Month: January 2012

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, propaganda, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

In the Dumb and Dumber department: I opened a letter marked “Personal Correspondence,” knowing full well that it was not. It used a very obvious handwriting font, nonprofit bulk-mail indicia instead of a postage stamp, and a sprayed barcode, and on the back was a Washington, DC mailing address with no name.

Personal correspondence, my arse! I opened it up because I wanted to find out who was lying to me.

Turned out to be a charity group that works on gay and lesbian rights issues, a group I’ve previously donated money to. Inside, there was no longer any attempt to look personal. It was a fairly standard fearmongering letter, some slick full-color inserts and a decal. I separated the decal into the trash, put the rest of it in the recycling—but I kept the postage paid return envelope. I’m going to print this blog post and mail it back to the org at their expense, to make a statement that I don’t like being lied to, do not condone unethical marketing even from causes I support, and to make it a few cents more expensive to treat me as a fool.

Doesn’t anyone vet this stuff before it goes out?

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Entrepreneurship, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life, Technology, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , ,

In Part 1, “Steve Jobs Introduces the first Macintosh, January 1984,” I discussed why “the computer for the rest of us” was such a big deal at the time. Now, I want to show you how the Mac allowed me to completely reinvent an old business model and dominate my local market for ten years. You might find some marketing lessons you can apply to your own business.

In 1984, when I bought my first (and one of the first) Mac, the bulk of my work was typing term papers and writing résumés. The difference for résumés, even with the dot-matrix printer that was all the Mac had back then, was amazing. Being able to bold or italicize, having the words appear on the screen exactly where they’d show up on paper, and most importantly, knowing exactly where the bottom of the page was and being able to adjust typographically to make things fit—W O W !

Up to that point, I would write a draft of the resume without worrying about formatting during the first interview, send the client away, type it up on an IBM Selectric typewriter (which sometimes took two or three tries, although it got better when I realized I could type on legal-size paper for photocopying onto letter-size and not worry so much about matching the top and bottom margins), and then bring the client back in to review the final product. Changes either required whiting out the error with a special paint, letting it dry thoroughly and very carefully inserting the correction, or retyping the whole bleeping page.

Now, here’s the lesson: Having access to this better technology meant I was not only able to change my business model, but create an unstoppable marketing advantage—and even back then, I was thinking like a marketer.

I went into the Yellow Pages with a little half-inch in-column listing that said “Affordable professional resumes while you wait.” (Couldn’t do accent marks in the Yellow Pages at that time.) Almost instantly, I had the busiest résumé shop in my whole three-county-area. And that slogan was my USP (Unique Selling Proposition) for the next decade. Résumés were not only more lucrative but a lot more fun than typing term papers, and within a few years, they (along with the growing percentage of students who had access to a computer) pretty much pushed out the term paper portion of my business. We rode the résumé train as the bread and butter of our business until Windows 95 started to catch on, with a résumé template that let people think (incorrectly, in most cases) that they could do their own résumés. And oddly enough, none of my local competitors offered the while-you-wait service that attracted so many people to us.

If you missed part 1 of this two-part series, https://greenandprofitable.com/steve-jobs-introduces-the-first-macintosh-january-1984

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By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Shel's Personal Life, Technology Tagged with ,

Part 1 of two related posts.

Here’s a video of Steve Jobs introducing the very first Mac, taken by Scott Knaster, who wrote software documentation for Apple.

If you’re under 35 or so, it may be hard to see what all the cheering was about—especially when you realize the audience was drawn from the smartest and most tech-savvy people in the country. After all, it’s a black-and-white computer with a terrible speech synthesizer and a 9-inch screen, running off a floppy disk, for goodness sake.

But compared to what else was out there, it was like going from a hand-crank-to-start Model T Ford to, let’s say, a Prius. There were no PCs in the under $8000 range that could do half of what the Mac did effortlessly, at a price under $3000. None that could:

  • Be controlled with a mouse instead of typing arcane instructions
  • Display type on the screen in multiple fonts, sizes, and styles, including handwriting-like script fonts
  • Create pictures using painting tools instead of massive amounts of computer code
  • Play chess on a realistic-looking 3D board, using the mouse to move pieces
  • Synthesize speech this clearly and easily
  • Have all the pieces in one relatively lightweight box, be carried around in a bag, and still have a screen big enough to work (there were portable computers back then, like the Kaypro and Osborne—but the Kaypro was big and awkward and had sharp metal edges, and the Osborne’s 5″ screen  was kind of like using something the size of an iPhone but weighed 24.5 pounds and had screen quality like an old non-cable black-and-white TV screen

Along with the “insanely great” slogan, Apple also called the Mac “the computer for the rest of us.” And it was! I had actually begun shopping for my first computer in late 1983. Frankly, although I recognized that I needed a computer and it would make writing my second book a lot easier, I was intimidated. I didn’t want to have to learn code, didn’t want to struggle with awkward and unintuitive commands. I had used computerized typesetting equipment on one of my newspaper jobs, and it wasn’t fun.

So I took my time researching. I looked at the Kaypro, Osborne, Morrow, Commodore 64 (which had the worst word processing software I’ve ever seen) and various others, and by March, 1984, I was pretty much set to buy an Apple II, but not excited about the learning curve, or about not knowing how the page would look until I hit print. But my dealer, who was a friend, told me, “wait a month, we’ve got something really cool coming.” When the Mac was released to the general public in my area in April 1984, I bought one of the very first ones.

In Part 2 of this series, “How the First Mac Gave Me a Monopoly Marketing Advantage for 10 Years,” I draw marketing lessons from what that first Mac allowed me to do that none of my competitors were doing.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

This is quite exciting: solar systems for remote, off-grid areas in developing countries, set up with near-zero upfront investment and a pay-as-you-go model, converting to full ownership when the system is paid for.

If you’ve read The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, this will make sense right away. If you haven’t read it, you might want to grab a copy. This is the future: bringing technology to the poorest of the poor, not as charity but as a profitable business model that maintains affordability even among customers who have almost nothing.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Politics

Some good news in the wake of the depressing and undemocratic court decision agreeing with plant owner Entergy that the Vermont legislature does not have jurisdiction over the continued operation of the plant past the March 12 expiration of its original 40 year license (a license renewed by the federal government for an additional 20 years, even though this plant has an abysmal safety record and its owners have been caught in serious distortions of the truth).

According to this article by the Conservation Law Foundation, the state of Vermont is still empowered to determine whether Vermont Yankee is operating in the public good and should continue to operate. It’s just that the decision-making authority is no longer the legislature, but the state Public Service Board.

Let’s hope they maintain the will of the people, refuse to renew the certificate, and force the leaky old troublemaker to shut down. If you’re a Vermonter, telling the Board members what you think wouldn’t be a bad idea, either—by email at the link in this sentence, or by phone at 802-828-2358.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business

If you’re interested in both business ethics and environmental sustainability (as I am), read this article on Triple Pundit that shows how corruption can degrade our environment, citing a few among many examples. They didn’t even mention many well-known cases, such as the lead-poisoned toys and adulterated baby formula from China a few years ago.

Do yourself, your customers, and your bottom line a favor: remember to be both green AND ethical.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, People Helping People Tagged with , , , ,

It’s nothing new to have bicycles as commercial haulers. In much of the world, bicycles are commonly used to haul both freight and passengers. In the US, where I live, I remember hundreds of delivery bikes on the streets of New York when I was a child: industrial-frame one-speeds with huge boxes on the front. More recently, many cities have added bicycle-rickshaws to their public transportation fleets, competing directly with gas-powered taxis. They’re cheaper and of course much greener than motorized ones, and in congested, traffic-clogged cities, often just as fast.

My much more rural area has had Pedal People, a bicycle-based trash-hauling and farmshare-delivery company, since 2002. Oh yeah, and when I was a high school student in the 1970s, I commuted by bike, 5-1/2 miles uphill in New York City traffic, when the weather permitted. It saved me half an hour each way over the bus, because the bus route was far from linear (although I could read on the bus and not on my bike).

So what makes this decade different?

First, the growing green consciousness. When people who are already disposed to lower their carbon footprint (and their costs) learn that bicycles are really viable transportation alternatives in many cases, the switch becomes easy.

And second, the rapidly developing technology of bicycles. The kind of high-tech freight-hauling bikes described in this article about a bike-powered cargo company in Victoria, British Columbia would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

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By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized Tagged with

These tips to green your clothes-washing range from no-brainer easy to fairly extreme in the DIY mode. I personally am not ready to start making my own washing solution by grating soap bars into flakes. But I’m already doing a lot of this, the easy stuff that makes no impact on lifestyle but a significant impact on carbon footprint. One he leaves out is to use a detergent formulated for cold-water washing, and then wash in cold water. If it hasn’t been sunny for a few days (we have solar hot water), I often do a load in cold water, and it comes out just as clean.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Demographics/Psychographics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,

The other day, I was checking my e-mail from the B&B I was staying in during a short visit to the Ft. Meyers, Florida area—and what do I see but a spam mail with the headline, “Sanibel Vacations.”

Normally, I’d delete this unread. But as it happens, Sanibel was about fifteen minutes’ drive from where I was, and I was planning to go there the following day. I actually opened up the e-mail, to discover that it was about lodging options. Not of interest; I was very happy with the B&B.

In the same batch, there was quite a bit of other travel spam: Hawaii, Italy, and I forget what else. These show up every day. But I don’t remember seeing spam about Sanibel more than once or twice in the past. Could this ad actually have been triggered by my logon from so close by the previous day, or was it actually random? It didn’t occur to me to check the sent time or other clues before hitting delete.

I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to get a popup or banner ad; that’s old news. For years, for instance, Facebook thinks I live in Alaska part of the time, because my virtual assistant sometimes logs in for me, and that’s where she lives. I regularly see ads from both Alaska- and Massachusetts-based advertisers. And I’ve noticed that my son the oboist will get classical music ads, while I get business and environmental messages, even though we log on through the same wi-fi network.

But this wasn’t a popup; it was an e-mail. Which means if it wasn’t an accident, someone has developed a rather scary system that matches a network’s IP address, an offer the robot thinks is relevant (which didn’t happen to be true this time—but would have been if the ad had been for restaurants or attractions)—and the address I was checking in Mail2Web, which doesn’t happen to run through my Gmail account and is not the dominant address associated with my iPad (I don’t expect any privacy when Google is involved).

To make it even more spooky, I’m writing this on the airplane back homeward, and this month’s Southwest Spirit has an article on predictive marketing, of all things, and the coming revolution in targeting enabled by smartphones. I have an old-fashioned dumb cell phone that never goes online, and I don’t have the phone features enabled on my iPad. Yet I got that particular ad.

Just a coincidence? I really don’t know. What do YOU think?

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Uncategorized

Despite the rosy tone the New York Times reporter used, the real message here is that “many evacuated residents must accept that it won’t happen in their lifetimes”—and

that radiation levels inside homes had dropped by only about 25 percent. That left parts of the city with levels of radiation four times higher than the recommended maximum exposure.

And

Experts say residents can return home safely only after thousands of buildings are scrubbed of radioactive particles and much of the topsoil from an area the size of Connecticut is replaced.

Even forested mountains will probably need to be decontaminated, which might necessitate clear-cutting and literally scraping them clean.

The Soviet Union did not attempt such a cleanup after the Chernobyl accident of 1986

Tell me again why nuclear power makes any sense?

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