The Clean and Green Club

If the consumer pressure directed to kids is an issue for you…if you’re disgusted by over-the-top parties for 6- or 10-year-olds that cost thousands of dollars…if you want to raise your children with an awareness of how they can make a difference in the wider world—here’s something I found remarkable and inspiring.

A mom-run Canadian company, EchoAge.com, has completely turned traditional birthday parties inside out. Instead of the usual model of everyone bringing a little present, Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by Shel Horowitz

As I complete six years of writing this column, I believe this is the first time I’ve reviewed an e-book instead of a physical book. Not only that, but an e-book with a absurdly low price of $9.95 US. I’ve seen a lot of those, and the vast majority I’d never recommend. They tend to be shallow, fluffy, and to exist only to upsell various other offers.

Tipping the Point is different. It has far more practical value than many e-books I’ve seen at five or even ten times the price.

Basically, it’s a quick-start guide to viral marketing, using integrity and ethics–and incorporating many examples (yes, including upsells). It starts with a theory section, but one made accessible and clear even to people who haven’t studied a lot of marketing–and one emphasizing the importance of building a real relationship. He covers force multipliers, the difference between viral ideas that spread via influencers and those that spread through the general public (a much larger group, of course, and therefore able to spread your idea or product much faster), and even looked at where Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point may have gotten some of its best ideas. He also covers some niceties as the ratio you need to become self-replicating and the ease with which you can get others to pass your stuff on.

Other goodies:
* 21-item glossary
* 11-point checklist for creating a message that people welcome and pass along
* More in-depth coverage of 14 different strategy success factors (not the same as those on the checklist)
* 12 problems that can sabotage your campaign
* 29 tactics to draw attention to your viral offering
* Plus a gazillion specific URLs for resources (more than I’m willing to hand-count!)
* A software bonus called The DOT (Do It Now), which claims to support you in achieving focus and concentration. It’s PC only and I’m on a Mac, so I can’t vouch for it.

Tom walks his talk, too. In the little over a year we’ve known each other online, I’ve noticed that he’s always doing little favors for me and others, without expectation of a direct return: a principle he espouses repeatedly in Tipping the Point (and one that I recommend in Principled Profit, as well). Oh yes, and he’s set up some nice charity stuff in this e-book, in keeping with the work he’s been doing at JointWinWin for a while now.

The book isn’t perfect. Yes, it does suffer from a few of the typical e-book flaws, like the occasional instance of poor proofreading and amateurish clipart illustrations. And while I prefer to think of his Britishisms (not just spelling, but idioms) as charming, not everyone may feel that way. (It’s honest, though–he is based in England.) But there’s an awful lot of good stuff here.

In fact, there’s so much good stuff that I took the very unusual step of becoming a dealer and putting it up for download on my own cart. And let me tell you, something has to be really good for me to do that. I still can’t believe he only wants $9.95 for this!

Please click here to get your own copy, and yes, I do benefit financially (a little, anyhow) from your purchase.

https://shelhorowitz.com/go/tippingthepoint/

Note: There are two volumes in Tipping the Point. Volume 1 is free and you can download it from this link. Volume 2 is available for $9.95 with the “add to cart” button on the page linked above.

How’s this for a mission statement (transcribed from the cheery video by the head of customer service, right at the top of the home page): “To help you find the most effective products to make your house most efficient.” The same video offers a great guarantee: “If you aren’t satisfied with anything you buy from us, we’ll replace it, refund your money, or work with you to make it right. We as a company, and I personally, are committed to you being 100% thrilled with us.”

Now, add a great selection of Green household products in these categories: electricity monitors, power strips, programmable thermostats, lighting, rechargeable batteries, water saving, window insulation, crank powered, space heaters, weatherstrips/air sealing, indoor air/ventilation, controls, timers & switches

Round it all out with a bunch of informative articles and how-to videos on topics like preparing for energy audits and keeping your house cool in summer, plus news articles and blogs about energy issues (one I particularly liked stated that LED lights, which are many times more efficient than even compact fluorescents, don’t attract bugs), and you have the wonderful site, https://energycircle.com/ – a great combination of green products and a helpful, approachable, customer-focused attitude. And that’s our Spotlight business for this month.

The Pursuit of Something Better: How an Underdog Company Defied the Odds, Won Customers’ Hearts, and Grew its Employees Into Better People, by Dave Esler and Myra Kruger (Esler Kruger Associates, 2008)

Can a mediocre company (whose main USP is dominance of markets too small for others to bother with) transform into something truly great? If U.S. Cellular’s experience is any indication, the answer is a very strong yes. It isn’t easy, quick, or cheap–in fact, as of the book’s publication late last year, it had been an ongoing 8-year process–but under the right leadership, in this case, the remarkable CEO Jack Rooney, a squirmy little company with little concern for either its associates, its customers, or its business practices can actually reinvent itself as a highly ethical, customer-focused company that not only makes its employees really proud to work there, but actually begins to make a positive impact in the family and community lives of those employees. It’s not surprising that it now has twice as many associates and three times as many customers (meaning not only is the company growing rapidly, but productivity has also grown; each associate handles more customers)

This is an insider’s story; Esler and Kruger are the culture consultants that Rooney brought in at the start of his tenure, and they’ve played an ongoing role in shaping the transformation. Yet they don’t gloss over the rough stuff, and there’s plenty of it along the way.

But they and Rooney–and thus, U.S. Cellular–drew lines in the sand, fired people who didn’t share the dream, and made it work. In the early years of this decade, U.S. Cellular was widely expected to be swallowed up. Instead, they’ve shored up existing markets, built new ones, won numerous awards both for their customer focus/workplace culture and the reliability of their technology, and are well-prepared to hold their own even in the current recession.

A couple of core principles dominate:

• How comes before what, and nothing is morally neutral: if you get the numbers you want through the wrong methods, it doesn’t count; go back to the drawing board
• Truth is less stressful than deception

A key insight: marketing is important too. In many companies, the grim reality doesn’t match the sunny marketing/advertising/public relations picture, and that’s a problem. At U.S. Cellular, the problem was in the other direction: the company refused to take credit early for what it was accomplishing (Rooney felt they weren’t ready yet), and so the sunny and glorious reality was vastly better than the public picture; the company could have grown faster, perhaps, if their marketing had lived up to their culture. (This is exactly why I show, in my award-winning sixth book Principled Profit, that the ethical and social commitments must be accompanied by effective marketing that harnesses and highlights these achievements.)

A bonus: this is one of the better-written business books I’ve read recently, as you can see from this passage below, at the very conclusion of the book.

Jack Rooney and his slowly-expanding team of believers challenged the long-prevailing assumptions that business is a blood sport, that the advantage inevitably goes to the ruthless and the greedy, that the only way to win is to hold your nose and leave your values at the door He has proven beyond question, once and for all…that a values-based model works, that it can raise both a company and the individuals who are part of it to undreamed-of heights, to peak experiences that will last a lifetime and change the way those lives are lived. He has shown that there is indeed a better way.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Another Recommended Book: The Heart of Marketing: Love Your Customers and They Will Love You Back, by Judith Sherven, Ph.D. and Jim Sniechowski, Ph.D. (Morgan James, 2009).

Would you run the same ad in the New Yorker and the National Enquirer? I sure wouldn’t! I’m a long-time believer in matching audience, offer, and message, and that includes tone.

Yet so many Internet marketers want to pretend that their unlimited bag of tools contains only one item: the pay-per-click ad that leads to a hard-sell long-format sales letter (perhaps stopping at a squeeze page along the way). Heavy on hype, lots of promises and claims…wrapped in a sleazy cloud of scarcity that doesn’t do wonders for the mental state of the marketer OR the prospect. Mind you, these have a time and a place–but that is certainly not every time, every place.

Marketing is never a one-size-fits-all choice, and in this day and age, it’s crazy to try; marketing works much better when the message is closely tuned to the target market.. Think of the most ubiquitous offers you can, and I’ll prove that even they are not for everybody. McDonald’s? Not much appeal for vegetarians. Coca-Cola? Diabetics and health fooders will both tune it out.

Sherven and Sniechowski, who come out of the soft-sell worlds of therapy and relationship coaching, understand this dynamic. They’ve achieved phenomenal success marketing softer products with a softer approach, and helping others to do the same.  I love their focus on authenticity and integrity, which nicely complements the work I’ve been dong with Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. They talk about the difference between “technique acting,” where the actor goes through the motions of showing emotion but doesn’t internalize it, and the much more effective “method acting,” where the character actually feels the emotions. By extension, they note, marketing that focused on “techniqued” approaches is rejected as hype. As soft-sell marketers, they understand the value of technique, but combine it with genuine emotional interest. And I love the idea of “reconciling commerce and care”–and getting well compensated at the intersection.

Sherven and Sniechowski note that in their world, Return On Experience is a more useful measure than Return On Investment. And testimonials may be a key to charting ROE, because it demonstrates the tangible results of the soft-sell marketer’s intangible services. As for the scarcity mentality so beloved by the marketing gurus? They reject it out of hand, saying instead that urgency must be authentic, and the use of scarcity often shows a lack or deprivation in the marketer.

This book will be released on or before May 1 and is available for preorder. I’d planned to save it for next month, but neither of the other two books I looked at this month were worthy of recommendation.

It’s still Passover, so I’m thinking perhaps more than usual about food. But before I get to this month’s profile…

Exciting News: Principled Profit Blog Wins Its Third Award in A Month!

I’ve been blogging on the intersections of media, marketing, ethics, politics, and sustainability since 2004, at https://www.principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/ And all of a sudden, people are starting to notice! Beginning March 14, I’ve been notified that my blog has won three different awards!

• Ripple 6 list of Best Big Business Blogs (B4) (emphasis on using social media–and pretty funny, considering I’m a one-person, home-based company):  “Clearly one of the best on blogging with good coverage on B4 issues.”
• 50 Best Business Ethics Blogs: “information on good business practices, high ethical standards, and those who got it wrong…This blog devotes itself to good business. Shel Horowitz is an expert on business ethics as a success driver.”
• Semi-finalist, 2009 Blogger Appreciation Awards (general excellence)

If you want to see what the fuss is about, go visit the blog. You can even sign up to hear about new posts through either RSS or e-mail.

Now on to this month’s profile.

Positive Power Spotlight: America’s Regional Best!

Recently, I saw an ad for RegionalBest.com on last month’s profiled business, HARO, and when I clicked over, I very much liked what I saw.

Here’s the mission statement:

We’re an online market offering some of the best local foods from across the country – America’s Regional Best! All are produced by artisans, farmers and other small, family-owned specialty food companies. Many of these regional foods are all natural and organic and use the finest local ingredients. We advocate and applaud sustainable farming and production practices.

Pretty hard to argue with that!

And I like the way the site is organized: click on a region of the country to get all the products from that region, or click on the nav bar to get all products within a category such as cheeses, gift items, or vegan products. For New England, where I live, you get not only the expected (Maine lobster, Vermont maple syrup products,blueberries and so forth, but also the unexpected, like vegan or traditional baklava, cereals, crackers, and such.

This month’s recommended book is all about how to find and fill a niche that not only matches your skills and talents, but your interest in bettering the world. Here’s an innovative company that does just that.

Reteez.com is a purveyor of handmade craft items–belts, jewelry, purses and totes, accessories–made from old t-shirts. Using the original t-shirt art as well as crocheting and other methods, the company creates one-of-a-kind objects, using t-shirts that were either donated, bought at thrift shops, or seconds purchased from fashion industry sources. Using a North American workforce, the company keeps an estimated 10,000 shirts per year out of landfills (or textile dumps in developing countries).

Certainly not the cheapest place to buy a unique gift, but remember that these are labor-intensive, made by hand by skilled laborers, and not made in sweatshops.

I learned about Reteez because the company sponsored an issue of HARO, a service that matches reporters and sources (and one that I’ll be profiling here, eventually). If you want a continuous stream of queries from reporters seeking story sources, at no cost, visit HARO and sign up.

Another Recommended Book: The Customer Delight Principle: Exceeding Customers’ Expectations for Bottom-Line Success, by Timothy Keiningham and Terry Varva (McGraw-Hill/American Marketing Association, 2001)

This rather academically-written, MBA-oriented book emphasizes that merely satisfying your customers isn’t enough to build even loyalty, let alone the fervent ardor necessary for customers to recruit more customers on your behalf; you have to delight them. And the bar on delight keeps getting higher, because one of the factors leading to delight is that it’s unexpected.

In other words…when a new, delightful practice is successful, it is adopted by the organization, and then becomes an industry best practice–and then it stops being delightful, because the customer begins to expect it as part of a minimum service standard. So innovation plays a key role.

This I think is a crucial insight, and one that makes perfect sense.

Keiningham and Varva also point out a number of other interesting observations, all based in research (and many accompanied by various charts and graphs):

The ROI on improving delight is non-linear; certain little improvements may make a huge improvement in profitability, while others that cost more may have little effect, and the returns may shrink over time
It’s relatively easy to figure out which initiatives will offer the greatest return; just identify factors in the customer’s experience that the customer sees as of critical importance, but where the current satisfaction rating is low
Profitable delight initiatives often target high-dollar-value, low-cost clients
If your customer survey is self-serving and focuses on your wants rather than the customer’s, you won’t get the data you need to improve
Not everyone is delighted in the same ways, so segment your markets accordingly
Multiple touches, when handled correctly, can make a customer feel appreciated and welcomed and special (the importance of which I discuss in my own book, Principled Profit)

• To delight customers, you need employees who are at least satisfied
• Marketing’s primary role is not to shove products down people’s throats, but “to understand the wants, needs, and expectations of current and potential customers, feeding this information into the  business organization to help it create and distribute products or services that more closely address and answer these inherent needs,” and its secondary role is to form and nurture connections with customers
• Customer delight strategies look at a customer’s lifetime value and not so much at the current transaction
• Delighted customers not only proselytize to friends and colleagues on your behalf, they also spend substantially more

The book ends with three extended case studies of companies that benefited by long-term thinking and a delight-based retention strategy: Roche Diagnostic Systems, Toys “R” Us, and Mercedes-Benz USA. Roche and Toys “R” Us both needed turnaround strategies, but the case of Mercedes is especially interesting to me, because that wasn’t about fixing a broken system so much as incorporating delight into the corporate culture with a true focus on serving the customer–and creating an entire business unit, in its own building, to do so. This wasn’t cheap, in other words.

Among other things, Mercedes integrated eleven different databases, collecting different types of customer data, into a single system that anyone could access before interacting with a client (the company stopped using the word “customer” and stopped referring to its franchises as “dealers”). It also developed a strategic separation between client acquisition and retention functions (something Keiningham and Varva strongly advocate). Delight factors entered in not just providing emergency road service but also pre-trip routing services similar to AAA…a line of branded merchandise for sale…multiple touchpoints including anniversary of vehicle purchase and mileage awards at 100,000, 200,000, and 500,000 miles.

Does it work? After initiating the program, Mercedes was projecting an astonishing 86 percent repurchase rate! Even if their projections turn out to be inflated by 100%, a 43 percent repurchase rate is going to look mighty good for the bottom line.

For more on delighting your customer, see Shel’s award-winning book Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

If ever a business created the perfect positive storm around quality, integrity, and product story, it was Newman’s Own. This selection of salad dressings, snack foods, and other goodies has been on my list of businesses to feature in this column for many years. It took Paul Newman’s death to move it to the front of the line.

The biggest qualification for inclusion is the firm’s pledge from Day 1 to give 100 percent of profits to charity. OK, so it helps that his movies made Newman independently wealthy–but still, this is a remarkable platform. And a whole lot of terminally ill children who attended one of Newman’s camps will never forget his generosity (to name one of dozens of examples). In his years in business, he was able to raise and donate $250 million to thousands of different charities, some of which–like those camps–he was directly involved in setting up and running.That’s an average of 410 million a year!

While most of the rest of us will never be in that situation, we could certainly donate five or ten percent of our net revenues to worthy causes. Tithing really does make the world better, and often helps the giver as well (see my friend Paula Langguth Ryan’s work at artofabundance.com.

Bt it’s not just the charity work. It’s a commitment to organics before it was fashionable (now spun off to a separate company, Newman’s Own Organics…a willingness to forge creative partnerships (as I advocate strongly in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First)high-quality, great-tasting products…and a sense of humor and play that’s present on all the company’s packaging and very much in evidence on the website (consider that the press room page is labeled “hoopla”–or this quote from the “Our Story” page):

We anticipated sales of $1,200 a year and a loss, despite our gambling winnings, of $6,000. But in these twenty-six years we have earned over $250 million, which we’ve given to countless charities. How to account for this massive success? Pure luck? Transcendental meditation? Machiavellian manipulation? Aerodynamics? High colonics? We haven’t the slightest idea.

Just back from my annual trip to Book Expo America, and one of the things I noticed was a definite shift toward sustainability–not just in the books being published, but also in attention to industry practices.

Some of these were aimed at publishers and printers, and some at consumers. One of the latter–which I learned about not at BEA but in a personal note from one of the founders–is EcoLibris.com, whose slogan is “Every book you read was once a tree. Now you can plant a tree for every book you read.”

Like carbon offset programs, this attempts to let consumers make restitution for the environmental effects of their reading habits. Starting at a dollar per tree and going down slightly with quantity purchases, the group funds reforestation projects in developing countries. It’s a for-profit business, and does retain a percentage of the donations. But it also includes all sorts of interesting environmental information on the site.

One of the pages I like best is the Collaborations page, which lists joint efforts with publishers, authors, bookstores, etc.–who are of course encouraged to spread the word and who receive customer kudos for being Green.

And while I think offset programs are only a temporary solution to reduction of pollution, greenhouse gases, etc., when I think of that convention center filled with literally millions of books and imagine a forest sprouting up with a tree for each book, it’s a vision that has a lot of appeal.

Read Shel Horowitz’s award-winning book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, for more on Green and ethical companies succeeding.