The Clean and Green Club, August 2018

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, August 2018
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This Month’s Tip: Three Principles to Grow New Markets

Watch the 3-minute video at the top of Expand Furniture’s Smart Space-Saving Ideas page. Don’t multitask; you need to see people going through the few seconds of converting a piece of furniture from one use to another, or storing it in tiny spaces when it’s not needed.

I found three takeaways for you in this short video:

1) Many FunctionsThis entire product line is an excellent example of the principle of one part, many functions (which I discuss in Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, BTW). If you want to create a green business, one of the planet-saving tricks is to build for multiple uses. It’s also an example of miniaturization; when not needed, these chairs, tables, sofas, and storage units take up almost no space.

Think of the all-in-one printer/scanner/fax as one example that’s gone mass-market. A smartphone is an even better example because it’s far more universal AND and embraces miniaturization.

When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, portable communication existed in concept and showed up in comics, science fiction, etc. (Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone, Dick Tracy’s walkie-talkie). And so did the idea of all-powerful computers that contained the world’s knowledge.

But combining those two concepts into one device that fits in a pocket—WOW! I don’t think I came across anything that even hinted at this until the introduction of early PDAs like the Apple Newton and the Palm Pilot in the 1990s, and I don’t think either of those had Internet access. Now, I even have a client about to introduce a line of portable multipurpose solar lamps about the size of a smartphone (and one model even has a phone charging port).

2) “Deep Kaizen”
Now, think about the video. Most of the furniture ideas are not really a new concept. William Murphy received his first patent for a “disappearing bed” in 1912 (and the concept predated him); modular sectional sofas and tables with self-contained expansion leaves have been on the market for decades.

The one really new product is that miraculous looking couch that seemed to pull out of a twisted piece of foam. It’s actually paper, and you can get a better look at it here and in this post’s photo.

Yet this gets only a few seconds in the video. The rest of it is simply doing more with ideas that have been around forever.

Some of the other designs could also be called “deep Kaizen.” Kaizen is the Japanese concept of continuous improvement. It got very popular in the US business world a few decades back. So yes, we’ve had Murphy beds forever—but have you ever seen a Murphy bunk bed before? An ottoman that holds a set of five padded folding chairs? A coffee table that can transform in under a minute into a full-size dining room table? And look at what I just did there. I used deep Kaizen to come up with the phrase, “deep Kaizen.” Okay, so I’m not the first to come up with that phrase—but I only found that out when I Googled it after I came up with it on my own.

3) Repurpose
And that Googling process—which I use whenever I’m helping a client name a business, product, service, book, or idea—brings up the third principle: repurposing. Just as I came up with a new way to use the phrase, ask yourself what do you already make or sell that could be used differently? I ask my consulting clients this question regularly, and it opens up many conversations about new markets and new ways of marketing to them. Expand has identified several target markets: condo dwellers and people living in Tiny Houses, among them. But some of the marketing photos and videos deploy the pieces in massive, spacious living rooms, too. The company understands that a photo like that changes the way people think about its products and make it attractive to a whole different sector.

How will you take these insights into your own business?

New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

I’ve been taping several other podcasts lately, and will post the links in future newsletters as I get them. In the meantime, you can browse the list of the more-than-30 podcasts I’ve done; they range from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.  
 
New on that page this month:
  • Alex Wise–Sea Change Radio
  • Carole Murphy–HeartStock Radio

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.

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/

Another Recommended Book: The Age of the Platform
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The Age of the Platform by Phil Simon (Motion Publishing, 2011)
 
The Internet is constantly changing. And yet, this book that was written (and rushed into print) seven years ago is still remarkably current. Some of the specifics have changed, certainly. Twitter doubled the maximum size of a Tweet about a year ago. Facebook abandoned API support for posting by third-party applications just this month.

But most of the principles remain the same, and all companies in his “Gang of Four”—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google—not only remain robust but have continued to expand. And each also shows some significant problems.

Even in 2011, Simon saw Amazon as a company offering integrated shopping across many categories, far beyond books. Many people still thought of Amazon as a bookstore back then; now it’s a retail giant more akin to Sears; it even owns Whole Foods. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, personally owns the Washington Post. Yet anticompetitive practices and less-than-friendly labor policies continue to show up.

Several years after Steve Jobs’ death, Apple continues to innovate—and develop non-price-sensitive markets—in computers, telephony, music, and other areas. It’s now the most highly valued company in the world. Yet that value could tumble at any time. Simon discusses why companies like Microsoft and MySpace have lost the competitive edge. Apple, especially on the hardware side, is a company I personally see as vulnerable.

Facebook has grown its user base enormously and competes with Google not only as an advertising venue but also in video (Facebook Live), images (Instagram), and chat. But as in 2011, it still faces privacy scandals, and now, content scandals like trollbots as well.

Google, in turn, has a social network (Google Plus) very similar to Facebook, although nowhere near as popular. And Google also has moved outside the computer world. While continuing to dominate search and (via Youtube) online video, it’s also gone into such wildly divergent technologies as driverless cars. You could argue that this is a logical extension of products like Google Maps and Google Earth. But it’s a pretty big leap from GPS to vehicle operation. The driverless vehicle project has had its share of pitfalls, too—including a fatality. It wouldn’t shock me if Google bought Tesla at some point; I see many parallels between these two companies.

In the 2011 book, Simon is enthusiastic about open APIs that allow outside developers to easily build new utility into the platforms. Since I was reading his book just as Facebook was restricting posting access from third-party apps such as HootSuite, I wrote to him and asked what he thought of the changes. He directed me to a blog post he wrote in 2012: https://www.philsimon.com/blog/platforms/the-gradually-closing-platform-strategy/

But enough about what’s changed since this book came out. Let’s discuss the content that remains relevant.

Simon argues that these four giants—three of which were recent startups (mid-1990s to mid-2000s)—got their preeminence because they switched from one-trick ponies (Amazon=books, Apple=computer hardware, Facebook=seeing what friends were up to, Google=Internet search) to much broader capabilities integrated in a “platform”: an “ecosystem” of interrelated applications and capabilities that allows a user to perform many and diverse functions without leaving…that can add new capability simply by adding “planks” either developed internally or integrated from outside providers (pp. 22-23). Successful platforms keep raising the bar on technology, both to create more powerful user experiences and to scale up; they’re happy to build more capacity than they need now, so that it’s ready when they need it—and until then, they can use the excess to charge other companies for services (e.g., pp. 134-135).

Key to this model is the concept of “prosumer” (p. 6): a person who both produces and consumes. The Gang of Four have made us all into prosumers; each of us creates lots of content, and consumes even more. And every time we do something in either of those roles, at least one of these four companies is likely monetizing it somehow. Even if there’s no cost to the user (and that’s often the case), someone is collecting marketable data…selling ads…and integrating those two functions to serve ads directly related to that user’s activity patterns: searches, clicks, photo tags, downloads, video views, etc. (e.g., p. 122). For me, as a business writer and consultant, and for my wife, as a novelist, this often has humorous results; we’ll see ads for things we have no direct interest in. But for the average consumer, the computer can seem scarily prescient, serving ads for a new freezer after mentioning on social media that you had no room in your current one, for instance.

Another key is the network effect: the more people use certain technologies or platforms, the more useful they are to other users. If you had email in the early 1990s, you had a tiny circle of contacts—and you needed different email addresses to connect with people on different systems. And you did this from a desktop computer in a fixed location, over slow and balky dial-up phone lines. I got my first email address in 1987: a long string of numbers running over Compuserve. I gave up my account within a few months and didn’t try again until 1994. By that time, AOL made it easy to do email. And then the original Netscape browser made it just as easy to explore the nascent Internet. And then there was enough critical mass to pursue broadband, which in turn made it possible to do far more online.

One thing Simon doesn’t really discuss but fits in very well with his concept of platform is the interrelationship between number of users and ease of use. The whole idea of the platform is to make it easy and comfortable for users to stay within the system, as Google and Facebook do so well (e.g., pp. 113-117)—and as AOL tried to do but failed once Netscape opened up the rest of the online world (pp. 181-183). When the system is easy to use, more people use it. When a user base reaches critical mass, developers make it easier. Thus, with more users, developers figured out how to send email across different networks, and most people could get by with just one email address. And as email became the standard, and more people turned to the Internet for information, more websites sprang up, and ways to exchange information over the Net became more sophisticated. You could send documents! You could FTP videos and other large files! You could check your email from a remote location! And as first Apple and then Google built a user base for smartphones while the cloud allowed off-site data storage, suddenly you could do all this on a device that fit in your pocket, creating another revolutionary wave.

Much of this is because of something he does discuss, in some detail: successful platforms innovate constantly. Google even requires employees to spend up to 20 percent of their time on non-core projects (p. 120)—and that’s led to many new products. Simon shows 78 different Google application icons (p. 117), a number that’s probably much higher now.

Why are these platforms so successful? They make things easier for the user, who has to master far fewer interfaces. They encourage collaboration and build community. They put a lot of resources into both technology infrastructure and technology innovation. They’re willing to try things that fail in order to get to things that win big (p. 200)—and are preparing for Web 3.0, the “semantic web” (p. 239).
He also looks at why some other companies didn’t achieve this type of success, and what the risks are to these four giants as they become larger and more bureaucratic.

No matter what type of business you’re in, you’re likely to find this book useful in understanding how business in the first quarter of the 21st century is different than even the last quarter of the 20th.

Accurate Writing & More
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Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
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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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