Month: December 2019

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Branding, Business Ethics, Business-general, Copywriting, Corporate Social Responsibility, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Green Business, Innovation, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Other, People Helping People, poverty, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

Every year, bestselling author and social media visionary Chris Brogan challenges his huge reader base to come up with three words to provide focus for the coming year. This year, I decided to take the challenge for the first time since 2016. And this time, I’m going to emblazon them on a printout in huge type, and post it where I can see my words every day.  My three words are:

  1. Clarity
  2. Justice
  3. Healing

Clarity

The first three lines of an eye chart
I’ll discuss Justice in Part 2 (with lots of links(), and Healing–including  a deeply personal experience that happened to me this month–in Part 3.eye chart reminds me of having clarity in this year of 20//20 Clarity, 2020 AD

The year 2020 reminds me of 20/20 vision: seeing with perfect clarity. While I don’t expect to achieve perfect clarity, even with the new glasses I’ve just been prescribed ;-), I do want to focus on seeing and acting as clearly as possible.

It’s been several years since I changed the focus of my business toward helping other businesses (and other types of organizations such as nonprofits) find the sweet spot where profitability intersects with environmental and social good.

I now market myself as the person who can help any organization discover opportunities to do go in the world by creating, identifying and re-purposing, and/or marketing profitable products and services that turn hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.

I’ve gotten a lot clearer in my messaging since starting this quest in the summer of 2013, since giving my TEDx talk in 2014, and even since publishing my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, in 2016 (which Chris Brogan endorsed, along with Seth Godin, Jack Canfield, and many others).

But I’m still nowhere near as clear as I need to be about:

  • Who wants to pay me to do this work?
  • Which services they most want, and to achieve what goals?
  • How to set a price structure that’s fair both to solopreneurs and large corporations? 
  • Who do I most want to serve?

I’m beginning to figure out the answers. I’ve settled on pricing based on the size of the organization, which seems reasonably fair because larger organizations are more complex and therefore a task such as a marketing plan our outlining a product development campaign will take a lot more of my time–but I’m not sure I’ve got all the bugs worked out yet. I’ve realized that I’d rather work with small entities than large ones, but I am very open to being farmed out by a larger entity to their smaller customers, suppliers, or business units–and to the larger entities sponsoring me in other ways, such as funding my speaking to organizations that can’t otherwise afford me.

Hopefully, seeing that message of clarity on the wall of my workspace every day will inspire me to figure all this out, and to make my message so clear that everyone understands exactly how I can help and why it’s important.

 

I’ll discuss Justice in Part 2 (with lots of links), and Healing–including  a deeply personal experience that happened to me this month–in Part 3.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Branding, Business-general, Consumer Issues, Greenwashing, language, localism/locavore, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

Nostalgiawashing: pretending that you represent the “good old days” of small-town, small-business artisanship while actually running a large, highly mechanized operation.

Although I just invented the term (zero relevant hits on Google), nostalgiawashing’s been a thing for decades. Think about Jack Daniels or Pepperidge Farm. Or nostalgia-driven experience-based companies like Cracker Barrell and even Disney. (Disney is a bit schizophrenic on this, because it markets both nostalgia (for example, Main Street, USA) and its opposite, which I’ll call “tomorrowism” (for example, Epcot). All these companies try to bring us back to a simpler era, when nearly all the figures of authority were straight, white, middle-aged, able-bodied Christian men, and when the upper class could mostly avoid contact with the “masses yearning to breathe free”: immigrants and locally-born alike in the lower classes. Of course, that era never actually existed!

I’m not going on the warpath to eliminate nostalgia-based marketing, even when I think it’s deceptive enough to be called nostalgiawashing. But at least don”t insult our intelligence with it!

This is inspired by a mailing that did insult my intelligence. It was a card that offered “warm winter wishes” on the outside and then offered me a discount on replacement windows and “one of my favorite holiday recipes” (included on a separate index card). I have been a customer, getting replacement patio doors from them a few years ago, so I’ll give them credit for at least keeping in contact. Here’s why it didn’t work:Four-piece mailing from the window company

  • The envelope used a very nice handwriting font, but a return address sticker without a name, just an address…a first-class presort stamp and a sprayed-on barcode. It wasn’t difficult to figure out that this was bulk mail, though I thought it was from a charity.
  • The card is in a different handwriting font, even though it purports to be from the same person who addressed it. And they even positioned the text so it slants up the page–but uniformly on every line??? Come on, people, do you really think you’re fooling anyone?
  • I understand why the recipe card, on what pretends to be an old-fashioned index card, uses yet a third handwriting font–because, of course, the manager’s “Aunt Amy” wrote it. But at the end of the second side (not shown), it has a copyright notice in the name of the company. And the recipe itself is something I personally found disgusting. I can’t imagine wanting to make a dessert out of a whole sleeve of saltines, and Heath bar bits.

Of course, I don’t happen to be in the market for new windows anyway. Even if the mailer had been brilliant, I don’t need what they’re selling. But if they were a client of mine, I would have not only used a completely different approach, but recognized that not a lot of previous customers necessarily need four more windows right now and provided incentives for referrals.

 

 

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