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| Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, August 2015 |
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Discounts on My Two Best Marketing Books—Yours for Just $15 each
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| This Month’s Tip: How to Select Partners |
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It’s been two years since we’ve visited one of my very favorite marketing strategies: forming partnerships with others who already reach the market you desire to reach.
Let’s talk today about how to select partners. You’ll find the best results when you and your marketing or operational partners both have a common understanding of how the partnership will help every partner. And your chances of that increase if at least one of these criteria is true:
1. Your products or services complement each other: You appeal to the same demographic/psychographic, but with products and services that work well in tandem (or in groups–like a one-stop wedding shop with florist, caterer, photographer, band, etc.).
2. You have similar offerings but join together to “make the pie higher” for all of you: cooperative advertising with several partners in one big ad that none of you could afford on your own, a big restaurant festival with 50 participants.
3. Similar customer/fan base with not too much overlap. This is the success secret of many Internet marketers. They promote each other’s products and each gain new fans.
4. Complementary operational expertise–like the partnership between FedEx and the United States Postal Service. FedEx is really good at logistics, and the PO is really good at last-mile delivery. So FedEx does the intercity air transport for Express Mail (and I think Priority as well) and the PO finishes the job.
5. Charity/for-profit partnerships with organizations whose mission is aligned with your brand identity. A construction firm can partner with Habitat for Humanity, a restaurant with a food pantry. I’m using this strategy myself. I partnered with Green America for the release of my 8th book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, and we’re doing it again for my forthcoming Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. I get in front of their 100,000 or so members multiple times, and they get a portion of the first royalty check.
In short, the possibilities are limitless, and make the most sense when they’re carefully thought out and advance the interests of all parties.
Note that for option 1, you don’t have to work only with people who only offer services and products that you don’t. can even have overlap. Here’s an example the very early days of my business—1981-85, when it was primarily a typing service. I had referral partnerships with several other typing services. Any of us would be glad to type a college term paper or a business letter, but there were other areas that some of us liked and others couldn’t stand. The services I referred clients to happened to like transcribing tapes, which was a task I loathed. And they in turn hated working with resume clients who wanted more than straight typing.
Eventually, once I got my first computer in 1984, I was able to make resume writing my primary offering. From 1985-95, writing resumes while-you-wait was the largest profit center in my business, until I began to supplant it with writing marketing materials for businesses and authors/publishers, and later with the green and social change marketing I’m known for today.
Side note: I actually still offer all the things I used to concentrate on except straight typing. I don’t go out of my way to chase the business, but I still write resumes, press releases, book covers, and web pages when I’m asked. But while I’m glad to have had a “second college education” by typing those thousands of pages, I don’t miss that piece at all, and haven’t typed a term paper or thesis since around 1990.
Next month, we’ll look at the wide range of possible partnerships. |
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Connect with Shel on Social Media |
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| About Shel & This Newsletter
As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel). Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.
Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.
He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way). |
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| “As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).” |
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| A Book I Recommend Only to Know Your Enemy |
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The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein
In the 13 years I’ve been reviewing a book per month, this is my first negative review. Normally, if a book I’m reading is not good enough to share with you, I move on to one that is. There have been months it’s taken three tries to find a book worthy of reviewing.
But there’s been a lot of buzz about this book, and I felt it important to dispel some of the blatant falsehoods he’s spreading.
Epstein is a master at framing—and, if you’ve followed me for a while, you know that I also pay a lot of attention to framing. It’s a key marketing tool for ideas, especially—but also for products and services. I also give credit to Epstein for creating a well-written book that’s enjoyable to read. And I even agree with some of his arguments:
- Humans live better because we’ve been able to harness energy—which has led to major improvements in shelter, agriculture, flood control, disaster response, etc.
- Thus, cheap, plentiful energy has saved millions of lives and improved the quality of life for billions more.
- Climate activists need to be careful of our science and not make outlandish claims. He points out that the 97 percent climate-scientist consensus that climate change is real and that human behavior is a factor in climate change is not the same as claiming that the same 97 percent feel an immediate need to act. The number is undoubtedly high, but there are some scientists who recognize that humans have increased CO2 levels but don’t see that as a problem.
- CO2, which plants breathe and turn back into oxygen for us to breathe, is good for plants
- Most energy company communications grant environmentalists the moral upper hand and don’t try to counteract the public’s image of these technologies as something that should be phased down. Epstein, a master at framing, says this is because the fossil and nuclear companies have failed to present the compelling moral case for their use. I say it’s because, in the face of better, cleaner alternatives, there is no such case for the moral superiority of a dirty technology; we have better ways of achieving our very real energy needs.
- Humans can have a positive impact on climate change.
But Epstein ignores “inconvenient” facts that don’t fit his worldview, and makes assumptions I don’t agree with:
- We can’t rely on clean renewables to meet the power demand. Solar and wind are too intermittent, and hydro requires flooding too large an area. Actually, we can. While, historically, solar, wind, geothermal, etc., have only generated a small sliver of our energy, they’re growing exponentially, and new technologies make them more affordable and more efficient. Amazing new developments in battery technology—as well as using the electrical grid itself to store power—solves the intermittence problem. And in-line hydro can capture the power of water without the need to build dams and flood farmland. Many experts believe we can meet 50 to 80 percent of our power society with clean energy within a fairly short time, when we reduce demand through deep conservation.
- We must examine everything from the point of view of its effects on humans. I prefer to look at the effects on entire ecosystems, of which humans are a part. Other members of the ecosystem are entitled to life and health, too—and this helps humans as well. We don’t know what cures for diseases might be lost if the wrong plant goes extinct. And we do know that removing one predator from the food chain can sometimes have disastrous consequences.
- Government meddling has kept nuclear from playing a major role. Actually, government subsidies and incentives (such as the Price-Anderson Act, which artificially lowers both the cost and the liability of nuclear insurance—switching financial responsibility for catastrophic accidents to property owners and taxpayers) are the only thing that keeps this extremely dangerous industry afloat.
- The steep increase CO2 levels has not caused major problems. But the steep rise in CO2 levels is exponential, and the planet responds in geologic time. The 65 years between hitting 300 and 400 PPM is a microsecond in the earth’s time—and far shorter than the time from 200 to 300. We don’t know yet what the consequences are, because the earth is still reacting. And if that exponential curve continues to shoot up (800 PPM in another 65 years?), atmospheric carbon will continue to shoot up.
- Major environmentalists including Amory Lovins, Bill McKibben, and others are a bunch of Luddite anti-progress know-nothings full of contempt for human beings and an evil agenda of undermining any impact technology could have. Absolute nonsense. Environmental leaders have for decades promoted the positive use of technology. Lovins in particular has built his entire career around using technology to reduce the need for fossil and nuclear by not just transitioning to safe, clean renewables, but designing more efficiently so that we can get the same or better results with dramatically reduced energy input. Many of these practical visionaries embrace a holistic world view that sees the importance of ecosystems, recognizes that humans have often been ecosystem disruptors, and sees human progress as key to helping get the world back in balance.
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