The Clean and Green Club

• In the mid-1700s, American Quakers started a movement to abolish slavery. It took 100 years (and a messy war) for that view to push its way through society.
• In 1848, about 300 people gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, for the first women’s rights convention. Just 21 years later, women got the right to vote in Wyoming. By 1900, women had the vote in four states or territories, with another four adopting women’s suffrage before the 19th Amendment made it national in the US.
• The first World Wide Web server went live in 1991, the first popular browser (Mosaic) was released in 1993, Google was incorporated in 1998 and spread virally. By 1999, email and the web were mainstream in the US and other developed economies—leaving a virtual junkyard of older Internet technologies (when was the last time you used Gopher or Usenet?).

Technology allows the pace of change to speed up dramatically. From the creation of the Web to ubiquity took only 8 years.

The ability to spread ideas virally also speeds up the pace of change, with social media as a huge amplifier. The word “ideavirus” was coined by futurist Seth Godin, who has spread quite a few idea viruses: that marketers should get permission and not keep interrupting…that being different and better is marketable…that being a smart risk taker gives you a chance for greatness (among others).

It thrilled me that Seth gave me the back cover endorsement for my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Jack Canfield has the front cover quote). That book is devoted entirely to spreading the idea that business can *profit* by turning hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.

This is the work I feel called to do. While it’s a logical outgrowth of things I’ve done my entire career, it’s only been my primary focus for the past five years. And I’ve found that getting traction in the mainstream world has been more challenging that I thought it would be.

Next month, I’ll tell you some of the ways I’ve been spreading the message—and then in March, we’ll look at how I plan to take it up an order of magnitude—and with a lot of luck and persistence, start to permeate this idea through mainstream society.

Beyond customer satisfaction, turn your customers into raving fans who will be your unpaid sales force, recommending you to friends and colleagues. But how?
McConnell and Huba identify six steps to get there, then profile several companies and rate each one on the six criteria:

• Customer plus-delta: the difference your customers perceive between your potential for greatness and their current experience with you—once you know where they want improvement, you can deliver and even surpass it
• “Napsterized” knowledge: democratizing and spreading no-charge content that demonstrates your expertise (through articles, webinars, discussion lists, social media, and more)
• Build the buzz
• Create community
• Break things down into bite-sized chunks, such as product sampling
• Create a cause (which doesn’t have to be charity; some of their examples have self-interested causes such as personal freedom)

They profile several well-known brands, including Southwest Airlines, Mark Cuban’s Dallas Mavericks football team, and Harley-Davidson. I found the most interesting was a brand I was completely unfamiliar with: Build-A-Bear Workshop.

This company has really created its own category. When someone comes into a shop and orders a teddy bear, the crew collects a personalized wish from the customer and sews it into a bear that’s custom-made right then and there, in 30 minutes, in plain view of the customer. The Master Bear Builder hands over the finished bear in a “Cub Condo,” not an ordinary shopping bag. (Online orders are personalized in slightly different ways.) Each bear has a way to contact the owner if the bear gets separated, and 1000 bears have been reunited with their owners as a result. The bear’s new owner receives a birth certificate, and the company follows up annually with greetings on the bear’s birthday. Each bear is entitled to free lifetime checkups, and if the bear is damaged, a visit to the “bear hospital.” Every facet of the experience is heart-centered and customer-centered. Build-A-Bear spends a full three weeks training every single employee, uses event marketing (Teddy Roosevelt’s birthday, for instance) and well-thought-out charity partnerships with logical partners including World Wildlife Fund and the Humane Society, as well as organizations that distribute bears to kids in need. Oh, and the company’s Advisory Board is customers aged 8-17. WOW!

How can you profit by putting the VALUE in your VALUES? Shel Horowitz shows how to MONETIZE your organization’s commitment to fixing problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. Shel consults individually and in groups, gives presentations, and writes books and articles including Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (endorsed by Jack Canfield, Seth Godin and others).