Just a quick brag: Monday, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, my hometown paper in Northampton, Massachusetts, became the first newspaper to contract for and publish an installment of my new column, Green And Profitable (Note: this paper may not let you see it if you’re not a subscriber–but it’s one of the sample columns on this site).
1 down, 999 to go to make my goal of 1000 paying markets for the column within two years.
Friday, I got a press release from the American Booksellers Association, crowing that a lawsuit against New York State’s “sales tax fairness” law–which states that any company using affiliates based in New York has a “nexus” in the state, and thus is subject to sales tax–had been dismissed on most counts.
The question of sales tax fairness has been a bone of contention between mail-order/online and physical stores for more than a decade (I wrote a piece about this ten years ago, in fact). Brick-and-mortar retailers claim that mail-order and (more recently) online merchants have an unfair price advantage because they don’t have to charge and remit sales tax. The remote merchants claim they aren’t actually doing business in the state, and that shipping charges shift the inequality back out. However, sales tax is usually a lot more than shipping, especially for small items like books and CDs.
As a very tiny online merchant who sells info products online and through the mail, my issue is a bit different. I do see it as unfair that we onliners don’t have to collect sales tax. However, it would be a crushing burden to have to collect and remit taxes in the hundreds of jurisdictions where our customers live—California alone has a different tax structure for almost every community, involving state, county, and local taxes in varying amounts. And what happens with international sales? Such a requirement would force hundreds, perhaps thousands of merchants to close or drastically reconfigure their businesses.
So what would be fair? Here are a couple of ideas.
1. Tax all purchases in the merchant’s home jurisdiction. On the plus side, merchants are already set up to collect and pay these taxes; all we’d have to do is change our order forms to collect tax on all product purchases. On the minus side, this would skew revenues. Amazon’s hometown of Seattle or eBay’s of San Jose would benefit enormously, while small municipalities (or those who don’t happen to have a mail-sales megagiant in their borders) are left out in the cold. Probably not the best solution.
2. Collect sales tax in a national pool at the same fixed rate for all localities, use software to automatically allocate it by purchase amount and purchaser’s zip code, and distribute it, less a small administrative fee (perhaps 1 percent of all the tax collected).
3. Provide free software to every merchant that would determine and automatically debit the proper tax without adding administrative burdens.
Both 2 and 3 potentially could be cheated by a skilled hacker, which makes me nervous.
4. Eliminate the sales tax entirely for both physical and virtual businesses, and replace the revenues with income tax or some other mechanism. In today’s political climate? I think this would be a non-starter.
In short, I don’t think we have the answer yet. But I agree with the ABA that the current system of a free ride for the virtuals and a big squeeze on the physicals is not equitable (and has probably contributed to the sad demise of so many downtown storefronts)
Heretic that I am, I’m going to take an unpopular position: that the Democrats lost not because they were too bold, but because they weren’t bold enough. As all the “pundits” tell the Democrats (as they always do) to move ever-more-rightward, I’ll say, yet again, that moving rightward and wimp-ward is why they keep losing!
The strength of the Tea Party vote is more than a repudiation of Obama. It’s also a repudiation of the “mainstream” GOP (which was already so far to the right that people like Nelson Rockefeller or Lowell Weicker would have found it very uncomfortable).
The massive switch of independent voters, in particular, was, in short, a continuation of the 2008 Obama call for “change”: a loud cry that people didn’t feel they actually received the change they had voted for in 2008.
And this can be pinned squarely on the Democrats’ failure to make bold policy, and to be willing to tell the story of their success boldly. On health care, on climate change, on the economy…the Democrats whittled themselves down to half-measures. Where was the single-payer health care program that almost every other country in the world has adopted in some form (and why didn’t they position that as the boon to the business community that it is)? Where was the Marshall Plan-scale effort to get us off fossil and nuclear and into job-creating, carbon-slashing clean renewable energy? Where were the measures to hold Wall Street and the GW Bush administration accountable for the mess they made? And where were the visionary leaders who should have populated Obama’s Cabinet?
Despite a huge mandate for change, and a majority in both House and Senate, the Democrats refused to even listen to calls for massive structural reform, and then forgot all the marketing lessons they learned in the campaign and let the other side not just control but completely dominate the discourse—leaving the impression that they are a weak and ineffectual party of favors to special interests who can’t fix the economy or anything else. And failing on three crucial aspects of marketing: to remind people firstly of who got us into this mess, second, of the steps they did take to pull us out, and third, of the policy initiatives where change was actually achieved in the last two years.
Don’t apologize for your beliefs. Three out of the four most recent prior Democratic nominees–Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry–all crawled on their bellies with messages that basically said, “umm, I’m not really a liberal, I didn’t mean it, I’m soooo sorry!” And all three lost because doing that took the wind right out of their sails. Bill Clinton, who is not a liberal, didn’t play that game. Not surprisingly, he won. Obama never apologized, ignored the L-word, and didn’t even flinch when in the closing days, McCain revved it up and actually called him a socialist (traditionally, the kiss of death in US politics).
Monday evening, Rachel Maddow released a video highlighting Obama’s accomplishments. It’s a great video. The Democratic Party itself should have made something like it, six months ago, and worked to get it viral. Released by an outside journalist, twelve hours before the polls opened, it had no time to gather momentum.
Here in Massachusetts, Governor Deval Patrick wasn’t given much chance a year ago. But he ran a positive campaign focused on the slogan, “Optimism and Effort.” He highlighted his accomplishments over and over again, made a case that the work wasn’t done, and inspired audiences with a message of hope, economic recovery, and the rights of ordinary people. In other words, he used the exact strategies I’ve been advocating for decades that the Democrats use. Despite his somewhat centrist record, he was able to position himself as a change agent. I went to one of his rallies and went up to him afterward to thank him for being a sitting governor bold and hopeful enough to go out and make that kind of speech.
He did benefit from a third-party candidate who clearly drew votes from the colorless, bland GOP candidate. But still, he won, and by a larger margin than many pundits had predicted.
Massachusetts Republican gubernatorial candidate Charles Baker has gone over the edge. Rather than attacking incumbent governor Deval Patrick on his record, Charles Baker pulled a number out of a hat and claimed Patrick could raise the income tax from 5.3 to 7 percent. Patrick has never announced such a proposal.
According to the Boston Herald story,
During a press conference at Fenway Park [map], Baker said he felt comfortable with his conclusion, which he printed on a poster that was used as a prop, because of Patrick’s record of passing tax increases and the lack of specific plans from Patrick to solve next year’s $2 billion projected budget gap.
Here’s what Baker has done in my household: I have been weighing the merits of voting for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, whose politics are much closer to mine than Deval Patrick’s, or voting for Patrick, the Democrat, because he could win and would be far better than his two other rivals. Patrick has been a decent, but uninspiring and sometimes clumsy governor. Baker not only has views I find icky, but this latest faux pas has me questioning his core ethics (and where is the outrage from Fox News, dare I ask?) Cahill, the independent candidate, has made a series of remarks that make me extremely uncomfortable, including some that I and many others interpret as bigoted.
Thus, between hearing a recent Patrick speech and finding myself agreeing with almost everything he said, and my deep concerns about living under either a Baker or Cahill administration, I will be marking my ballot Tuesday for Democratic governor Deval Patrick. Charles Baker can take at least some of the credit for my vote.
I’ve written a great roundup of the cool Green trends I discovered walking the floor of the Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival in Washington, DC this weekend. some amazing stuff in fashion, transportation, shelter, food, and more. They’re doing another one in San Francisco November 6-7.
This will be the lead article in November’s Clean and Green newsletter, which will be published next week. If you’re not a subscriber yet, visit https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/ to sign up, so that you’ll see this coverage (no charge–just put your e-mail in the space at the upper right). You’ll also get eight freebies: Seven Tips to Gain Marketing Traction as a Green Guerrilla–and a series of seven action tipsheets covering:
So what are you waiting for? Just visit <a href=”https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/”>https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/ and leave your e-mail in the form at the upper right.
Shortly after starting my blogging career, I switched from Blogger to WordPress and began hosting the blog on one of my own sites, Principled Profit. Since the blog was called “Principled Profit: The Good Business Blog,” this made sense. I also had a radio show called “Principled Profit: The Good Business Radio Show” from 2005-09, and of course, my award-winning book at the time was Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.
But from now on, my blog’s primary home will be on GreenAndProfitable.com, and the blog will be known as the Green And Profitable blog
So after all this time, why change? I still feel a lot of empathy for the brand, after all.
First of all, as a condition of publishing my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, John Wiley & Sons required me to take Principled Profit off the market; they didn’t want my self-published book competing with theirs.
#2: Yes, I have a website at https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com—but that didn’t seem the right place to put the blog. I’m in a thinking-big mood lately, and I wanted something that would encompass the whole world of successful green business, not just the marketing slice.
And finally, I’ve had a long-held dream (at least 25 years, maybe longer) of being a syndicated columnist, kind of like George Will but with progressive, earth-centered viewpoints. I want to use the “bully pulpit” to make a difference on the environment, move the world toward ending hunger, poverty, and war, and reach a lot of people who haven’t read my books or e-zines. I’ve sent out column queries a number of times over the years, but so far, no luck. (I have served as a non-syndicated columnist for various publications over the years, most recently Business Ethics for over two years, until the magazine rebranded.)
With some good coaching from my Mastermind group, I’ve decided to move forward and begin at least by self-syndicating a column called—want to guess?—”Green And Profitable.”
I’ve long been a believer in speaking, writing, and consulting reinforcing each other and moving forward both a business success profile and a social agenda. If I can begin to find newspapers and magazines to take a monthly column (and pay at least a little something for it), I’m hoping my ideas will reach enough people to make a difference in the world. And as the climate crisis worsens, I feel like I can not only be an antidote to all the doom and gloom, but a conduit for ideas that people can incorporate into their own lives…ideas that make a real difference in the world and in my readers’ personal success.
Wish me luck!
Good article on Triple Pundit about how to discuss environmental issues with people who either don’t care or are actively hostile to the Green perspective. Five talking points you can use to reach people via their own self-interest.
The list includes the sweeping headings of population, education, “natural capital,” and the economy.One particularly thought-provoking point in the natural capital category: the easiest and cheapest half of any natural resource is always extracted first, meaning the environmental and economic impact of continuing to extract starts climbing very steeply once the low-hanging fruit is gone. This is why gasoline was only 30 cents a gallon when I was a kid, and floats between $2 and $4 in my area currently (much more expensive in Europe, by the way).
But on the whole, this article doesn’t give a lot of ammunition to environmental advocates in the trenches. The next step is to take these categories and make them specific and actionable, and really appeal to the self-interest of those listening.
Examples?
Today is another Blog Action Day for social justice, and today’s topic is water. My slant on this, as someone who writes about environmental issues, is that access to clean, safe water is both an environmental and a justice issue. And that the easiest way to promote safe, clean water around the world is for us resource hogs in the developed countries to be much more careful not to squander the good water we are privileged to have.
Here are some facts provided by Blog Action Day (emphasis added):
1. Unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Unclean drinking water can incubate some pretty scary diseases, like E. coli, salmonella, cholera and hepatitis A. Given that bouquet of bacteria, it’s no surprise that water, or rather lack thereof, causes 42,000 deaths each week.
2. More people have access to a cell phone than to a toilet. Today, 2.5 billion people lack access to toilets. This means that sewage spills into rivers and streams, contaminating drinking water and causing disease.
3. Every day, women and children in Africa walk a combined total of 109 million hours to get water. They do this while carrying cisterns weighing around 40 pounds when filled in order to gather water that, in many cases, is still polluted. Aside from putting a great deal of strain on their bodies, walking such long distances keeps children out of school and women away from other endeavors that can help improve the quality of life in their communities.
4. It takes 6.3 gallons of water to produce just one hamburger. That 6.3 gallons covers everything from watering the wheat for the bun and providing water for the cow to cooking the patty and baking the bun. And that’s just one meal! It would take over 184 billion gallons of water to make just one hamburger for every person in the United States.
5. The average American uses 159 gallons of water every day – more than 15 times the average person in the developing world. From showering and washing our hands to watering our lawns and washing our cars, Americans use a lot of water. To put things into perspective, the average five-minute shower will use about 10 gallons of water. Now imagine using that same amount to bathe, wash your clothes, cook your meals and quench your thirst.
So…not to leave you sunk, here are a few easy and cheap/free ways to use less water:
Don’t run the water unnecessarily! Whether washing dishes or brushing your teeth, think about low-water methods. For those dishes, clean the insides with a
soapy sponge and then only turn on the water (at modest force) to
rinse. For tooth brushing, wet the toothbrush, turn off the faucet, brush, wet again to rinse–you’ll use teaspoons instead of gallons.
Unbottle yourself. Save bottled water for places where tap water is not safe to drink. Bottling water consumes vast amounts of water (several times what’s actually in the bottle), energy, and plastic (much of which ends up in landfills). And lots of bottled water is nothing more than expensive public water supply water anyway. In much of the developed world, filtered tap water tastes as good as many bottled brands and has a far lower environmental and financial footprint.
Eat less (or no) meat–see #4, above. As a 37-year vegetarian, I can tell you that the wonderful cuisines of the world opened up to me when I stopped eating meat. I eat healthy, tasty, nutritious food, and I don’t miss the stuff I used to eat.
Sign the Blog Action Day UN Water Rights Petition:
(For more water saving tips, please see my e-book Painless Green: 110 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life-With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle.)
Shannon Cherry posed an interesting question on her blog: how encouraging should she be of people who want to train with her and then essentially remarket her stuff? Should she be a thought leader, or build a brand?
I was perhaps a bit rambly in my response (even citing the Old Testament—Abraham as a persuasive marketer!), but I still think it’s worth sharing here, since the question touches on a number of concepts I’ve explored over the years:
Here’s what I wrote:
Shannon, I’ve experienced this tension many times. It’s easier to make my peace with other people getting wealthy (wealthier than I am) from my ideas, when I remember a few things:
1) As someone who describes myself as “in constant learning mode,” I have drawn from dozens of teachers and books over decades, synthesizing what works for me and putting my own imprint on the overall combination–which has quite a bit of original thought mixed in as well. But let’s face it: 80% of what I know and teach owes some debt to someone, somewhere—but not the same someone. So when someone borrows form me as part of their own larger mix, I’m OK with that (especially if they’re considerate enough to acknowledge me).
It would be a bit different if someone took and bottled everything I know as their own. I certainly get teed off when I see other people’s bylines on something I wrote—unless it went out as a press release, and then I see it as a supreme complement (I still remember the bylined NY Times article from maybe 10 years ago that lifted whole paragraphs from a press release I wrote for a client). But if someone takes one or two of my ideas and mixes it with some from others and some of their own, I think they are the legitimate owners of that “marketing salad.” I can’t think of any marketer whose ideas are 100% original; even Claude Hopkins studied his predecessors. Some, like Jay Abraham, Janet Switzer, and Dan Kennedy, may have more originality than most, but they are not working in a vaccuum. I suspect strongly that Dan Kennedy studied Jeffrey Lant, and that Lant studied Melvin Powers, and that Powers studied John Caples and Hopkins, and back it goes, past Lincoln, Jefferson, and Franklin, at least as far as the Biblical Abraham, who used his marketing skills to persuade God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if he could find ten righteous people. (Abraham won the argument, but couldn’t find the 10.)
2) I was so enchanted by Alex Mandossian’s concept of “the paradox of syndication” that I put it in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. This is kind of a bit like Godin’s Idea Virus: you get your stuff into as many places as possible, and it grows for you. A great example of this is Amazon: With the brilliant idea to offer a no-inventory, no-work bookstore to all sorts of mom-and-pop websites in the mid-90s, Amazon became a powerhouse. It was years later before so much of the action moved to Amazon’s own site; in the early days, it spread by offering this no-work profit center to anyone who wanted it. Again, when someone spreads your stuff around, it’s on some level a deep complement. Of course, it’s much more of a complement if they give you credit. I’m a big believer in this; my books typically have long lists of acknowledgments and lots of sources cited in the text. But if your plan is to be a thought leader, it kind of goes with the territory.
For myself, I’ve decided that spreading the idea virus, being the thought leader, is more important to me than getting the glory, since I am motivated by a strong desire to create social change. But the glory certainly feels good! I think Nancy Marmolejo may have said it best in her comment:
Thought leaders don’t ask permission, they go for it. Be the one who makes this a “both/and” story, not an “either/or”.
Back to back, I saw two instances of organizations making a good step forward, but stopping half-way. Why do they stop there?
I’m in New York because I spoke at a conference today, at the Sheraton on 7th Avenue at 53rd. So of course, I took the E train from where I’m staying in Queens to the conference hotel. And since I was speaking, I had a handcart loaded with books to sell after my talk.
Getting off the train, I noticed an escalator up. Oh, good–it’s not much fun to carry 30 pounds of books and a cart up a crowded NYC public stair. And good, too, for anyone who pushes a stroller.
This is progress. When I was a kid growing up here, only a handful of stations had any kind of mechanized people lifter. A few escalators, a handful of elevators. Now, people with disabilities can navigate many parts of the system, but nowhere near the whole thing. The city is definitely making an effort.
However…the escalator only goes as far as the token arcade, and there’s still a flight of stairs from there to the street. And in the opposite direction, down to the platform, there is no option. It’s stairs–a loooong flight–or walk to another station. And no one in their right mind would take a wheelchair even on the part that has an escalator. Fail!
Inside the elegant hotel, I got to the conference room and was pleased to see, instead of the usual water bottles, the far Greener approach of carafes of filtered tap water and biodegradable (compostable, really) plastic cups. An excellent start–score one for Sheraton.
But to complete the circle, the hotel needs to collect those cups separately for composting. Instead, they’re going into the regular trash. Considering the premium price the hotel is likely paying for branded, custom printed compostable plastic, this is rather odd. Either the hotel should do glass, or collect the cups separately for proper, eco-friendly disposal.
Unlike the subway accessibility problem, which would be hugely difficult to re-do, this would be an easy fix, and would give the chain a lot more Green karma points.