Author: Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert

A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com

By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Diversity Tagged with , ,

Guest post by By Melissa M Williams, Author of Iggy the Iguana

Have you ever been afraid to start something new because you didn’t know what to expect? Maybe everyone will be different than you? Doing something new and out of our comfort zone can definitely develop a person, well in this case, an Iguana’s personality!

Iggy the Iguana is a story about a young iguana boy starting his first day at a new school. It doesn’t seem too bad, until you find out that he has to change from a private “All-Lizard” school out in the suburbs to a public “All-Animal” school located in the heart of the city in Houston, Texas. Diversity and acceptance has the power to change Iggy from being a timid and insecure iguana to a confident and understanding reptile.

Turtles can’t take off their shells … not even if they have a bad back. Cats have to shave off their hair if they want to play baseball outside in the summertime. Who knew! Bullfrogs from New York don’t always come across as friendly, so maybe you should get to know them a little better. Newborn puppies don’t always look like cute little dogs at birth, so don’t mistake them as aliens. Box shell turtles can’t swim, so why is the one Iggy meets determined to surf one day? Just because the mouse from Spain doesn’t talk very much, doesn’t mean he can’t speak English … maybe he has more to say if you just ask. It’s hard for Iggy to believe that if he didn’t meet all of these different animals in fourth grade, he would have missed out on so much knowledge and excitement. Iggy went from being shy and reserved to being inquisitive and open-minded. Experiences with those who are not alike help a lizard, like Iggy, become a more well-rounded individual, once he realizes his way of doing things is not the only way in the world. Iggy also got to teach the other animals a thing or two about being a lizard! When we accept others and find ways to relate on a whole new level, our own self-acceptance emerges too. Just think, if we were all the same, life would be pretty dull.

Iggy’s story doesn’t just teach that diversity on the outside is interesting, but diversity on the inside matters too. Not everyone’s family upbringing or structure is the same. Many of the animals in Iggy the Iguana didn’t come from the same type of family as Iggy. These eye-opening realizations help Iggy become more empathetic and understanding. The true value of friendship is addressed as Iggy makes lasting relationships with his new friends.

Iggy the Iguana – Iggy the Iguana is the first book in the Iggy Chapter Book Series for ages 7 to 11. The story focuses on the major themes of acceptance, friendship, and diversity while Iggy starts a brand new school. The transition from a private “all-lizard” school to a public “all-animal” school is eye opening, as Iggy soon accepts that just because other animals are different doesn’t mean they can’t be your friends. By the end of Iggy’s 4th grade year, he realizes that changing schools was the best move he could have ever made!
Melissa M. Williams is an advocate for literacy and creativity in children. Her children’s chapter books were inspired by real life experiences with childhood pets she owned while growing up in Houston, Texas. While finishing her Master’s degree in Professional Counseling, Melissa started substitute teaching for elementary schools in order to understand the daily life of her young audience. The students helped her create relatable and realistic stories while including lessons, values and acceptance within the story-line. In addition to writing, Melissa spends most of the school year speaking to students about her own journey as an author and the process of creative writing, while encouraging each student to think outside the box, follow their inner passion, and write their own stories.
Win the Iggy the Iguana Give Away! Including the Newly Released Items in Iggy Collection, Snap Shell the Turtle (Plush Doll), Iggy Collector’s Baseball Cards, and The Read3Zero T-Shirt … supporting the fight against illiteracy 30 minutes at a time. Be our most active visitor during the tour for a chance to win this Iggy Collection — the tour schedule is posted at https://virtualblogtour.blogspot.com/2010/01/iggy-iguana-and-melissa-m-williams-tour.html to make it easy for you to visit and comment. To learn more about Iggy and Melissa Williams – visit www.iggytheiguana.com.

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By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics, Peace and War, propaganda

Very interesting post from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), raising the question about whether a journalist with a son in the Israeli army can be neutral and objective in covering the war where his son is a soldier.

Rather than tell you what I think in my usual blunt and loud way. I’d like to know what you think. Please fill in a comment, below.

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By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Networking Tagged with , , ,

I read a lot of business books, and too many of them are so dry you could use them for sawdust.

Last year, I happened to meet Kevin Daum at a dinner party Sam Horn threw in Washington, DC (where neither of us live) and we connected quickly and personally. Kevin is a sales and marketing guy who has a similar approach to mine, and he’s also someone who can write. He’s even working on a book about Green business!

Kevin’s latest book, Roar! Get Heard in The Sales and Marketing Jungle, is a classic business parable of the sort popularized by Ken Blanchard. I’ve read a lot of these. What’s especially interesting about this one, in addition to the quality of the writing is what he calls the “3500-year-old sales process,” rooted in, of all things, the metaphor of the Four Sons from the Passover Seder.

And it’s impossible NOT to get the message that every company employee needs to know how to highlight the company’s strengths and points of differentiation, both in general and to specific types of buyers with specific concerns.

As a marketer, you can learn a lot just by watching this book launch. Kevin is doing something very smart: he’s building his preorder list months in advance. And he’s built in lots of try-before-you-buy (something else I recommend). He’s even managed to find a bcouple of independent bookshops to do discount coupons. So you can go visit https://www.awesomeroar.com/index.htmand see a brief video, grab a couple of sample chapters, and read dozens of blurbs (including one from me). and of course order your advance copy, if you’re so moved. You can also read Kevin’s wonderfully transparent blog about his “Quest for the Jewish Super Bowl Ring”: to launch as a New York Times bestseller (where he’s not afraid to discuss failures in the campaign as well as successes).

Not a big surprise either that Kevin is a master networker who’s asked a lot of important people to help out. I’m glad to be in that category, and happy to alert you to what he’s doing.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Energy & Sustainability, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , ,

Tonight I was reviewing the PowerPoint for the talk on Green Marketing I’m giving next week in Davos, Switzerland. And I was struck yet again by the big case study in my talk: a company that has been producing products from recycled paper for 60 years, but only bothered to tell anyone within the last decade.

What a marketing advantage they would have had, if they had made this commitment the centerpiece of their marketing–especially in the old days, when it was hard to find recycled paper goods at any price, and their pricepoint was competitive with non-recycled brands.

Instead, they actually went bankrupt before the turnaround management team rebranded the company and emphasized saving a million trees.

The lesson: if you’re gong to do the right thing, harness the marketing leverage it gives you! This is something I discuss extensively in my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), BTW.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Networking, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

Cooperate with others to open new markets. It’s one of the key principles of my brand new book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), released this week by John Wiley & Sons. The book is a manual for thriving by doing the right thing, showing businesses that Green and ethical practices aren’t just a way to stay out of jail–they’re a success strategy–and cooperation is one of those practices.

So–do we practice what we preach? Here are some of the things we’re doing to launch the book:

  • We chose to partner with Green America for the launch. We are donating a portion of proceeds, and they have spread word of our book to their 94,000 members.
  • We solicited other partners who will tell their following about the book–and we gave them two powerful incentives: the chance to build their own lists by submitting a bonus, and to promote an upsell product that pays commissions.
  • With these partnerships, we’re able to offer anyone buying the book this month a package of extra worth well over $2750 (and still climbing)–AND to reach at least 702,000 people who are on the lists of these partners.

    So…adding Jay’s lists and mine together, we have about 94,000 subscribers. Adding Green America alone doubled that. Adding in the partners means we multiplied our original 94,000 by about eight times, to 890,000. Even chopping off ten percent for duplicates, that still means 801,000 people are hearing about this book, and that’s 703,000 people that Jay and I couldn’t have reached on our own. And that doesn’t even count Twitter, e-mail discussion lists, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

    Oh yes, and let’s talk about my bringing in Jay as a partner co-author. Leveraging the strength of his name definitely helped to build all these partner relationships, as well as strong partner relationships within the publishing house. So now, instead of reaching 10,000 of my own subscribers to inform them of my newest book, I’m reaching 801,000, of whom 791,000 are the result of our outreach efforts, outside of my own network.

    Cost to me? Only time. OK, quite a bit of time, including my assistant’s time, which I am paying for. But time well-spent.

    Is it resulting in sales? A week ago, the Amazon sales rank for Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green was in the 575,000s. In other words, five hundred seventy five thousand books were outselling mine.There have been some wild swings, but at the moment, it’s at 28,793. In the environmentalism category, it’s #13 right now. And Amazon is only one of the five channels that we’re linking to from the books website, https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com. In other words, yes–people are BUYING the book, and in doing so, validating this key concept.

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    By Posted on Posted in Politics, Protests and Crackdowns

    Oy, a few more like this and we’re really in trouble:

  • Death toll in Haiti climbed above 200,000, millions more injured and/or homeless.
  • Supreme Court removed restrictions on corporate campaign contributions, and this could have severe consequences for our democracy (I particularly like Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s commentary on this).
  • Not that they were using it anyway, but the Democrats not only lost their supermajority without passing very much important legislation, but they managed to lose it in my own state of Massachusetts. Since the Republicans have made very plain their policy of dragging almost every initiative into the swamp-of-no-return, this could cripple the already fading hopes that we’d make some progress, or at least back away from the tyrannical policies of the GWB-coup administration.
  • The renegade coup government in Honduras ran out the clock to the end of its predecessor Manuel Zelaya’s legitimate term, and Zelaya is leaving for exile as a private citizen. This makes at least three right-wing national coups that have succeeded in the Western Hemisphere in the first decade of the 21st century: Honduras, Haiti, and the non-military, non-violent election theft by GWB in the US.
  • Despite the popularity of outgoing President Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s newly elected president is a right-winger with some possible ties to the brutal Pinochet coup government of the 1970s

    At least there are bright spots in my own life, including the release this week of my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson).

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    By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, propaganda Tagged with , , , ,

    Following Martha Coakley’s loss in Massachusetts, Obama will no doubt get a lot of advice to move to the center, to compromise more, to give up any hope for the progressive agenda he was elected to deliver.

    But that advice is totally wrong-headed! If he wants to be remembered as anything other than an ineffectual one-term president, he and his weak-kneed party need to seize the debate, push the agenda, and present themselves once more as the party of change. Maybe they should even go back to Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativsim” and pin that label on the GOP.

    It is unconscionable that even the last few months when they’ve had their precious 60-vote supermajority, they’ve kowtowed to the right and let the party of intransigence frame and control the debate, and the votes. Now that they’ve lost that cushion, they’ve got only one hope of staying viable. Here’s the briefest outline:

  • Stop running crappy candidates! The Dems lost two governorships and for goodness sake Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat because they keep running candidates who don’t stand for anything, do little campaigning, and expect their money and connections to carry them to victory. Did they learn nothing from the John Kerry debacle? Or from Dukakis in 1988? I live in Massachusetts and can tell you that Coakley ran a terrible campaign.
  • Be the framers of the debate. Show the people how you proposed the change Obama ran on, and over and over again, the Republicans, the party of the failed policies of the past, have blocked your way no matter how many bipartisan overtures you make. Build momentum in the streets as well as in the boardrooms. Show that these Republicans, and the Blue Dog Democrats who vote with them, are blocking the way. Then mount effective campaigns by effective progressive candidates to get them OUT in November.
  • Refuse to tolerate the shenanigans of people like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson. The Republicans managed to get a lot of their agenda through with a very close majority during the Bush years, because they held together. Make it clear that the party will support primary challenges(and general election challenges) from the Left.
  • Play hardball. When Nelson, Lieberman and Snowe threatened the health bill unless it dropped all its substance, the party’s progressive stalwarts should have been out there shouting very publicly that dropping the public option meant dropping THEIR vote. Even Bernie Sanders wasn’t willing to go there.

    THIS strategy will result in one year writing good laws that won’t get passed, throwing the bums out, consolidating power, and having an amazing third and fourth year. Franklin Roosevelt used this strategy successfully in his first term, showed the public that he wanted to make real change, and swept back into office not just for a second term but for a third and a fourth.

    Obama, as a former community organizer, knows how to do this. He did it effectively in his campaign. He did it in the first weeks of his administration, and built a culture of hope. And then he started back-door dealing, chipping away at the agenda, providing giveaways to Wall Street, maintaining the worst aspects of the Bush foreign policy…is it any wonder his constituency feels deserted and abandoned? And that hope crashed and burned, leaving people bitter, angry, and unmotivated to vote for weak-kneed scoundrels–which is how they are perceiving the Democrats.

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

    Visiting my father in Florida, we treated him and his ladyfriend to lunch on fashionable Ocean Drive in Miami Beach’s South Beach deco district. Lots of lessons here on how to deal with a saturated market.

    First of all, almost every restaurant (and they are numerous), not only on Ocean Drive but on several of the surrounding streets, like Lincoln Mall and Española Way, hires shills: people to stand outside, engage anyone walking by, and try to get them to stop and eat. Most of the restaurants have at least one, some have several (for the most part, pretty young women, many with European accents. I guess it must be effective, but after a while, it feels like running the gauntlet.

    Second, recognizing that the consumer benefits from comparison shopping, many of the establishments print up postcards with their (for the most part very similar) offers. To us as consumers, this was very helpful, because after walking three or four blocks along the strip, we had a basis for remembering which ones had seemed like the best choices (and in fact returned to one to actually eat on the basis of the postcard).

    Third, when you’re doing popular loss-leaders, you make up the revenue in other ways. We were offered $4.95 breakfasts and $8.95 to $9.95 lunches all up and down the street. The food was actually quite good—but a simple cup of tea was $3.50!

    Finally, one to avoid: unpleasant surprises. When we were seated, the shill had told us she could to the advertised prices or 20 percent off the specials on display. My father asked the price of the steak special: $65! “I didn’t want to buy the cow,” he said, ordering instead one of the $4.95 breakfast deals: a huge omelet with meat, cheese, and vegetables.

    We saw this same strategy in some of the retail shops, where some items were really, really cheap, and others were wildly overpriced a shelf or two over.

    On the steak dinners, I imagine a fair number of people order one of the displayed specials without bothering to learn the price, and suffer major sticker shock when the bill arrives (or maybe after the drink specials, they’re too gone to notice). Considering that the same restaurant is using the same term to describe both its loss-leaders and its top-line offerings, I think this could be a disaster. It doesn’t strike me as a good way to make up revenue. In a crowded market, the last thing you want is a customer loudly arguing about the bill, especially in an open-air café that faces directly out on the street. Yes, of course, there are many places where you can pay $65 for a steak dinner and feel fine about it, but those are not restaurants that get you in the door on the basis of a $9.95 entrée. Different market, different clientele, different expectations, and no price resistance.

    Interestingly, our dinner choices for two of our three nights were restaurants with no shill. In both cases, we had excellent, reasonably priced food, and the place was certainly busy enough.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Customer Service as Marketing, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

    Rule Number One of my approach to marketing is to treat the customer right. As I say in my books, it’s far cheaper to bring back an existing customer than to have to go out and recruit a new one. And even in the following case, where there is no likelihood of a repeat purchase, it still would have made more sense to honor the request. A business owner never knows when a customer will tell a very large circle of people about either a good or a bad experience. And in this particular case, I’m prepared to escalate and the merchant may find itself with neither the money nor the merchandise, just for being stupid about customer service.

    For right now, I won’t name the company; we’ll see what kind of response I get. But here’s a letter I wrote that I should never have had to write:

    On January 12, 2010, we purchased two bags at your Lincoln Mall store in Miami Beach, a few minutes before closing time. We came into the store because my wife needed a replacement for her everyday purse. She found one that was a little larger and considerably heavier than her current purse, and I found a fanny pack, which I’d been looking for. It wasn’t ideal but she thought she could make it work. However, walking the few blocks back to where we were staying, it became obvious that the weight would be a problem. We actually took turns carrying it, and she decided we’d bring it back the next day.

    The purse never left the [name of store] plastic bag. It was exactly as it had been when we took it out of the store. But when we returned the next evening, the store refused to refund her purchase (we’re keeping the fanny pack). They pointed to the sales receipt, which stated that all returns would be for exchanges, not refunds.

    However, this information is not posted anywhere in the store. There is no way to know about the policy until after you’ve made the purchase and the store considers you bound by it.

    As it happens, I’ve written several books on marketing, and while not a lawyer, I have at least a basic understanding of consumer law. One of the requirements of a valid contract is that it’s entered into voluntarily by all parties. In this case, the terms of the contract were essentially changed by one party after purchase. The standard for American retail is to take back unused, salable merchandise within a reasonable time after purchase, and where the conditions are different, they need to be visibly posted so the customer is aware. Handing someone a sales receipt with different conditions is not something likely to hold up to scrutiny.

    However, the store did not accept this argument and refused to issue a refund; we spoke to four different people. We did look around to see if here was anything else we needed, but we had come to the store specifically to buy the purse, and couldn’t find anything else even remotely suitable.

    I am writing to you because I’d rather we work this out as reasonable people. We were only visiting Miami Beach and have left the area, so we can no longer bring the item back in person. However, we would be glad to return the bag if you refund our purchase price ($29.95 plus $2.10 sales tax, total $32.05) and issue a prepaid call tag from UPS or any other carrier. We will not pay to ship it back, since it was not our fault that the store refused to take it back when we went in person.

    I’m sure we’d both rather avoid a credit card chargeback, and therefore, a refund is the better path.

    Thank you,
    Shel Horowitz

    I’ll let you know what happens.

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