The Clean and Green Club

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.

Marcia Yudkin, 20+-year marketing veteran and widely published author who proves you can be an introvert, be extremely ethical, and still be a major marketing guru.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, we looked at the incredible effectiveness of visibility marketing in advancing social causes. Can it also advance a for-profit business, and do so without buying enormous amounts of expensive advertising? Can small businesses take advantage of this kind of messaging?

I’d give the answer a qualified yes. Branding/visibility campaigns can work for small businesses, especially those with a social and/or environmental message. And now that a branding campaign can drive traffic to a website that reveals the whole story, it’s easier to pull one off than it would have been 20 years ago.

A large-scale but very counterculture example is Read the rest of this entry »

Go Green, Live Rich: 50 Simple Ways to Save the Earth (and Get Rich Trying) by David Bach with Hillary Rosner

Okay so there are a gazillion books, e-books, and pamphlets with tips on going Green, including my own Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life—With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle—so why buy this one?

A few things make this one stand out. First of all, it’s written by a retirement-planning guru: David Bach, author of such books as Start Late, Finish Rich and The Automatic Millionaire (with help from Hillary Rosner, who worked on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth). It’s very refreshing to have a celebrity personal finance author take on the topic of personal environmental responsibility.

Second, the book is crammed with hundreds of websites and resources (including Read the rest of this entry »

I used to be really scornful of “visibility advertising”: campaigns that had only a branding purpose, didn’t try to sell anything and in many cases didn’t even try to pass on a message. For most of my career, I thought this kind of marketing was only the province of corporate giants with unlimited budgets: companies like Coke, Nike, and McDonalds.

But ten years ago, I had an experience that caused me to change my mind. We were in the middle of a deep, multichannel campaign to block a particularly nasty housing development going all the way to the ridgeline of our local mountain (right next to a state park on the next mountain over, whose gorgeous view would be ruined). In addition to the press releases, the media campaign, the lobbying, the massive turnout at public hearings, and all the other tactics we were using, we did lawn signs and bumper stickers.They just said “Save the Mountain” (the name of our group) and gave our website. Of course, this was not only branding the organization, but also the idea that the mountain could actually be saved; our action mission was right there in the organization’s name.

One day, some of our canvassers were working a local farmers market when who should stroll by but the developer and his wife. And she turned to our people and said, Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Brown, founder of RideBuzz.org: a web-based organization to promote and facilitate ridesharing/carpooling, thus reducing carbon footprint and use of fossil fuels, easing traffic congestion, and saving its users money. Jeff talks about how and why he started this organization in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, how it’s benefiting its users, and how others might replicate this idea elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »

Links about the Gulf Spill:
BP’s behavior, if these sources quoted in NY Times are accurate, is probably criminal (via @gfriend, quoting @climateprogress): https://climateprogress.org/2010/05/03/bp-oil-spill-federal-permit-cut-costs/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateprogress%2FlCrX+%28Climate+Progress%29

If this is the plan that’s working, I’d hate to see the one that failed: (via @BusinessGreen) https://bit.ly/b2uW3g

RFK, Jr.: Gulf oil spill caused by anti-ethics culture of Bush’s “regulators” in collusion w/ BP, Halliburton: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/sex-lies-and-oil-spills_b_564163.html

BP’s Louisiana oil disaster will have repercussions across numerous industries (Triple Pundit)–and WHY are we still talking about expanding offshore drilling? I think we should be looking at the safety of all the existing rigs, first: https://www.triplepundit.com/2010/05/economic-impact-deepwater-horizon-oil-spill-loui…siana/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TriplePundit+%28Triple+Pundit%29

The always-brilliant George Lakoff on how Obama could have used the BP disaster to create a unified multi-issue leadership/moral position #fbhttps://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/obamas-missing-moral-narr_b_593528.html

Other Links:
My favorite energy futurist Amory Lovins’s TED talk on how to get the US OFF oil entirely, add 1 million jobs & lots of ROI #fb #li https://us.cnn.com/video/?/video/living/2010/01/04/ted.amory.lovins.ted #Green (I love his “Faroffistan”)

Go Green Cars: Videos: Hemp sports car by Lotus lighter, cheaper, stronger than steel. Research by Henry Ford, 1941! – https://tinyurl.com/2b946ez (via @GreenCelebrity)

Prevention Mag: Why you’re greener than you think/24 easy green steps https://bit.ly/bhmS2C

World Bank $12 million program to replace African kerosense lamps (polluting, nonrenewable, carbon spewing) w/ solar (via @whatgreeninvest) https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64H46220100518?feedType=RSS&feedName=GCA-GreenBusiness&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FUSgreenbusines…sNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Green+Business%29&utm_content=Twitter

Even a very conservative study finds that investments in climate change mediation and other Green measures are well-worth doing: https://greeneconomypost.com/conservative-study-climate-action-improves-economy-9723.htm

Alicia Polak, CEO of Khaya Cookies in South Africa. Former Wall Streeter who gave it up to provide jobs making organic cookies in the townships. Focus on economic development and job creation for women in marginalized communities, how a global company looks at sustainability/how to be Green when you’re in an import business, keeping costs down with partnerships, and organic health benefits.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I spoke at the Go Green Expo in New York City a couple of months back, one of the companies exhibiting there was a wind-powered printing company from New Haven, offering attractive pricing, eco-oriented design templates, and of course, FSC-certified and/or recycled paper. I have actually seen their wind turbine when I take the bus from New York back home to Massachusetts; it’s visible along the coast, just as my bus turns up I-91.
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