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The Clean and Green Club, January 2021

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: January 2021

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How Do You Successfully Rebrand a Century-Old Racist Image? 

A reporter recently asked, “How do you communicate new branding to a legion of fans who might not want it? Cleveland’s name change is a significant branding change. Even though it is the right thing to do, it could have consequences for fans. What this mean for other brands? And what should business owners keep in mind as they build their brands?”I thought my response was worth sharing with you, first, because it addresses a super-topical issue that many firms are struggling with, and second, because it gives insight into how to analyze a situation, find and seize opportunities, and leverage massive improvement (I think this is one of my core strengths–and if you need this sort of thinking, please reach out):

Pitch Title: Rebranding: Cleveland has some advantages (HARO) The Cleveland MLB team won’t be the first professional sports team to change–not even the first to change from less to more politically correct. The Houston Astros started out as the Colt 45s, and the Washington Wizards basketballers were once the Bullets.

And let’s face it–if Humble Oil can successfully do a complete rebranding–not just the name change but the whole image–from warm, fuzzy but lily-white Esso with its “put a tiger in your tank” mascot and pictures of smiling White men pumping gas for happy White families–to cold, corporate Exxon, whose ads were largely devoid of people and completely lacking in cute animals, the challenge of a well-established franchise with the resources to spread the news and a good political reason for making the switch should not be all that hard.

Cleveland is a city with a strong Black community and a long history of speaking out on racial justice. The team has an opportunity to bring that community into the renaming process, provide a sense of ownership in the new name. They also have not just an opportunity but a moral obligation to reach out to Native American communities, not just in NE Ohio but around the Midwest. They should commit some dollars to amplifying their voices and giving space to the case that Red lives matter as much as Black and White ones. They could easily put up a web page that didn’t just explain the reason for the change but gave room for Red folks to tell their stories. This could even be on the homepage of the current site with a button to redirect to the new site for the new name, rather than an automatic redirect.

As a green/social entrepreneurship profitability consultant, speaker, and author of Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (endorsed by Seth Godin, Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield…)–I take businesses beyond mere “sustainability” (status quo) to “regenerativity” (improving): I help develop and market profitable products/services that turn hunger/poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. Branding and product/company naming have been part of my work since the 1980s.

She then asked me to get specific about her four questions, and I wrote,

1. How do you communicate new branding to a legion of fans who might not want it?

The easiest way might be to identify a group of maybe 100 influencers–maybe people who have been season ticket holders for five years or more and also have 5000+ social media connections and/or newsletter subscribers (these are arbitrary numbers, just an example). Woo them a little. Reach out several weeks ahead of the public rebrand and describe some cool VIP activities that only they and their cohort (and maybe they can each invite three friends) get to do. These activities could be virtual (a live smartphone guided tour through the back, player-only parts of the stadium with a knowledgeable live guide who has an important title and can do real-time Q&A, for instance). Or do an in-person version for five or ten masked, distanced super-VIPs (that’s pretty labor-intensive and risky, so it has to be a tiny group). Give them some big hints of the new identity, but not a full reveal. Have a guessing contest with prizes for the person who comes closest, and some other prizes too.

Then actually ASK for help in spreading the reasons for the rebrand. Ask also to help you come up with new chants, ideas for cool swag, etc. Make them involved partners who want to give you their best thinking and to share their love of the club with their own base. Take lots of notes, implement the best stuff, and credit those whose ideas you used and those who didn’t–by commenting gratefully on their own and your social media feeds (on Facebook, you can do both at once by tagging. That used to be true on Twitter but seems not to be right now.)

2. Cleveland’s change is a significant branding change. Even though it’s the right thing to do, it could have consequences for fans. What does this mean for other brands?

Yes, it’s a significant branding change but plenty of teams have done it before. See for instance https://popculture.com/sports/news/7-sports-teams-changed-racist-names-mascots/#7 . Probably hundreds of high school and community teams have also switched. While it has consequences for the team, in terms of the expense of replacing all the uniforms, swag, signage, and maybe even the beer cups at the concession stands, it’s hard to see “consequences” for the fans. Some may be unhappy about the change, but hey, people are unhappy when Trader Joe’s stops carrying their favorite snack. Life goes on. In fact, there may be some positive PR buzz for finally doing the right thing, even if decades late and precipitated by a national crisis around racism this past spring and summer. That benefit can be multiplied if the team makes some sort of reparations. It could be something as simple as offering unsold VIP boxes to a rotating set of local community groups working on diversity and inclusion, at no charge and maybe with some VIP treatment.

3. And what should business owners keep in mind as they build their brands?

A brand is not just the slogan, logo, mascot, colors, etc. It’s the sum of the customer’s or prospect’s experience dealing with your organization. This means that if you’re part of an organization that says it’s an ally around diversity, you have to walk your talk. The good news is that by paying attention to what your brand REALLY stands for, aligning with a higher purpose than simply revenue or showing fans a good time, you can build amazing loyalty. And since sports teams already have enormous loyalty, they are ideally positioned to take it further and do really great things that address and begin to solve our biggest problems (not just racism but hunger, poverty, war, catastrophic climate change, pandemics, etc.)–and actually help change the culture by taking leadership. I have a lot of resources on this at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com 

4. How does a business pivot after rebranding?

Carefully but with enthusiasm. Make your mistakes in the beta phase and get them out of the way before your public launch. Get as much buy-in as possible ahead of the launch.

This Interview Breaks New Ground on Reimagining the World

I’ve begun to focus some good thinking and research on how the pandemic creates opportunities to skip “going back to normal” and instead remake the world we really want to see. I’m even looking for a publisher for an article I’d like to write, called Leveraging the Great Pivot: How COVID-19 Creates Opportunities for Racial Justice, Economic Advancement, and Environmental Healing.

As I began this research,
…Read more

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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.

For his Western Mass Business Show, radio host Ira Bryck asked Shel to put together a panel. Shel reached into the activism world to pull in State Senator Jo Comorford (who was elected after a decades-long career at MoveOn and elsewhere) and to the green business world for Raj Pabari, a 16-year-old entrepreneur who has started multiple companies and has 16 employees. Listen tomorrow, 1/16 at 11 a.m. ET and Sunday, 1/17 at 2 p.m. ET over WHMP, 1400 AM or WHMP.com, and listen any time, once the air dates have passed, at https://whmp.com/podcasts/shows/taking-care-of-business/

Kindness Summit, January 26-28 (online)
I’m giving the opening keynote of this three-day conference featuring a dozen speakers on various aspects of kindness at work. My talk, “Making Kindness Profitable,” includes many examples of kindness to people and planet–famous ones like Oprah and Mr. Rogers, plus plenty of very cool innovations you’ve probably never encountered. I’m on Tuesday, January 26, noon Eastern/9 a.m. Pacific. The conference is amazingly affordable, with a sliding scale starting at just USD $35. Visit this link to register

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.

You are “The Expert” – Let the world know.

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Save 15% when you register at this link:  http://www.expertclick.com/discount/Shel_Horowitz

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Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things

Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things by John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning

Stuff walks through a typical day in the life of a hypothetical and typical Seattle adult, looking at both obvious and hidden environmental impacts. We get an inside look at global trade, as we go piece by piece through the making and use of a car, bicycle, cheeseburger, fries, newspaper, cup of coffee, aluminum soda can, computer chip, t-shirt—and this very greenly produced book (which still has significant environmental impact). The authors include suggestions at the end of every chapter for easy lifestyle changes that reduce consumption and waste—and some policy recommendations to make a much bigger difference.

While the book is exhaustively researched, the day-in-the-life approach keeps the story moving forward, and doesn’t bog us down in the details unless you want to read the nine pages of endnotes that provide al the sources. It’s an easy and quick read.It’s really important to have an understanding of just how much is involved in making one of these objects, and what price our earth pays when we acquire and use it.

And it’s also really good to see how many improvements the business world was starting to make by the time it was published in (gulp!) 1999—and how much farther down the road to sustainability we’ve come since then, at least in the making and use of one object. To name five among many examples, when this book was published,

  • LED light bulbs were expensive and of horrible quality
  • Hybrid and all-electric vehicles were rare; the original Honda Insight was the only hybrid available in the US, although Prius had been released in Japan (and yes, I am aware of the environmental issues around hybrid cars)
  • Household solar was expensive, inefficient, and in limited supply
  • Lumber and tote bags from recycled soda bottles were almost unknown
  • The local food movement was tiny; CSA farms and even farmers markets had far less impact than they do now

The problem is that despite these huge increases in sustainable production and distribution since then, more people are getting more stuff—so the improvements in the environmental footprint of one unit for one household might be counterbalanced by the vastly increased number of units—and the number of trans-oceanic trips the components often make.

The book also points out that residential customers subsidize very eco-UNfriendly operations, such as aluminum smelting, which took 20 percent of all energy sold by the Northwest’s Bonneville Power Authority (p. 65)—and that people in the US account for just 5 percent of the world’s human population, but consumed 24 percent of the world’s energy and 13-39 percent of various other resources (pp. 67-68).

I don’t typically review a book that’s out of print—but it’s available as a Kindle. Even though the actual numbers are probably not accurate anymore, the concept of the book is, if anything, more applicable now than it was. Also, the book mentions that several portions are available at Sightline Institute, the environmental think-tank that produced the book, http://www.sightlineinstitute.com . The website is very much operational (and quite cool), though I wasn’t able to find the excerpts on a quick look.

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.

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The Clean and Green Club, December 2020

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: December 2020

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When Is It OK to Distort the Truth?

I was deeply shocked to watch the actor playing committed pacifist Dave Dellinger, who was an actual friend of mine, punch someone out in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” Dave served some serious jail time for refusing to fight in WWII, and all of his writings emphasize nonviolence. Quite relieved to read Harvey Wasserman (who was involved in the Chicago events) say in his review of the movie that it never happened, was disgracing Dave’s legacy, and should be removed from the film:

Here Sorkin’s film hits a bad bottom. Played by John Carroll Lynch, we sense a suburbanite whose spiritual roots in a lifetime of pacifism are not quite clear.

In one truly inexcusable moment, Dave is shown punching a court officer (and then apologizing for it).

THIS ABSOLUTELY DID NOT HAPPEN!!!

Dave Dellinger spent years in prison for refusing to take up arms during World War II. He was an elder beacon for countless nonviolent protests.

He titled his autobiography From Yale to Jail. Even when sorely provoked — at least in his adulthood — it was a point of honor that Dave Dellinger would refrain from physical violence.

Years later, as we sat in at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, Dave made a pretty convincing case that Abbie had been murdered. When election protection attorney Bob Fitrakis held hearings on how Ohio’s 2004 election had been stolen, Dellinger came to Columbus while conducting a long water-only fast.

It was also Dave — not Tom — who read the names of those killed in Vietnam. He did it at the beginning of the trial, not the end. The litany included Vietnamese names, not just American ones.

Like Tom (and unlike the actor who portrays him) Dave’s powerful physical presence reflected his heartfelt commitments. There are artistic liberties that work in this film, but that alleged moment of personal violence does not. Mr. Sorkin, please edit it out!

Dave once wrote me a letter describing not wanting to do violence by smoking a cigar when people found it offensive. So I believe Harvey. And I don’t understand why Sorkin would undermine everything Dave believed in for a cheap visual. People will watch this movie and think, well, he wasn’t so committed to nonviolence after all. It is a total invalidation of what he stood for and the way he lived his life.

Harvey’s critique is all the more valid because Harvey himself has a tendency to write in a somewhat apocalyptic style, with a lot of capitalizations and exclamation points and predictions of dire consequences or major victories (see an example in the single-line third paragraph I quoted). Yet this false characterization of Dellinger was unacceptable because it completely changed the meaning of Dave’s philosophy and behavior.

Bending or distorting or outright ignoring the facts is something that happens way too often in Hollywood movies. I still remember a movie portrayal of nuclear safety whistleblower Karen Silkwood, whose death on a highway has been widely linked to a deliberate attack. While official investigators said she’d fallen asleep, a union investigator found that her car was indeed rammed from the back. That the documents she was bringing to meet with a New York Times reporter were never found makes the story of deliberate murder far more likely.

But in the movie (it may have been “Silkwood” or it may have been “The China Syndrome”), her little Honda is repeatedly hit from behind by a large pickup truck—but she survives.

I honestly don’t see how changing the outcome was at all useful in telling the story. It essentially lets the company she worked for get away, literally, with murder.

Yet, when I interviewed one of my favorite authors, Madeleine L’Engle (author of A Wrinkle in Time and dozens of other books), she made a distinction between truth and fact. The emotional impact of powerful fiction doesn’t have to be based in fact, she says—and we have many powerful novels to prove her right.

Facts are limited. It is a fact that we’re sitting here, but whether any truth comes out of this meeting is something else again. We don’t always know [truth]. I write stories because that’s how I look for truth. I was looking for truth when I was writing Wrinkle. We live in a world where it’s very difficult for people to understand that a story can be truthful and not factual.

For me, the line in the sand is whether shifting the facts to make a better narrative interferes with perceiving the truth. In both the movie examples I’ve cited, I think changing those particular facts is unacceptable because it changed everything about what we believe about Dave Dellinger and about the people who probably killed Karen Silkwood.

Where is the line YOU draw, and why?

This Interview Breaks New Ground on Reimagining the World

I’ve begun to focus some good thinking and research on how the pandemic creates opportunities to skip “going back to normal” and instead remake the world we really want to see. I’m even looking for a publisher for an article I’d like to write, called Leveraging the Great Pivot: How COVID-19 Creates Opportunities for Racial Justice, Economic Advancement, and Environmental Healing.

As I began this research, podcast host Tony D’Urso invited me to return to his show–so I got my first chance to see how some of this sounds out loud. Keeping in mind that this is in the very early stages, and that we spent the first ten minutes sharing some background, I’d love to know your thoughts. You might even get a credit in my next book!

You can listen (and read the transcript) at https://tonydurso.com/crisis-opportunities-now-with-shel-horowitz/ –and Tony would be grateful if you gave a quick kudo at ratethispodcast.com/tony And here’s my list of takeaways from the call

Shel’s personal backstory as a writer, marketer, and activist (Timings: 00 through 8:20):

  • How activism got me into marketing and journalism in my teens
  • My start in journalism: a right-wing high school alternative newspaper gave 15-year-old left-wing me a platform–and ran my articles with disclaimers!
  • My first paid writing assignments, at $3 per hour–and my unusual motivation to write those articles quickly
  • The humble beginnings of the business I’ve run for more than 39 years
  • Why forming a successful group to block a large mountainside housing development proposal opened the door to the work I’ve done for the last 20 years, integrating profitability with environmental and social good

Shel’s motivation for activism on multiple issues, especially clean energy (8:20 through 10:33, 15:06-17:35):

  • Why clean energy has a much brighter future than even 20 years ago
  • How the energy-hogging Empire State Building was converted into one of the greenest buildings around–and how those improvements generated 33% return on investment
  • The cow-poop-powered green heating system in my antique farmhouse (built in 1743)

How we pivoted in 2020, and how we can make those pivots bigger and more long lasting to create a better world (17:40-24:38):

  • The opportunity COVID created to remake the world differently–including the newly global reach of formerly local events
  • How I got connected to a 16-year-old green entrepreneur on the other side of the country, which would never have happened pre-pandemic
  • Chances to explore entirely new careers, because your old career may not exist anymore
  • How we’ve often faced huge social shifts (the 1918 pandemic, when no one had Zoom and few people had a phone in their house; transition from horse to engine power; the vast disruption of the Internet) and risen to the challenge

What it means to be environmentally and socially responsible AND profitable (29:23-39:54):

  • Successful examples from clothing company Patagonia to a company that builds a ladder out of poverty using inexpensive solar LED lanterns
  • Cost savings in going green, including a different approach to manufacturing (and the technology we already have that will eventually make that possible at scale)–and how that could revolutionize medicine and other areas
  • How even a pizza shop could make a meaningful difference–with a youth training program that offers four distinct types of benefits around job and entrepreneurial skills, healthy eating, life skills, and more profit to the shop owner
  • How a house in the Colorado snowbelt went net-zero-energy–in 1984–and paid for all the improvements out of energy savings
  • How mindset changes possibility, including a magnificent quote from Muhammad Ali (I built my TEDx talk around this quote)–and how to frame the narrative to find out what actually is possible
  • What I’ve learned by posting a daily public gratitude journal

“Opportunities, ideas, are under every rock and tree” (44:34-48:00):

  • If you generate ten ideas a day), find two each month to explore
  • Our power is in our resilience and our inventiveness
  • The benefits of the conscious choice I made to have a happy life

Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World–and what my legacy might be (48:00-54:00):

  • How marketers benefit by finding an elastic market (like books)
  • Why Guerrillas should be quick and nimble
  • Marketing that leads to action–and action that makes the world better
  • The secret of turning customers into ambassadors
  • Why customer evangelism is one of the most profitable things a marketer can invest in–and how surprisingly easy it is to develop and harness that loyalty (easier for businesses with a higher purpose, by the way)

Tony’s summary of the call takeaways (54:00-57:12):

  • The necessity of getting good and getting fast
  • The power of a higher purpose: “sew good seeds and do good deeds”
  • When you see problems–brainstorming how things can work better–grab hold of your vision
  • Find ways you can pivot
  • Find 10 new ideas each day

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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.

You are “The Expert” – Let the world know.

3 Ways you get found by news media and Google search:

** Press Room Search Engine select from 39 topics
** Send News Releases (including Google News) sent out 10 ways
** Print Listing in the 2021 Yearbook of Experts, Authorities & Spokespersons

Save 15% when you register at this link: http://www.expertclick.com/discount/Shel_Horowitz

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Dare to Matter

Dare to Matter by Jordan Kassalow and Jennifer Krause

Social entrepreneur and optometrist Jordan Kassalow gives us a book that’s part memoir, part guidance for social entrepreneurs, and part inspirational self-help pep-talk about living a meaningful life. Co-authored with his rabbi (who gets a full co-byline, not just a “with” or “as told to” credit), the book is exclusively in his voice.

Kassalow stumbled around for a while before he found his joy, but eventually chose to help people in deeply disadvantaged economies live and work better through providing eyeglasses. In many cases, a simple non-prescription pair of drugstore readers could take someone from hopelessness to active citizenship and add years to their productive work life; for others, a common prescription could do the same. After working with various medical charities that took him to distant lands, he founded VisionSpring to make glasses more widely available.

While short on the specifics of how to start and operate a social entrepreneurship venture, the book is strong on the personal challenges one particular social entrepreneur faced, and how he overcame them. And even stronger on how to figure out where your skills, interests, and resources intersect, what your purpose is—and how to align your life and career with that purpose, and make your life matter by harnessing that purpose. Among the tools to guide that discovery are the instruction to find the need that specifically needs you, as opposed to some random other person—your skills, knowledge, joy, and feeling of aliveness when you do the work (pp. 113-114). Related to that, ask yourself these two questions (p. 228): “What needs me? What feeds me?” He also gives some good guidance on whether, in your unique situation, you should set up as a for-profit, nonprofit, social entrepreneur, or other model (p. 76), and how to balance your need to do good with your own financial health (p. 83).

And I love his injunction to “see compassion as a renewable resource,” nurtured by your own self-care (p. 108). He further admonishes,

Be hyper aware of any injustice you encounter that ignites a fire in your belly so intense that the only way you can extinguish it is to act. Challenge yourself to examine the issue from all angles—don’t stop at one giant problem. Tease the issue apart until you find the need within the need that you are uniquely suited to serve…the point of need where you can exert your energy that helps take down much bigger and more overwhelming problems. (p. 131)

Providing glasses to those in need enabled him to check off boxes for addressing poverty, inequality, and educational opportunity.

He notes that social entrepreneurship pioneer Bill Drayton calls finding that personal sweet spot “your jujitsu move.” This is particularly relevant to my own mission of using profitable business to address the world’s biggest social and environmental problems.

I also love the schooling he got in making sure every aspect of a social good enterprise respects the dignity of those you serve. One lesson was understanding why it was no help to provide someone with the perfect prescription if the frames were so hideous as to make the patient a laughingstock. Similar lessons are sprinkled throughout the book.

Peppered with quotes from people like Helen Keller, Rumi, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (one of my favorite spiritual teachers), and even my old friend Rev. Victoria Safford, who I’d lost touch with decades ago (and got inspired to track down and reconnect with), the book is an easy read. It’s fun to watch Kassalow try to integrate the very different parts of his life: practicing his craft as a partner in his father’s optometry practice where he serves mover-and-shaker clients in the 1%, his work on the ground in primitive conditions in remote parts of Latin America, Asia, or Africa, his love of backcountry camping, his journey as a Jew, his hobnobbing with other social entrepreneurs at conferences such as the World Economic Forum in Davos. There were a few times when I found him annoyingly out of touch with the realities that many of us face, a certain sense of privilege and arrogance. But on the whole, I enjoyed it.

One of the things I really like is that Kassalow sees joy and gratitude as integral in his work. I especially like the suggestion (borrowed from Heschel) to live your life in “radical amazement” (p. 256). I didn’t have that wonderful wording until reading this book, but I’ve been attempting to do that for many years, and fairly successful at it. My daily public Gratitude Journal on Facebook often celebrates the mundane with that sense of radical amazement—the joy I take in living a life so full of blessings. Later this month, I will post about whatever little miracles happen to me for the thousandth consecutive day.

Strongly recommended for people of any age who are figuring out how to align their career with their values. Order from your favorite independent bookstore at https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780806539034

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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.

 

Links in this newsletter may earn commissions. Please click here for our privacy and endorsement policy.

 

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