Category: Business Ethics

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Greenwashing, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Fascinating profile of Peter Brabeck, Chair of Nestlé, and his crusade for world-wide water conservation and water sustainability. Especially fascinating since Nestlé’s water bottling approach has often gotten the company in trouble with water rights and environmental activists, and has occasionally brought it to court. (In my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, I discuss Nestlé being hauled into court in Canada by green activists, on greenwashing/misleading advertising charges.)

These days, Brabeck is saying that 5 liters of water to drink, and 25 for other personal needs, should be the daily right of every human being. But he also says that direct human consumption is the smallest portion of water consumed by humans—just 1.5 percent. The energy and agriculture sectors use far more (and he didn’t even discuss industry in general). He is particularly troubled by “unconventional oil” (such as tar sands), which he says consumes up to 6 liters of water for every liter of fuel, compared with just a tenth of a liter to produce a liter of oil conventionally. Water conservation, he says, is essential—and thus we shouldn’t be using those water-hogging technologies. Of course, there are MANY other environmental arguments against tar-sands oil, in addition to water conservation!

And he notes that when he was born 68 years ago, the world had 2.7 billion people and stayed well within its water budget, using only 40 percent of the renewable water. But now, with 7 billion people on the planet, we’re already exceeding what the planet can renew—and we’re heading to 10 billion.

Note: just because in our daily lives our water consumption far less than what industry and agriculture use, please don’t take that as a license to squander. As individuals, we still have a responsibility to be frugal with the world’s water. Even something as simple as brushing our teeth can be done with about 95 percent less water, just by not letting the water run the whole time—voila, instant water conservation. Wet the brush, turn off the water, repeat as necessary. Use the same principle when washing hands, washing dishes, etc. And when it makes sense (as it does in most of the US, Canada, and Europe), use filtered tap water instead of bottled water. Many people don’t realize how much water consumption is involved in the bottling process—wasting,often, up to three times as much water as actually goes in the bottle.

Go ahead and read the interview. If you’re skeptical about Nestlé, that’s OK. So am I. But I think there’s a lot of wisdom in Brabeck’s thinking, and a wake-up call to the world.

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

What do you notice about the two images in this photo?

Deceptive comparison ad

Here’s what I notice; the placement and composition of the vegetables and fruits are exactly the same. Look at the carrots, for instance. It is statistically impossible to pose a bunch of carrots in exactly the same alignment for two pictures taken at different times, and just as impossible to find two different bunches of carrots where each carrot has exactly the same shape as one in the other batch and are in the same order. It’s somewhat easier with mushrooms and peppers, but still highly questionable.

What this tells me is that one of two things happened, neither of which are OK if you’re an honest marketer:

1. The same photo was used as the basis for both images. At least one of them was retouched to change the colors, probably the didn’t-use-it one, which also had believability-enhancing touches like aging in the mold on the grapes.

OR

2. The advertising agency took the first photo, and then left the fridge untouched for some period of time, and came back and took the aged picture.

Either way, just like the food in the aged picture, it doesn’t pass the sniff test. The ad claims that these were different batches of food and implies that they were subjected to a scientific comparison. That would mean two different sets of vegetables aging in different but calibrated refrigerators for the same time, one with the treatment and one without (or the same refrigerator used to test each batch one at a time, starting with the untreated one to avoid tainting the results). I do not see any evidence in this photo that this is what happened.

Chose your own term: false advertising, deceptive advertising, misleading advertising—whatever you choose to call it, it’s certainly a major ethical violation and quite possibly a violation of truth in advertising laws such as Section 43(a)(1)(A) of the Lanham Act.

And therefore, I don’t believe the ad. And therefore, I don’t trust anything else in the catalog where I found it (an in-flight sky mall). And therefore, this entire catalog loses any chance of getting me as a customer, forever. And therefore, I am sharing my perception that this company engages in deceptive practices. Perhaps this post could even go viral and be seen by thousands or millions of people.

So on a practical as well as a moral level, this deceptive advertising practice backfired. Big time. My question to the ad agency and to the people at the client who approved it (who may, in fairness, not have realized the ad was deceptive): was it worth it? This catalog company should fire its ad agency for engaging in false advertising, and should look with a critical eye at every other bit of advertising this agency prepared.

And if you’re a marketer, take a look at your own marketing. Have you accidentally or deliberately engaged in similar false advertising practices? Are you aware that one demonstrable lie can ruin a long-built reputation for integrity if anyone publicly calls you out for deceptive advertising in the press or in social media?

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Business Ethics, Copywriting, Democracy, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , , ,

“Framing” is the way you position an issue, ideally in terms that are easy to grasp. Alan Grayson is one of the few on the left (Van Jones is another) who are really good at framing. Look how he describes the impact of Walmart’s low wages as an attack on taxpayers, on Cenk Uygur’s national TV show—something people on the right can relate to. (The full transcript is at that link.)

As you pointed out, the average associate at Walmart makes less than $9 an hour. I don’t know how anybody these days can afford their rent, afford their food, afford their health coverage, afford their transportation costs just to get to work, when they’re making only $9 an hour or less.

And who ends up paying for it? It’s the taxpayer…The taxpayer pays the earned income credit. The taxpayer pays for Medicaid. The taxpayer pays for the unemployment insurance when they cut their hours down. And the taxpayers pay for other forms of public assistance like food stamps. I think that the taxpayer is getting fed up paying for all these things when, in fact, Walmart could give every single employee it’s got, even the CEO, a 30% raise, and Walmart would still be profitable… I don’t think that Walmart should, in effect, be the largest recipient of public assistance in the country. In state after state after state, Walmart employees represent the largest group of Medicaid recipients, the largest group of food stamp recipients, and the taxpayers shouldn’t have to bear that burden. It should be Walmart. So we’re going to take that burden and put it where it belongs, on Walmart.

Consider framing for wide appeal when you develop your organizing messages. If you plan carefully, framing can play a major role in the debate. I credit a lot of the success of Save the Mountain, the environmental group I started in 1999 that beat back a terrible development project in just 13 months, to the careful attention I paid to framing, starting with the very first press release and continuing through the whole campaign.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Green Business, Politics, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

In light of the close defeat for the California GMO-right-to-know ballot initiative in this month’s election, it’s worth reading this article on Sustainable Brands that shows customers want non-GMO even more than they want organic.

They say, “if the people lead, the leaders must follow.” We WILL win this  one. Eventually.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business Ethics, Demographics/Psychographics, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, media-general Tagged with , , , , ,

(continued from yesterday)

Scary warnings and official-looking documents from Publishers Clearing House
Scary warnings and official-looking documents from Publishers Clearing House
  • Publishers Clearing House still believes in direct mail that scares people into action. The envelope and packet are full of legal-looking documents, dire warnings in big bold print, etc.
  • The “involvement devices”—labels to pull off and attach, gold-covered panels to scratch off, very complicated instructions to follow exactly—are variations on the same stuff I remember from Publishers Clearing House mailers in the 1970s and 1980s. And they were old and tired even back then.
  • Publishers Clearing House apparently never got the memo on credibility in marketing. Instead of using real credibility builders such as testimonials, they fill the mailing with official-looking layouts, fake stickers with bar codes, and language on the return form with language like “I am claiming eligibility…” Oh yes, and they’re still using celebrities, as they used the late Ed McMahon for many years (in fact, I first heard of Ed McMahon through PCH sweepstakes, and had to find out later that he was a TV star). Now, it’s Brian Williams.

Back in 2000, the PCH sweepstakes mailings inspired this quote in the Direct Mail section of my earlier book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World:

Forget about glitzy, complicated sweepstakes offers, with seemingly dozens of different-sized papers, foils, stickers, and scratch-off cards; your production cost will be enormous before you even start. Besides, they cost you tons of money mailing to and following up on false prospects.

A simple, straightforward approach is far better. Use ordinary paper sizes and stocks, and win the prospect over through the strength of your offer—not gimmicks or packaging. You’ll stay within your budget, and target serious prospects, not a bunch of chiselers hoping for a million dollars from you, Ed McMahon, or the tooth fairy.

That was true when I wrote Grassroots Marketing, and even more true now.

PCH sweepstakes-related inserts vs. ad delivery from other companies
Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes-related inserts vs. ad delivery from other companies
  • Of the 44 pieces of paper in the envelope, only 9-1/2 were actually related to the PCH sweepstakes and offer. The others, including the back of one of the Publishers Clearing House pages, were ads from other companies. Given that so much magazine content is available online, for free, that a whole generation will barely pick up a paper magazine any more, and that numerous other channels provide the information we used to get from general-interest magazines, it makes sense that Publishers Clearing House realized its business model had to change. Now they’re apparently in the business of delivering cheesy offers from other merchants—what could have been a good use of the partnership strategy I advocate, if the offer quality and targeting hadn’t been so pathetic.
  • Geotargeting has become more sophisticated. One of the slips announces “SHEL HOROWITZ, THE SEARCH FOR A MAJOR PRIZE WINNER IN THE SPRINGFIELD-HOLYOKE TV AREA INCLUDES YOUR 01035 NEIGHBORHOOD!… There will DEFINITELY be a   Major Prize Winner of $1,000.00 from Your Local TV Area, which includes your Zip Code!” (capitalization, punctuation, and underlining are exactly as they were in the original). So Publishers Clearing House is now matching zip codes against media markets, and guaranteeing at least one winner—note the SMALL dollar amount—in my media market (which contains dozens of zip codes).
  • Technology isn’t perfect. My envelope contained two copies of a several-page ad bundle (one of several in the mailing)—and DID NOT contain the actual form to select magazines! Even if I’d wanted to subscribe, I couldn’t do so from this mailing.

I may get an onslaught of comments pointing out that Publishers Clearing House’s methods are obviously working, or they wouldn’t keep at it after all these decades. Of course they work! I freely grant that.

But to what effect? What’s the real benefit of developing a large list of purely transactional contacts who didn’t necessarily even buy—they entered a chance to win big bucks for free. Do these people have any loyalty? Has PCH done any segmentation other than geographic? Can they market to these people as individuals in any meaningful way?

The negative answer is obvious in the kinds of junk offers crammed into the rest of the PCH sweepstakes envelope: tchatchkes and trinkets and home repair products of dubious value—the sort of stuff that gets sold on late-night TV ads over obscure cable channels. It’s these clueless merchants that I actually feel sorry for.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business Ethics, Copywriting, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , ,

Thanks, I’m guessing, to the no-junk-mail opt-out list, it had been quite a few years since I’d heard from Publishers Clearing House.

Front of the envelope from Publishers Clearing House

Front of the envelope from Publishers Clearing House

Yup—Publishers Clearing House. The infamous magazine subscription discounter that used to clutter up my mailbox with screamy hype implying very strongly that I’d won some enormous fortune, if only I followed all the (seemed like) 39 steps to claim it.

The same Publishers Clearing House that once sent a mailer to Dance Spree, a community arts group, boldly announcing, “D. Spree, You May Already Have Won a Million Dollars” in a mailmerge whose dot matrix fonts didn’t match the rest of the offset-printed letter.

On a whim, I decided to open the envelope—not with any intention of entering the latest Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes, but to see if the business world’s shift over the last dozen years or so in the direction of switching off the hype in favor of softer and more ethical marketing approaches—a shift that I like to think I had at least something to do with—had made any impact on Publishers Clearing House, King of the Old-Style Hype.

The quick answer is no. What I received was a smoother, more sophisticated version of the same junk that Publishers Clearing House has been sending for decades.

Here’s some of what I noticed.

  • Very high environmental footprint. Not only did the fat envelope contain 42 separate pieces of paper, but several of them are on shiny paper stock that may not have come from trees, contain decals, etc. In other words, the packet will be difficult to recycle.
  • Improvements in printing technology are noticeable. The customized portions were done on a very high-quality digital printer that looks almost as good as offset. No more hideous dot-matrix mailmerge—except that on the mailing address “label” (you’ll understand the quote marks in a moment), there’s some all-caps text meant to simulate a hand-typed look, reading “THIS IS THE BULLETIN WE ALERTED YOU TO LOOK FOR”
Rear of the envelope from Publishers Clearing House
Rear of the envelope from Publishers Clearing House

 

  • Disguises and subterfuge. If you give it a casual look, you might think the envelope had three added-on labels (one of them crooked and another upside down), two checkmarks, a note, and a circle in pen, the aforementioned hand-typed-look message, and both black and red rubber stamp imprints. But actually, as far as I can tell, all the various items on the envelope designed to create a feeling that a human being prepared it individually are actually printed on. You’ll also see phrases scattered throughout the mailing, like “prize patrol,” once again designed to convey the impression that a human being is out there, trying to match you up with your winnings. Most people won’t be looking so carefully, of course—but we are not stupid, and I’m betting only a very tiny percentage will think any part of this is actually hand-prepared.

To be continued tomorrow (including a deeper look at the psychology they’re using, and why I discount it).

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business Ethics, Green Marketing, Greenwashing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Yet another company has gotten in trouble for greenwashing. Raz Godelnik writes in Triple Pundit about cereal giant General Mills’ legal woes: multiple lawsuits over deceptive packaging, claiming for example that its Nature Valley brand of granola bars is “all natural” when in fact it’s highly processed and contains such ingredients as maltodextrin.

You’d think by now companies woud have caught on that honesty really is the best policy.

Of course, it would be nice if the word “natural” actually had a legal definition, and thus some teeth. But it would also be nice if a company that claims to be strongly guided by ethics would do a better job of walking its talk.

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

I sent an article around by Seth Godin, talking about how bullying buyers of expensive items shot themselves in the foot when they try to tear down the seller, or the quality of the item.

My friend Jacqueline Church Simonds from Beagle Bay Books responded with a story of how Mitchell Volvo in Simsbury CT, earned her undying love:

After we expressed interest in the V70 wagon, the dealer sat us down and said, “You’re intelligent, educated buyers. You know how to look on the Internet and see what my competitors are asking for in 5 surrounding states. Here’s the price that makes money for me and gives you a deal besides.”

The only dickering we did was on my 100k Taurus. He was genuinely chagrined he could only give us $2k trade-in on it. Since I’d been trying to sell it for 6 months, I caved. It was better than having it towed.

I’ve yet to find a dealer who treated me as fairly.

Thirteen years later, she still sings that dealer’s praises. Isn’t that what you want your clients and customers to do?

By contrast, I had such a bad experience in 2003 at Northampton Toyota (since sold to a dealer organization that I have no complaints about) in Massachusetts that I wouldn’t even go back there for a tube of touch-up paint until the dealership was sold and the management changed. I won’t give you the whole sordid story, but here’s one piece of it: the phone call a couple of weeks into the process that said “you have 24 hours to get your car out of our lot, and by the way, the engine is in pieces in the trunk.”

Amazingly, when we went in to a local used car dealer to see about replacing this car, he said, “it’s only got 71,000 miles and all it needs is a new engine? You could drive that car for many more years!” He actually brokered a used engine for us and arranged for a specialized shop to install it—giving up an easy sale but earning a lot of referrals from us over the coming years. And he was right; we drove that car eight more years, until 2011.

The ultra-shabby weeks-long encounter with Northampton Toyota’s service department was so bad that I wrote a five-page letter to Toyota’s vice president for US customer service. The response I got from them was too little and waaaay too late (two months to get a form response asking me to call a customer service center that turned out to be in India, with a representative who had not seen and could not access my letter—and another two months to get the letter with the inadequate and inappropriate make-good).

So what did I do the next time I needed a car, a year and a half after this incident? After driving nothing but Toyotas and one Toyota clone (labeled as a Chevrolet Nova) since 1982, I took my money elsewhere, because earning my loyalty was obviously not a priority for this company. I bought a brand new car that for the first time in 22 years, was not a Toyota and not designed by Toyota. Then, last year, the replacement engine on the old Corolla finally gave out, when the car was 14 years old and the odometer read something like 167,000 miles. We did buy a Toyota to replace it, but we bought it used, so no money in Toyota’s pocket on that sale. And just last week, I helped my stepfather buy a new car. He’s had several Toyotas over the years—but he bought a brand new Honda.

In other words, in the past 9 years, the imbecilic treatment we received from the service department combined with the laughable response from corporate has diverted three large sales away from Toyota—three sales that would have been theirs for the taking, if they’d only just made us feel that we mattered.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,

On April 30, 1977, I entered the construction site for the Seabrook (New Hampshire) nuclear power plant. The next day, I was one of 1414 people arrested at the site, while arch-conservative Governor Meldrim Thompson, dressed in combat fatigues, gave orders to the police. Under Thompson’s administration, many protestors were held until May 13.While we were in captivity, William Loeb, publisher of the state’s largest newspaper, repeatedy called us “terrorists.”

Fast-forward 35 years. Today, April 14, 2012, I was one of 1500 or 2000 people attending a rally in Brattleboro, Vermont to shut down the deeply troubled Vermont Yankee nuclear plant—which, under Vermont law and agreements signed by the plant owner, should have been shut down and has been operating illegally since its license expired. Ironically, the plant sits on the Connecticut River, which is the border between Vermont and New Hampshire.

Only this time, the governor, and most of the state, was on our side. Governor Peter Shumlin was the featured speaker, and he outlined ten specific lies or broken promises on the part of New Orleans-based Entergy, which owns the plant.

Along with Governor Shumlin, US Senator Bernie Sanders, Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell, and several state legislators from both Vermont and neighboring Masachusetts were on the program or sent greetings. Vermont’s lone US House Representative, Peter Welch, sent greetings, leaving only Senator Patrick Leahy out of the event among Vermont’s three-member Congressional delegation.

Yes, we’ve won over at least one state government. But our work is not done until this very dangerous plant—a plant that was unsafe even when it was new, and which uses the same totally discredited GE Mark I design as Fukushima-Daiichi—is shut down. Until Entergy honors its promises. And until all nuclear plants in the US and around the world are shut down before catastrophe happens.

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