The Clean and Green Club

In the new approach to marketing that I discuss in my award-wining sixth book Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, one of the cornerstones is building partnerships with others who can market for you.

Mark Joyner has taken this principle and essentially written a whole book on it, and to my joy, he includes some attention to ethics—urging entrepreneurs to only participate in cross-promotions when the opportunity is a comfortable fit with their values.

In integration marketing, you partner either with yourself or with others to add more value all the way around: to the participating businesses, to the consumer, and perhaps to the marketplace as a whole.

As an example: Joyner’s first Internet company, Aesop Marketing, first partnered with itself, with an upsell offer on the thank-you page when people bought (they were possibly the first to do this; now, of course, everyone does it). Once the bugs were worked out, Aesop offered other companies the chance to run the same offer. The other web publisher gained a new product to sell, more standing in the eyes of its customers, and an income stream in the form of commissions. Aesop, of course, gained whole new streams of customers well beyond what it was reaching on its own.

At the end of the book, Joyner posits a radically different business ecology based on integration marketing—based on, in other words, not crushing your competitors but cooperating with them. (Readers of Principled Profit will find this VERY familiar.) Expanding the model globally, he sees the possibility of actually reducing war. Powerful stuff.