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| Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, March 2015 |
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Your Chance to Gain Great Green Business and Social Change Skills—In a Beautiful Setting, at a Very Affordable Price
Come to Massachusetts in the beautiful spring and immerse yourself in the world of marketing for green and social change businesses. May 22-24, I’m hosting a three-day Green Marketing and Social Change Retreat at my home in the beautiful 18th/19th century ecovillage of Hockanum, in Hadley, MA (I think it’s the oldest solar home in the US). You can get small-group training (12 people, maximum) and learn to:
- Identify three distinct audiences for your green/social change products and services, and develop talking points to reach each of them
- Harness your core expertise to transform social problems into profitable solutions; make money as you turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war and violence into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance
- Sharpen your marketing chops by working together on marketing ideas for a real-world product
- Determine media angles for your organization, create a press release, and begin your marketing plan—and benefit from Shel’s post-event feedback when you complete it
- Receive media training, captured on video so you can watch and study as often as you need to
- Reach out to and partner with the best possible ambassadors: people and organizations who already reach your best prospects
- Learn how to fit your own advances in sustainability into our collective power to shape a better world
Early-bird pricing during March is just $795 (a $200 savings), and if you use the coupon code, ShelSubscriber, you can take an extra $50 off. That even includes four home-cooked gourmet vegetarian meals. Visit https://makinggreensexy.com/come-learn-with-shel-3-day-green-marketing-intensive-in-beatuiful.html to learn more (including all the fun activities on the agenda)—and https://shelhorowitz.com/shels-green-products-and-services/#intensive to register. There’s also a three-payment option, and you can even bring a friend for an extra $100 off the combined registrations. Be sure apply the coupon code and set the shipping to “Downloads Only—No Shipping” before you advance to the checkout screen.
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| Shel and his wife, Dina Friedman, outside the site of the Shel’s May 22-24, 2015 Green Marketing and Social Change Retreat |
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| This Month’s Tip: Co-Solve It! Part 1: When One Solution Addresses Several Problems |
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Imagine that you’ve developed a product or service that helps to fix poverty or war at the same time it makes a difference on climate change. Imagine that this product is cheap enough to reach the poorest of the poor, yet profitable enough to build a business.
In nature, and in our bodies, many things have more than one purpose, and nothing is wasted. As an example, think about trees. Trees provide a number of “ecoservices”: |
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- Food for people and other animals (fruits, acorns, nuts, leaves, maple or birch syrup)
- Oxygen for us to breathe
- Shade to make us more comfortable in summer
- Light modulation, allowing more light to reach the forest floor at the times of year when it’s most needed
- Habitat for a large assortment of birds, bugs, fungi, and mammals
- Construction material (wood)
- Heat energy (when burned)
- Paper
- Soil rehabilitation (as leaves drop in the fall or rotten branches fall off and are composted)
- Rainwater and groundwater management
That’s ten different functions, and probably there are others. Seven of these happen with no need for human intervention, and with no need to remove the tree.
We can frame co-solving at least two ways:
- Bringing DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES TO DEAL WITH A SINGLE ISSUE (discussed below)
- Addressing MULTIPLE ISSUES WITH ONE SOLUTION, as the trees do (in Part 2, next month, we’ll share some actual business examples)
In both, we use fewer resources to get more done, more effectively—and we share those resources so they don’t have to be expensively duplicated.
The corporate world talks about “getting people out of their silos” so Marketing, Sales, and Engineering can all brainstorm together. Academics gather in “interdisciplinary teams” to study phenomena that might include astrophysics, biology, and sociology. Nonprofits and government agencies understand “partnerships” such as public-private collaborations and cause-related marketing. Online marketing masters organize “joint ventures (JVs)” for massively successful product launches. Community organizers “build coalitions” with other groups, coming together on the issues where they agree, and separating when they diverge. Just as co-solving itself brings people from different spheres together to solve one set of problems or address one set of issues, these different but overlapping perspectives all teach us something. We can create win-win syntheses of the best of all this thinking, and use that power and synergy to address—and solve—even the most intractable problems.
Next month, we’ll look at the second category—with actual examples of business offerings that confront more than one problem.
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| Hear & Meet Shel
With eight nonfiction books under his belt, including the long-running bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and award-winners Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers and Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, you’d think Shel Horowitz might be one of those people who makes a living selling books.
But actually, book sales are only small pieces of a diversified income, all of it involving the same analytical and communication skills he uses to write his books.
This call will explore several income streams writers can pursue, such as:
- Speaking
- Consulting on the publishing process
- Consulting on your field of expertise (in Shel’s case, profitability and marketing for green/socially conscious businesses as well as authors and publishers—and with companies that want to turn hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change into sufficiency, peace, and planetary balance)
- Commercial writing for business: marketing and informational copywriting, correspondence, company histories, executive biographies, speeches, social media feeds, etc.
- Commercial writing for individuals (from resumes to thank-you notes to social media profiles)
- Foreign and subsidiary rights sales
- Product sales other than books
- Ads on your website
- Teaching and training
- Event organizing and facilitation
- Article, blog, and newsletter writing
- Radio and TV work as on-air personality, pundit, analyst, etc.
So here’s the good news: you can be a writer and make a living, even if the obvious ways aren’t working for you. Shel started his writing and consulting business back in 1981 as a typing service, “to hold me over until my freelance magazine and newspaper career took off.” The business kept evolving and is now an international copywriting, consulting, and speaking enterprise with clients on five continents. (He hasn’t typed a term paper in 25 years, and hasn’t had an outside employer since 1981.)
May 22-24: 3-Day Green/Social Change Business Intensive in Hadley, MA: Learn lots of cool stuff about marketing, product development, and profitability for green, socially conscious enterprises and have a lot of fun in a beautiful place. See description and link at the beginning of this newsletter. Again, the registration link is https://shelhorowitz.com/shels-green-products-and-services/#intensive (Note: expect prices to be substantially higher for future Intensives).
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| Some of the neighbors’ cows at the site of the May 22-24, 2015 Green Marketing and Social Change Retreat led by Shel Horowitz |
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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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Friends who Want to Help
Save the Date: Earth Day, April 22, and a Great Program from Shift Network
The Spring of Sustainability’s Earth Day event on April 22: Earth Day Summit & Initiation: Radical Times Call for Radical Transformation.
During this important 1-day virtual event, experts will share the most cutting-edge information about what is REALLY happening in the world of sustainability and what we can do to become part of the change we want to see. Next month’s newsletter will have the no-cost registration link.
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| Another Recommended Book—Deepening Community |
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Deepening Community, by Paul Born (Berrett-Koehler, 2014)
I don’t know if the author would call this a business book, but I’d call it one. To me, understanding community is key to understanding things like:
• buyer behavior—individually and in groups
• transmission of ideas (and products) through the culture
• changing behavior patterns
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| As an example of the business utility of communities, it was a local librarian who first showed me a Google search, in 1998 (the same year Google was incorporated). Google’s status as our go-to search engine came about because it spread through communities, just as the librarian showed it to me. Better results, delivered faster, and through a much cleaner interface—what’s not to like? So people who had discovered this amazing creature shared it with their friends, neighbors, colleagues, and other networks—with their communities; within a year or two, it pretty much owned the search market.
But let’s put this in perspective; the business use of community is a small fraction of the whole. While many companies have attempted to build communities among their product users, and a fair number have succeeded wildly, from Apple to Harley-Davidson, true community is not about creating shared shopping experiences. It’s about people helping their neighbors, breaking down barriers, caring.
I was particularly moved by Born’s story of first living in a neighborhood where nobody interacted, then discovering what it was like to live in a neighborhood that had created a vibrant and genuine community, to moving back to another hollow neighborhood and taking the initiative to build that sense of community. It turned out to be a lot easier than you might think, and the results were awesome. So another lesson to take away here is that each of us has the power to build community where we live, where we work, and where we interact with others. We don’t have to wait for someone else to do it.
But why make the effort? Because “collective altruism” has positive benefits for those who participate. People feel motivated and rewarded in doing good things for others, and it’s an extra bonus that they experience direct benefits too. Thus, we see communities built around bringing food to an ill neighbor or rebuilding a fire-damaged building.
In other words, you might say, altruism is in our self-interest.
Born identifies three different types of community: shallow, fear-based, and deep (not so different from the three kinds of buyers for green products and services that I discuss in my “Making Green Sexy” talks). Of course, his focus is on achieving deep community. He recognizes that communities may be geographic, but also may be focused on common interests. Some of the others are less-than-healthy, such as fear-based communities organized around keeping out those seen as different. He responds with good suggestions about how to transcend evil by working to do good together. And he points out that this actually goes back at least as far as Charles Darwin, who in his later years modified his ideas about survival of the fittest to determine that cooperative communities of organisms (animal, plant, even bacterial) are “fit” and appropriate in his worldview. Born even uses the phrase, “survival of the kindest.”
Within the framework of deep community, Born highlights five different purposes of successful communities (with a chapter on each)—as:
- Identity
- Place
- Spiritual
- Intentional
- Natural living system
He reminds us that each of us have a role to play, as communities develop. He recommends starting any meeting by letting people answer this question: “Why is it important that I am here today?” And one of the things I love is his axiom that community is not about engaging with people who are like us, but with those who are engaged by the same things that engage us.
But even as he cites a successful example of a teen who created deep community via Facebook, he regards nongeographic communities (and particularly online communities) with a certain wary skepticism. And that’s one of the places where I disagree with him. Over and over again, I’ve seen deep communities from online, and I’ve also seen the ability of an online community to provide very firm support to offline communities. Two examples of the latter: the two online discussion groups that gave strength to a community organizing campaign I founded, and the Facebook group serving members of my high school class year—which not only helped us organize our 40th reunion but keeps us actively in touch between events, providing some lubrication to the very rusty in-person relationships.
Ultimately, he says, community is about permanently creating joy—which he defines as “the deep satisfaction that we are living a life of purpose and meaning with and for others…showing and receiving compulsion and kindness.” |
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