Tag Archive for Guerrilla Marketing

The Green and Clean Club, April 2018

 

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, April 2018
ONE deep-discount ticket to the Guerrilla Marketing Summit in Orlando, May 3-5. I bought two tickets in December at the Early Bird rate of $199. Right now, it costs $797 for a pair, and that’s going to keep going up until the last-minute rate of $1497 for a single ticket. But the person I thought would use the other ticket has decided not to go. If you’d like to buy it from me for $99 (slightly below my cost), please write to me. Include a couple of sentences about what you do and why you’d like to go. And if you’re a nonsmoker, let me know if you’re interested in keeping costs down by sharing a room.
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This Month’s Tip: The Perils of Victory

What happens next if you win your biggest battle?

Whether you’re in business, running a nonprofit, or spearheading a community campaign, you need to know the answer to that question.

I speak from personal experience. In 1999, I started Save the Mountain, a citizen campaign that I expected to win—and I thought it would take about five years. But it was so successful that we won near-total victory in just 13 months (just over one year—a fifth of the time I thought it would take). We had near-total agreement in our town of 5000 that a mountain abutting a famous mountaintop state park was no place for the massive real estate development that a local builder announced—but what we needed to change was the very strong idea that people in town were powerless to stop the project. Once that changed, after just four months, our victory was in motion. After that, it was just a mater of lining up all the pieces in the right way.This was a very exciting campaign. We had dozens of people actively working to save this mountain, bringing expertise in science, water resources, lobbying, fundraising, and other areas. I brought my own expertise in marketing and community organizing and helped to secure about 90 stories in local print, radio, and TV, social media as it existed in the pre-Facebook era of 2000, and even a story in the Boston Globe, the paper of record in the large city 100 miles away.

We were consistently able to bring out more than 400 people to public hearings, pass several pieces of legislation to regulate mountaintop development in town—and most important, change the consensus from “this project is terrible but there’s nothing we can do” to “which of the numerous arrows in our quiver will put the final nail in the coffin of this unwanted project?”

But the biggest mistake we made was not having a Plan B for what would happen to Save the Mountain once we achieved our big victory. We were organizationally unprepared to win. And thus, all the momentum that we could have harnessed in a future campaign dissipated rapidly.

This organization could have morphed into a permanent force for environmental improvement in our local area. Yes, most of our thousands of supporters joined specifically to accomplish the immediate goal—but many of them would have been happy to keep improving our area’s beautiful environment. Once we won, though, we had nothing for them to do, no other project to harness that incredible energy. The organization crumbled.

So we saved the mountain—but we let the organization wither and die, when it could have gone on to many other victories.

It’s worth pointing out that other organizations have evolved far from their original purpose. Tesla has moved from focusing on transportation to putting big tentacles into solar power production and storage, and even space travel. MoveOn.org, the massive petition site, started as an organizing effort to get Republicans to stop wasting tax dollars trying to impeach President Bill Clinton. Save the Mountain could have at least taken a role in trail maintenance and park cleanup, once we added the threatened acreage to the adjoining state park. At best, it could have taken a leadership role in redefining appropriate land use in our county. But we had no organizational way to take those steps.

In my consulting, my organizing, and in running my own business, I will not make that mistake again. I urge you to think about how—in your own business, in the community projects or nonprofit causes you’re involved with, even in your family—to think about how your next victory will create the energy and direction you need to achieve the victory after that. Do that thinking now, before you need it.

New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel
Carole Murphy of Heart Stock Radio interviews me live Friday, April 20, 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT. Carole has a very interesting green business of her own, making purses of wild-collected Indonesian rattan, which grows among the rainforest trees and makes them too valuable to log. KBMF 102.5 FM, Butte, Montana, on Facebook, iTunes, and elsewhere.

Have you ever been to a Pecha Kucha? It’s 20 seconds each for 20 slides. I’m one of several speakers presenting one on
April 24, for the Family Business Center of the Pioneer Valley, in Holyoke, Massachusetts—and I’m working as hard on this as I did for my TEDx talk back in 2014. If you’re interested I attending, I can bring one more guest who owns a business in or near Western Massachusetts. Respond to this newsletter and tell me you want to come on April 24.Guerrilla Marketing Summit May 3-5 in Orlando. I’m doing a 50-minute solo talk on social entrepreneurship as the next big thing for guerrilla business success, and also moderating a panel of several Guerrilla Marketing co-authors, each with their own subject expertise.Mature Preneurs Talk with Diana Todd-Hardy.

  • Why I got into marketing (through activism)
  • How activism led me into writing books
  • When I figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up (not so long ago)
  • How you can design to solve multiple problems at once (for instance, poverty, environment, and safety)—and to build in circular (no-waste) resource use
  • The difference between old-style social responsibility and thinking really big
  • The biggest challenge I have found in this new work
  • The most exciting parts for me personally of the new social change work
  • The difference between marketing and advertising
  • How to write sexy, attention-getting press releases (and other marketing materials) that DON’T fit the 5W formula
  • Where to look to surmount almost any engineering challenge—the surprising key
  • 2 key questions to green your business and profitably address social issues
  • How the Empire State Building changed its thinking about energy to save $4.4 million per year

Profitability Revolution with Ruth King

  • How even a very small business can get involved in healing the biggest problems of our time
  • The key questions to ask in developing a profitable approach to social change within business
  • An unrehearsed brainstorm about how a consultant can make an impact in developing countries and find people to pay for it
  • The key to solving war
  • Positive versus negative motivation
  • How the most famous skyscraper in the world got a 33 percent return when it went deep green

Watch for This One! I’ve got a taping date but not an air date for:
Mark Struczewski Podcast, focused on productivity

Friends Who Want to Help

Looking for a Job? Visit Our Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.com

Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?

Repurpose that expensive content, without using any staff time. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use immediately: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
 
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
Another Recommended Book: Doing Good Better
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Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill (Gotham/Penguin Random House, 2015)

I don’t usually recommend books that annoy me as much as this one did, but I do recommend it. MacAskill raises crucial questions for anyone in the nonprofit or social responsibility spaces: how are our time and money best spent to make the world better? I agree that we have to be willing to dive deep enough to discover that sometimes, things that seem terrific at the macro level crumble in our hands when we look closely.

Yes, we want our resources to make the maximum impact—to hold our social impact projects and charity partners responsible for their actions AND their outcomes. And seeking fact-based answers about which of our actions do the most objective good is well-worth the effort. He’s an advocate of a scheme called QALY, which imposes a quantitative framework on decisions by looking at the outcomes. In theory, QALY should tell us whether it’s better to increase lifespan or increase quality of life, whether we best serve a greater number in less depth or a lesser number in greater depth, and how to measure costs and benefits of any initiative. And MacAskill remembers to factor in a lot of subtleties, such as how much improvement would occur without your help.

As an example, if a student is deciding whether to go into medical school, MacAskill suggests looking at how much impact this particular person would have as a doctor, versus someone else who would fill the medical school slot; there are always more people wanting to study medicine than available slots, so a doctor will be created regardless. That involves a whole host of questions: would the doctor be working in a developed country where services provided would not have great impact on the larger social picture but the potential for charity donation is enormous, or a developing country facing a massive health crisis, where that doctor could save many lives? Would another doctor have a social conscience? But despite MacAskill’s best efforts, a lot of it would be guess work.

Sometimes the answers may be extremely counter-intuitive; he cites cases where the most effective thing certain individuals can do is to go into a high-paying profession and live simply enough to donate large portions of that pay to well-vetted causes.

But I have a problem with his Bean-Counters Uber Alles approach. He tends to ignore a lot of the human factors, and I think that’s the kind of attitude that got us into trouble with our planet in the first place. It was actually a big relief to read that he became a vegetarian out of concern for animal rights, because it showed a caring persona that’s largely absent from the text. Yet he scorns the little actions we can all take to live more in our values, which I strongly feel make a big cumulative difference. In fact, I’ve written an ebook, 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, offering 111 simple and no-cost/low-cost steps we can take as individuals. If everyone did even 50, I think it would make a tremendous difference.

Doesn’t something go missing when we worry so much about the numbers and so little about the human factors? Is working at a job you hate for 20 years so you can donate more money and then be financially secure enough to take an executive position with a charity really better than working at lower pay in a meaningful career right off the bat? Are there tradeoffs in the massive improvement you can make in one person’s life through some kind of direct intervention versus the benefit of eradicating some scourge that affects many more lives? And how do you predict which of the people you help might go on to find the cure for cancer? It makes a lot of sense to reduce malaria deaths at a cost per life saved of $40,000, while the US spends millions per life saved on highway safety—and this aligns with his theory that we do the most good when we focus on the more neglected areas. But then again, I am alive today because improvements in vehicle safety allowed me to walk away from a 60-mph crash. So, in some ways, the whole set of questions and assumptions is absurd.

MacAskill gets even more absurd, with obnoxious positioning like a chapter called “The Moral Case for Sweatshop Goods” (he says they provide better jobs than the indigenous industries. I say that’s not good enough).

But in other areas, he’s spot on. As big a supporter of peace as I am, it’s hard to argue with his math that eradicating smallpox has saved more lives over the past 40 years than creating world peace would have over the same time frame. And it’s certainly important to choose to give to charities at the top of the curve, who consistently achieve far more with less and significantly outperform average charities. He names several of his favorites.

And one area where I’m in total agreement is how much impact one person can have, especially when joining with others, and especially in poor countries, where a dollar goes so much farther. Most human advances—in medicine, technology, agriculture, even human behavior—were because one person had an idea and nurtured it.

Bottom line: if you come in to the book as an engaged and questioning reader, willing to mentally dialogue with him about what makes sense and what doesn’t, you’ll find tremendous value. If you either accept it all at face value or throw the whole thing out, I’d say you’re making a mistake.

Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done 29 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
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Hadley, MA 01035 USA
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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), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. 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, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and 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).
“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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