In one day, I had two interactions with people reaching out on behalf of their employer that made me scratch my head.
I got telemarketed by a woman who claimed to have sent me some stuff I never received. She didn’t understand the simplest questions like “was it by postal or email?” (answer, repeated 3x: “Mail”) “What domain was it coming from?”
To top it off, the follow-up email, or what I believe was the follow-up email, came from a different domain and was signed by a different person, but it mentioned a conversation with their office.
And then there was the person who private-messaged me on Facebook about her social media marketing services. When I clicked the link, I was appalled at the sloppy grammar–NOT a way to get me to do business. When I told her that careful writing matters to me and that I wouldn’t be doing business, she started asking whether I would scout for her as an affiliate.
Who vets these people? If you have people representing your company, they should leave a GOOD impression with prospects. Yet over and over, I see businesses being harmed by the clueless, aggressive, unhelpful people they hire.
The brain of a call center clerk ("Call Center Dave," by Ray Smithers)
The brain of a call center clerk (“Call Center Dave,” by Ray Smithers)
Dear business owners and bureaucrats: If you fill your customer positions with stupid people, or if you don’t empower them to address issues that come up, you damage your own brand.
All customer service people are by definition part of your marketing team. If they perform badly, they drive customers away.
I’ve just had one-too-many encounters with a stupid person in a customer service position, and I realize I won’t get any real work done until I can blow off some steam. So I may as well blow that steam as a blog post. I’m overdue for a good rant in this space.
I’m helping an 85-year-old, not-very-computer-savvy Japanese citizen renew his passport. The Japanese Consulate Boston website says their online renewal form only works with PCs; my friend has a 12-year-old Mac. So I called them to get an application form mailed to him.
The idiot I spoke to was amazingly UNhelpful. First she said we had to send a self-addressed 9×12 envelope to Boston with $1.20 in postage just to get the forms. And then she refused to give me the consulate’s address and told me to get it off the website (which is in Japanese, which I don’t read). I actually had to yell at her before I could pry the street address out of her.
You would think they could simply mail out the packet, and tack an extra $5 onto the renewal fee if using postal mail.
This has the effect of pushing Japan farther down on the list of countries I’d like to visit.
It also got me thinking about the hundreds of times I’ve encountered an employee charged with “customer service” who either didn’t have a clue about what customer service actually means, or haven’t been empowered to actually deal with situations that come up.
I’m remembering in particular the time (about ten years before they went out of business) that I was in a Blockbuster Video and I saw a sign with great language about how they empowered every one of their employees to do right by their customers. I was writing a book on marketing (as usual 😉 ) at that time, and I asked the counter clerk for permission to photograph the sign so I could quote it in my book. And this disempowered employee in this supposedly enlightened store said he didn’t have authority and I’d need to ask headquarters!
It wasn’t so much his inability to let me do what I asked. It was the disconnect between what the sign said and the 180-degree-opposite reality that completely wrecked my perception of Blockbuster’s brand. I never set foot in a Blockbuster again. They lost a decade of my business for being stupid.
Then there was the chief mechanic at my local Toyota dealer, who called me after several days of non-response to my status queries and told me I had 24 hours to get my car off his lot, and by the way, the engine is in pieces in the trunk. I was so appalled I wrote a long letter to the VP of customer service for the United States, and I never went back to that dealer for anything else, ever, not even a tube of touch-up paint. I drove 40 extra miles round trip when I needed something from a Toyota dealer. And the next time I bought a new car, it wasn’t a Toyota. That mechanic threw away 20 years of brand loyalty and a lifetime customer value in the hundreds of thousands.
Let me say it differently: front-line customer service reps are either your marketing ambassadors (think Southwest Airlines, Nordstrom, Ritz-Carlton) or your marketing saboteurs. Which do you choose to represent you?
2016 is going to be a GREAT year for the green world, and the green business world in particular. I thought so even before two developments this past week that make me even more optimistic:
Add in the widely spreading understanding in the business world that going green the right way slashes costs, boosts revenues, and generates profit, and it’s not surprising that 2016 will be a year of great progress. (If you don’t yet see the connection, order a copy of my new book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. It’s got hundreds of examples ranging from Fortune 100 to solopreneurs.)
Expect to see lots more high-level research, looking for holistic steps that create big jumps in energy efficiency and big reductions in waste. Already, we’ve made amazing technological leaps within just the past couple of years. I’ll name two among hundreds:
Approaches like biomimicry—modeling how nature solves complex problems—will let sustainability ripple through the whole culture, relatively rapidly.
Electrical storage (a major restraint on renewable energy growth) has made huge strides, including the vaunted Tesla battery systems.
All is not sunshine and roses, of course. The Act of Congress that extended the clean-energy tax credits also opened up the door for some of the worst kind of carbon-intensive development: exporting the dirtiest types of fossil fuel energy. Public pressure—activism in the streets, in the boardrooms, and in the halls of legislative power—must hound every proposal to put in fracking, use or transport tar-sands oil, build unnecessary pipelines, etc.
One key meme has to be “honor the commitments we made at COP21.”
If the business community, especially, makes it clear that it expects the US to do its part in meeting the targets, and that exporting fossil fuels across oceans will work against this, that open door may stay largely unused. But it will take vigilance.
One not-so obvious trend
The above predictions are relatively mainstream in the green world, even if they appear startling to those outside of it. Let me conclude with a much more “out-there” proposition:
Businesses will go beyond merely going green. Sustainability will be seen as a first step. More and more companies will be going beyond sustainability to create a world where hunger and poverty turn into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.
Why? Because they will see enormous profit opportunities, and because it feels so much better to oneself, employees, neighbors, suppliers and other stakeholders to see making the world better as a key success metric. How? I wrote a whole book to answer that question.
As a new subscriber to John Corcoran’s newsletter and a constant reader, I followed John’s link to his list of 20 influential business books. It was a terrific list (I’ve read quite a few of them). And he got quite a few additional suggestions from readers. (Side note: sign of a successful post: 40+ comments, most of them recommendations.)
He has never heard from me. As far as know, he has no idea who I am. But I, of course, jumped in. I’d like you to read my comment in “learning mode,” think about what lessons you can pull from it, and post a comment on this page. THEN check out the lessons I think I’m imparting here, and comment again on that page. (You probably want to look at John’s list first.)
Hi, John, great list. I’m fairly new to your email tribe and this is the first time I’ve seen it. I’m a business book writer and an addicted reader (read about 70 books in the first 9 months of 2015) and was delighted to see how many I’ve read. I’ll look forward to listening to some of those podcasts. I’m listening to the interview with Dan Pink as I write this.
My own recommendations? Two in particular that no one else has mentioned:
1) The Success Principles by Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer. By far the best thing I’ve ever come across on personal motivation and the life hacks to build world-changing influence.
2) Cash Copy by Jeffrey Lant utterly changed the way I think about copywriting. Plenty of other books I’ve read since have a similar trajectory, but Cash Copy happened to be the one I read first–somewhere around 1988 or 1990. It turned me on to the whole idea of the you-focus of solving a pain point or helping the reader achieve a goal, rather than what I call “we we we all the way home copywriting” (e.g., “At _____ [company], we believe…”). That led me to develop “story-behind-the-story” marketing materials for my clients, such as a press release for a book on electronic privacy that used the headline, “It’s 10 O’Clock—Do You Know Where Your Credit History Is? (The book didn’t even get a mention until the third paragraph.)
I’ve been told by a number of people that my own Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green has opened them to the idea that green business is not just the right thing to do but can be quite profitable, thank you. I’m hoping my next book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, will broaden that discussion to show that turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. John, I’ll be in touch with you privately to see if you’d like an advance review copy.
—Shel Horowitz, https://impactwithprofit.com
Again, I invite you to post your immediate takeaways here. Then visit https://greenandprofitable.com/the-lessons-i-think-i-was-teaching to see if my intention matched your reaction, and post again over there. It may prove a fascinating and illuminating conversation—and give you lots of insight to use in your own marketing and customer relations.
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
It’s not often you hear a self-professed liberal Jewish feminist open her talk with ten minutes praising the Pope. But that’s how Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, and several other groundbreaking books, began her talk at Mount Holyoke College last night. While acknowledging a litany of areas where she and Francis have profound disagreements—among them same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to control her own body—she thanked him publicly for his attention to the planet in peril and its dispossessed people, saying he was a great example of what environmental leadership looks like right now.
And for Klein, those two areas—helping the planet and replacing poverty with abundance—are forever braided together. “Climate change is an accelerant to all the other issues going wrong…It’s not about saying climate change is so big that it trumps everything else. All are equally urgent, and we don’t win by pitting these issues against each other.” We win, she says, by joining forces to demand holistic approaches that simultaneously solve climate heating, create jobs and economic opportunity, and remediate ism-based oppression—by “connecting climate change with a broken economic model”—a concept she calls “intersectionality.”
(This is a message particularly dear to my own heart, and thoroughly integrated into my forthcoming 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World as well as my own talk, “‘Impossible’ is a Dare.”)
The impacts of climate change, she notes, often fall most heavily among the very poor countries, and the very poor residents of rich countries. Oil refineries, coal plants, and high asthma rates tend to be found in low-income communities, often with high concentrations of people of color. Rising floodwaters will inundate poor, tiny island nations first. “It’s not just about things getting hotter, but about things getting meaner. More militarized, more racist,” as we see in the response of countries like Hungary to the Syrian refugee crisis. Which she sees as climate-related, noting that the Syrian civl war followed the worst drought in Syria’s history. Climate change, she says, is also a women’s and a feminist issue; the impacts hit women disproportionately as well.
So her challenge to climate activists is to turn “disaster apartheid” (e.g., the detestable official response to Hurricane Katrina) into “energy democracy.” And that includes making sure that the communities hit hardest are first in line for improvements that meet their needs.
Hurricane Katrina, which inspired Klein to write The Shock Doctrine and begin her climate study that led to This Changes Everything, was a perfect storm combining “heavy weather and a weak and neglected public sphere.” She points out that by the time Katrina made landfall, it had been downgraded from a Category 5 hurricane to a mere tropical storm. The levees should have withstood the onslaught, if they hadn’t been allowed to fall into disrepair.
While the world looked on with horror as “FEMA couldn’t find New Orleans,” and “prisoners were abandoned, locked in their cells as the waters were rising,” evacuees were given one-way tickets out, and the elites seized an opportunity to remake the city as a wealthier place, with 100,000 fewer poor blacks, even tearing down public housing projects undamaged by the storm, to replace them with high-end condominiums.
Quoting Black Lives Matter leader Alicia Garza, Klein says it’s time to “‘make new mistakes’…we can’t demand perfection but we can demand evolution.”
Examples of the old mistakes we shouldn’t keep making:
“Projecting messianic fantasies onto politicians” and becoming disappointed when they fail to save us
Believing we can solve all our problems with market forces (she cites the recent Volkswagen fuel emissions tampering scandal as an example of why that doesn’t work)—or with technological fixes, which include not only wonderful new green energy systems but also environmentally catastrophic technologies like fracking (“the oil companies have figured out how to screw us sideways”), tar-sands oil, and massive pipelines such as the Keystone XL
“Building a movement entirely of upper-middle-class white people and wondering why people of color don’t join”
“Tearing other people to shreds” in bouts of anger disguised as political purity
Thinking that any one of us can do it all ourselves
Noting that fossil fuel companies will work extremely hard to protect their enormous profits and will try to win the public by pointing out the lifestyles of luxury fossil fuels have allowed us, Klein says we won’t win by trying to educate fossil-fuel billionaires like the Koch brothers. Furthermore, “we cannot look at this without looking at who burned what, when. Fossil fuels have allowed us to live the fantasy of a life apart from nature. But the response from the earth, though slow in coming, says there’s no such thing as a one-way relationship, and you were never the boss! We could see this as a cosmic demotion—or as a gift.”
But we do have many victories to celebrate, including Shell’s decision this week in the face of strong opposition from environmentalists to withdraw from arctic drilling…China’s major reduction in coal development and initiation of carbon cap-and-trade—due to public pressure even in that repressive society—when only a few years ago a new coal plant was opening every week…the 400,000 new jobs Germany has created in shifting 30 percent of its energy from fossil and nuclear to solar and wind (to name a few). “As I talk to people, the biggest problem is that they think they can’t win. But we are winning, as part of a global movement.
And just as the shock of the Great Depression economic collapse created space for New Deal social reforms, so the climate catastrophe, coupled with the current collapse of fossil fuel prices, with the price of a barrel of oil plummeting from $100 to $50 in three months, could catalyze transformation: “integrated holistic solutions and a road map. There’s a progressive tradition of using these shocks to build….a moment where we can do things that weren’t possible before. We can shut down bad projects and bad policy. We can win a moratorium on all arctic drilling. It’s easier to bring in a bold progressive carbon tax…the political goal has to be a polluter-pays principle…the mostr sustainable route is weaving together the yes and the no.” She delighted in recent progressive electoral victories in Alberta (long controlled by tar-sands-loving right-wingers) and in the UK, where the Bernie Sanders-like Jeremy Corbyn has just become head of the Labour Party. Also in Alberta, she took hope from a conference that brought together union miners from the tar sands, environmentalists, and many other sectors and emerged with a progressive manifesto.
Before a brief Q&A, she closed her formal presentation with a clarion call to optimism AND action:
We need to move from a society based on extraction to one based on caring, including a guaranteed annual income. Caregiving jobs are climate change jobs. We must expand the caring economy and contract the careless economy. 2016 is a leap year; we add a human-created day in deference to the earth’s rotation. That’s an increased opportunity to build a much better world. We will be told it’s impractical. But $2.6 trillion has been divested from fossil fuel.
Quoting a woman leader in Nauru, a tiny Pacific Island being lost to climate change after a catastrophic history of exploitation by First World economies (Klein chronicles the sad tale in This Changes Everything), she continued,
“If politics are immovable, let’s change the politics.” Now is not the time for small steps. Now is the time to leap!
I do not use “killing it” or “crushing it” to mean “successful.” Successful does not have to be about dominance and submission, winners and losers. I believe in an abundant, win-win world where we have the power to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—while making a nice profit. The words we choose help determine where we (individually and as a society) are going, and how we get there.
In fact, I set up a whole new website, https://goingbeyondsustainability.com, to bring this message home. Somehow, I don’t think it would have the right tone if I had called this website “killingitforsustainability.com”.
Language matters. A lot. I just told a client yesterday to remove the word “dumb” from her vocabulary; she’s building a brand around smart, sexy, socially conscious blondes, and the “dumb blonde” stereotype is the exact opposite of that.
I don’t use the term, “senior moment.” I see elders as more often wise than confused. I’m 58 and I expect to be doing good work for the rest of my life, whether that turns out to be another 50 years, or whether my time turns out to be much more limited. I avoid gender-specific language; it’s almost always possible to find a gender-inclusive way to say something. “Firefighter” rather than “fireman,” “chair” (or the more cumbersome “chairperson”) instead of “chairman.” Since “s/he” or “co” or any other quick substitute for “he or she” hasn’t become common language, I do say “he or she” or “his and her.” Even though it’s clunky, it is less clunky to my eyes and ears than switching gender every paragraph.
Yes, I know that the word “niggardly” (meaning stingy) has nothing to do entomologically with a certain slur-word directed at black people. The root is different. But because the sounds of the words are so close, I would never use it. I don’t want to reinforce any association with the n-word. I’m also careful about words like “savages” or “primitive” or “cripple.” And I even avoid “sucks,” which was introduced as a slur against gay men. So many words are so loaded up with negative baggage that it’s a whole lot easier just not to use them.
Marketers should pay attention, too. Chevrolet made a huge mistake decades ago when it tried to introduce its popular Nova line into Latin America. Nobody bothered to check what that name meant locally. Oddly enough, it turned out that the locals weren’t exactly breaking down the doors to buy a car whose name is Spanish for “it doesn’t go.”
There is one military metaphor that doesn’t bother me at all, however. I use the word “target” to describe a tightly defined market niche. I like the precision of that. And because I’m a Guerrilla Marketing co-author, I use the phrase “guerrilla marketing.” But if I had been naming the brand, I’d have chosen something less grounded in war (and maybe easier to spell).
The Four Intelligences of the Business Mind–Book CoverThe Four Intelligences of the Business Mind: How to Rewire Your Brain and Your Business for Success, by Valeh Nazemoff (CA Technologies, 2014), reviewed by Shel Horowitz, primary author, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green
According to the Nazemoff, any successful business needs to concentrate on four different types of intelligence.
The first is financial intelligence, which most people already think about when they think about business.
But we also have to think about customer intelligence, data intelligence, mastermind intelligence. Mastermind is really what we normally think of as brainstorming. It’s the idea that a group of people can be smarter than any one individual.
In data intelligence, she suggests marrying the “9 Cs”—Collaborate, Consolidate, Communicate, Collect, Connect, Coordinate, Change, Converse, and Convert—to the classic 5Ws and an H that every beginning journalist learns to ask: Who, What, Where, When, Why, How.
Combining these, we get what she calls neuro-economics. And sometimes, small incremental changes that create a big result.
To me, the most interesting chapter was on customer intelligence. She talks about how to develop a customer profile, personas, and markets. and how to use this information to create communities. But she also shed some fascinating light on data. Specifically, the importance of determining whether your data is good. And I love her statement that success is not about how much data you have, but whether you have the right data.
These intelligences have implications in decision-making; Nazemoff talks about using them to determine who is responsible to make the decision, who is accountable, who gets consulted, and who simply gets informed.
Whole grain cracker (stock photo, not the brand I’m writing about)
In the next town over, there’s a store I frequent that sells remaindered natural foods. I bought some whole-grain rye crackers there recently, costing 99 cents for an 8.8 ounce package. Yesterday I noticed this astonishing bit of small print on the label:
Made in England from local and imported ingredients…Imported and distributed by [address in Australia] and [address in New Zealand].
Our nearest full-scale international airport is in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, about 100 miles away. Googling the distances, it’s about 20,000 miles from England to Boston via either Australia or New Zealand.
The cracker label does something very odd about ingredients: wholegrain rye flour and salt are listed, and then—presumably because they’re recycling the same back panel across several flavor varieties—”May Contain Oats (Gluten), Wheat (Gluten), Sesame Seeds, Soya.” It’s a fair guess that at least the sesame (definitely included in this flavor) and soy traveled an additional few thousand miles to get to the factory in England.
Mind you, I’m not a locavore purist. Yes, I prefer to eat local, but I’ve got plenty of olive oil, chocolate, and other products in my kitchen that don’t grow around here. But when there is a local product available, I prefer to buy it. Years ago, I stopped buying the very wonderful bread I used to get because it’s made in California, and there’s perfectly lots of good bread made within 10 miles of my house—and I’ve basically only bought locally baked bread since then. (I did buy a loaf of my old favorite when I was in Berkeley, where it was local.)
Grains can be grown in my area, and some of the local bakeries actually use local ingredients (including a tortillaria that uses local, organic heirloom corn, and their tortillas are delicious).
It should not even be possible that something could travel 3/4 of the way around the world, be sold to me at that price, and have anyone involved make a profit. The shipping costs alone have to be much higher than that. And if externalities were counted and the true costs figured in, I should have been looking at a price tag somewhere around $10.
In the privileged middle-class country where I live, the impact is somewhat modulated, because only a small percentage of people make their living as farmers, and many of those farmers have secured markets that are insulated from these kinds of macroeconomics games (farmers markets, specialty restaurants, etc.). But talk to any dairy farmer in the US, and you’ll find that the economics are very troubling.
And when imports are dumped below-cost into subsistence farm economies in developing countries, the results can be tragic. Farmers who cannot compete with these artificially low prices lose their markets, and eventually their land. They crowd themselves into massive urban slums where they can find menial jobs, and those overcrowded megacities become crime-invested nightmares—while the land they once farmed withers or is polluted by some big industrial scheme where manufacturing jobs have been outsourced because it’s cheaper to operate in countries without strong environmental regulations.
We need to rethink our food economics and our whole consumer economy. Desperately.
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 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.
It’s still a new movement. Only 1203 certified B Corps exist in the world, as of late January, 2015. Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s unit was one of the first B Corps, back in 2012—and Ben & Jerry’s CEO Jostein Solheim is leading the effort, apparently with strong support from Unilever’s sustainability-minded CEO, Paul Polman.
The B Corp certification process is long and arduous for an entity as complex as Unilever, one of the largest consumer products corporations in the world; it’s likely to take years. But just the act of engaging in the conversation is a game changer:
Unilever’s tacit endorsement of the B Corp movement confers legitimacy; if one of the largest and most successful business organizations in the world can embrace it , other companies will say, “perhaps we should look into this.”
The B Corp movement is still not very well known, compared to similar movements such as Fair Trade. With Unilever coming onboard, a lot more people in the business world will hear about it—and take it seriously.
It will provide Unilever with substantial marketing advantages for several years. If the company is able to harness them properly, it can expect to sway many now-neutral customers to Unilever’s vast portfolio of brands. (As a marketing and profitability consultant to green/socially conscious businesses and the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, I can speak with some authority on this :-). )
Most importantly, it will show the entire business world that corporations don’t have to be rapacious; they don’t have to put short-term gain above the earth and its citizens (human and otherwise). It could even provide major leverage to overturn the body of corporation law that says corporations are legally required to put short-term profit ahead of all other considerations. And since most business people actually do want to do good in the world and many have felt burdened by this charter, this could create a seismic shift throughout the entire business community. (Some on the hard left will disagree that most business people actually want to do the right thing. Go ahead; the comments field is waiting for you.) Of course, there are a myriad of profit-making opportunities out there for activist companies willing to create and market goods and services that meaningfully reduce hunger, poverty, war, catastrophic climate change, and other suffering—you don’t need to be a B Corp for that. But as B Corp certification slowly becomes the default, it will speed that change.
In short, I’m heartened and excited by this news, and wish them success.
