Tag Archive for biomimicry

The Clean and Green Club, December 2022

8 Dec, 2022 No Comment biomimicry Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World marketing lessons social activism

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Going Beyond Sustainabiilty with Shel Horowitz

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: December 2022

Be sure to read the blog post, This Could Change Everything–it’s crucial to understanding a big shift that’s upon us. The link is below the main article and seasonal message.

Marketing Lessons from a Fruit Tree and a Spider Web? Yup.

Last month, we talked about operational reasons why one size DOESN’T fit all. This month, we continue that conversation, but look directly at why it doesn’t work in marketing either—looking to nature for examples.

I’ve been really interested in biomimicry for many years, and have written and spoken about how it can improve our engineering and design. My latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, even has sections about biomimicry visionaries like Janine Benyus, Amory Lovins, and John Todd. It also has a section on John Kremer’s concept of biological marketing, where he talks about a single ear of corn generating thousands of ears.

But it was only just last month, on a beautiful day where I spent half an hour telling a prospect why I was uniquely qualified to write him a marketing plan for a venture that actually is unique (synthesizing ideas from at least three different industries) and then another hour planting garlic, that I really GOT how biomimicry applies to marketing.

Let’s ask some questions of our friends in nature.

Reporter: “Fruit tree, what’s your marketing plan?”

Fruit tree: “You’re going to think this is really funny, because it’s not a human thing—my marketing plan is to be eaten.”

Reporter: “Wow, that sounds crazy. How does that even work?”

Fruit tree: “Birds and animals nibble my fruit, then they move someplace else, poop out my powerful seeds—and my little babies, little clones of me, grow in all sorts of places I can’t reach (in case you haven’t noticed, I’m rooted deep into the ground. Not only is this how I reproduce, it’s the only way I can travel—and I love to travel).”

Reporter: “How about you, Spider—what’s your marketing plan?”

Spider: “Remember that famous book, The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches by Joe Karbo? He was so lazy he took his idea from me. I’ve been doing lazy spider marketing for 250 million years [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_spiders], and Joe-com-lately didn’t show up until 40 years ago. All that talk about passive income, that’s my jam since before there were any humans. OK, I do work hard spinning a fancy web—but hey, the artistry feeds my soul and the craftsmanship feeds my body. Because once it’s done and my web looks gorgeous, all I have to do is lay back, quiet down, and wait for some company to drop by—and get stuck until I can have a nice snack. It’s eco-friendly, too, by the way. Zero carbon footprint—and without me and my sisters and daughters, this world would be overrun with pesky bugs.”

So what are the lessons here? I’ll offer two of them. If you come up with others, I just might mention you and your idea.

1. Just as the fruit tree’s marketing plan wouldn’t work for the spider and vice versa, a marketing plan for a B2B (business-to-business) green engineering firm would be useless to a B2C (business-to-consumer) weatherization company, even though are both are sub-slices of the green building scene. Your marketing plan has to make sense for your products and services, your market niches and their demographics/psychographics, and yes, your mission, values, and impact on the wider world.

2. Both the tree and the spider offered benefits. The tree’s ultimate client is its own progeny, but to achieve that ultimate goal, it offers food to hungry animals in search of sweetness—just as so many industries (social media networks, Internet search tools, and traditional media, to name three) entice users with services—but their real clients are buying eyeballs, or data. And the spider, perhaps aware of her own arrogant reply, points out the bug protection benefit to us, which helps to neutralize a predator (humans kill a lot of spiders).

If you need help thinking through the best ways to apply this in your particular organization, I’ll happily give you a 15-minute phone or Zoom consultation. Request a time at https://calendly.com/meet-shel/15min (Note: Calendly sometimes offers times it shouldn’t, and I sometimes miss the notifications—so after you get instantly “confirmed” from the Calendly robot, you’ll also get a manual confirmation or request to shift from me.)

Blessings of the Season
If you celebrate a special holiday at this season, such as Christmas, Chanukah (I do that one), Kwanzaa, or Solstice, may you enjoy many blessings and joys in your celebration. If you celebrate a holiday at a different time, such as Ramadan or Diwali, may the blessings I’m sending now ripen and blossom at the time they apply. Here in the U.S., we also celebrate the beginning of a new calendar year; many parts of Asia mark that time a month or two later. Jewish culture celebrates several New Years, the earliest of which is Tu B’Shvat, the New Year for the Trees (this year, it’s the evening of February 5th and all day February 6th. And the one you’ve probably heard of, Rosh HaShanah, is always in the fall, usually in September.

This Could Change EVERYTHING

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.

View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

The Capitalist and the Activist

The Capitalist and the Activist: Corporate Social Activism and the New Business of Change by Tom C.W. Lin (Berrett-Koehler, 2022).

Lin urges coalitions between activists and capitalists. Since I’ve written four books on activist business success (most recently, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World), I’m very familiar (and agree) with that case.

Lin covers some ground that I don’t. I appreciate his analysis of both sides’ strengths. He cites corporate skills in communications, operations, and accountability (p. 104)—and I’d elaborate to specify analytical/data capture/measurement skills (accountability), exponentially larger resources (operations), and global presence. But I see activists as the better communicators; their passion, tenacity, and creative tactics capture public attention, at no cost, that corporations often have to purchase.

And I appreciate his call for both groups to enlist governments—with far larger resources than activists and corporations combined—as partners (pp. 151-152), and how much power those combinations can bring to bear. He starts off with the four—four!—teenage Parkland shooting survivors who not only organized a massive Washington million-person demonstration (plus satellite demonstrations around the world) in just six weeks but also actually got gun safety legislation passed into law in notoriously gun-friendly Florida (pp. 1-4). Later (pp. 109-113), he discusses JP Morgan Chase’s $200 million economic and skills investment—in close collaboration with local government, business, and activist organizations—to rebuild Detroit’s shattered economy. Chase CEO Jamie Dimon freely acknowledges its self-interest. This effort turned it into “the home bank,” with 65 percent market share (p. 112). The company plans to replicate the effort elsewhere.

He documents many other corporations benefitting through social and environmental advocacy and argues that companies should choose their activism targets according to their strengths: logistics for a delivery service like UPS, housing for AirBNB, financial activism for banks… (p. 153). And he notes that social and environmental action can attract more impact investors and more capital (p. 115).

Also, recency creates relevancy. Lin documents many events and trends that hadn’t happened yet when I wrote my books. He covers the revulsion of CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg against the previous administration’s policies of deliberate cruelty, open racism, othering of numerous groups from Muslims (pp. 72-74) to women to people with disabilities to protestors exercising their rights to dissent to immigrants—even to the point of caging children (pp. 76-79). He also chronicles business response to the nationwide elevation of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis (pp. 86-89), the gender gap and #MeToo movement (pp. 92-96), and the attack on democracy itself that culminated in the violent riot of January 6, 2021 (pp. 79-81).

Refreshingly, he warns against over-reliance on corporate saviors (pp. 117-131). Corporate elites (especially those not yet changed by diversity efforts) may slant their causes toward the most mediagenic or the ones with the largest financial stake (p. 127) rather than the most important, may attempt to deflect attention from bad actions in other areas, may water down legislation, etc. And causes without profit potential still need attention—thus, he sees a major role for government.

He encourages companies to see their purpose-driven mission not as PR but as a key element in the company’s core identity (something I’ve advocated for years). And he applauds the many ways activist corporate execs are making changes from the inside.

But he lacks deeper analysis of business’s ability to benefit by addressing really big problems in a systemic way. Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World has a lot more depth there. In short, the books complement each other, and you’ll benefit by reading both.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing! http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.

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The Clean and Green Club, December 2021

6 Dec, 2021 No Comment biomimicry Collective Visioning Going Beyond Sustainability Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World holistic

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: December 2021

Find the Beautiful Symmetry: Are You Properly Closing Your Loops?

Holistic thinking works in circles, not straight lines. In nature, waste products of one species are inputs for another. Animals breathe oxygen in and breathe out carbon dioxide, which plants breathe in and convert back to oxygen. Each needs the other, and the process is circular. We can learn from watching and emulating nature, as Biomimicry guru Janine Benyus consistently points out.

Most of the loops have more than two steps: A bird eats an insect, and is in turn eaten by a coyote, which, when it dies, decomposes and attracts insects. Or water evaporates into a cloud, which releases water in the form of rain, which allows plants to grow, and the water evaporates again. Some loops might have many more steps than that.

In my most recent book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, I cite a number of examples of humans mimicking nature and creating similar looped systems. For example, The Intervale, an industrial park where brewery waste grows mushrooms, the mushroom waste supports tilapia, and the fish waste fertilizes grain for the brewery—and in the process, this integrated agricultural loop anchor an enjoyable downtown biopark.

In other words, a green or socially conscious business can benefit by thinking holistically.

Unfortunately. far too many businesses take a step in the direction of the better world we all want and then leave it hanging. Think about a coffee shop that uses compostable single-use cups, lids, and cutlery—but fails to separate them in the trash and sends them into the landfill. There’s no benefit to the earth in that, just an unnecessary extra cost (last time I priced them, compostable cups ran about 25 cents apiece versus five cents for landfill-designated cups).

What other loops should be closed? Here are a few to get you started (some about going green, some about social justice or employee empowerment):

What happens to your waste? Is it something to dispose of, or something you can reuse or even sell?
Are there energy, materials, or water supplies being squandered in leaks or inefficient processes? If so, how can you fix them?
Do you have convenient collection stations for reusable or recyclable packaging and products? Are the collected materials successfully reused or recycled?
Is your DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) commitment successful? Are you reaching out to the target populations in hiring (including execs and senior management, not just line employees) AND in your user base? Are you letting the target communities know what you’re doing? And are you actively partnering with organizations that serve these communities to spread the word, identify candidates, coordinate services (e.g., sign language interpretation at an event)
Have you set up feedback systems to early-alert any HR problems, evaluate and (when appropriate) implement employee suggestions and potentially reward those suggesting, and monitor their effects? How else is innovation rewarded and soul-killing bureaucracy discouraged?
How are customer and vendor complaints handled?
Do you cross-train employees and otherwise prepare them for advancement?
Do they have a way to notify friends and family of appropriate vacancies?

View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

Collective Visioning

Collective Visioning: How Groups Can Work Together for a Just and Sustainable Future, by Linda StoutWhether you’re in business or activism, you probably have a lot of meetings to go to. And while there are plenty of books on running effective meetings, I’m not aware of many that focus on the meeting as a form of empowerment. Stout brings years of organizing successful cross-racial, cross-cultural, cross-class community organizations and coalitions that built on her experience as a working-class rural white woman working mostly in the Deep South, who never thought, growing up, that she could be a leader.

Yet, she’s led several organizations, including at least one national group. And her engagement of working class people and those of color long predates the current embrace of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in both the business and social change worlds; her book has a 2011 copyright and draws on work she’s done for decades.

For Stout, organizations work best when they create a process to collectively create a vision, not just for a particular organization or campaign but for society as a whole—and then figuring out how to implement that vision. One of her most powerful case studies describes school children in post-Katrina New Orleans who designed a whole new model of education (pp. 22, 27) and got big pieces of it adopted by the school system (though some parts were casualties of other factors like the crashing economy of 2007-09).

In today’s walking-on-eggshells time when many on the left are super-worried about offending people from various historically oppressed groups, Stout offers an example of a white group that hosted an event in a church known to have KKK connections and then wondered why their outreach to communities of color didn’t bring turnout (p. 48). But she says even an event in very white places like Iowa can attract participants of color, if organizers thoroughly understand not just their messaging but how it’s received in targeted communities. [This is true in the business world, too. Chevrolet brought the Nova to Latin America without noticing that the name translates as “doesn’t go”—and then wondered why sales were terrible.] You may have to work at inclusion. If you want young moms to attend, you’ll need childcare and perhaps transportation; if you want people with physical disabilities, meet in a barrier-free space. And if you hire an ASL interpreter, reach out ahead of time to deaf communities and let them know (p. 47). And even a space with a problematic history can be used if the history is acknowledged in the right way (p. 49).

Meetings accomplish more, Stout says, if they reach agreement on process and behavior right from the beginning and to accept that others in the room have good intentions, even if that takes some time (pp. 54-55).

While she loves the group visioning process, Stout recognizes that not all gatherings are ready to plunge in. Particularly if your attendees are feeling hopeless and powerless, some personal visioning (pp. 69-86) might need to happen before the group brainstorms a collective vision.

Once the collective vision is in place, the work is far from done. Pages 107-115 address the challenge of agreeing on strategies for action and implementation. One way is phrase goals positively (pp. 127-129). Another is to have participants look back to the present as “ambassadors from the future” from a time down the road when the goals have been met or exceeded (p. 131). And another is to make a point of celebrating even small victories (p. 135). She mentions several others. One I particularly like is a set of strategies for involving the whole community (not just the organization’s members and activists) to accomplish goals like closing a prison or challenging segregationism in local media and government at the same time (pp. 155-165). It isn’t easy, but she reminds us that repression and censorship are signs the other side thinks you’re winning, that languaging and messaging are really important, and that the culture can be changed.