Tag Archive for social activism

The Clean and Green Club, December 2022

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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.

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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