The Clean and Green Club

Last week, I signed a contract with John Wiley & Sons to do a book based largely on my 2003 self-published book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

Some people think this is every self-publisher’s dream. Well, having been a big-publisher author (Simon & Schuster, 1993) and being married to one (D. Dina Friedman: Simon & Schuster AND Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, both in 2006), I can tell you that both methods have their advantages.

For me, every book is different, and for each book, there are reasons to do it one way or another. I chose to self-publish Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First because I wanted absolute control; the ideas were pretty revolutionary at the time, and I didn’t want anyone watering it down. I also wanted to seize a moment that I wasn’t sure would still hold in the two years before my work would see the light of day with a big publisher. But I always hoped the day would come when I could resell that book to someone else.

Another book I’m circulating a proposal for needs a big publisher and a large advance. It will take far too much research time to do on my own, and the people I need to interview hide behind a lot of gatekeepers. Those gates swing open a lot more easily if a big publisher has backed the project. If I don’t sell that book, I simply won’t write it.

A project I just managed for a client went to the printer last week. Speed was essential, because the story is very relevant to a major movie being released in January. We only started working together in June, and most of the work took place after September. A big publisher simply wouldn’t do that for anyone other than a superstar celebrity. I found a copy editor, cover and interior designers, and a printer, and the book will be out in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, I wrote a letter that the client used to build a relationship with people at Paramount Pictures, and wonderful things might happen.

Also, that book hadn’t been in shape to be taken seriously by the publishing world. It needed cleanup and rethinking, and most big-house editors these days aren’t willing to put that kind of effort into a book unless they know they’re going to sell many thousands of copies.

Which leads me to the key point: the big houses no longer buy many manuscripts on the basis of their merits, but on the author’s strengths as a marketer. They will take a mediocre or adequate book with a superstar marketing platform any day over a fabulous book with no platform.

The reason I got to sign this contract with Wiley is because out of 32 pages (not counting sample chapters) in the proposal, 27 of them deal specifically with marketing and the market for the book, including changes to make the book more user-friendly and marketable, involvement of a celebrity co-author, a market analysis, recognition the book has already received (awards, endorsements, foreign republications, etc.)—and six entire pages about my platform: my speaking, writing, e-zines, media interviews, social networking communities, and perhaps most important, a credible and substantiated argument that I can reasonably expect to use pre-existing relationships with various newsletter publishers (relationships I’ve carefully cultivated over the years) to reach about five million people with news about its publication, when the time comes.

Is this the only way to get a big-publisher contract? Certainly not. But it did propel a self-published book with relatively modest sales into a book that the New York publishing world is taking seriously.

Given that, here’s a homework assignment: Over the next month, write down every useful connection you’ve established, every credential you’ve earned–and then, if you ever want to pursue a big publisher, you’ll have something to work into a marketable proposal.

Within my parents’ lifetime, six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis for the crime of being Jewish–including some of my mother’s cousins. As a Jew of Eastern European ancestry, I cannot be silent while one set of people is singled out for removal of the privileges of full citizenship–because we’ve already seen where that road leads. I speak out against injustice, and I speak out in favor of full citizenship rights for all classes of people: black, white, brown, or yellow…gay, straight, bi, or transgender…rich, poor, or in between…Christian, Muslim, Jew, or other religion…And I believe fervently that all people’s rights must be vigorously defended, and that our freedoms stop when they transgress the rights of others.

–>If I did not take this stand, I would have no right to claim any authority on ethics.

And I believe that committed life partners should have access to the same rights that many of us take for granted: from coordinating care in a terminal illness to playing an active role as a parent. The back of the bus isn’t good enough. Separate-but-equal is not equal, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1954.

In this context, I salute the Equality Business Advisory Council, a business coalition that sprang up to oppose California’s reprehensible Proposition 8–the ballot initiative that took away the right of same-sex couples to legally marry. Unfortunately, the ballot initiative passed.

I do not understand the anti-gay-marriage movement. As a man married to the same woman for 25 years, I don’t see how the right of two people who love each other to make a legal commitment that allows them to be full partners in any way lessens the marriage I have with my wife. I can’t see taking away that right as anything other than discrimination. And I live in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage has been legal for several years. I haven’t noticed that the sky has fallen. I can see only positive changes from this law–changes that materially impact only the families involved, but whose impact is huge.

The Equality Business Advisory Council included such well-known companies and organizations as MTV, PG&E, Levi Strauss & Co., and Google. Even the usually conservative Clear Channel joined in.  Apple Computer gave $100,000 toward the effort and issued this strong statement:

Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights — including the right to marry — should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8.

Google’s public statement opposing Proposition 8 was written by none other than co-founder Sergey Brin:

Because our company has a great diversity of people and opinions — Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, all religions and no religion, straight and gay — we do not generally take a position on issues outside of our field, especially not social issues. So when Proposition 8 appeared on the California ballot, it was an unlikely question for Google to take an official company position on.

However, while there are many objections to this proposition — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.

In all, the coalition included well over 500 businesses, community organizations, Chambers of Commerce, and media outlets, including 68 newspapers who wrote editorials opposing passage.

My thanks to fellow ethics blogger Chris MacDonald for telling me about this coalition, and flagging the Apple and Google statements I cited.

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.

Today, as I brought in my newspaper, my eye was caught by a bright orange piece of paper. it was a Free Standing Insert (FSI). In the right circumstances, these can be far more powerful and sometimes less costly than traditional in-page advertising.

Here’s when you might use it:

• Your product or service has broad general appeal–like pizza, gasoline, laundry
• You’re promoting a time-sensitive event that cuts across demographics, like a county fair, a sports event, a carnival, a restaurant festival
• It makes sense to use a coupon
• The newspaper you’re planning to use has at least some days when there are no other FSIs
• A high-impact graphic can convey your message quickly: a line drawing, a chart, a cartoon, or a high-contrst simple black-and-white photo
• You want to target a certain neighborhood (FSIs are much easier to segment than space advertising)

Use a bright color, either letter-size or half-letter-size (5-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches, in the U.S.). Investigate whether you should have the newspaper do the printing, or whether you should print elsewhere. And set up everything in plenty of time to work out glitches.

For more on cost-effective high-return advertising, have a look at my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Finalist). Right now, if you’re in the U.S., you can get free shipping on any (or all) of my marketing books, which make great gifts. Just visit https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart and enter FREESHIP as the promotional code.

For years, the house-party concept has been used to sell products, especially in the network marketing industry. Think about Amway/Quixstar, Avon, and other household names. and think about Tupperware, which probably did the most to popularize the model–so much so that the phrase “Tupperware party” came into the language.

In a recent newsletter, Steve Harrison of Radio TV Interview Report/Free Publicity offered a few examples of authors who have done very well with house parties. One of them, Kelly Corrigan, a big-publisher author (Hyperion), actually did a traveling house-party book tour covering over 30 events up and down the Northeast, using her wide network of personal connections to get people in a living room to hear her read and buy books.

The result? #15 on the New York Times Best Seller List. Is that cool, or what?

Personally, I’ve done a house party as a book launch (and got over 50 people to my friend’s loft in Brooklyn for the New York launch event), but never tried to do a house-party tour. Maybe when book #8 comes out, I’ll try it, in addition to bookstore events.

Book parties can provide a big advantage for lesser-known authors who may not easily attract a crowd in public venue such as a bookstore or library. By getting your friends to invite their friends, and providing them with the chance to meet a real author at close range, you can have a very successful event.

Anybody out there try this? Tell us what happened.

The 4Cs of Truth in Communications: How to Identify, Discuss, Evaluate and Present Stand-out, Effective Communication, by Isabelle Albanese (Ithaca: Paramount Mountain Publishing, 2007)

Reviewed by
Shel Horowitz

From the Fortune 500 world of advertising comes this perky little book, and surprisingly, its advice is very applicable to small entrepreneurs with limited budgets, and translates well to many other media besides TV ads.

Albanese’s thesis is that the most effective communications embody four characteristics, all of which begin with the letter c:

1. Comprehension: how well the message gets across
2. Connection: whether the reader/listener/viewer/web visitor feels the material is relevant and emotionally arresting
3. Credibility: Is the message in tune with the customer’s perception of the brand? Is it based in ethics?
4. Contagiousness: Will the message spread with the help of its own prospects and the media?

She quotes Edward R. Murrow:

To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful

And then flips the statement around to say that credibiity creates believability…which creates persuasion…which results in sales.

After analyzing each of the 4 Cs, she applies them to a raft of marketing and informational messages, including e-mail (a particularly good analysis that mirrors many of the points I’ve discussed in my Frugal Marketing Tips and my various books), Instant Messaging, eBay, and even movies. Oh yes, and she shows how the 4 Cs may have influenced the 2004 presidential election. In the final chapter, she applies the formula to personal communications between lovers or spouses, and between parents and children.

Shel Horowitz is the founder of the Business Ethics Pledge and the award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and six other books.

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.

Shel Horowitz’s Monthly Frugal Marketing Tip, October, 2008

A lot of marketers think direct-mail–the old-fashioned kind that shows up in your physical mailbox–is the most important tool in their arsenal. But others have been badly burned and are reluctant to try again. Which is understandable, when you think about spending a dollar or more per envelope (postage, printing, professional copywriting, etc.), and only converting about 2 percent.

2 percent is considered a very decent return–but at a dollar each, that means each actual sale costs you $50, not counting the cost of product.

So…when does it make economic sense for you to use postal direct mail? Here are few situations; there are others, of course:

• You’re selling high-ticket items. If you’ve got a $500 product that costs little or nothing to produce (let’s say, an information product), and your cost of sale is $50, you’re doing very well.
• You’re mailing to influencers and decision-makers who control large numbers of orders–for example, wholesalers and distributors who might order thousands, or professors who could order 300 copies of your book for use in their courses
• You know that your lifetime customer value is high enough to more than justify the high cost of that first sale; this new customer will go on to spend thousands of dollars with you over the next few years
• You’ve done some things to bring down the cost and/or increase the return, so your numbers work better (we’ll talk about how to do that next month–if you can’t wait, I recommend ordering a copy of my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart — we’ve got some very nice specials right now)

Anatomy of a Promotional Offer

This is a real offer (actually two real offers) that I’m making to you–and then I’m going to analyze it and show you my exact thinking in constructing it. I think this may be extremely helpful in your own marketing, especially since I deliberately violate two key marketing rules.

Here are the offers:

With the holidays coming up, this is a great chance to save money on Shel’s books–they make fabulous gifts for the entrepreneurs, authors, marketers, and business managers in your life, or for those who’d like to be authors or marketers.

As a subscriber, you can not only get the usual discounts for ordering the books in combination, but you also get FREE shipping in the U.S. (or a $5 savings on shipping elsewhere) on any order for printed books now through December 1–and that offer is not for the general public. This offer holds for single copies of any of these books, and multiple copies of the two Grassroots books.

To get the free shipping, all you have to do is visit our order page at https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart/ If you’re in the U.S., enter FREESHIP when you get to the Discounts and Coupons field and the cart will automatically zero out your shipping. If you’re elsewhere, enter FREESHIP in the comment field (NOT the coupons) and I’ll manually take $5 off (I still have to punch every order into a cc terminal so this is not a big deal)

If you want multiple copies of Principled Profit–a very wise decision–I have an even better deal for you a bit farther down the page. (If you want to know more about any particular book, please click the book titles):

This month’s Positive Power Spotlight has a guest author: Cynthia Kersey, from her book, Unstoppable. This profile of Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop was written a few years ago. Roddick was given the honor of Dame by Queen Elizabeth, sold The Body Shop to L’Oréal in 2006, and died in September, 2007 at age 64.

Here’s Cynthia:

No one who has ever followed a dream has taken a direct, unobstructed path and arrived at his or her destination effortlessly and on time. Following a dream is not a direct highway but a bumpy road full of twists and turns and occasional roadblocks. The journey requires modifications and adjustments in both thought and action, not just once, but over and over.

Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop, used creativity to overcome challenges that would have stopped the vast majority of new business owners. She broke just about every rule in the book when she started The Body Shop and she’s still breaking the rules today. Of course, such irreverence has its consequences. In Anita’s case, the consequences read like this: The Body Shop now has more than 1,500 stores throughout the world, is worth over $500 million, and has influenced the products and marketing of all its chief competitors. And those are just the consequences in the business arena. The Body Shop is also a powerfully effective vehicle for social and environmental awareness and change; as far as Anita is concerned, that is the most important consequence of all.

From the moment in 1976 when Anita first conceived the idea of opening a shop to sell naturally based cosmetics, she was thinking in a most unbusinesslike manner. Most entrepreneurs set out to establish a company with growth potential that will make them wealthy someday. Anita was just looking for a way to feed herself and her two children, while her husband, also a maverick, was away on a two-year adventure, riding a horse from Argentina to New York.

Her first challenge was to find a cosmetics manufacturer to produce her products. No one she approached had ever heard of jojoba oil or aloe vera gel, and they all thought that cocoa butter had something to do with chocolate. Although she didn’t realize it at the time, Anita had discovered a market just about to explode: young female consumers who would prefer their cosmetics to be produced in a cruelty-free and environmentally responsible manner. When manufacturers failed to have the same foresight, Anita found a small herbalist who could do the work she required.

Since Anita was not the typical entrepreneur, she saw no drawbacks in starting her company with almost no capital. To save money, she bottled her cosmetics in the same inexpensive plastic containers hospitals use for urine samples, encouraging her customers to bring the containers back for refills. Because Anita couldn’t afford to have labels printed, she and some friends hand printed every one. Her packaging couldn’t have turned out better if she’d planned it that way. With the improvised packaging, her product now had the same natural, earthy image as the cosmetics themselves.

Anita opened the first branch of The Body Shop in her hometown of Brighton, England. When she first opened, neighboring proprietors made bets on how long the store would last. Less amused were the owners of local funeral parlors who insisted she change the shop’s name. No one, they complained, would hire a funeral director located near a place called “The Body Shop.” She stuck to her guns and the name stayed.

The first store was only minimally successful. Nevertheless, Anita decided to move ahead with a second one. The bank questioned the wisdom of her plan and refused a loan. So she found a friend of a friend who was willing to lend her the equivalent of $6,400 in exchange for 50 percent ownership of The Body Shop. Today that person is worth $140 million. Signing over half of her business was the only real mistake Anita ever made. But it wasn’t the only decision that looked like a mistake. Here are three more:

• She has never advertised even when she opened shops in the United States. People told her it was suicide to enter a new market without massive advertising support.
• She doesn’t sell in any outlet other than The Body Shop stores. (Some of her Asian stores are the only exception and are located within department stores.)
• She resolved early on that her shops would be a catalyst for change, not just in the business world, but in the world at large.

These decisions turned out to be some of the most inspired “mistakes” in the history of retailing. Even though Anita has never paid for advertising, her unconventional ideas have inspired hundreds of articles and interviews generating tremendous publicity. Her first shop in New York was packed with customers from the day it opened. At one point, a thirty-five-year-old woman on roller skates threw up her arms and shouted, “Hallelujah! You’re here at last.” So much for advertising.

A new branch of The Body Shop opens somewhere in the world every two and a half days. Occasionally, Anita has had trouble opening stores in shopping malls. But having a past that was filled with challenges, Anita is accustomed to coming up with creative solutions. For instance, when one mall refused to lease her space, she organized every mail-order customer within a 110-mile radius to write letters to the management of that mall. Within a few months, a branch of The Body Shop was open.

Anita also had this nonconformist idea of putting ideals ahead of profit. From the start, Anita wanted not just to change the faces of her customers but to change the entire face of business. She envisioned a company that was socially responsible and compassionate. “I see the human spirit playing a big role in business. The work does not have to be drudgery, and the sole focus does not have to be on making money. It can be a human enterprise that people feel genuinely good about.”

Some of the raw materials for her products are harvested by groups of people in underdeveloped regions, thus generating an income for them. The Body Shop has launched campaigns to save the whales, ban animal testing in the cosmetics industry, help the homeless, and protect the rain forests. All of these campaigns have been eagerly supported by loyal customers.

Employees of The Body Shop are actively involved in these efforts. Each month, employees receive a half day off with pay to volunteer in the community. Some employees, for example, went to Romania to help rebuild orphanages. In the stores, customers are encouraged to register to vote, recycle their plastic cosmetics containers, and bring their own shopping bags to save paper and plastic. Because of all these activities, people have suggested Anita’s company should really be called “The Body and Soul Shop.” Customers emerge not only looking good but also feeling good.

“Business as usual” isn’t part of Anita Roddick’s make up. But as far as she’s concerned, doing what is not usual has made all the difference.

Action:

Anita said that what saved The Body Shop over and over was their willingness to recognize what wasn’t working and quickly identify a new way to approach a problem. This is a crucial strategy because everyone who starts a business is going to face challenges. Things never work out exactly as intended and creativity will play a key role in enabling a new business owner to conquer daily battles. If you don’t come up with alternative solutions, your dreams will die.

The first step to expanding your creativity is to clearly identify the problem you’re experiencing. Maybe you’re struggling in sponsoring people who are interested in working the business and not simply purchasing the product. Or maybe you’re having a hard time finding new prospects period. Write the numbers 1 through 10 vertically down the left side of the sheet of paper. Finally, write ten possible solutions to your problem. Make sure they are viable options, but stretch your imagination.

Remember, the solution to every problem lies within you. You may need a few minutes of quiet time to complete the exercise effectively, or you may need to brainstorm possible solutions with a friend. Feel free to do whatever you think is necessary to connect with your inner knowing. When you’ve completed the exercise, you should find that the solutions you have found will renew your sense of possibility and your commitment to your goal.

About the Author:

Cynthia Kersey is a nationally-known speaker, performance and productivity expert and the author of the bestsellers, Unstoppable, Unstoppable Women and the bestselling audio program, “The Unstoppable 30-Day Challenge!” To receive a free gift worth over $100 in value go to https://www.unstoppable.net/gifts.htm