The Clean and Green Club

Last month, we looked at the incredible effectiveness of visibility marketing in advancing social causes. Can it also advance a for-profit business, and do so without buying enormous amounts of expensive advertising? Can small businesses take advantage of this kind of messaging?

I’d give the answer a qualified yes. Branding/visibility campaigns can work for small businesses, especially those with a social and/or environmental message. And now that a branding campaign can drive traffic to a website that reveals the whole story, it’s easier to pull one off than it would have been 20 years ago.

A large-scale but very counterculture example is Read the rest of this entry »

I used to be really scornful of “visibility advertising”: campaigns that had only a branding purpose, didn’t try to sell anything and in many cases didn’t even try to pass on a message. For most of my career, I thought this kind of marketing was only the province of corporate giants with unlimited budgets: companies like Coke, Nike, and McDonalds.

But ten years ago, I had an experience that caused me to change my mind. We were in the middle of a deep, multichannel campaign to block a particularly nasty housing development going all the way to the ridgeline of our local mountain (right next to a state park on the next mountain over, whose gorgeous view would be ruined). In addition to the press releases, the media campaign, the lobbying, the massive turnout at public hearings, and all the other tactics we were using, we did lawn signs and bumper stickers.They just said “Save the Mountain” (the name of our group) and gave our website. Of course, this was not only branding the organization, but also the idea that the mountain could actually be saved; our action mission was right there in the organization’s name.

One day, some of our canvassers were working a local farmers market when who should stroll by but the developer and his wife. And she turned to our people and said, Read the rest of this entry »