if you’re sending a pitch letter, demonstrate your competence—NOT your incompetence.
My correspondent was selling press release writing and distribution. I’ve written hundreds of press releases for my clients, my own business, and community groups—but don’t do the distribution part. So, bingo–this email got opened…Ugh!Take a look at the first two paragraphs. What issues do you notice? (Scroll down to see the ones I spotted.)

For Press Release needs and more, we provide your business with comprehensive solutions. We have worked with hundreds of businesses around the world. We have worked with companies of all shapes and sizes, addressing such needs as Targeted Media Distribution, Web Distribution, and even PR writing services.

In other words, will help you shape your Press Release with the best possible scope, style, and language. We then take things to the next stage by utilizing our powerhouse network of media sources.

Here’s my list:

  1. The biggest red flag is in the first line of the second paragraph. That “will” should either be “we will” or “we’ll”—something 30 seconds with a grammar checker would have flagged. Who’s going to trust this organization to write a press release?
  2. The writing is unnecessarily stiff (contractions would help). Having developed “story-behind-the-story” press releases that people say feel like reading a good novel, why switch to one that sounds like a job application cover letter from the 1970s?
  3. It’s a perfect example of “we, we, we all the way home” copywriting. In ten lines, three “we” statements plus one missing one (see #1 above). Scroll down to see one of many ways to do it differently.
  4. It suffers from excessive, inappropriate capitalization.
  5. It makes me feel like the person in the picture ?

Why NOT to “we, we, we all the way home”

Copy should not be about you, your company, your brand. It should be about how you help your prospects and customers (or clients, patients, students, direct reports, etc.) remove a problem, fix a pain point, accomplish a goal, or experience something wonderful. In this example, why should a prospect care that this agency has “worked with companies of all shapes and sizes”?

(For more on why “we, we, we” usually doesn’t work—and the one situation where you actually WANT to use it, please visit this article from the Clean and Green Club archives.)

If this were my copywriting assignment, it might have looked something like this:

Have you been featured in any major media lately? Would you like be?

Media attention helps you not only get noticed in a crowded world, it builds credibility, loyalty, and a desire to be part of the “in crowd” by working with you. But too often, entrepreneurs like you fail to get that media attention—maybe their competitors got it instead.

Why? Because they don’t know how to write a press release that gets noticed and picked up.

Maybe you’ve experienced this. Have you spent hours writing a press release, sent it off with great expectations—and pffft, it died a quiet death in the trash folders of all the reporters’ email programs? Maybe you hate to write and passed the task off to an untrained secretary or intern with no marketing expertise.
And then, did you decide that PR doesn’t work? But that’s like missing your first shot at a basket when nobody’s ever showed you how to shoot one, and then deciding you’re no good at basketball.

Here’s some good news: you can have all the benefit of press coverage without having to write anything, and without dragging in people who don’t have the skills to make it work. What would it be like—how would it improve your business—to work with an experienced copywriting and distribution team that’s gotten coverage for [name two famous clients] and many others in publications and TV networks like [name three well-known media outlets where your work got your clients coverage]?

See the difference?

Oh, and by the way, this was a quick spontaneous riff. It took 20 or 30 minutes to write replacement copy to replace the real and awkward note. No research, no interviews. Just one draft.

For an actual client, of course, a lot more energy would go into it. If you think you could benefit from a press release or other marketing copy from a copywriter who understands you-focused, benefit-oriented marketing—and especially if you have a story to tell about sustainability, regenerativity, or social equity in your business—there’s room in my schedule for a couple of more clients. Learn more at https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/marketing-consulting-copywriting/ (green/social equity organizations).

PS: Because most of us have been taught to write that way, the first draft of this article contained 15 instances of the first-person singular (the capitalized letter that sits alphabetically between H and J. All but one were edited out in this draft—proving that it may not come naturally even to someone who knows to look for it, but it certainly can be done.

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.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (Harper Perennial Paperback, 2009)

I’d been hearing amazing things about Freakonomics, which won several awards and garnered fabulous reviews in the mainstream press, since it was published in 2005. The book’s premise is simple: we should dig deeper and find the true, non-obvious causes of various phenomena backing our hypotheses with data—recognizing the differences among cause-and-effect, coincidence or the same factor impacting more than one variable . And they look at some fascinating questions—like why many crack dealers live with their parents because they can’t afford to move out (pp. 100-104) or how real estate agents actually have more incentive to sell quickly and cheaply than to get the best price for their clients (pp. 68-73).

That’s a totally valid perspective. But it isn’t enough, and this book disappointed me. I didn’t feel it came close to living up to the hype. And the bait-and-switch techniques they occasionally use were very irritating to me. For example, after going on at some length about how nature is more important than nurture, examining adopted kids from low-performing birth families raised by high-performing parents, they undermine the entire argument by showing that while those kids perform poorly at the beginning of their school careers (p. 173, with a related argument on p. 211), they more than make it up over the entire course of their education (pp. 178-179). Admittedly, this “we didn’t mean it” narrative may have been more annoying right now because I was reading this book as the story broke that newly elected Congressman George Santos had lied about almost anything that mattered in his entire history. And it felt like I’d been “Santosed.”

Perhaps the most controversial conclusion they draw is that the reduction in crime in the 1990s had far less to do with changes in policing policy and strategy than with the far smaller number of unwanted babies born into unloving homes following the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion throughout the US. I think there is a good chance that they are right. If the 2022 holding in Dobbs that effectively reversed Roe continues to allow states to undo that right, and if the data 20 years from now shows a dramatic increase in crime, we will have pretty good evidence that they were correct.

Page numbers are from the 2009 Harper Perennial paperback edition.

Connect with Shel

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

About Shel

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

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

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The Clean and Green Club, January 2023

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

 Sporks vs. 3-in-1 Printers
Photo Credit: Lenore Edman
A spork seems like a great invention—until you actually try to eat soup or spear a vegetable. Then, you discover it’s a compromise. It can do some of what a spoon does, and some of what a fork does, but for the most part, does neither very well.

The early 3-in-1 printers were like that, too. Dot-matrix (low-quality) printing, horrendous fax and scanning software, and expensive general awkwardness. They didn’t catch on until they got a lot better. Now, with high-resolution laser printing and quality scanning, good reliability, intuitive software, and smaller footprints both in price and square footage than having three separate devices (well, okay, two—I don’t know a lot of people who still use fax), they make a heck of a lot of sense. My first one, a gift from the manufacturer, retailed for $1200. It had a good laser printer but the scanning software was so awkward I had to relearn it each time I used it. My current one was only about $150, does two-sided printing, and takes up much less space. Once I figured out how to batch scans, my only complaint is the lack of autofeed for scanning. Fortunately, I don’t scan very much.

At this point, even if you only needed scanning or fax capabilities once in a while, why wouldn’t you buy a 3-in-1?

So—What’s the Lesson Here?

This: Usability, quality, and simplicity are as important as convenience. Convenience is only appreciated if you’re not compromising usability, quality, and simplicity. My current printer passes the test—not with flying colors, but adequately for my purposes. The spork, despite its brilliant simplicity, fails—and so did the $1200 printer I no longer have. So, if you’re designing a convenient solution, make sure you don’t leave essential performance tools on the cutting room floor.
In the green world, that might mean making appliances or even floor tiles modular and easy to disassemble, so if one part fails it can be replaced easily and inexpensively. It’s why single-stream recycling (sorted later, not by the user) is so popular. It means that if you offer compostable coffee cups, you should make sure the tops are compostable as well—AND you should have a collection point for used ones at your retail location and other convenient spots.

PS: Even sporks have their uses. I discovered recently that the spork is awesome for scraping out a can of wet cat food. But I don’t think I’d buy one just for that purpose.

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 Anticipatory Organization

The Anticipatory Organization: Turn Disruption and Change into Opportunity and Advantage by Daniel Burrus (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2017)

A few years ago, I reviewed Burrus’s earlier book, Flash Foresight. This book revisits that territory and expands from it. While aimed at large corporations, much of his advice holds for small businesses, including solopreneurs like me—even if we don’t have the kinds of financial and logistical resources big companies can throw at a problem. Note: I am using his preferred capitalization.

His main theses?

  1. If we divide our forecasting into inevitable Hard Trends (e.g., Baby Boomers are aging out of the workforce and into eldercare services) and malleable Soft Trends (Boomers take their hard-won knowledge with them as they exit), we will know how to both anticipate and be ready for the inevitable changes and consider whether we want to impact the soft ones—such as creating a way to capture that soon-to-be-lost experience-based knowledge through the exit process.
  2. Checking whether we are using Hard (data-based) or Soft (gut-based) Assumptions can help avoid disaster. Trends based on Hard Assumptions are much more likely to come true.
  3. Many of the disruptions are caused by three technology trends: faster processing speed, higher bandwidth, and better/more storage. Others are caused by the changing relationships these tech trends enable.
  4. Even though phones, tablets, and personal computers might face hardware limitations, these three trends allow us to push more tasks out to the cloud—which has, for practical purposes, no such limitations.
  5. Disruptive approaches can be created and harnessed by “Opportunity Managers” who can spot the possibilities and ride the exponential curves. And if you don’t disrupt, someone else will (p.129).
  6. Be a contrarian. Innovate instead of competing. Choose to be extraordinary every day and ask the questions an extraordinary person would ask (p. 157). Skip the obvious problems and anticipate/plan for the deeper ones so you can turn them into opportunities—especially when you see the low-hanging fruit others aren’t noticing. Zag when others zig.

I would add one more to his three megatrends: exponentially better ease of use. That, in turn, democratizes the technology. Ease of use takes something out of the realm of engineers in lab coats and puts it into the pockets of ordinary people, even kids. Compare a DOS interface from the 1990s (or worse, a punch card-driven mainframe of the 1970s) with the few simple, well-labeled icons on a smart phone—WOW! My first experience going online was CompuServe, in 1987. Not only did we have to use command-line prompts, we had to deal with 10-digit all-numeral user names—so we never knew who was writing to us. And my creakingly slow 300-bps modem connection was very balky, so I was constantly getting thrown off. After a couple of months, I gave up. Now, nine-year-olds and ninety-nine-year-olds can get online with a few clicks.

And this means that any of us—a preschooler, a solopreneur, someone just learning a written language—can become a disrupter and harness the early-mover advantage. Even as a home-office solopreneur, I disrupted the local portion of an industry all by myself, back in 1984, after buying my first computer (an original 128K Mac). At that time, my business focused on typing term papers with some resume writing—using an involved process of interviewing the client, writing and editing a draft, having the client approve the wording, and then typing a final, formatted copy. Suddenly, I could do the whole thing in one shift. I put a little half-inch in-column ad in the Yellow Pages reading “Affordable Professional Resumes While You Wait.” Clients loved the speed, quality, and low price. Within about a year, it was the biggest part of my business—for a decade. And after that success, each time I switched my focus again, I looked for an approach that was at least a bit disruptive and different from what everyone else was doing: from popularizing “story-behind-the-story” press releases in the 1990s to staking my position around the idea that business can profit from building deep environmental and social responsibility into core products and services, which has been my core mission for almost a decade now.

Be sure to read Appendix A, a list of 25 principles in the book, and Appendix B, an expanded glossary that serves like an alphabetically organized Cliff Notes; they come after the acknowledgements and author bio, but before the thorough index. These two together will deeply reinforce the learning. Appendix C is about his video program.

Connect with Shel

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

About Shel

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

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

————–

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The Clean and Green Club, December 2022

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

Be sure to read the blog post, This Could Change Everything–it’s crucial to understanding a big shift that’s upon us. The link is below the main article and seasonal message.

Marketing Lessons from a Fruit Tree and a Spider Web? Yup.

Last month, we talked about operational reasons why one size DOESN’T fit all. This month, we continue that conversation, but look directly at why it doesn’t work in marketing either—looking to nature for examples.

I’ve been really interested in biomimicry for many years, and have written and spoken about how it can improve our engineering and design. My latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, even has sections about biomimicry visionaries like Janine Benyus, Amory Lovins, and John Todd. It also has a section on John Kremer’s concept of biological marketing, where he talks about a single ear of corn generating thousands of ears.

But it was only just last month, on a beautiful day where I spent half an hour telling a prospect why I was uniquely qualified to write him a marketing plan for a venture that actually is unique (synthesizing ideas from at least three different industries) and then another hour planting garlic, that I really GOT how biomimicry applies to marketing.

Let’s ask some questions of our friends in nature.

Reporter: “Fruit tree, what’s your marketing plan?”

Fruit tree: “You’re going to think this is really funny, because it’s not a human thing—my marketing plan is to be eaten.”

Reporter: “Wow, that sounds crazy. How does that even work?”

Fruit tree: “Birds and animals nibble my fruit, then they move someplace else, poop out my powerful seeds—and my little babies, little clones of me, grow in all sorts of places I can’t reach (in case you haven’t noticed, I’m rooted deep into the ground. Not only is this how I reproduce, it’s the only way I can travel—and I love to travel).”

Reporter: “How about you, Spider—what’s your marketing plan?”

Spider: “Remember that famous book, The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches by Joe Karbo? He was so lazy he took his idea from me. I’ve been doing lazy spider marketing for 250 million years [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_spiders], and Joe-com-lately didn’t show up until 40 years ago. All that talk about passive income, that’s my jam since before there were any humans. OK, I do work hard spinning a fancy web—but hey, the artistry feeds my soul and the craftsmanship feeds my body. Because once it’s done and my web looks gorgeous, all I have to do is lay back, quiet down, and wait for some company to drop by—and get stuck until I can have a nice snack. It’s eco-friendly, too, by the way. Zero carbon footprint—and without me and my sisters and daughters, this world would be overrun with pesky bugs.”

So what are the lessons here? I’ll offer two of them. If you come up with others, I just might mention you and your idea.

1. Just as the fruit tree’s marketing plan wouldn’t work for the spider and vice versa, a marketing plan for a B2B (business-to-business) green engineering firm would be useless to a B2C (business-to-consumer) weatherization company, even though are both are sub-slices of the green building scene. Your marketing plan has to make sense for your products and services, your market niches and their demographics/psychographics, and yes, your mission, values, and impact on the wider world.

2. Both the tree and the spider offered benefits. The tree’s ultimate client is its own progeny, but to achieve that ultimate goal, it offers food to hungry animals in search of sweetness—just as so many industries (social media networks, Internet search tools, and traditional media, to name three) entice users with services—but their real clients are buying eyeballs, or data. And the spider, perhaps aware of her own arrogant reply, points out the bug protection benefit to us, which helps to neutralize a predator (humans kill a lot of spiders).

If you need help thinking through the best ways to apply this in your particular organization, I’ll happily give you a 15-minute phone or Zoom consultation. Request a time at https://calendly.com/meet-shel/15min (Note: Calendly sometimes offers times it shouldn’t, and I sometimes miss the notifications—so after you get instantly “confirmed” from the Calendly robot, you’ll also get a manual confirmation or request to shift from me.)

Blessings of the Season
If you celebrate a special holiday at this season, such as Christmas, Chanukah (I do that one), Kwanzaa, or Solstice, may you enjoy many blessings and joys in your celebration. If you celebrate a holiday at a different time, such as Ramadan or Diwali, may the blessings I’m sending now ripen and blossom at the time they apply. Here in the U.S., we also celebrate the beginning of a new calendar year; many parts of Asia mark that time a month or two later. Jewish culture celebrates several New Years, the earliest of which is Tu B’Shvat, the New Year for the Trees (this year, it’s the evening of February 5th and all day February 6th. And the one you’ve probably heard of, Rosh HaShanah, is always in the fall, usually in September.

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 Capitalist and the Activist

The Capitalist and the Activist: Corporate Social Activism and the New Business of Change by Tom C.W. Lin (Berrett-Koehler, 2022).

Lin urges coalitions between activists and capitalists. Since I’ve written four books on activist business success (most recently, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World), I’m very familiar (and agree) with that case.

Lin covers some ground that I don’t. I appreciate his analysis of both sides’ strengths. He cites corporate skills in communications, operations, and accountability (p. 104)—and I’d elaborate to specify analytical/data capture/measurement skills (accountability), exponentially larger resources (operations), and global presence. But I see activists as the better communicators; their passion, tenacity, and creative tactics capture public attention, at no cost, that corporations often have to purchase.

And I appreciate his call for both groups to enlist governments—with far larger resources than activists and corporations combined—as partners (pp. 151-152), and how much power those combinations can bring to bear. He starts off with the four—four!—teenage Parkland shooting survivors who not only organized a massive Washington million-person demonstration (plus satellite demonstrations around the world) in just six weeks but also actually got gun safety legislation passed into law in notoriously gun-friendly Florida (pp. 1-4). Later (pp. 109-113), he discusses JP Morgan Chase’s $200 million economic and skills investment—in close collaboration with local government, business, and activist organizations—to rebuild Detroit’s shattered economy. Chase CEO Jamie Dimon freely acknowledges its self-interest. This effort turned it into “the home bank,” with 65 percent market share (p. 112). The company plans to replicate the effort elsewhere.

He documents many other corporations benefitting through social and environmental advocacy and argues that companies should choose their activism targets according to their strengths: logistics for a delivery service like UPS, housing for AirBNB, financial activism for banks… (p. 153). And he notes that social and environmental action can attract more impact investors and more capital (p. 115).

Also, recency creates relevancy. Lin documents many events and trends that hadn’t happened yet when I wrote my books. He covers the revulsion of CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg against the previous administration’s policies of deliberate cruelty, open racism, othering of numerous groups from Muslims (pp. 72-74) to women to people with disabilities to protestors exercising their rights to dissent to immigrants—even to the point of caging children (pp. 76-79). He also chronicles business response to the nationwide elevation of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis (pp. 86-89), the gender gap and #MeToo movement (pp. 92-96), and the attack on democracy itself that culminated in the violent riot of January 6, 2021 (pp. 79-81).

Refreshingly, he warns against over-reliance on corporate saviors (pp. 117-131). Corporate elites (especially those not yet changed by diversity efforts) may slant their causes toward the most mediagenic or the ones with the largest financial stake (p. 127) rather than the most important, may attempt to deflect attention from bad actions in other areas, may water down legislation, etc. And causes without profit potential still need attention—thus, he sees a major role for government.

He encourages companies to see their purpose-driven mission not as PR but as a key element in the company’s core identity (something I’ve advocated for years). And he applauds the many ways activist corporate execs are making changes from the inside.

But he lacks deeper analysis of business’s ability to benefit by addressing really big problems in a systemic way. Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World has a lot more depth there. In short, the books complement each other, and you’ll benefit by reading both.

Connect with Shel

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

About Shel

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

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

————–

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The Clean and Green Club, November 2022

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

If You Appreciate this Newsletter and its Mission, Maybe You’ll Be the One I Hire to Keep it Going
My long-time assistant is moving on to other ventures. I’m looking for someone to take over two tasks from her: 1) Formatting the email (using Get Response) and web (using WordPress) versions of the newsletter each month, and 2) Sending a pre-written birthday message to Facebook friends as their birthdays come up (typically somewhere between 5-15 per day). Interested? Please write to me (shel AT greenandprofitable dot com) with the subject line “Newsletter Formatter” with a bit about your background.
DUMP this Useless Business “Truism” Already—Because It Isn’t True

One-size-fits-all is a myth! Want proof?

  1. A colleague in New York City is trying to drum up support for a citywide education campaign to encourage recycling in New York’s thousands of large apartment buildings. I read her material and thought it’s going to take more than education—because multifamily apartment buildings present challenges that just aren’t relevant in a single-family house, or even a triple-decker with a yard or a driveway. Example: many inner-city apartments (not just in NYC but around the world) are really, really tiny. I’ve seen some that only had one sink in the kitchen and none in the bathroom. Other bathrooms have a triangle-shaped mini-sink that fits into a corner, allowing the bathroom itself to be only a couple of feet wide. I had a friend who used a Murphy bed that folded up vertically into the wall of her one-room apartment, so she could have living space during the day. When space is so scarce, who’s going to devote a big percentage to separate bins for recycling glass, metal, plastic, and paper, plus compost and trash? The suburban solution assumes a garage or at least a large closet and just won’t work in a studio or efficiency apartment with living space of only 200 to 500 feet. Even if you have a bigger place, the average apartment size in NYC is only 702 square feet—with an average monthly rent of (are you sitting down) $4265. If you’ve ever wondered why the tables are so close together in NYC restaurants, that’s why. Every square inch has to count.
  2. Selling to a poverty market. Even the very poor in the US, Europe, or the big economies in Asia would be considered extremely wealthy in much of the developing world. In four countries in Africa, the average gross income is under $1000 US. Since the wealthy are always a little sliver of the population, most residents are surviving on far less than that. So if you’re selling into that kind of economy, you need to re-engineer everything. You’ll be asking how to produce products for 1/10 the cost you’d face in the developed world, how to deal with poor or nonexistent transportation, storage, and dealership network, how to handle government corruption and high security threats, how to get people to pay such a big chunk of their income for your stuff (Among many possible models: no-interest time payments; money recouped from savings; rent-to-own; advertiser or grant support), and how to best support your people on the ground—all without compromising the product or service’s key functionality.

Yes, it can be done—but not with the same models as you’d use in a country where people are far more economically secure. I’ve written a few times about one company that has risen to the challenge: d.light sells solar LED lamps to replace toxic, flammable, and expensive kerosene or go into situations that hadn’t had any artificial light before. That first link has a quick summary of six benefits this product offers to its customers (and some other examples of solving multiple problems with one initiative). The other link is the excerpt from my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World that describes d.light’s business model and accomplishments in more detail.

If this area interests you, I’d also strongly recommend not only my own book, but two other brilliant books: The Business Solution to Poverty: Designing Products and Services for Three Billion New Customers by Paul Polak and Mal Warwick, and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, Enabling Dignity and Choice Through Markets by C.K. Prahalad (both links go to my review of the book). The two links about d.light and the Polak review go to full newsletter issues; you’ll need to scroll down. The Prahalad review is its own page.

Next month, we’ll continue looking at one-size-fits-all is nonsense—but from a marketing lens.

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.

A GBB staffer will be happy to demo the assessment tool for you. 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.

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 Answers Are There

The Answers Are There: Building Peace from the Inside Out by Libby HoffmanThis is a remarkable, super-optimistic book that I wouldn’t even have looked it based on the title, but a colleague I have great respect for not only recommended it but sent me a pre-release copy (publishing date was October 25). It’s all about forming real community in strife-torn lands, in ways that respect and honor and take direction from the indigenous perspective while helping establish resilience in very different ways than the typical First World development agencies try to work. It’s a deeply personal account that’s also elegantly written and remarkable easy to read. I often found myself gliding through 20 or 30 pages at a sitting—not typical of the books I review—even while pausing to take lots of notes.

Hoffman has been working with local peace leaders in Sierra Leone, and especially John Caulker, founder of an organization called Fambul Tok (Family Talk) that has done amazing work in helping that country move through the deep bitterness and resentment following a civil war with tens of thousands of atrocities. Starting in a single village, Hoffman, Caulker, and their colleagues have spiraled out to develop a framework that was eventually accepted by the national government—one resilient enough to help turn the country around during the Ebola epidemic, which hit Sierra Leone particularly hard.

Unlike typical western aid projects, Fambul Tok was at least as much about the process as the result—and because of that, the results have been spectacular.

Some of the key principles and insights:

  • Peace must be in a local context, based holistically in local ecosystems and traditions: not just physical ecosystems, but cultural and spiritual ones
  • No matter how barbarous a crime or series of crimes, reconciliation can happen if space is made for sincere repentance and apology and rebuilding, for listening to the perpetrators AND the survivors, and communally figuring out how to move forward—and sometimes, the most brutal actors can be among the strongest supporters, taking leadership to undo the damage they caused
  • Successful aid/development is not a one-way street from funders and programs to passive recipients; every person has things to contribute, things to learn—and perhaps more importantly, things to unlearn
  • The typical current pattern of development agencies is broken, because it doesn’t recognize that truth, attempting instead to impose a project from the outside, plan out all the details, pilot it and rapidly scale it up, rather than let one emerge organically from the needs—and strengths and capabilities—of the local community, and according to that community’s traditions and initiatives, on a timeframe that makes sense in the local culture
  • Proactively building locally-rooted resilience is immediately empowering to indigenous people who have long felt unheard, unseen, and uncared about—and that resilience is a powerful way to get beyond the next crisis; rebuilding Sierra Leone after the civil war meant it was much more ready to face Ebola
  • Unheard voices may belong to women or others who have not been welcomed into the circles of power—and their leadership can bring deeper changes than anyone would have anticipated before those conversations started
  • Even the most dedicated leaders need to recharge and be nourished, and amazing learning and growth can come out of the spaces and rituals that enable those recharging moments

Hoffman uses a lot of powerful metaphors. Example: As early as page 10, she introduces the concept of repairing the cup (the community) before pouring water (aid) into it, and by page 218, that morphs into a series of nested bowls, spiraling up and out from the local villages through chiefdoms, districts, nations, the world, and whatever might be beyond—which she calls “the idea of wholeness.”

I could easily write another couple of thousand words, pulling out specific quotes and wisdom. But I want to honor the organic nature of Hoffman and Caulker’s work, and not to be just like those western planning and development agencies that impose their own structure on a recalcitrant village instead of coming in expecting to learn as much as they teach—and I don’t want to subject their message and methods to that subtle violence. So I will end simply by saying that anyone who really cares about peace and about ending poverty will find this book well worth the time you put into it.

 

Connect with Shel

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

About Shel

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

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

————–

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The Clean and Green Club, October 2022

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

Which Inventor Are You? Great Leaper or Kaizenist?

The world grows through two kinds of invention, and both are important.The Great Leap is a huge technological breakthrough: putting an engine inside a carriage instead of needing a couple of horses at the front. Developing a way to send the human voice across distance, or humans to the moon. Making the connection between sanitation and infection control.

Kaizen is a Japanese word for continuous improvement—usually pretty small improvement. Think about making Twitter actually useful by letting users add a hyperlink that didn’t count in the 140-character limit that existed at the time. Or about the continuous miniaturization of computer chip size while magnifying power.

My first laptop had 24K—not gig, not even megabyte—just 24 measly kilobytes of main memory. It had an almost unreadable eight-line screen with no character descenders (black-and-white only, of course). But it was still life-changing, because I could type out a draft for an hour and a half or two hours before I ran out of memory and had to upload the file to my Mac (where I could revise on a legible screen). All of a sudden, I could go interview someone and type the interview directly to a computer instead of spending hours deciphering and typing my much less complete handwritten notes. Once I bought a storage device, I could take notes on trips and conferences. That machine was released in 1983; I got mine in 1986. Thousands of Kaizens over just 39 years resulted not only in the full-fledged laptop computers I now use but also in a 64-gigabyte smartphone that can do pretty much anything a computer can do and fits in my pocket. In a few years, smart phones will probably have holographic full-size keyboards and will be a lot better for us writers. But meanwhile, I can at least dictate a rough draft and then clean up the dictation errors.

Often, an invention can be both a Great Leap and Kaizen—like the original iPhone, which combined phone and usable Internet functions with an intuitive interface and still fit in a pocket (Great Leap), but was also simply an improved (Kaizen)—MUCH-improved—portable phone—and then was re-Kaizened a gazillion times with better reception, better camera, better touch screen, better voice recognition, etc. And of course, prices came way down.

Nobody would want an iPhone 1 as their default phone today—but it was so much better than a flip phone, even a flip phone that had (text-only) Internet and a (crummy) camera. Still, it was the series of Kaizens that allowed smartphones to become the default hand-held device. When the first smartphone was introduced, I didn’t buy it because it was too expensive. I waited until (Android) smartphones were under $200. Now, I’ve met people who are homeless, migrants who ran for their lives from other countries with almost no possessions, grade-school kids, teens in Africa who live in deep poverty—and they have smartphones.

Similarly, a motorcar was built at least as far back as 1769 when Joseph Cugnot threw a huge, clumsy steam boiler on a three-wheel wagon. And Leonardo Da Vinci sketched a design for a spring-powered car in (are you sitting down?) 1478, though he never built a prototype. (Da Vinci also sketched out a helicopter, by the way.) And the internal combustion engine, which powered or partially powered almost all motor vehicles larger than golfcarts built between about 1920 and 2008 (when Tesla introduced the first modern all-electric car) dates at least to the 1860s  and some say to the 1790s—but the auto industry was tiny until Henry Ford figured out how to lower costs by standardizing production along an assembly line. The Model T (not Ford’s first car) was introduced in 1908, when salaries for low-level workers started around $200 a year, and skilled professionals like engineers could make a few thousand. Once production ramped up enough to produce major economies of scale a few years later, he was able to offer his Model T starting at just $260. The previous year, the average price of all cars was $2834.

The point of this little history lesson is that Ford, like many popularizers, was a Kaizenist, not a Great Leap inventor. He took a manufacturing process from the gun industry and applied it to the production of cars, until then individually crafted and very expensive. That enabled him to lower the price enough that people wanted to buy it, and a lot of people did just that. Bill Gates is also a Kaizenist. Once he landed the contract to supply the PC operating systems that built the Microsoft empire, he bought and modified a variant of the then-popular CP/M operating system.

The questions I have for you: Which kind are you, and how will you cross-pollinate with the other kind?

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.

A GBB staffer will be happy to demo the assessment tool for you. 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.

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.

Win Win Win

Win Win Win: Organizational Success through the Power of Agreement by Brian D. Molitor

This title jumped out at me after sitting unread for years. I’d thought it would be a book about negotiation and/or crafting solutions with multiple winners. I’m a big believer in multiple wins and often spotlight companies such as d.light and Greyston Bakery that create wins for employees, stockholders, abutters, customers—as well as social justice and the environment.

Molitor’s book is mostly about leadership and effective communication, not marketing, product development, goal-centered engineering, etc. And it doesn’t really discuss the environmental and social justice pieces at all. But effective communication is a foundational principle, and those with employees will find it especially helpful. I took five pages of notes, starting with the dedication to Visionaries, Leaders, and Peacemakers (p. vii).

He notes early (p. 8) that most human transformational miracles are rooted in cooperation and agreement and encourages us to think of people not as “human resources” but as our most important assets (p. 14), to be nurtured—by creating a feeling of ownership (p. 37), among other ways.

Molitor’s book plugs his services (as many business books do). His case studies draw from his practice, and exhorts us to do this work deeply: to understand that overhauling the entire organizational culture won’t be quick, easy, or cheap—but that the huge boosts in morale, productivity, quality, and profitability easily justify the time and money (example: pp. 50-54). You’ve got to be all-in; not-losing is nowhere near as good as winning (p. 51).

More principles:

  • Communication has to work in both directions, even in a hierarchy. Judge the impact of the words themselves and the emotions in how they’re delivered, as well as the specific message (pp. 177-179). He recommends professional training.
  • Specific (including detailed written task lists about the WHAT) agreements around values and mission go a long way—but the top brass should craft and commit to the values and mission before percolating them through the organization, then let line workers own the HOW (P. 61)
  • When doing the detailed surveys he recommends, use professionals to craft the survey, interview ALL employees, share the results after reviewing them with the executive team, and explain how you’re working the findings into your long-range strategic plan (pp. 90-91; 129-131)
  • Approach recommendations without defensiveness and with a willingness to implement real change; enable the workers to see that their concerns and suggestions are acted on (extrapolation from Shel: implement where practical, discuss with employees the barriers to implementing others, and listen to refinements that might overcome those obstacles)
  • Make sure each employee knows that both senior management and the employee understand what role that employee plays in the company’s success (p. 126); always treat every employee with respect, as an expert in their tasks (p. 165)
  • Examine not just the negative factors (e.g., falling sales) but also positive shifts. Change can arise from either (p. 112; p. 230).
  • There’s always room for more well-thought-out innovations (p. 116)—and don’t fret much if innovations don’t work out; think of the failures as pilot projects/learning opportunities (p. 165).
  • When problems arise, look to the values and mission for guidance, rather than setting inflexible rules (pp. 147-148)—and frame the values as “we will” and “we will not” statements (p. 156)
  • Workers will accomplish more in teams than by themselves—but don’t think about “work teams”; think instead about “teamwork” and organize those teams around clear purpose and direction, effective leadership, productive interpersonal relations, communication and listening skills, problem solving/decision making/planning, de-escalating conflict resolution strategies, skills/knowledge/abilities, resources, and reward-inclusive evaluations (pp. 218-224)

I particularly liked the case study of Saginaw County, Michigan, for the large impact, thoroughness, and seeming permanence of the transformation (pp. 133-141).

However, the book is not without its flaws. While it addresses diversity of skill sets and economic power, it’s very quiet about racial, gender, and religious diversity. In fact, the book assumes we live in a Christian society—which I as a Jew found unappealing. It didn’t address questions about how one case-study organization dealt with staff redundancies after two hospitals merged, even though it flags the concern. And he relies overmuch on trite cliches.

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 2022

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

Effective Persuasion Demonstrated in a Four-Minute Video; Failed Persuasion in Two Sentences

As marketers, we have to be persuaders. Here’s a four-minute lesson in the art of persuasion: Notice how he builds an effective rational argument, point-by-point, and backing it up with documentation (the text of the Constitution, his background, and a government training document) to activate the rational left-side-of-the-brain—then moving stealthily into emotion-based arguments that hook the right-brain side.

He’s a candidate for public office, but he’s on the other side of the country and this is not an endorsement of his campaign. He offers his credentials in the video and on his campaign’s About page (which reinforces both the left- and right-brain approaches here). This video takes a position on a super-controversial issue: How to interpret the language of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution (the gun clause).

This month’s tip is all about modeling persuasion—something we as marketers have to do every day. Too many marketers go on and on about how great they and their company are. They forget that what’s relevant to their prospects is how you can help them, and they fail to use both emotional and logical hooks.

Here’s a real-life example of the ego-centric approach (copied from an actual website):

We engage mission groups, NGOs, private sector organizations, and governments to fund and implement sustainable projects and developments in developing communities.

Find out more about our vision, approach, and projects.

Words like “we” or “our” can be an inclusive or exclusionary term—it can mean “you and I, together on this journey” OR “my colleagues and me, an exclusionary tribe.” The two sentences I typed in from that website are an exclusionary example—while the first and third paragraphs of this tipsheet article are inclusionary: “we” work together as marketers. How would you do that web copy differently?

<this space is to give you time to think about that question>

If the site owner had hired me to rewrite this web page, it might read:

Are your project dollars effectively supporting the right sustainable projects and developments in developing communities? NGOs, private sector organizations, and governments should get their money’s worth.

Find out more about how you can fund and create projects that align with your vision and mission.

See the you-focus in both paragraphs? The emotional triggers around not wasting precious resources and aligning with vision? The same identification of target markets in the original? Copy this inclusive takes some work. The first draft of this tip included four instances of “I” in the first three paragraphs—but they and some later ones were edited out in the revision.

Oh, and if you want some help with your own copy, please visit https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/marketing-consulting-copywriting/ —where you might notice 108 instances of the words “you” (including contraction forms) or “your” but only one “I” and one “I’m,” excluding those in client testimonials—and two very powerfully inclusive “we” sentences.

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.

A GBB staffer will be happy to demo the assessment tool for you. 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.

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.

Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation

Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation by Paul Hawken (Penguin, 2021)

This book came out last year, while The Carbon Almanac, which I reviewed in June, was only published in July 2020. There are a lot of similarities. Both are large-format paperbacks divided into many short articles, both were assembled by a team, both feature color photographs throughout and many additional resources—including all the numerous reference citations—online.

Most importantly, both spend a lot of time outlining the problems with the way we humans have chosen to live on the earth these last several millennia—but instead of getting mired in despair, both show that we have already developed the solutions we need, and give some advice on how we can undo the damage humans have wreaked on the earth. I recommend reading both, taking good notes on each, and perhaps having a month or two off between readings. They reinforce each other, but they also complement each other, with each including some pieces the other leaves out or glosses over.

Regeneration is more holistic than the Almanac, and somewhat more focused on actions we can take to restore the planet, its ecosystems, its peoples, and the other living creatures we share it with. It encourages action both by individuals and through sweeping changes in policy, legislation, and culture. And it hammers at the hypocrisy of corporate and government approaches that—as one among many examples—allow companies to take carbon credits for planting monoculture forests of non-native species that will take 20 years to offset the carbon, will displace indigenous cultures, and will be destroyed for lumber within a generation or so of planting (p. 245, with a related article on pp. 44-45).

These companies talk the talk, these days, but they aren’t walking the walk; CO2 emissions in 2019 were a third more than in 2000 (p. 246); more than half the total virgin-materials plastic produced since its invention in 1907 has been in the past 15 years, and 60 percent of that ends up as waste (p. 237). The Paris Climate Accord is not resulting in the huge progress we need. Morocco and Gambia are the only two countries on track to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Hawken, who has been a major figure in the responsible business movement for decades, is also much more willing to face the big, scary social issues like poverty, prisons, and racism, as well as under-the-radar but high-negative-impact industries such as fast fashion, big pharma, and big ag—and to look both at their climate impact and their human impact. To look at the reality that much of the world lives in megacities and is distanced from the land (see especially p. 149). And to look at the unintended consequences of human efforts to improve things by reducing biodiversity (addressed throughout the book, with the especially relevant story about how humans disrupted a balanced system in Yellowstone, pp. 64-67).

Hawken and his team are surprisingly optimistic. They cite research to bolster their conclusion that once climate is under control, which can be done in a single generation, the earth will stabilize rapidly (p. 9)—although the work of making sure will continue for a century (p. 12), still a nanosecond in our history as a species.

This review barely scratches the surface of this remarkable book. Go get a copy. Read an article or two every day, and take good notes. Then think about how you can turn these insights into action, starting with the action section at the end, pp. 248-255. I’m including the last page, 255, a brief essay on how to develop and share the hopeful yet realistic stories we need to get un-sunk and move forward: as individuals, communities, nations, and species.

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, August 2022

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

Don’t Send Out Turnoffs!

Latest in the “Archives of Ridiculously Bad Marketing”: I received this email with a From name that matched the name at the bottom of the letter, but the address looked spammy and from a different person–and the subject line was someone else’s name. Oh, and there was no signature or even URL—just the person’s probably-fictitious name. Here’s the content, exactly as I received it. I found at least 8 grammar and usage errors in the four-line first paragraph. How many did you spot?

This Morning I was on your website and I can see a few issues affecting your website Ranking I would like to send you a no-cost proposal on your website that will give some vital insight as to why you aren’t on page 1 yet and to show you some bigger issues. This is totally no-cost you’ll not be charged for any of this
Does this sound good?
Regards,
[Name]

Normally, I wouldn’t even respond—but somehow, I felt that maybe this person was teachable. And I know how hard it can be when it feels like your communications fall into the abyss. So I wrote back:

If I could give you some unasked-for advice: sending an ungrammatical mess with three different identities isn’t a really effective marketing strategy.

Why am I sharing this? Because I see a lot of people making mistakes like this—and I believe one of the best ways to do better is to dissect the failures.

It’s not just the bad grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. What other problems do you see in this 70-word message?

Here are a few that I notice:

  1. The writer failed to be specific. The letter is generic and could be applied to any business owner in any industry.

  2. There’s no attempt to engage with me as an individual business owner, e.g., “I love your focus on business succeeding by solving the world’s biggest problems”—or even “On your About page, I noticed that your use of the phrase, ‘extravagant cookie monsters’ could be costing you search engine rankings because [insert brief explanation].” If I had seen some indication that my correspondent had actually gone to my web page and spotted a problem, I would have been willing to gamble the time to read the report. (And just in case you go looking, that was a made-up example. I’m pretty sure that the archive of this newsletter will be the first time “extravagant cookie monsters” has appeared on any of my sites 😉 .)

  3. While it has a call to action, it has no third-party validation (like testimonials or reviews). It has no URL for me to check it out on my own (and a generic Gmail address that doesn’t give me the website). And it has no credibility.

  4. There’s also no differentiation. What makes this service different than the dozen other SEO services that pitched me this month? The only differentiation is the sense that this is a low-skill individual that I cannot trust to do a good job.

So there’s a quick four-point list of how to turn a pathetic email into a useful one. Go out there and make it happen! And if you want expert help with your copy, visit my contact form (on my main site, Going Beyond Sustainability), and let’s talk.

———————————————————————————————————————————-

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.

A GBB staffer will be happy to demo the assessment tool for you. 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.

 

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.

Business and Corporate Social Responsibility Presentation

Business and Corporate Social Responsibility Presentation by @Tutor2U, 2015

If you find yourself bollixed up when someone asks why social responsibility is important in your business, share this 20-minute slide presentation. The UK-native speaker has a charming accent and his slides are clear and easy to understand. He covers the basics (including the Milton Friedman-inspired arguments against it, which he knocks down reasonably well though not in great detail) and at least mentions the idea that CSR can be a profit strategy, citing experts like then-Unilever CEO Paul Polman and the very positive experience of major UK retailer Marks & Spencer.

For a much deeper exploration of CSR generally and its potential role as a bottom-line success driver, I recommend my own 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. You can sample some really nice excerpts at no cost at https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/freebies/

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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