The Clean and Green Club

News Flash: I Was Inducted Into the National Environmental Hall of Fame

Read all about it and see a picture at https://greenandprofitable.com/i-was-inducted-into-the-national-environmental-hall-of-fame-today/ I hope to post a video next week, if the videographer sends me something I can use. Several dignitaries in attendance, too.

Contents of This Issue:

• A Marketing Ploy that Cut Through the Clutter
• Hear & Meet Shel
• Friends Who Want to Help
• Another Recommended Book: Brandwashed

A Marketing Ploy that Cut Through the Clutter

UPS dropped off a surprise package from Random House recently; it looked like a box that would be used to ship a case of books.

When I opened the box, I saw a smaller, unmarked, white box, shrinkwrapped and floating on a cushion of air-filled plastic bags. I cut the shrinkwrap, opened the box, and took out a black slipcase, unadorned except for a line of headline type saying “GUESS THE YOUNGEST AGE EVER TARGETED BY A MARKETER.” Just below and to the right, these words in a starburst: “Be the first to know with this fascinating sneak-peek.”

Finally, inside the slipcase, another, very deluxe box.  The front cover answered the question on the slipcase. When I opened it, the inside cover had four panels of marketing copy, contact information, *and* a video player containing three video trailers and a screen about the size of an iPhone’s. Needless to say, the graphics on the whole thing were extremely professional. The main part of the box contained two cutouts: one held an advance review copy of a new book, Brandwashed, by Martin Lindstrom, and the other held a small red plastic infant bottle whose label, extremely reminiscent of the famous Heinz catsup bottle, declared,

“WHINES EST’D 2011 BRAND WASHING YOU’RE NEVER TOO YOUNG”

The two enclosures were topped with a custom plastic tray that had a cut out for the bottle and fit snugly but comfortably into the box.

I remembered that Lindstrom had personally e-mailed me two weeks earlier, asking if I’d be interested in reviewing his forthcoming book. He’d written,

Like you, I have long been a proponent of environmental responsibility and have sought ways to encourage others to take a more active role in making and keeping our communities more “green”. That is why I think you should take a careful look at the multi-million dollar world-of-mouth marketing experiment that I had funded and chronicled in Brandwashed. I wanted to study just how persuasive word-of-mouth marketing could be as pertaining to household decisions, and in the latter stages focused specifically on environmentally conscious products and services. The results were shocking!

I’d been impressed at the time that he not only sought me out but that he spoke directly to my key interest area: the intersection of marketing with the environment.

As book reviewers go, I’m pretty low on the food chain. Typically, I do one review a month, in this newsletter (whose circulation figures don’t exactly set the world on fire)—and then the reviews get posted on Amazon about a month later. To receive such an intricate package despite my low status in the book review world was a recognition that somebody, in this case a best-selling author and top consultant in my field, values my opinion enough to be sure he gets noticed—and that’s flattering.

I had a number of reactions to receiving this package, and as a marketer/environmentalist who educates other marketers and environmentalists, I’d like to share some of them with you. The insights you might gain from a look into my psyche may help you as you design your next campaign.

1. Undeniably, it was effective. As it happened, I hadn’t yet picked out a book to review this month, and with half the month gone, I needed to start. Martin’s book didn’t even stop at the top of the pile; it went directly to my exercise bike, where I read while working out, and I started reading it that very night (see my review elsewhere in this issue).
2. To make that impression cost quite a bit of money. I’m guessing the package cost at least $50 per copy to design, prepare, and send. Am I enough of an influencer to be worth that investment? It would be nice to think so, but I don’t know.
3. Obviously, the campaign is reaching people who do have a great deal of influence. On October 6, less than 10 days after publication, the book not only has 41 reviews on Amazon, but the #1 and #2 slots on three subcategories for marketing books and an enviable overall rank of 283. His earlier book, Buyology, is also doing quite well at the moment, probably with a little help from Amazon’s “people who bought also bought” trick.
4. While the marketer in me is quite impressed, the environmentalist part of my brain is appalled. This was a very resource-intensive effort involving unrecyclable mixed materials and weighing seven pounds. In tiny print on the back of the player box, it notes that you’re not supposed to throw this out in the trash and should return the box to the video player company for processing. Not a lot of reviewers will even see that note, and fewer still will go through the trouble to find a suitable box, address a label, and pay for the postage to return it. Reviewers get dozens of packages per day, and many cases, get them pre-opened by a mailroom employee. The slipcase and the two outer boxes can be recycled with my other cardboard, but the rest of it is problematic. This is especially ironic, given Lindstrom’s personal message to me.
5. After experiencing this elaborate and expensive press kit, I am surprised by the book cover, which in my opinion is both unattractive and unimaginative. If a client came to me with this cover, I’d have advised a different concept.
6. Targeting is key. This book was well-targeted to me, and Lindstrom’s personal message was even more targeted. Had I received a similar press kit for, let’s say, a book about Britney Spears’ hairstyle shenaningans, I would have been annoyed instead of intrigued, and the whole thing would have gone into the recycle bin without a second look.

How would you react if you received a package like this? Click on this link to tell me, or to make any other comments. Please tell me if I have permission to publish your comment publicly. I’m thinking of gathering the responses into a blog post (which is also an easy way for you to get a link from my site—just include your URL in the e-mail).

Friends Who Want to Help

The Best-Conceived JV I’ve Seen

Do you do Joint Ventures? As I hinted last month, I’m helping to orchestrate a particularly exciting one, involving celebrities, politicians, environmental education, kids, quilts and all sorts of other cool stuff that appeals to the media and will get you coverage and contacts. We’re planning ahead on this–want to get commitments this year for ramping up early next year and a launch that ties in with Earth Day next spring–but don’t wait to get involved. If you’d like to receive an invitation as soon as we’re ready, please use this link to tell me (and let me know if you think of yourself as more of a marketer, or more of an environmentalist).

Unfamiliar with Joint Ventures? Basically, we partner with you, you tell your own contacts (like the readers of your e-zine or blog), and if people make purchases from your link, you earn a commission.

30-minute No-Cost Consultation with Scott Cooney from Green Business Owner, and a Cool-Looking Sustainability Game, Too

Scott gave me one of these consultations, and I very much appreciated his fresh perspective. He’s also just developed a very spiffy-looking game on sustainability themes, set in Hawaiii. To get your consult, visit GreenBusinessOwner.com, and then click on the Consulting link on the top menu. For the game, go directly to this link.

Two Book-Publishing Conferences:

D’vorah Lansky’s Online Book Marketing Conference

Check out the amazing speaker line-up for the 3rd Annual Book Marketing Conference Online–I now almost all of them and can vouch for their good work. And this one has a series of free preview calls, too.

* Kathleen Gage: “Become an Online Bestselling Author in Today’s Crowded Author’s Market”
* Carolyn Howard-Johnson: “Your Awards: How to win them and then use them to set your book apart”
* Brian Jud: “Selling More Books, More Profitably to Non-Bookstore Buyers”
* Lynne Klippel: “Going Beyond the Book: Fast, Easy Product Creation for Authors”
* Jill Lublin: “Be the News”
* Connie Ragen Green: “How to Repurpose Your Existing Content to Become a Bestselling Author”
* Marnie Pehrson: “Using Social Media to Create a Buzz About Your Book”
* Penny Sansevieri: “Maximize and Monetize Social Media -3rd Annual Book Marketing Conference”
* Felicia J. Slattery: “How Authors Can Create a Signature Speech to Build Platform and Sell More Books”
* Dana Lynn Smith: “The Secrets to Planning a Profitable Virtual Book Tour”
* Steven E. Schmitt: “How I made millions by listening to my intuitive voice”
* Noah St. John: “Attract More Money Blueprint: Your Hidden Power for More Wealth and Happiness”
* Denise Wakeman: “The Secret to Author Blog Success: How to Dominate Your Niche with a Book Blog”

Get the details at: https://www.bookmarketingmadeeasy.com/center/idevaffiliate.php?id=139

Publishing Conference in Nevada Next Month

This is taken directly from a press release I received: PubWest, the leading trade association for small- and medium-sized book publishers, is pleased to announce the full agenda for the PubWest Conference 2011 in November. The programming includes notable keynotes by Len Riggio, Chairman of Barnes & Noble; Tyson Cornell of Rare Bird Lit; and Kevin Smokler, author of the forthcoming essay collection Practical Classics. Sessions include intensives on Digital Publishing and Creating EPUBS with Adobe InDesign CS5.5, Exploration and Discussion of the Chicago Manual of Style’s New 16th Edition with Alice Levine, Evaluating the Effectiveness of Social Marketing, Optimizing Digital Production Workflows, Improving Your Publishing Company’s Profitability, Product Line Branding and Permissions, “Green” Publishing, Faceoff between Traditional and New Social Media, Enhanced E-Books, Metadata and Discoverability, plus lively and interactive roundtables held by professionals in the industry.

Registration: www.pubwest.org/conference. More info: kent@pubwest.org

The Living Organization

Tough times call for better ideas – Packed with powerful insights, tools, and practices, this book is a potent resource for aspiring, emerging, and seasoned business leaders alike. Norman Wolfe reframes and broadens our understanding of how organizations can create better results. Every leader, every CEO, board member and senior executive will benefit from the practical guidance this book provides. The Living Organization – check it out: https://bit.ly/puW6nt

Hear & Meet Shel

October

• Speaking at Bioneers-By-The-Bay, wonderful conference October 21-23 in New Bedford, MA, https://www.marioninstitute.org/connecting-for-change My talk is Sunday October 23: signing books at 12:30-1 p.m. at Bakers Books tables inside the Butterfly Exhibition Tent, then presenting Getting Buy-In: Building Stakeholder Consensus for Sustainability, at Bristol Community College, 800 Purchase St., Conference Room. Note: this is the very first time I’m giving this talk, aimed at activists, government leaders, and green business owners. Lots of good nitty-gritty stuff about how to analyze and reach your market.
• October 28 and beyond, my interview on Good And Green Radio will be available at https://wgrnradio.com/archive-good-and-green-radio-with-susan-davis/

• I’ll be walking the floor in the afternoon at the Green Expo Opportunity Fair in Springfield, MA, at the MassMutual Center. Let me know ahead if you’d like to meet there.
• November 15, 8:00 pm ET/5 pm PT, January Jones interviews me: 818-431-8506
• November 16, 7 pm ET/4 pm PT: Interviewed on Your15Minutes Radio’s “Brand This” with Shaun Walker and Reid Stone, www.your15minutesradio.com
• November 17, 11 a.m. ET/8 am PT: Interviewed by Susan Rich on “Get Noticed Now.”

Another Recommended Book: Brandwashed

Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy, by Martin Lindstrom (Crown, division of Random House, 2011)

Both as a marketer and as a consumer, you want to understand the psychology of modern-day marketing (and especially the particular marketing subset called advertising). Without a clear picture of just how deeply manipulated we are, at a level not even dreamed of when Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders back in the 1950s, you will be defenseless against the continual assault on your wallet.

Martin Lindstrom, an industry insider who has helped big brands go deep into their consumers’ minds and come out the other end with fistfuls of money, turns his attention to explaining how these companies get inside your brains, and what they do once they get there.

While he certainly pays attention to the traditional buy triggers, like fear, sex, celebrity, spirituality, fear, and nostalgia—each of which gets its own chapter—the real news in this book is the evolution of companies’ knowledge about us, and how they manipulate every aspect of your “buyer experience,” through a huge range of tools, to create the desired effect: a ravenous, insatiable hunger for the company’s brand.

This well-written and well-researched book should give anyone pause. But perhaps the scariest part is how early it starts. Marketers have known for many years that buying habits and brand loyalties acquired in childhood can shape lifelong preferences. That’s why, for instance, computer companies value the elementary education market so highly.

But it starts much earlier than that. Literally, the music you hear, the smells you experience in the womb can influence your choices all through life. And peer pressure has been documented at 14 months old.

The positive side of this is that these sensual memories can help with things like stroke recovery. But the Big Brotherish part of it is disturbing. Add in such factors as the deliberate manipulation of fear to literally make us stupid and not only do you have a commercial marketer’s paradise, but also (here I’m extrapolating from Lindstrom) the easy ability to whip up patriotic fervor to justify evil actions by governments (think about the manufacture of anti-Jewish sentiment during the Holocaust, or anti-Muslim sentiment in the US following 9/11, with the media cheering on the crackdown in both cases).

Another key insight: when we encounter arousing images, we perceive ourselves as sexier. (This is what psychologists call “transference.”) No wonder so much of advertising features sultry women and hunky men. And according to his research, straight men are a major, if hidden, market that responds to those pictures of hunky men. Also, the male who is conscious of his own beauty and spends lavishly on personal care products/services is a hot new trend.

Celebrity marketing is related to this; we perceive ourselves as increasing our status and power when we read and watch those with high status and power—they are our idealized future selves. Celebs (including various royal families) feed into this and deliberately manage their personal brands very carefully.

Concerned about privacy? Basically, it no longer exists. Data mining is far more sophisticated now, and companies can create incredibly detailed profiles not just segment-by-segment, but person-by-person. They know who you are, what you wear, what you eat, where you work, where you are (if you use a cell phone), and how long you’ve spent on which web pages. Not only do we voluntarily reveal enormous amounts of information about ourselves to companies like Facebook and Google (and some companies have learned how to subvert the privacy safeguards and harvest this), but there’s plenty of data collection going on without our consent, too. And data mining companies sometimes require their customers to provide more data if they want the service.

But wait! There’s more!

• Some products, notably in the cosmetics industry, do the opposite of what they promise, thus feeding more purchases because the wearer thinks, “I must not have put enough on.”
• 60 percent of teens think they can buy their way to happiness with the right brands (and many of them will outright reject unbranded items)
• While brands are seen as a path to self-esteem, knowingly buying a counterfeit lowers self-esteem
• Nostalgia marketing has hooks back to our earliest childhood; we long for simpler times before we had grown up worries, and will welcome even products we ignored at the time
• GPS-like devices on shopping carts allow stores to track individual movement patterns in the store—while digital price signage allows companies to actually change prices to reflect trends at different times of day
• Receiving advice that seems to be expert shuts down our critical thinking, even if the expertise is weak or is really celebrity in disguise)—and word-of-mouth from a trusted friend or colleague *definitely* counts heavily

Lindstrom ends the book with a complex experiment he set up, giving a real family a mission to influence the buying habits of their friends.  The results are shocking; go read the book to learn what happened, and to learn many more startling tidbits than I had room to describe. (See, now I just implanted a suggestion to you. I’m not being paid in any way to recommend this book and am not using my Amazon affiliate code. But I’d love to see whether my self-perception as a trusted expert translates into sales that bear out Lindstrom’s hypothesis, despite my transparency about it —so if you buy the book on my say-so, please drop me a note: mailto:shel@frugalfun.com?subject=IBoughtBrandwashed .) Please tell me if I have permission to publish your comment publicly. I’m thinking of gathering the responses into a blog post (which is also an easy way for you to get a link from my site—just include your URL in the e-mail).

Ever dream of getting a big New York publisher for your future best seller? Don’t do it like this—in fact, don’t esend any kind of pitch letter that makes these mistakes:

M husband has a finished book and he is looking for a Book Agent or Book Publisher. His book is geared for young adults. He is a Highschool teacher and his students are chomping at the bit to read his book. We are sitting on a gold-mine! If you are interested, please leave your information so we can send you more information on the book! Thank you so much.

This was an actual query, submitted through a media query submission service. Let’s play a little game with this, just for fun. How many things can you find wrong with this post? Use the comment form to respond, and then scroll down to see my list (don’t cheat!)

Publishers are deluged with queries and are actively looking for reasons to say no. Any of the eight points below will probably trigger rejection. All of them together? This proposal is going nowhere, fast. Similarly, executives look for reasons to brush off sales pitches…customers of any kind want to be romanced, but this letter is more like the equivalent of a wolf-whistle on the street corner.

1. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation count. I notice two typos (dropping the y in My and running high and school together into one non-existent word), one inappropriate hyphenation, and four inappropriate capitalizations.
2. Writing style counts. This limp and wooden paragraph gives me no confidence in the author’s ability.
3. I don’t even know if this is fiction or nonfiction, let alone the subject and genre. Tell me what the book is about, tell me your working title, get me interested.
4. Young Adult, in the children’s book market, is a much younger reader than high school. She doesn’t know her terms and her audience, which means she doesn’t know the industry, which means the product is not likely to be salable.
5. Don’t give me hype (gold-mine). Give me facts.
6. What a great market analysis—NOT! His students are eager for the book. OK, let’s say he teaches five classes of 30 kids each, which would be a pretty big load but not out of the question. OK, so that’s a universe of 150 students per semester. If even 25 percent of the market actually buys (and that’s about 5 to 10x more than I’d guess), you’ve just sold a whopping six books. That won’t even pay for the cover design. I think this particular gold mine may be all played out. And no other markets are mentioned.
7. What’s his name, what are his credentials, and why isn’t he writing his own letter?
8. Finally, why submit this to a media pitch service that goes to experts across all genres, seeking publicity by answering reporters’ queries? The targeting is very poor. It would make a lot more sense to pitch a list of actual publishers, don’t you think?

And by the way, if you’re thinking of submitting a book proposal or query letter to an agent or publisher, a bit of expert help can make a huge difference. I offer critique services, rewriting, or writing from scratch. And I’ve sold to Wiley, Simon & Schuster,and Chelsea Green, as well as gotten nibbles for my clients from many other fine houses. For those authors better suited to self-publishing, I walk you through every step of the process and we come out the other end with something as good as books coming from major publishers.

Earn a commission–find me a paid speaking gig in the Bay Area for January 17 or 18. I will be speaking on the 19th at the Sustainable Food Summit. Contact me directly at 413-586-2388, shel at greenandprofitable.com

Shel’s Green And Profitable monthly column has launched. If you know a newspaper, newsletter, website, or blog that would like to run this column, please recommend us. the link is https://greenandprofitable.com/green-and-profitable-column/

In This Issue…

• Pushing the Green Bar Higher: Report from the Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival
• Persuading People to Buy, by Marcia Yudkin
• Hear & Meet Shel
• Friends Who Help

Pushing the Green Bar Higher: Report from the Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival

Saturday, October 23, I did my Green Marketing talk at the Green Festival: the largest and most well-run event of its kind I’ve been to, and I’ve been to quite a few.

The way the schedule worked, I ended up not being able to connect with a lot of the other great workshops—but that was ok, since it took me pretty much the whole day to go through all the exhibits.

Let me tell you, the Green world is hopping! Two years ago, much of what I saw at the show would not have even been on the drawing boards, and now it’s reality.

Some random observations:

Water: Awareness of water as a global resource issue has come a long way in the past few years, and that plays out on several fronts, among them:

•   Products that reduce or eliminate use of bottled water, such as Hydros Bottle: a reusable water and highly portable bottle with a built-in filter

•   Industrial and agricultural processes designed to use much less water

•   Consumer awareness projects such as Corporate Accountability International’s very effective “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign

Community Food Self-Sufficiency: Innovative companies and community organizations are noticing that not only rural people are looking for locally-sourced, healthy food. Urban people want options too. Some of the solutions have been around for years, such as farmers markets bringing their wares to urban centers or Community Supported agriculture farms that sell memberships for a whole growing season. But others could be just as game-changing, such as the offering from Sustainable Garden Supply, Inc. This company does “vertical gardens” and claims that 30 different plants could be grown in a three-foot space. It looks somewhat like an Italian Renaissance fountain and can be used indoors or out.

Fair Trade: No longer just about coffee, cocoa, and tea, the list of fair-trade certified products (and groups certifying them) continues to grow. Sugar, bananas, clothing, and other products are now obtaining certification, and several different certifying bodies are now active. And there were at least four different fair-trade chocolatiers sapling their yummy wares (a far cry from the acute shortage of decent chocolate I encountered when I switched to fair trade several years ago).

Home, Shelter, and Energy: There must have been at least two dozen vendors selling and/or installing solar energy systems, a comparable number selling conservation and retrofit products, plus some geothermal. Attention to wind seemed to be concentrated in the nonprofit organization booths, though. Many contractors were also around to discuss building new green structures or renovating old ones, along with eco-friendly landscaping, gardening, and decorating. And Zero Waste as well as Zero Energy have become popular catchwords.

Fashion and Home Decor: Green has gotten very chic. Say goodbye to the drab monochrome patterns and I-used-to-be-a-burlap-bag look of years past. Today’s eco-fashions are colorful, dramatic, interestingly cut, heavily influenced by world-beat cultures, and look nothing like an old coffee sack. Think of the difference between recycled paper in 1990 and today. Reusability is also big, with, for instance, reusable cloth wraps with Velcro closures to replace sandwich bags—and a portion of the Mother Earth News booth set up as an heirloom seed exchange. And speaking of Zero Waste, many small vendors featured a wide assortment of craft items created from what used to be considered scrap: jewelry made of recycled paper and metal, elegant art papers made of deodorized and sanitized elephant dung (which I actually came across in 2009 and mentioned in Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green), textiles from old soda bottles, furniture from recovered glass…

In short, if your exposure to green products is based on what was out there 20, 10, or even five years ago, it’s time for another look—which you can take by browsing the exhibitor catalog, posted here.

Another Recommended Book: Persauding People to Buy, by Marcia Yudkin

As a long-time subscriber to Marcia Yudkin’s Marketing Minute newsletter, I read most of these essays when they were first published in that format.

Now that she’s organized some of her columns into books, I’m pleasantly shocked by how much more I get out of them. She has clearly given much thought to the order, so that essay builds upon essay to strengthen and hammer home the central messages–such as the importance of knowing your market inside out and backwards, and matching the medium, market, and message.

The articles are short and digestible: 1-1/2 to 2 widely spaced pages apiece (remember—these were first published in a newsletter called the Marketing *Minute*). Normally, I like my content longer, because I like depth. But Marcia wastes no words and achieves that depth in surprisingly little space. Which is why I continue to read her newsletter for more than a decade, even as I’ve unsubscribed from dozens of others after a couple of years, or even a few months.

Icing on the cake: the little aphorism or bit of humor at the end of many of the articles that lets different synapses connect in your brain, and reinforces the article’s message while generating a smile.

As a long-time advocate of these principles, I strongly recommend Marcia’s book, with its easily-digested nuggets, as a complement to my own Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.

Disclosure: I am personally acquainted with Marcia and we were in a mastermind group together for a while.

—Shel Horowitz

Hear & Meet Shel

November

• Monday, November 8, 3:30-4:30 ET/12:30-1:30 PT, Felice Gerwitz interviews me on book marketing for WritingandPublishingRadio.com
• Tuesday, November 16, 9pm ET/6 pm PT: Mastermind class for GreenBusinessOwner.com. Details at https://www.greenbusinessowner.com/products/item6.cfm.

December

• Thursday, December 2, 1:00 ET: 90-minute audio conference with Association of Strategic Marketing “Reaching the Green Consumer with Effective Marketing”
  Register at https://www.associationofmarketing.org/bookstore.php?sku=387283 and use Priority Code 16899, or ph 866-226-0828 and mention code 16899 (my affiliate code).
  I’ll provide you with a bonus audio on how to respond to journalist queries with pitches that lead to coverage–just e-mail a copy of your receipt to shel at greenandprofitable.com, subject line: Audio Bonus for 12/2 Webinar.
  Please tell you friends and colleagues about this one!
• Thursday, December 9, 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT: How to Create A Message that Resonates with the Green Consumer, 60-minute webinar for Strategic Sustainability Consulting, https://www.sustainabilityconsulting.com/events-list/webinar-green-and-profitable-creating-green-messages-that-ma.html Contact: tracy (at) sustainabilityconsulting.com

• Personal profile of me as a green marketer on Stephanie Chandler’s website (print)
  https://businessinfoguide.com/interview-with-author-shel-horowitz-guerrilla-marketing-goes-green/
• With I. Vitt Argent on Green Marketing: https://www.blogtalkradio.com/ivaradionetwork/2010/10/27/kiva-talk-radio-interveiws-guerilla-green-business
• With TJ Walker on social media: https://www.tjwalker.com/2010/10/13/radio-shel-horowitz-shares-some-communication-tips-on-using-social-media/
• With Carma Spence on public speaking:
  https://publicspeakingsuperpowers.com/featured-speakers/shel-horowitz/
• With Lillian Brummet on conscious marketing and green living:
  https://www.blogtalkradio.com/consciousdiscussions/2010/09/07/conscious-marketing

Friends Who Help

Some companies are just discovering that taking sustainability measures actually increases profits, and therefore they may as well join the gang. Other companies have sustainability as a core value; it’s built into their DNA. And some, like this moth’s Spotlight business, are designed from the ground up to move us toward sustainability; it’s the reason they’re in business in the first place..

We Beat the Mountain is a company formed specifically to create markets for recycled products and thus reduce the “mountain” of trash piling up at landfills. Thus, the rather odd-sounding name actually does make sense.

Visiting the site, you don’t even feel like you’re looking at a catalog; you’re joining a movement! Consider the copy on We Beat the Mountain’s home page:

We Beat The Mountain – Join The Movement Now!

Think about the items you have bought over the last few days… Go on, take a minute… How many of those items are made of recycled materials? And how many of those items could be made of recycled materials?

We Beat The Mountain is an organization that aims to reduce the trash mountains all over the world. Products that are no longer in use, such as Read the rest of this entry »

Big news: I am reintroducing a no-cost newsletter. I had up to four per month from May 1997 until the end of last year, and I realized a few things in these months of not doing it:

1. I missed it.
2. Not enough of you wanted to pay, and the amount of work I was doing to support the members and subscribers was just as much as it had been before I went to a paid model, but the revenue that would have compensated me wasn’t there.
3. Doing a newsletter offers benefits not only to you, but also to me–and I was not receiving those benefits.
4. There is no way I’m going back to four newsletters a month. If I am going to make a newsletter work, it has to be simple to do and not nearly as time-consuming.

So…instead of having three marketing and business newsletters every month plus one for the consumer market, I’m simplifying and consolidating. I will do a single marketing newsletter every month, called Clean and Green Marketing. If you subscribed to Frugal Marketing Tips, Positive Power of Principled Profit, or Book Marketing Tip of the Month, your subscription is automatically transferred over (that’s why you’re receiving this). Frugal Fun Tips, my consumer publication, will not be brought back–but you can find a lifetime’s worth of frugal fun ideas in my $8.50 e-book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist.

The articles will be shorter, and there will be fewer of them. Each regular issue (published between the 5th and 10th of every month) will have at least one of the following:

A practical, hands-on marketing tip
Profile of a Green/ethical company
“Think piece” on trends in business and marketing
Review of a book or other resource worth knowing about

My guess is that most issues will have one, maybe two main articles. I’m starting this incarnation with two.

You’ll also get the usual side features: my upcoming speeches (both live and virtual), new content on the website, and offers from friends and colleagues who want to help you. Once in a while, I’ll probably update you on what media have covered me or on new special projects I’m working on.

Going down to one regular issue a month does mean that you may get additional mailings from me when there’s a time-sensitive opportunity I don’t want you to miss. It shouldn’t be more than a couple of extra times a month, and many months there won’t be any at all. But if there’s something that could help you but would be stale by the next issue, I want you to know about it.