Category: Demographics/Psychographics

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Branding, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics: General, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The two big messages of the Democratic Convention were Hope and Inclusion. Hope, of course, was one of the two themes (along with Change) that propelled Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008.

The danger with memes like Hope and Change is that they leave people greatly disappointed when not much appears to change. Obama actually has a pretty powerful record of accomplishment (and here’s a shorter but more up-to-date list prepared by the Democratic Party). But he’s somewhat diffident about claiming it—and his legacy is much less than it could have been because of the concerted effort of the GOP to deny him any victory no matter how small. Here, for instance, is Mitch McConnell, early in Obama’s presidency, saying the President is not sufficiently bipartisan, despite Obama’s unprecedented and massive outreach to the other side at the expense of that agenda of hope and change—something even Fox News noticed. (Of course, by 2010, McConnell was openly saying his top priority was making sure Obama was a one-term president.)

I have plenty of issues with both Obama and with Hillary Clinton—but government is supposed to be bipartisan, not spoil-sport-losers-blocking everything. The Democrats even allowed George W. Bush to govern, despite his awful, destructive policies from which the country is still recovering. That Obama has been able to get anything done in this climate (and as those two links above prove, he’s done quite a bit) is remarkable. That the Republican Party has thwarted the will of the people over and over again these 8 years is shameful.

Obama also has a tendency to “roll over and play dead” unnecessarily. To name one example, that he gave up so easily on filling the Supreme Court vacancy caused by Scalia’s death is shocking—and very bad precedent. As a former community organizer, Obama should have had a clue about how to break he deadlock—keep the apparatus that twice elected him president active, to deluge Republican legislators with calls and letters supporting particular pieces of Obama’s agenda—to keep people involved and motivated while at the same time disassembling Republican intransigence, making its revelry in being “The Party of No” politically difficult. Obama could have organized a backlash in the 2010 election and accumulated massive majorities in both houses. But he let his eager champions wither on the vine.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders

Inclusion may not be as powerful as hope, but it’s a very strong meme nonetheless. This year’s Republican candidate openly embraces hostility to inclusion—attacking Mexicans and Muslims along with immigrants in general, mocking disabled people, and even attacking the patriotism of decorated war hero Senator John McCain. So it’s a good move for Hillary Clinton to reclaim the emotional territory she gave up to both Sanders and Trump during primary season—and in this case, I do think it’s genuine. The first night of the convention, especially, was all about outreach to those who’ve felt disenfranchised (including the millions of supporters of Bernie Sanders). Clinton’s good dose of Policy Wonk may also be the antidote to Trump’s sketchy sound-bite promises about how he would govern.

The themes of inclusion, hope, and competence were in tremendous contrast with the Republican Convention, whose dominant message was fear—expressed in xenophobia. The other message of the Republicans was “we don’t have to give a crap about people we can beat up”–a big rallying point for those who agree, but a big push-away for anyone who might be a potential victim–and that’s a LOT of people. This is essentially the message of fascism, and it scares me to see it coming out of the mouth (and Twitter feed) of a nominated major-party candidate for President.

And this is why I will vote for Hillary even though my own politics are closer to Jill Stein’s, and even though I live in a state that will vote Democratic no matter what. I am not thrilled about voting for Hillary, but I will vote for her. I consider Trump the greatest threat to democracy and liberty in my lifetime. His repeated use of Hitlerian memes is very troubling. And I think very deliberate. I want Trump’s margin of defeat to be so “YUGE” that we never see his ugly politics again.

Looking at the election as a whole, I’d bet that Trump, a master marketer for decades, has studied NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming—an extremely powerful approach to getting inside people’s minds through the use of deep psychological triggers) and is far better at getting his (loathsome) message across than Clinton is. The Republicans have been using sound bites that appear to be based in NLP techniques for over 30 years, but Trump has taken it much deeper. Clinton, by contrast, is an old-school politician who hasn’t quite figured out the 21st-century shift in marketing from push to interactive. And Sanders has probably not studied marketing but he’s a natural. His brand is wrapped in an integrity that neither party nominee can offer—and he has a long background in (and deep understanding of) community organizing as well as electoral politics. When he started as a politician, Vermont was not exactly a progressive hotspot. I believe he helped create the climate where his state is now among the bluest in the nation.

Interestingly, all three are around the same age, spanning from Clinton’s 68 to Sanders’ 74 (Trump just turned 70)—yet the oldest, Sanders, had the strongest appeal to youth. And the younger candidates, from O’Malley to Rubio, were all eliminated months ago.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Branding, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, General Commentary, Marketing Trends/News, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’d hazard a guess that most US natives between the ages of 40-80 can still sing the jingle: “Candy-coated popcorn, peanuts and a prize. That’s what you get with Cracker Jack.” It was a big part of our childhoods, back in the days when three TV networks controlled the entire universe of video and national advertisers bought saturation advertising programs that aired the same commercial many times a day. Cracker Jack was immortalized in the song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in 1908, started bundling the prize way back in 1912, and began its national TV advertising in 1955.

The Cracker Jack box as it appeared during my 1960s childhood (courtesy of Wikipedia)
The Cracker Jack box as it appeared during my 1960s childhood (courtesy of Wikipedia)

It didn’t matter that the prize was something worth about 2 cents, something not even worthy of being called a tchochke. It was the thrill of the hunt, searching through all that icky sticky stuff to locate the prize—and the thrill of mystery, never knowing what, umm, “treasure” you’d find. Sometimes it would be something really cool, like a spy decoder ring. But like any other grab-bag item, sometimes it was truly worthless. I knew kids who bought CrackerJack just to get that prize.

At that time, the company was owned by Borden, whose Elsie the Cow was another advertising icon of the period. It’s now owned by Pepsico’s Frito-Lay division

Well, here’s some shocking news: Despite its wildly successful run of more than 100 years, the Cracker Jack toy is now an endangered species. As Bob Dylan sang during the Cracker Jack saturation TV period, “The times, they are a changing.” Cracker Jack is replacing the “tchochkette” (if I can coin a word that merges Yiddish and French) with a slip of paper bearing a QR code!

I’m sorry, but that is just not the same. From a branding point of view, I think it’s a huge error. Cracker Jack’s whole brand is built around nostalgia, Americana, baseball, and that unforgettable jingle. Sure, digital natives will redeem their QR codes and not think twice about it. But they won’t know what they’re missing. And those who can’t afford or choose not to use smartphones are left out entirely. Plus, their kids will never hear their parents scream at a bad driver, “Did you get your license in a Cracker Jack box?” A piece of American culture is disappearing.

In Cracker Jack’s earliest days, during a baseball corruption scandal known as the Chicago Black Sox scandal, a fan reportedly went up to the legendary Shoeless Joe Jackson and begged, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” Maybe now, we need to say, “Get back on the track, Jack!”

 

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By Posted on Posted in Branding, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, propaganda, Psychology Tagged with , , , ,

The 21016 US presidential race shows that branding repels as well as attracts.

Three of the five remaining candidates have very strong brands. Trump has the strongest, clearest brand: “it’s all about me; the issues don’t matter.” I found him repugnant 11 years ago when he keynoted a conference where I was speaking, and find him even more so today. What part of his brand that is not based in Donaldism is rooted in misogyny and racism. His cult of personality is far too reminiscent of dictators in other countries, other centuries. His cluelessness on the issues, tolerance of violence at his rallies and in his campaign leadership, and his blatant disregard for truth create a strong brand indeed—but it’s strong like the odor of raw sewage, a push-away. This is not who I want governing the country!

Next strongest is Sanders, who is all about integrity, consistency, and giving a leg up to those who’ve been squeezed out by the 1%. And who got my vote in the primary. While just as much an outsider, Sanders is the opposite of Trump. I think ultimately Sanders’ “we” will trump Trump’s “me.” Win or lose, he is out there to build a movement, and is universally respected for it.

Interestingly, both of these two have built brands on their outsider-ness. Not a good year for the mainstream candidates, even those who are the son/brother—or wife—of former presidents.

The third brand-builder is Clinton. She is very much a mainstream candidate and has built her brand around “isn’t it time for a smart, powerful woman to be in power?” Like Trump, she’s a “me” candidate, but with more appeal to constituencies that vote. Unfortunately for her, it’s been wrapped up in a package of entitlement, incompetence, lack of transparency, and settling for crumbs.

That Sanders has even been a contender, let alone actually won so many contests and nearly tied several others, shows some of the flaws in Clinton’s strategy. Without resorting to attack ads, he has successfully pointed out that she is a Janey-come-lately on issues ranging from LGBT rights to the TPP trade agreement, where he has been forthright and consistent for decades. He is the first serious contender in decades to raise a viable campaign budget from a broad base of millions of supporters. Meanwhile, she tells the American people to be satisfied with what they have, while he talks about redistributing wealth from the 1%.

There is certainly some part of the Clinton brand that is wildly successful. She is perceived as greater a friend to people of color, while even though Bernie grew up in ultra-diverse New York City and marched with Martin Luther King while she was working for Barry Goldwater, he is perceived as trapped in whiteness. And she has successfully outflanked him from the left on one issue: guns. But the perception is that she doesn’t see the big picture, doesn’t understand the shift in the culture, will be at least as obstructed by the other side as Obama, and expects people to vote for her just because she’s been waiting so long.

Of course, two other candidates still remain on the Republican side: Cruz and Kasich. Neither has really built a brand. What Cruz stands for—a hard-right agenda fueled by religious conservatism (and, seemingly, some personal unlikability)—is not widely known around the country. If he becomes the nominee, the Democrats will build his brand for him, warning of the apocalypse to come (as they’re already doing regarding Trump).

As a relatively personable moderate with a reasonable track record, Kasich would actually be the Republicans’ best hope if he had any marketing traction. Of the three remaining, he’s the only one who could get independents and centrist Democrats aboard. Fortunately for the Democrats, he doesn’t. The GOP clearly wants an extremist this year, and Kasich has won only his own state of Ohio.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Advertising, Demographics/Psychographics, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, poverty, Psychology, travel Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Through the 26 dynasties that made up its history until 1911, China developed a unique culture, strongly rooted in a visual aesthetic and a behavior code rooted in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism.

The 20th Century saw several massive shifts. The Qing Dynasty fell and the Republic of China was formed under Dr. Sun Yat-Sen. The Japanese invaded in the 1930s. Led by Mao Tzedung, Communists forced out Sun’s successor, Chaing Kai-Shek. Mao’s 1960s-70s Cultural Revolution deliberately abandoned (and criminalized) both Chinese and Western traditions. After Mao’s death, new leaders starting with Deng Xao Ping began to embrace western-style capitalism, both by encouraging Chinese entrepreneurs and by inviting western companies in.

One of the many pieces of public art in the Beijing subway system. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
One of the many pieces of public art in the Beijing subway system. Photo by Shel Horowitz.

Today, in Shanghai, it’s hard to find the old China. The wide boulevards are lined with stores like H&M, Apple, and Starbucks (we were told the coffee chain has over 180 locations in the city). Billboards advertising glitzy western luxury goods—and using about 15 western models for every image of a Chinese. Recent construction waves favor enormously tall highrise apartment buildings going out for miles from the city center (and we were told that most have only two elevators). If the residential areas are not 60-storey megatowers, they’re either Soviet-style cheap apartment buildings of 20 storeys or so, or six-storey walk-ups—both constructed in massive numbers following the Communist takeover. Bicycles have been largely pushed out by electric mopeds, and cars are crowding those off the road. Highways are layered up to four deep at some complex intersections, with crazy systems of ramps spiraling from level to level.

In Beijing, the situation is similar, but many old hutongs—close-knit neighborhoods in one- and two-storey buildings—still flourish. Of course, the majority have been torn down for new construction, but the remaining ones are easy to spot. Also, many important historic sites and temples remain open in and around Beijing.

But in Shanghai, the extremely toursity neighborhood of Old Shanghai—with 500-year-old buildings hosting a lot of western quick service restaurants—is almost the only respite we saw from new construction except the Bund, whose riverside prerevolutionary hotels and trade edifices are mostly about a century old. The entire Pudong (eastern) side of the city is new, with some 8000 skyscrapers constructed on former farmland since about 1990, and the population doubling from 12 to 25 million.

We saw surprisingly few industrial areas (of course, we weren’t in factory cities like Guangzhou or Wuhu). And we also saw remarkably little evidence of China’s role as a world leader in solar. While most buildings have visible solar hot water systems, we saw almost no photovoltaic. Given China’s major air pollution problems and its heavy reliance on dirty fuel (especially coal), it’s surprising to me that more solar hasn’t been installed where it’s suitable (and there are plenty of them).

One of the West’s more obvious exports to China is status consciousness. Although places to live are expensive and hard to find, motor vehicle registration plates cost up to $15,000 in Shanghai, and imported luxury goods are taxed at 300 percent even if they’re made in China in the first place, all four cities we visited include a significant population that buys expensive clothes and expensive cars. In Shanghai, I saw a Ferrari, three Porsches, numerous Audis and Mercedes, a few Range Rovers, and several other luxury/sports cars I couldn’t identify. Of course, there were plenty of cheaper cars. In the business districts, the streets are full of fashionistas—not to the extent of Milan or Barcelona, but far more than, say, Boston. Chinese women with lots of disposable income shop at Prada and Sephora, while those with fewer resources go to the many bargain stores. Two of our guides made the same joke about getting to work by BMW: Bus/Metro/Walking. One of them also told us that single Chinese women in their thirties (who can be pretty choosy, because men outnumber them significantly) look for men with “five cs:” Condominium, Cash, Career, Car—and Cute (in that order).

We heard that people who go abroad bring back as much as they can and share it with their friends, to save on that 300 percent tax.

In some ways, the country is modernizing and westernizing rapidly. A lot of people drink western-style soft drinks as well as coffee, and the cities are full of large hotels now.—many of them connected with an american or European brand. Public bathrooms in many tourist attractions and better restaurants include at least one western-style toilet.

Yet at the same time, the average wage for people outside the capitalist sector is quite low, and those who were not into fashion were often somewhat shabbily dressed.

And while the subways are fully bilingual, it was shocking how few people even in high-tourist-contact jobs had any English at all. The hucksters knew how to name prices and negotiate them, but even staff at airlines and hotels often had no English. I don’t go around the world expecting English to always be available. I was not shocked that our innkeeper in remote Goreme, Turkey or a store manager in a small town in the mountains of the Czech Republic spoke no English—but I do expect that the cabin crew on a flight from Shanghai to New York will have basic conversational English. This was apparently unrealistic. Over and over again, we encountered people who simply did not have the language to answer even very simple questions. However, even ordinary folks in non-tourist neighborhoods were skilled at communicating despite the language barrier. Talking at us nonstop and gesticulating, they usually got their point across. And those few we encountered who do speak English had excellent fluency; we didn’t encounter any half-baked attempts of people with just enough English to confuse.

Although China recognizes more than 40 ethnic groups, Han Chinese make up 92 percent of the country. Considering that some areas, like Tibet or the Muslim Uigur area bordering Central Asia, are majority non-Han, that means the cities I visited are almost monoethnic. As white westerners, we were constantly gawked at and asked to pose for selfies, especially by Chinese tourists from far-away regions. A young blonde in our group got it far more often than the rest of us.

Shel Horowitz’s latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, shows how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—using the power of the profit motive.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, Psychology Tagged with , , , ,

In September, 2011, a small group of  protestors took over New York City’s Zuccotti Park, one block from Wall Street. They called themselves “Occupy Wall Street.”

This action was the first in a national and international Occupy movement that sprang up in parks and elsewhere, and lasted for months. I visited Zuccotti Park, as well as Occupy parks in Boston, Northampton (MA), and Montreal; it was clearly a powerful movement. It sparked global awareness that a lot of people, especially young people and people of color, felt pretty marginalized. It popularized “99 percent vs. 1 percent” organizing slogans. And it forced US President Barack Obama to move his rhetoric leftward, and to at least verbally champion the dispossessed.

That action continues to reverberate through American and world politics, four and a half years later. The movement around a $15 minimum hourly wage is just one of its legacies. Another is the amazingly strong presidential campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an outspoken progressive. Sanders, with no ties to the power structure and no reliance on conventional political funding, was given no chance of even having an impact; now, he’s ranked as the contender likely to most easily beat either Trump or Cruz in the general election.

Two Bernie Sanders volunteers decided to set up a short-notice phone bank for Bernie…right in Zuccotti Park! The symbolism of raising money to fight Wall Street in Wall Street’s own shadow—and at the very scene where a bunch of “riff-raff” took on the power structure—is clear…and beautiful.

It’s been a good week for symbolism in the Bernie camp; a few days ago, a bird landed on his podium while he was addressing a rally, and he immediately dubbed it “a dove asking us for world peace.”

A bird lands on Bernie Sanders' podium (PBS)
A bird lands on Bernie Sanders’ podium (PBS)

His campaign is gaining traction all the time. I hope the Democratic Party has the courage to let him be its standard-bearer this fall.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, General Commentary, language, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

So much of the news is bad right now. Both my local papers had the same depressing Associated Press article this morning. In the years since Sandy Hook, apparently, many states have made it EASIER to carry guns and basically nothing has been done to bring gun violence back to levels typical of most civilized countries.

Another article talks about the attacks by Republicans in Congress on our democratic society, on the environment and the new #COP21 climate agreement just hashed out, and even on medical benefits for 9/11/01 first responders, among the other bad stuff they have in store.

“What does he mean by ‘attacks on our democratic society?'”  you ask. I’ll answer with a couple of excerpts from the article:

The trucking industry wants to allow longer tandem trucks and block rules requiring added rest for drivers.

If you don’t think that’s an attack on our democracy, consider the consequences if the driver of a supersize truck falls asleep at the wheel and crashes into a school bus. There’s the human cost of an avoidable tragedy, of course, but also the financial burden on cities and counties already squeezed to the bone. It will be the safety net that gets shredded.

Financial companies want to ease tighter regulations imposed by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law.

Have we learned nothing from the debacle of 2007-08?

And there are efforts to repeal a law requiring that meat be labeled with its country of origin…and to block mandatory labels for genetically modified foods

Whatever happened to consumers’ right to know?

And then, of course, there’s the usual run of Islamophobic racism in our land built by immigrants, many of them refugees:

Republicans want to include a House-passed bill restricting Syrian refugees trying to enter the U.S. Faced with an Obama veto threat, that may be replaced by a measure, approved with bipartisan support by the House, restricting visa-free entry into the U.S. by many foreigners.

These Republican politicians forget that they are also descended from people who came here seeking a better life.

It happens that I sent a birthday greeting on Facebook to a Muslim (Pakistani immigrant) friend yesterday (I happened to sit next to him at a Bruce Springsteen concert several years ago, and we’ve stayed in touch). His response and the dialog we’ve had is relevant to the conversation. I reprint with his permission:

Him:
Thank you Shell….. It’s been an awesome few weeks. Finally became an American citizen and celebrated my birthday the same week.
Me:
Wow, congrats. We’ll have to change that Springsteen song (did he sing it the night we met? I don’t remember) to “CHOSE the USA!” It’s a powerful time to make that choice, with anti-Islamic crazies running high-poling campaigns for president.
Him:
Lol…. The same day I received my naturalization, Trump opened his mouth …. Lol…. It was funny…. However, the support has been wonderful from friends and coworkers.
Me:
All I can do is shake my head in wonder. He is sounding more like a Nazi. It shakes my faith in America that he has measurable support. My best hope is that he doesn’t get the nomination but gets close enough that he runs as an independent. And Hillary (more likely) or Bernie (my preferred choice) leads a Dem sweep that gets not just the WH but both houses of Congress and we can actually get some stuff done around here. Of course, US media has been playing up anti-Arab and anti-Islamic bigotry since at least the 1970s oil crisis–even though other than 9/11, Fort Hood, and this recent tragedy in California, most of the gun violence is at the hands of people who self-identify as Christian (I don’t think Christ would agree with their claim).
It just occurred to me as I hit send that this might make a good blog post. May I have your permission to reprint your comments–you can be an anonymous “Muslim friend” or I can name you.
Him:
Sure. Trump is just an attention seeking idiot. Amazing that a reality star, upstart millionaire can received so much attention …. Lol.
I’m glad he’s not deterred by recent xenophobia. Like my ancestors and yours, he will help us build a better country in the US.
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, language, Marketing Trends/News, Politics, Social and Economic Justice, Socially Responsible Investing, Technology Tagged with , , , ,
Delegates at an international meeting
A similar international meeting (in Bonn, Germany)

After the failure at Copenhagen a few years back, I didn’t have big hopes for this year’s event. Yet, I’m beginning to think the big Paris climate change conference known as #COP21 may actually accomplish some real change.

Oddly enough, my optimism is rooted in something I would have seen a few years ago as a fatal flaw: that the results will be based in voluntary, not mandatory, compliance.

Why? Because:

  1. We can’t GET mandatory compliance. In the US, that would require a yes vote in each house of Congress, or even worse, the 2/3 Senate support required to adopt a treaty. But even as far back as Kyoto, US electoral politics had become a toxic swamp of attack-dog partisanship. No climate change bill with teeth is going to pass Congress any time soon. And without US (or China’s) participation, any agreement would be useless.
  2. The US and China have already agreed to take climate seriously, and have negotiated their own agreement. Weaker than I’d like, but a heck of a good start, and one that seems to have helped apply the brakes on China’s mad rush to coal (the worst scenario for averting climate disaster).
  3. The business community has woken up. Often a force for conservatism, the business world now understands the catastrophic consequences of failure to make meaningful progress on climate change—and the profits to be made in doing the right thing. If the government won’t act, they will force action through other channels. The emergence of environmental activism among evangelical Christians and even a subset of Tea Party activists who care deeply about the environment is also very encouraging.
  4. The growing use of carbon markets provides additional financial incentives for cutting carbon.
  5. New technology makes it easier to do more with less, use. our resources far more effectively, and solve engineering problems with biological thinking (for example, letting bridge engineers study spiderwebs). We understand now, for instance, just how much energy and carbon we can save by going for deep conservation.
  6. Early discussions about whether the world should agree on a 1.5 degree Celsius vs. 2 degree C cap in global temperatures compared to what existed before the Industrial Revolution means we’ve finally gotten past the question that’s been holding us back for so long: why do we need to contain rising temperatures in the first place? For the first time, the world is pretty much in agreement that it has to be done. Not just scientists, this time, but governments, too. Climate deniers (other than in the US Republican Party leadership, apparently) are now as marginalized as environmental activists were 20 or 30 years ago.

I could keep going, but you get the message—we can do this!

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Business-general, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics in Government, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, language, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
Photo of debris after Hurricane Katrina
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!

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By Posted on Posted in Branding, Business-general, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, language, Politics, Psychology Tagged with , , ,
Peace, in many languages
Peace, in many languages

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).

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Branding, Copywriting, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , ,
Spanish-language fundrasiing letter
Seven reasons why this letter failed to raise money from me

What’s wrong with this picture? Plenty.

  1. The letter is in Spanish. Although I do happen to speak Spanish, I’m not great at reading big quantities of it. And I’m pretty sure that whatever charity rented them the list, it’s one that does business in English. Which means most of the people receiving it won’t be able to read it at all.
  2. They’ve enclosed six cents of real American money. Which probably upped the cost of the mailing by at least a dollar apiece, because of the technologies involved in mounting coins precisely on circles, facing the right direction, etc. If they can afford to spend a dollar to send me money, they don’t need me to send them money.
  3. If I understand the Spanish correctly, they actually request that I send them back the six cents along with my donation. If this is supposed to weigh on my psychology and pull on my heartstrings, it fails. It just gets me annoyed that their gift is false.
  4. It’s not a group I’ve heard of, and they don’t do enough to build my confidence in the organization. Other than telling me (on the back) that 95 percent of contributions go to programs, and logos (again on the back) from Ministry Watch and BBB, they do basically nothing to convince me that this is a legitimate organization. There’s no reference to checking them out on Charity Navigator, nothing about what they’ve actually done with the money they received. All they tell me (translating) is “Founded in 1982, Food For The Poor is an interdenominational Christian organization that works for ending the suffering of the poor in the Caribbean and Latin America.” It doesn’t say how they accomplish this.
  5. I’m not a Christian and prefer to contribute to good works through nondenominational or Jewish organizations. So I’m not in their target market.
  6. I respond much better to pictures of people being empowered through changemaking organizations than I do to 1970s-Biafra-style hunger photos. And I think a lot of other people do as well; in my own copywriting, I emphasize the positive change, not the desperation.
  7. It’s addressed to Señor Sheldon Horowitz. True, Sheldon Horowitz (generally without Señor attached) was my name until I was 15. But as a junior in high school, I shortened it to Shel, and started coming out from under a lot of negative emotional baggage tied up with my birth name. In 1983 when I got married, Shel became my legal name. I didn’t move to my current home until 1998. Thus, there has never been a Señor Sheldon Horowitz at this address. Call people what they want to be called, not by a name they rejected. Yeah, I know, they were just buying a list—but it must have been a nonresponsive list, because calling me Sheldon predisposes me to reject the request.

The sad thing is, it would have been easy for them to do so much better. I actually went to Charity Navigator and looked them up anyway. They score very well on both financial and organizational criteria. They took in over a billion dollars in 2013, and funded programs with almost $985 million that year.

Too, the Charity Navigator site gives me a description, obviously written by the charity itself, that would have done a lot to assuage my concerns, had it been in the letter:

Food For The Poor (FFP) ministers to spiritually renew impoverished people throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Established in 1982, FFP’s goals are to improve the health, economic, social and spiritual conditions of the men, women and children we serve. Food For The Poor raises funds and provides direct relief assistance to the poor, usually by purchasing specifically requested materials and distributing them through the churches and charity organizations already operating in areas of need. Since its founding FFP has distributed more than 63,000 tractor-trailer loads of aid to the poor. We have also built more than 84,000 housing units for people desperately in need of adequate shelter, and completed more than 1,475 water projects that provide lifesaving water and sanitation to hundreds of thousands of people in need.

Nice and specific about what they do and how they do it–so why not include it in their mailings?

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