The Clean and Green Club, November 2024

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: November 2024

Why Marketers Need Poets (and other creatives)

Photo Credit: Anna Pou via Pexels

In a recent newsletter, Brian Kurtz of Titans Marketing quoted his late mentor Marty Edelston, founder of Boardroom Reports (best known for the Bottom Line newsletters):

“Fiction is not worth your time. We don’t need to escape but we always need to learn through business books.”

Despite my enormous respect for both Brian and Marty, I vehemently disagree. This is adapted and expanded from my response to Brian:

Really shocked that a marketer as astute as Marty would say this. Fiction and poetry and drama (and visual art, music, dance, etc.) are windows into souls—keys to understanding psychology—extremely useful for every marketer who is not trying to sell a universally needed product. And as far as I know, there’s no such thing as a universally needed product. Toilet paper comes pretty close—but there are plenty of people who use bidets, or who live in cultures that have other ways to clean up. Historically, we all managed to do without TP for most of human history—a point reinforced by the packaging of the Trader Joe’s recycled TP I sometimes buy.<end of my note to Brian>

I feel that my effectiveness as a marketer is deeply rooted in the insights to the human condition that I get through literature, music, visual art, movies, and other forms of creative expression. It’s hard for me to imagine invention or innovation without them. It doesn’t surprise me that the earliest human artifacts include works of visual art that tell stories (cave paintings and pictographs)—and that they are present in many ancient cultures all around the world. I’ve personally seen them in places as far apart as Western China and New Mexico.

Let them into your own life. Not just because you’ll get marketing insights, but because you’ll feed your soul. My initial attraction to the arts had nothing to do with marketing—but once I was immersing myself, I became a much better marketer.

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.

Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands

Climate restoration

Crossing the Line: Finding America in the BorderlandsBy: Sarah Towle

I don’t usually review resources dedicated to uncovering and solving big social problems without an obvious business context—but I’m making an exception for this historical and current analysis of the incredibly cruel US immigration “system”—which is not at all systematic in its functionality, only in its cruelty and racism.

And while it may not be obvious, business is definitely a factor in this cruelty. The private prison/detention system is a huge beneficiary, building massive profits out of the exploitation and even torture of those who fled for their lives. The human traffickers and smugglers who help bring people and products across the border are running businesses, albeit illegal ones. Also, the roots of the border crisis have a lot to do with US policies going back a century and more that prioritized profits for giant agribusiness companies growing such crops as coffee and bananas. The term “banana republic” actually came out of that long-running exploitation—and so did the dual crisis of drugs ravaging the US while US-made guns ravage Latin America.

Towle explores both, as well as the devil’s partnerships between those private entities and some of the most repressive agencies within our federal and state governments—some of which have their own roots in the slave abduction rings that operated before the Civil War—and the way both have abused those in their custody to the point where torture is the only word to call it. Both the agencies and the profiteers are aided and abetted by a shadowy network of right-wing organizations organized by a man named John Tanton (p. 140)—a name I hadn’t encountered before reading this book, although his impact has been felt in repressive laws, repressive judicial appointments, and much more.

These tangled webs may help explain why oppression and arbitrary (often illegal) treatment of low-income immigrants of color are a curse in our society whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House.

Towle is a good writer and researcher. She tracks down long spirals of causes, long histories of completely unnecessary cruelty and barbarism directed at those who came to the US seeking protection. All-too-often, they find the opposite. And she makes the point over and over (p. 105, for instance) that attempting to deter migrants from entering doesn’t work, and won’t work as long as they are fleeing direct threats to their own and their loved ones’ lives.

As I do, she would love to see policy based on what we say we believe in as a country. It was the US that in the aftermath of WWII pushed hard to get other countries to accept asylees and refugees.

Personal note: I have been involved in immigration justice activism since the spring of 2019 and I met many of the activists Towle profiles when I participated in an eight-day witness delegation to the US-Mexico border in early 2020.

Note: Towle is based in London and currently touring the US. If you are in or near Massachusetts or Connecticut, this flier outlines a series of events from November 12 to 20. I’ll be attending her program this Wednesday evening, November 13, at Amherst Books along with my wife, D. Dina Friedman, author of recent poetry and short story collections on immigration themes (if you’re in the room, please say hi to me). She will also be in Northampton, Hartford, Worcester, and Boston.

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.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.

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