Tag Archive for Denny Hatch

The Clean and Green Club, June 2022

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

Test Drive This Powerful Green Business Certification—No Cost

I’ve been telling you about the Green Business Bureau and the many benefits they offer, including the GBB EcoAssessment™, a very spiffy self-guided software-driven certification process that is very easy to use and much more friendly to small businesses than other certifications I’ve looked at.

A GBB staffer will be happy to demo the assessment tool for you. You don’t have to be a member to see how it works. All you have to do is fill out this 1-minute form with your name, company or organization, email and phone. Your request will be forwarded to a member of the Green Business Bureau staff.

You do have to be a member to actually go through the assessment and obtain certification. Membership is quite affordable, starting at just $212.50 (10 employees or less) once you factor in the 15 percent off I’ve arranged for you no matter how big your business is. To claim the lower price, just visit https://greenbusinessbureau.com/membership-purchase-options/ , choose the number of employees that describes your business, and enter the code Shel15 (no space between the lower-case L and the number 1).

Yes, I will get a commission if you join—and YOU get 15 percent off.

50.17 Years in Marketing—and This Still Blew Me Away

Yes, that’s a clickbait headline—something I almost never do in this newsletter. I used it this time to very deliberately illustrate something. Can you guess what it is? Here’s another example—the actual reason I’m choosing this topic for this month’s newsletter: a presentation by direct-mail legend Denny Hatch called

A Whirlwind Tour of Direct Marketing Knowhow: From July 10, 1194 through the 21 st Century

That title got me to stop what I was doing, put aside my agenda for the day, go and watch Denny’s 41-minute talk, and then write this article—and that sequence doesn’t happen too often.

Why were these 15 brief words so persuasive to me? Can you guess?

Yes, it helped that I knew Denny Hatch’s reputation, and that it was sent in a newsletter from Brian Kurtz, for whom I have enormous respect. But the real motivator would have gotten me to click even if I knew nothing about the presenter. Have you figured it out yet? Here’s the secret:

This talk title used specificity to harness curiosity!

By putting in a specific date from more than 800 years ago, in an industry that most people assume is only about 250 years old, Denny didn’t just engage my curiosity, he grabbed it.

One-paragraph digression: And yes, he delivers on why that date is important in marketing—avoiding a mistake too many clickbait headline writers make (a mistake that I’m betting leaves the reader feeling cheated and less interested in the product). If you’ve clicked on any ads that use words like “tragedy” and then name a celebrity like Willie Nelson or Whoopi Goldberg and then discover an ad for a CBD company, you may have experienced that sort of disgust. End of digression.

The thing is, this talk title wouldn’t hook in everyone—but I happened to be the ideal audience for it. I wrote my first marketing copy around April 1972 (yep, that’s the 50.17 years in my own headline) and I’m fascinated by history. So when he offers something very specific and unknown to me about the long-ago history of marketing? Oh, yeah, baby, I am so hooked! For someone who’s more interested in football or the Kardashians, this headline weeds them out. Only the actual markets (marketers and lovers of history) will respond to that title and watch the presentation—but they won’t be able to stay away.

If you’re curious also, his presentation is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ww8a-8hyio

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 Carbon Almanac: It’s Not Too Late

The Carbon Almanac: It’s Not Too Late by The Carbon Almanac Network, foreword by Seth Grodin

Did you know…

Bad News

  • Climate change has secondary impacts in every aspect of our lives: flooded homes and roads, inflation, loss of precious beaches, diseases, famines… (pp. 28-29)
  • 634 million people (~2x US population) risk climate-related flooding (p. 34)
  • Flying adds 6x atmospheric carbon per person as the same trip done by train (p. 37)
  • Despite years of pretending they didn’t know, Exxon released a memo (excerpts reproduced on pages 46-47) on November 12, 1982 outlining the consequences of human-caused climate change and identifying fossil fuel industries as the major cause
  • Methane traps 80 times as much heat as CO2; nitrous oxides trap 270 times as much (p. 51)
  • We use 8x energy and produce 7x emissions to support 3x the population of 1950 (p. 72)
  • Plastic produces 6x its weight in CO2 over its lifetime (pp. 78, 79); plastics manufacturing also causes massive deforestation (preventing capture of 6.5 million metric tons per year of carbon) and emits gigatons of CO2. Only 9 percent of discarded plastic is recycled; 12 percent is incinerated, further worsening carbon impact (p. 34).

Good News

  • Only 8 percent of Norway’s 2021 new-vehicle sales were powered by fossil fuels (p. 101)
  • We improved air and water quality and slashed food waste during the pandemic (pp. 113-114)—so we can replicate that success through behavior changes
  • Switching from chemiculture to organic could cut crop losses by about half—as they were before most farmers switched to chemical pesticides (p. 120)
  • Trees, wetlands, and coral reefs embody biodiversity; a single tree can host 2.3 million organisms; coral reefs contain 25 percent of marine species; peat bogs (wetlands) capture twice the carbon of forests (pp. 136-140)
  • Tools such as “border carbon adjustments” (p. 163) and counting GNP to factor in environmental and social costs and benefits (Robert F. Kennedy quote, p. 117) could eliminate the competitive advantage of poor carbon habits and help businesses actively mitigating their environmental and carbon impact
  • Primitive solar continues to power the Vanguard I satellite, launched in 1960 (p. 178)
  • Humans first harnessed tidal power in 687 A.D.; it was widely used in 18th-century England (pp. 182-183)
  • 25 percent of all US fossil fuel hubs are ideally suited to green energy (which provided 90 percent of new capacity in 2020)—thus offering retraining opportunities for thousands of miners (p. 196)
  • We could probably eliminate world hunger by using the 1/3 of all food that’s thrown away uneaten (p. 201)
  • Drip irrigation cuts water 60 percent while increasing crop yield 90 percent over open-channel irrigation (p. 204)
  • Cross-laminated wood buildings have many superiorities over steel (p. 223)
  • Solarizing all US K-12 schools could replace 18 coal plants (p. 245)
  • Above all, humans have risen to overcome all sorts of “insurmountable” crises (p. 326); this book proves we have the know-how—let’s find the will to do it!

You’ll find or extrapolate hundreds more takeaways in The Carbon Almanac, spearheaded by Seth Godin and written by 300+ volunteers. Forthcoming in July from Penguin/Random House. It’s a readable and comprehensive single-volume guide to…

  1. Why atmospheric carbon must be addressed
  2. The many ingenious solutions—and a refreshing willingness to confront the new problems these solutions (from bioplastics to mass-scale solar) sometimes bring
  3. The impact of lifestyle choices, such as using an electric bicycle instead of a car for the short trips that represent more than half of our car travel (p. 166), changing our fashion habits (p. 162), planting trees (p. 155, in numerous suggestions to switch your primary search engine Ecosia, and in the collective’s pledge to replace 10x as many trees as are consumed to produce the book, p. 226), and eating less meat (pp. 76, 200, 203)—and the potential impacts of our activism (I love that the glossary, p. 312, defines “activist” as “You”—and the long list of activist organizations to get involved with).
  4. The way all these factors and many more intersect and interact, presenting a holistic analysis a bite at a time

Besides 40+ pages of information and action resources within the book, each article has an info/sources page on https://thecarbonalmanac.org —which keeps that single volume to a manageable size while encouraging interested readers to drill much deeper. That also allows the content to be updated easily: As a long-time opponent of nuclear power, I wrote to Godin challenging the nuclear fission article’s implication that there have been only three accidents, vs. the actual 100+. While it was too late to change the book text, he immediately posted a correction at the top of that web page, https://thecarbonalmanac.org/093

I’d scheduled my review expecting a mid-June release date. That’s been pushed back a month. I urge you to 1) preorder your copy from your favorite independent bookstore (a chance to make a lifestyle change and support your local economy), 2) get involved in the launch promotion: https://seths.blog/joining-the-almanac-launch-team/ , and 3) sign up for the Carbon Almanac Network’s Daily Difference newsletter (at the bottom of thecarbonalmanac.org home page).

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 for, too.

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