Starbucks has been getting a lot of flack since announcing its “Race Together” initiative. People are mostly either calling the company self-serving or questioning why a cafe chain would want to take on an agenda that seems so unrelated to its core business.

Now, I’ve certainly criticized companies for cause marketing that seems to have nothing to do with its purpose. For example, I’ve publicly questioned why Ford has chosen to support a breast cancer charity rather than something related to, say, transportation access.

And I’ve given space to Starbucks critics like Dean Cycon of Dean’s Beans, who says the coffee giant could be doing a lot more on sustainability, fair trade, and organic.

But I actually think this time Starbucks did something sensible and good, and I was really pretty shocked at the negative media firestorm.

Consider this:

  • In the post-Ferguson climate, where black communities are showing righteous anger about police violence, race is back on the agenda
  • Many legislative bodies are imposing onerous barriers to registering and voting, ostensibly to stop “voter fraud” (which is close to zero)—but whose deeper agenda seems to be denying the vote to people of color and those with low incomes
  • As a culture, when we want to talk things over, we do so over coffee—so what better place to start a national conversation?
  • Starbucks has thousands of locations in cities—Ground Zero for the recent race incidents; thus, the company has a vested interest in de-escalating tensions and opening dialog so those stores continue to thrive, in addition to the moral grounds it cites

While writing the message “Race together” on cups ends today, Starbucks continues to see fostering dialog on race as a priority. In a public letter yesterday to the company’s employees, CEO Howard Schultz wrote,

We have a number of planned Race Together activities in the weeks and months to come: more partner open forums, three more special sections co-produced with USA TODAY over the course of the next year, more open dialogue with police and community leaders in cities across our country, a continued focus on jobs and education for our nation’s young people plus our commitment to hire 10,000 opportunity youth over the next three years, expanding our store footprint in urban communities across the country, and new partnerships to foster dialogue and empathy and help bridge the racial and ethnic divides within our society that have existed for so many years…The heart of Race Together has always been about humanity: the promise of the American Dream should be available to every person in this country, not just a select few.  We leaned in because we believed that starting this dialogue is what matters most.  We are learning a lot. And will always aim high in our efforts to make a difference on the issues that matter most.

If this is self-serving, I say we need more of that kind of self-serving.

 

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Much as I would love to see a Bernie Sanders presidency, I don’t think he should run. Why? This comment I wrote in response to a Facebook “fantasy” (her word) of a Sanders-Elizabeth Warren ticket explains succinctly:

Fantasies? Absolutely. Elections? Not so much–and I say this as someone who has voted for Nader and Kucinich and who feels Bernie Sanders represents me as well as Vermonters. We need them both in the Senate where they can actually work for change, and not marginalized as 3% presidential candidates who can be safely ignored or ridiculed. Oh, and Elizabeth Warren (who IS my Senator) needs to get off the Israel-right-or-wrong train.

Now, if we had instant runoff, parliamentary democracy instead of winner-take-all and some other much-needed reforms, it would be different. But right now, the system is totally stacked in favor of forcing us to vote for the least horrible mainstream candidate instead of the most wonderful fringe people. 20 years ago, I was excited at the idea that the day would come when I could vote for Hillary–but she was a different person then.

Among the other reforms we need is in campaign finance. It’s an absolute travesty that we allow our candidates to be bought and sold, and force them to spend so much time fundraising. We also need to look at the often-ridiculous way congressional district lines are drawn. The way we let candidates buy attack ads without proving their facts. And the way we allow TV to control the discourse in ways that restrict real discussion of real issues.

With those additional reforms, perhaps we’d get a viable party that actually stands for the people’s interest—or the planet’s. In Europe, which has a parliamentary system and a different way to fund elections, Green Party candidates often win seats and most countries have been governed by people-centered democratic governments. And, perhaps not by coincidence, things like health care and college education and maternity leave are considered fundamental rights. Meanwhile, we’re stuck with Tweedlebad and Tweedlehorrible.

Meanwhile, please, let’s keep Bernie and Elizabeth in the Senate.

That’s my opinion. Please put yours in the comments.

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cover of the book, Creative Anarchy
Creative Anarchy cover (green side)
For a non-visual learner like me, Creative Anarchy is a mind expander. The author has brought together ideas from design studios around the world, many of which offer very non-traditional approaches.

The book has two key principles. The first is that rules are made to be broken. The second is that in order to break the rules, you must understand them.

For example, a common rule in book publishing is that books have both a front and a back. However, this book has two fronts. The larger, green, side is more or less about the rules. The thinner, red, side is about breaking those rules.

It makes fascinating reading.

However, as someone who occasionally hires graphic artists, I find that I generally insist on two rules that only get lip service here. First, I believe that it is usually important to write copy before considering the design. And secondly, I believe that any visual representation should enhance the message. Some of her examples do this beautifully and creatively, while others left me scratching my head and saying huh?

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Value is about not just price, but quality. This busy market obviously understands.
Value is about not just price, but quality. This busy market obviously understands.
If you want to market on price, look at words like “affordable” and “value.” “Cheap” can be deadly.

As a service provider, I did lead on price for a number of years. Back in the days when much of my business was resume writing, I used a simple half-inch in-column ad in the Yellow Pages (remember them?) with the slogan “Affordable professional resumes while you wait.” The year they changed it without permission to “Affordable professional resumes while U wait,” I successfully argued that proper grammar was a key selling point in my line of work and they killed it—and got the cost of the whole year’s ad refunded. I turned out to be wrong; that ad brought me plenty of clients. But I personally would not patronize a writing service whose face to the world was ungrammatical.

Those ads ran in the 1980s and 1990s, and resume writing is only a tiny fraction of my current business. These days, I stress value, not price–for all the services I offer. Some are still quite inexpensive, like writing a press release or book cover—or, for that matter, the occasional resume I still write. Others, including strategic consulting on green and social change profitability as well as book publishing consulting, can be fairly pricy.

I would have moved away from marketing on low price anyway, as my business matured. But if I hadn’t, my business would have dried up. The market is very different now. Nobody is a prisoner of their own geography any more. I can’t compete on price with some clown on a bottom-feeding service bidding site who throws an article into a word-blender and spits out crap for $5 a shot. But I sure can compete on value and quality.

As a consumer, I’m price-sensitive on some items, but quality will trump price, and so will politics. Yesterday, I spent $40 or $50 at the farmers market. I could have bought the (theoretically) same items at a supermarket for half the price, but not the organic/local/fresh choices I purchased. But I also stopped at the local independent discount store and picked up some just-past-date polenta for a buck. I cooked it last night and it was fine. I have a less gourmet one in my fridge that I paid $3 for at a different store and it doesn’t expire until November, which means the one I ate tonight was probably packed last summer. But that’s OK, it was fine.

I learned all the way back in the 1980s that price and value were not necessarily the same. After a couple of bad experiences with cheap electronics, I started buying better quality components for my stereo, better telephones, and so forth—and being much happier with my purchases. I learned that I could get a good deal through a remainder catalog, and that a $100 item with an original list price of $300 was generally going to be a much better value than a $75 item that had never sold for more than $100. And when I bought my first computer, I went with the expensive but easy-to-use Macintosh and was very happy I did.

I will shop at that local discount store, but I won’t shop at that very famous low-price big box store beginning with a W. While I recognize that they are among the best in the industry on sustainability (something very important to me), I’m also painfully aware of how much I dislike their store siting and closing policies, their community relations, labor practices, supplier practices, and a bunch of other stuff. Plus, I’ve heard that the quality is often less than stellar. I give them kudos in my speeches for, among other things, developing a massive market for organic foods among people who have never been inside a Whole Foods. But I personally choose not to shop there.

But I’m perfectly happy to drive inexpensive, functional cars. Right now, we have a 2004 Mazda, bought new for $17K, and a 2005 Toyota Corolla, bought at six years old but with only 26,000 miles on it, for $10K. I expect both to last several more years. When we bought the Corolla, one of our other options was a used Prius with 99,000 miles, for $12K. The Corolla seemed like a MUCH better deal. It wasn’t the lower price so much as having only 1/4 as many miles.

In short, as a consumer, I’ll definitely factor in price, but it won’t be the only factor. How about you? As a business owner and as a consumer, how does price factor into your decisions.

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Today, I encountered a post from an Internet friend who lives in Israel, urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netenyahu to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities.

The post made me feel queasy. My original response was a desire to scream and yell that this was racist. Fortunately, I had enough self-control not to give into that stupid and unproductive urge. I also didn’t want to start a firestorm of negative attacks on me because I had the temerity to disagree with a view that I felt was both racist and extremist. And yet I wanted to confront this way of thinking and not let it go unchallenged.

So instead, I thought for a couple of minutes about what type of response would actually be heard and not blocked out—what could actually advance a dialog. (I will confess that I haven’t always been skilled in that type of response, but I think I’ve gotten much better in the past several years.

And this is what I finally wrote—knowing that my friend is deeply religious, and that an appeal to his religious convictions might actually get through.

Even as poor a student of the Torah as I am knows that God does not want to see innocent blood shed. Your recipe for Bibi would leave hundreds of thousands dead and the Middle East–including Israel–in flames. Possibly the entire world. I urge you to think carefully about unintended consequences.

And amazingly enough, this actually did open a door for some mild and thoughtful dialog. Not a perfect outcome but one I could feel reasonably good about. I had used the marketing principles I teach, and given the right message for the audience.

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The famous globe at the Epcot Center entrance
The famous globe at the Epcot Center entrance
On my fifth trip to Orlando, staying 3 miles from the Walt Disney World entrance, I figured it was time. So I arranged for press comps and spent half a day at Epcot (the logical park for someone into both travel and outer space). I had low expectations, but the experience fell so far below those low expectations it was shameful.

I’d always thought that the travel half of Epcot attempted to recreate the experience of being in many different parts of the world. They featured exactly 11 countries, eight of which I’d been to. Nine of those 11 were exclusively about shopping and eating. Two actually had an educational exhibit (one of which, in the Japan pavilion, was quite well done but only took about 30 minutes to go through the whole thing). We did catch one excellent performance by a Chinese dance troupe. On the space side, the simulated space ride was excellent, but the rest of it was pretty mediocre, and the lines were very long. And considering that almost all the space exhibits had corporate sponsors, you’d think they could do something about the very high admission fees.

I’d experienced a similar space simulation 40 miles away at the Kennedy Space Center, a much more interesting park overall, and considerably cheaper, to boot. In fact, we liked Kennedy so much, we went back the next day to see the parts we’d missed. If you’re going to Orlando and you’ve got a personality like mine, it’s a better bet.

The whole experience made me very grateful that neither of my kids ever showed any interest in going to Disney. They’d much rather come with us to places like Denmark, Italy, and California (we live in Massachusetts).

Real places, in other words. Disney is a marketing machine that has very little to do with recreating reality.

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Ooops! I’ve been reviewing my blog posts over the past several years, mining material for my next book. And I’m embarrassed to find this post, dated March 14, 2012, promising to report back on the results of a concentrated effort to get search engines to notice a particular page—in this case, the page for my resume writing services (once the mainstay of my commercial writing services, but now a considerably smaller percentage of my work).

So, better late than never, here are the results:

Whether it was the strategy I discussed in that post or something else, I’m pleased to report a definite uptick in inquiries (most of which come by phone, interestingly enough). Last year, for the first time in a long time, resume clients who found me by looking outnumbered those referred by past clients or colleagues—and virtually all of those were via Google or an online Yellow Pages (I think there were one or two who found me in the paper Yellow Pages). And while it’s still a very small part of my business, the overall number was significantly higher last year.

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I just took a first stab at writing an Environmental and Social Change Business Bill of Rights. Adopting these principles would level the playing field and enable green, socially conscious businesses to compete as equals—and in that competition, they will win almost all the time.

But this should not be just me spouting off. I got the discussion started, but I want to learn what others would be important in that kind of a campaign (and who has energy to work on it.

Also, I’ve got seven points here. If we continue to model it after the US Bill of Rights written by James Madison (who later became President of the United States), we need ten What did I leave out?

We, the people of Planet Earth, hereby declare that every nation and the planet as a whole have certain inalienable rights, including Life, Sufficiency, Peace, and Planetary Balance. To these ends, we call upon the governments of the world, at all levels, to establish these rights through mandating the following policies:
1. Manufacturers shall take full responsibility for their products at all stages in the product lifespan, including manufacturing, distribution, use, collection, reuse, disassembly, recycling, and disposal. Retail and wholesale channels shall accept used products and convey them back through the supply chain to the manufacturers.
2. Passing off costs to others, as externalities, is not acceptable. Pollution, waste, destruction of others’ property, etc. will be paid for by the entity that causes it.
3. All new construction or major renovation shall meet minimum standards of energy, water, and resource conservation, as well as fresh air circulation. Such standards shall be incorporated into local building codes, meeting or exceeding LEED silver or stretch codes.
4. All newly constructed or significantly renovated government buildings shall be Net Zero or Net Positive in energy and water use, producing at least as much energy and water as the building uses. Private developers shall receive incentives to meet this standard.
5. All subsidies for fossil (including but not limited to oil, diesel fuel, airplane fuel, natural gas, propane, and coal), nuclear, or other nonrenewable energy sources shall be phased out as soon as practical, to be completed within a maximum period of three years.
6. All subsidies that promote fossil-fuel-powered vehicles over cleaner alternatives, including subsidies to infrastructure exclusively or primarily for their use, shall be phased out as soon as practical, to be completed within a maximum period of ten years.
7. Average fleet vehicle mileage standards shall be increased to 70 MPH for passenger vehicles carrying up to six people, and to 40 MPH for trucks and buses within ten years. Non-fossil-fuel vehicles shall be designed to make a contribution to stationary power needs.

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Thursday night, I went to a workshop by my friend Ingrid Bredenberg, Essential Skills for 21st Century Leaders, put on by the graduate program in Leadership at American International College. Her curriculum was based on the DiSC personality matrix.

Short version: we often expect people to act as if they approach the world the same way we do—but actually, most people tend to emphasize certain personality traits and de-emphasize others. We fall into four sweeping personality categories, though with plenty of gray area and overlap. If you expect the same behavior patterns from someone with a different way of looking at the world, you both will be disappointed and frustrated.

The four personaity categories, according to DiSC (image by Shel Horowitz)
The four personality categories, according to DiSC (image by Shel Horowitz)

The two axes measure whether a person is outgoing or reserved, and whether he or she focuses more on people or on tasks.

Dominants (D) are outgoing and very focused on results. They ask What questions, like “what has to happen to move this forward?”

Influencers (i) are also outgoing, but much more people-oriented. They ask Who questions, like “who should be part of the team?”

Steady (S) people are a lot quieter and dependable. When a D or i initiates a project, often it’s the S who gets it done. Look for How questions: “How can we accomplish this task?

And the Conscientious (C) are task-oriented introverts who ask Why questions, such as “why do we need to do this?”

The thing about personality traits is that they are strengths up to a point—but in overdrive, they become weaknesses. A super-intense D may turn lets-get-it-done into running roughshod over others and becoming a tyrant, while a super-C can turn caution into stubbornness, dig heels in and not move forward. A super-i could be annoyingly flighty even at a party, eventually, while a super-S might turn strong loyalty into blind obedience. (These are my examples, not Ingrid’s.)

Why does the i take a small letter when the other three are capitalized? Ingrid thought it might have been as simple as the need to make it clear that it was not a lower-case L. In the sans-serif typefaces that DiSC’s graphics people favor, those two look pretty similar.

As a marketer rather than a manager, I see implications far beyond running a meeting or tasking a project through an organization. Just as in the green world, I tell my clients to message differently to Deep Greens, Lazy Greens, and Nongreens, and just as many marketers tell you to market differently to people who learn by sight, sound, or touch (visual, aural, or kinesthetic), so it’s important to reach the different personality styles with messages that resonate with each.

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Old Movie Camera: How much real news went through these cameras? And how much goes through today's?
How much real news went through these cameras? And how much goes through today’s?

When I’m in airports, fitness centers, and other places that force-feed TV news, I’m always astonished that anyone takes it seriously. Even in the 60s when they had real news staffs, it was so superficial. I read somewhere that an entire 1-hour newscast transcript would only fill a couple of columns on a page of the NY Times.

These days, it’s far worse than “if it bleeds, it leads.” Murder, mayhem, celebrity gossip, and an astonishingly small amount of actual news, and even less serious analysis. And those are the serious networks. Add in a serious case of propaganda and distortion and you can’t be surprised at how little most Americans understand their world, if they accept what’s fed to them by the medium they’ve chosen to “consume” the news.

Of course, the good news is that anyone who wants to educate themselves now has unlimited choices from around the world. My favorite newspaper these days is London’s The Guardian. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actual paper copy.

In the 1980s, I used to subscribe to a magazine called World Press Review, which featured reportage on the same story from 8 or 10 different papers around the world; it was like a one-stop course in media literacy and the nature of 1) matching message to audience, and 2) shaping the audience through the message. Since I made (and continue to make) my career as a marketer and a journalist, these were crucial lessons.

However, it was a monthly, and the stories were at least three months old by the time they got to my mailbox. Of course, technology has passed it by now, and I don’t miss it; we can easily get the same effect by viewing the same story on NPR, Fox News, Al Jazeera-English, the New York Times, Paris Match (which Google will even translate for you, sort of), and your local newspaper.

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