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| Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,
December 2014
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This Month’s Tip: How to Get Famous People to Help You
Last month, I talked about some of the well-known people who have helped me with one thing or another: a book endorsement, an interview, a joint venture…
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| Some of these folks are famous in their own community…and some, like authors Jack Canfield (Chicken Soup for the Soul series), Jay Conrad Levinson (Guerrilla Marketing series) and Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle in Time), musicians Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Arlo Guthrie are international superstars known widely beyond their own circles.
How have I been able to get so many celebrities to help me? Sometimes, they help you out of simple generosity, or because they feel your passion and believe in what you’re doing. But usually, it boils down to one thing: offer them something they want or need.
What do you have that a celebrity wants or needs? Here are a few possibilities:
- Publicity
- Credibility
- Help for a cause he or she supports
- A visit to an exotic location
- A chance to meet others he or she admires
- Ability to grow his her own community
- Income streams
Now, here’s the key: once you know which hot button to use, make the approach in ways that immediately build a connection around that hot button.
Publicity
Do you have access to an audience the celeb would like to get in front of? That could be a major newspaper or magazine–but it also could be a small newspaper in a community where that celeb is doing a live event soon and needs an audience. It could be your blog, a telesummit or conference you’re organizing, or even a large number of active followers on social media.
Help for a cause he or she supports
Appeal to their higher purpose. Do some research before you approach them and find out what jazzes them. Approach the celebs whose higher purpose is aligned with yours, and show them how their participation will help that purpose. Hint: find the cause first, and then dig around to see who supports it.
Credibility
Can you increase the celeb’s star power? I did this for “Mr. Guerrilla Marketing,” Jay Conrad Levinson. I’d read enough of his books and articles to know that he was sympathetic to environmental and social justice issues, but not active or particularly well-known in those worlds. He was what I call a “lazy green” in my “Making Green Sexy” talks. I was able to show him that partnering with me (a subject-matter expert in the green business world) would give him some “chops” in the green world. That was something he valued–and I got the benefit of being part of the biggest marketing brand in history.
A visit to an exotic location
If you’re organizing an event in a place people like to go (Hawaii, the south of France, Bali…) and can cover travel expenses, celebs may make time in their busy schedules to participate. My first trip to Turkey was because I was flown over and paid to give a talk; I liked it so much that my wife and I spent two weeks there last year.
A chance to meet others he or she admires
If you’ve already got some famous folks on the program, others will more easily sign up. Just like the rest of us, they like chances to network with their peers. In the marketing, publishing, and green business conferences I’ve attended, I’ve noticed that the speakers generally like hanging out with the other speakers, even with those who aren’t as well known; you can often find them talking shop–or just having fun–in the breaks or after-hours. The smart and nice ones also make themselves accessible to non-presenter participants.
Ability to grow his her own community
For both joint venture promotions and events, a celeb expects to cross-pollinate with the other presenters. If you bring together 10 people who each have lists of 10,000 non-overlapping names for a telesummit or live event, that means each featured guest gets to be in front of 90,000 new people. If they wow the audience, they’ll add many people to their databases–and their marketing funnels.
Income streams
As shown above, it’s not all about the money. But it is partly about the money. If your celeb is setting aside precious real estate in followers’ minds to promote you, you’ll want to make sure there’s something in it for them. They can only go back to the well so many times. If, for instance, they do a solo mailing for you, that might mean they have to say no to someone else. So if earning some dinero is part of the agenda, they’ll want to make sure you follow through. Your e-blasts should be tested and perform well, your offers should be compelling, and it really help if your track record is solid.
This three-part series concludes next month with some ways you can more easily get noticed by that celeb in the first place. While it may seem that I have the order backward, I’m doing it this way so that when you do get through to a celebrity, you know what to say.
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| Another Recommended Book—The New Sustainability Advantage |
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Connect with Shel on Social Media |
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About Shel & This Newsletter
As a green business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of eight 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 most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet. 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, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He 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).
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| “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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The New Sustainability Advantage, by Bob Willard
Bob Willard originally published The Sustainability Advantage: Seven Business Case Benefits of a Triple Bottom Line back in 2002. In 2012, his publisher, New Society Press, brought out an updated 10th Anniversary edition, and changed the title to The New Sustainability Advantage. |
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| Basically, Willard takes apart every conceivable factor in business economics and shows how greening the company (when done right) yields vast financial benefits for businesses large and small. In other words, the entire book is a validation of something I’ve been saying for years: business can profit strongly by going green.
The book covers obvious and non-obvious savings and income possibilities in many areas, with entire chapters on revenue/market share, energy, waste, materials and water, employee productivity, HR expenses, and risk reduction; these are the seven benefits in the subtitle. The risk reduction chapter is particularly detailed—covering reputation damage (with five subcategories), cost spirals (six subcategories), compliance, and other areas.
What’s a non-obvious saving? One example would be the cost of water embodied in the production of paper; it turns out to be an astonishing 60 liters per ream (page 88). I certainly didn’t know that!
Willard uses a mixture of real-world examples and two hypothetical companies, one quite large and the other much smaller—and uses very conservative projections for both. For the smaller company, with $1 mm annual revenue, the profit boost tips the scale at 51 percent. 51 percent growth in profit—that is, income minus costs—is not too shabby. But the large company, with revenues of $500 mm per year, showed a truly astonishing 81% net increase.
Once again, Willard is using extremely conservative assumptions, bending over backward to avoid sensationalizing the results.
Still, I would have preferred two real case studies of companies that have taken these steps, with real numbers. Fortunately, he does cite many real-world examples to illustrate specific categories of savings and revenue. To name a few of them:
- GE’s Ecomagination line of earth-friendly products brought in $18 bn in 2009, up from $10.1 bn in 2005. This was roughly 10 percent of total revenue, and was expected to grow at twice GE’s overall rate in the following five years (page 42).
- IBM turned a $1.5 mm cost into a $1.5 mm revenue stream by selling something it used to throw away, adding $3 mm to profit each year; the US Postal Service turned a $9.1 mm annual disposal cost into $13 mm annual income, or $20 mm in profit (page 72).
- The UK department store Marks and Spencer’s internationally recognized Plan A sustainability initiative was adding £50 mm (approximately $80 mm) per year to the bottom line through its original 100 sustainability commitments; this was part of the incentive to up the number of metrics to 180 (page 159).
He also cites statistics that show overall growth in consumer awareness and shifts in purchasing habits. Examples include findings that 77 percent of consumers describe themselves as green and/or health-conscious; 57 percent had made a green purchase in the previous six months; 40 percent chose particular products or services because of the values the company espoused (page 43). 92 percent of young professionals want to work at an environmentally friendly company (page 120), while at least 57 percent up to 83 percent of employers acknowledge that their corporate responsibility policies influence employee retention and loyalty (page 125).
While the book is definitely tilted toward larger entities, even small companies with just a few employees will probably find some ideas to implement that produce substantial savings and generate new revenue. For example, trash reduction can help even very small businesses lower costs. Here’s a link to a trash consultant who works strictly on a percentage of what he saves you, https://greenandprofitable.com/slash-your-solid-wastetrash-bill-50-or-more-at-no-cost/, so that would be an easy “low-hanging fruit” place to start.
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