I’m a long-time fan of Van Jones, and one of the things I love is that he can frame things in ways that those on the other side of the political continuum can relate to.
Later in the talk, he discusses solar and wind as farmer power, cowboy power, etc. And demonstrates that organic farming is traditional, and that we should return to our roots after a century of “poison-based agriculture.” And calls not for subsidy for green initiatives, but for green as entrepreneurship, enterprise, and job creation—arguments that both liberals and conservatives should relate to.
When making any marketing purchase, you want to know what it will bring you. Too many business owners forget that step, and buy blindly, wasting a ton of money.
This morning, I got a call from a promotional products salesman that illustrates this all-too-well. This a real conversation, as best as I can transcribe it from memory:
Me: I don’t do advertising specialties, because I don’t even meet most of my clients. I get them from my books, from online networking, from my speeches…
Salesman: Would you like more traffic to your website? We do these beautiful laser-engraved pens with your website URL.
Me: I already get about 50,000 visits a month to my site.
Salesman: Well, imagine hundreds of thousands more visitors.
Would you type in a URL from these pens?
Me: You think I’m going to get hundreds of thousands of visitors by giving out pens? Let me ask you—when was the last time you visited a website because someone gave you a pen with the URL?
Salesman: Most of the pens I’ve seen don’t have URLs.
Me: Well, I’ve seen plenty that do. I read every printed pen I get. And I can’t think of a single one that got me to type in the URL.
First of all, the guy is out of touch. URLs have been appearing on pens for years. I did a quick survey of ten random custom pens in my stash; half had a URL, and some of the others, like a pen from Hyatt hotels, didn’t really need one because the URL is obvious. If you’re going to do any kind of promotional product, you want your URL nice and prominent on it. And second, he was so completely clueless about the ROI for me. The ROI for him is obvious: a commission. But what’s the benefit to me? Zero.
Mind you, I’m not dissing the category of promotional items. I’ve seen examples that work well: an auto sunshade with huge block letters on both sides, promoting a mayoral candidate (she won)…a mug that stays on your desk as a reminder, month after month, a solar calculator promoting a solar energy consultant…lawn signs with the silhouette of the mountain a local environmental group was trying to save, along with both phone and URL (they won).
In fact, I’m actually planning to experiment with a small run of imprinted seed packages; I believe they will harmonize with my message of business growth through green principles. I’ll hand these out when I speak at green business conferences, and maybe throw a few out to the audience for answering questions correctly in general business conferences.
Promotional products make sense when there’s not only a good fit between the marketing vehicle and the brand, but also a good fit between the utility of the product and the visibility of the marketing message. On that last, it’s the difference between items like pens or worse, sunglasses, where the marketing message is hard to read and too small to do much branding anyway—and something that actually might be useful for marketing, say, a t-shirt or tote bag, where the message can easily attract attention.
What are some of the best and worst marketing purchases you’ve made (or seen), from an ROI perspective? Comment below.
A blogger on Sustainable Business, Marc Stoiber, wonders why a major sustainability milestone achieved by Translink, the Vancouver, British Colombia transit system, went almost unnoticed by local and national media.
The funny thing is…transit systems control their own media, one that reaches the two most important audiences they have. If I were the company’s marketing director, I’d put inside placards on the front and back of both sides of every bus and subway (four signs in each car) to reach the actual riders—and exterior signage to reach the next-most-important constituency: Vancouver-area residents not yet using public transit.
The interior placards would not just brag about the accomplishment—they’d say thank you to the riders for their part. And those exterior signs would recruit new riders to join the tribe, e.g., “become part of the greenest commute in North America.” And I’d supplement this with a nice social media campaign, which itself could be a subject for exciting press releases, etc.
Then, the local media and perhaps the national media would almost certainly pick up the story—but even if they didn’t, the message would be out there, and if done right, ridership would grow.
Stoiber goes on to discuss the very creative marketing of another transit advocate, Jason Roberts—who put up a website for the a nonexistent light-rail transit line in Dallas, Texas called the Oak Cliff Transit Authority—and was able to organize so effectively around this public vision that the project actually got funded! You might call Roberts’ story “If You Dream It, They Will Come—IF You’re a Marketer and Organizer Who Can Create and Gather a Tribe.”
Vancouver Transit execs: I’d love to consult with you on how to build big awareness. I already have one Vancouver-based green company as a client.
I’m writing this on Sunday, immediately after posing my question to you, and posting it on Tuesday, as promised. Hopefully a few of you have added your wisdom. And here’s what I think:
1. Chris Brogan is spot on when he says you don’t achieve greatness by following the existing paradigm. You conceive the ultimate goal—hopefully something big and bold—and then engineer a path from today’s world to that goal.
Examples:
Steve Jobs envisioning a “computer for the rest of us,” or a whole music library that fits in a shirt pocket
2. A number of lessons to be learned from “Caine’s Arcade”:
Caine’s parents were wise enough not to interfere, not to assault their son with messages that what he was trying t do was impossible, useless, or even misdirected. They gave him room to follow his dream.
For Caine, it was enough to build it even when people didn’t come—just as for me, I’m driven to write my blog, my monthly column, and my books even though my audiences are small. Because I know that a few people do passionately pay attention to my ideas, it gives me a lot of juice to keep going. Of course, if I had the fame of a Chris Brogan or Seth Godin, I’d reach a lot more people. And that would harmonize with my own goals to change the world. But just knowing that I have changed the lives of a few people and the course of a few communities helps me keep going. I’m not sure I’m as brave as Caine, though. I’m not sure I could do it anymore if I didn’t think anyone at all was listening.
The missing ingredient in both Emerson’s “build a better mousetrap and people will beat a path to your door” and director Phil Alden Robinson and writer W. P. Kinsella’s “if you build it, they will come” is marketing. While Caine says he doesn’t care if anyone comes to play, he tells us of feeling excluded and teased when he tried to share his accomplishment at school. And his reaction when his lone customer brings a crowd to play shows that while just the achievement had been enough for Caine, sharing it with others is so much more. Nirvan, that solitary customer, did the marketing for him, and did a fabulous job. The happy ending is as much a testament to Nirvan’s social media prowess as to Caine’s creativity and ingenuity—just as the rise of Apple needed both Jobs’ vision and marketing skills and Steve Wozniak’s engineering genius. The lesson for entrepreneurs is that if you don’t have all three elements—vision, engineering, and marketing—you need to partner with someone who has the pieces you lack.
3. The actual ad featured in the going green video is a brilliant example of using big-picture thinking to convey a message. Take a walk—and find your true love. Yes, it’s absurd. But it’s also very compelling. and it talks most elegantly to the way people can change behavior and become greener—achieving both a planetary and a personal good.
Much traditional advertising of for-profit products and nonprofit causes focuses on one or the other: buy this car or smoke this cigarette and you’ll feel sexy, that sort of thing—or “only you can prevent forest fires,” give money to cancer research, etc.—helping-others messaging without a clear direct benefit.
Without starting with that intention, I’ve been immersing myself in “creativity juice” this morning. A whole bunch of the e-mails I’ve opened have, by random chance (if there is such a thing), forced me to think about how creativity happens, what it means, and whether “if you build it, they will come”—a/k/a, in the pre-“Field of Dreams” world as the better mousetrap aphorism—has relevance in today’s world.
Today, I’ll share three of these inspirations with you: the raw material. And I’ll write down what I think about this confluence, but set it to post on Tuesday—because I want your reactions before you see mine. Please comment below.
When I think about all that a business can do to succeed (or all that an individual can do, for that matter), I start from the mindset of forgetting about the path that someone else has forged. Why? Because innovation rarely (never?) comes from following an established path. If I were going to design a hotel, I wouldn’t try learning what worked and didn’t work for the Four Seasons, I’d think through (and then interview others about) all the details that matter to me as a traveler, and then consider what I could do better.
While I won’t give away my reactions yet, I will tell you that my response cites Steve Jobs, energy visionary Amory Lovins, and some game-changing, category-inventing products.
Meanwhile, you have the floor. I’m eagerly awaiting your response.
Here’s a description that Susan Rich wrote. It’s pretty accurate for all four calls:
Join get-you-noticed expert and internet radio host Susan Rich as she talks marketing ideas that help you grab attention and drives sales.
This week she’ll be joined by the ultimate expert in Get-You-Noticed tactics: copywriter, marketing consultant, author, and speaker Shel Horowitz. He has published eight books on the topic, the latest is: Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.
Here’s a company that’s been selling hand-made recycled art papers since 1998 (think about really cool and classy invitations)—and has just developed a new paper line using post-brewery barley as one of the ingredients—and being smart marketers, billing it as the first beer paper. They sponsored this morning’s HARO, and thus, I learned about them. I clicked over half expecting some very rough page put up by a few carousing fratboys–boy, was I wrong! These people love the earth and love what they do, which is obvious on every page of their site.
I’ve long been a fan of marketing to different market segments according to their own hot buttons, as anyone knows who has read my books (especially Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green).
I just love this! While one of Los Angeles’ major freeways was closed (the so-called “carmageddon”), and Jet Blue offered $4 airfares for the 40-mile jaunt between Burbank and Long Beach, a group of cyclists
And they did. The cyclists, part of a group called Wolfpack Hustle, made the ride in an hour and thirty-five minutes. Another member of the group drove to the airport, arrived the requisite hour early, waited in the security line, boarded the plane, landed, and took a cab (which apparently got lost) to the finish line—arriving more than an hour after the cyclists, and after a challenger who made the trip by public transit and walking, and another who rollerbladed it.
That’s right: On Sunday, an airplane got its butt kicked by bicycles, metro rail, and a pair of rollerblades.
Score two for self-propelled transportation (bikes AND inline skates), and another for land-based mass transit. I thought it was pretty cool that when I was a high school student in the Bronx, I could easily beat the bus coming back from school on my five-mile bike ride, and took about the same time on the way there (uphill). But this, I have to say, is so much cooler. 🙂
(Thanks to Eric Eustache (@E_volution on Twitter) for sharing this terrific article.)
One of the most exciting things about the green movement lately is the way it’s become so mainstream. After some 40 years in this movement, I am deeply gratified that every company I can think of is taking steps toward sustainability. Some, like Marks & Spencer in the UK and believe it or not, Walmart in the US (and worldwide)—a company not exactly swarming with treehuggers—have practically made it into a religion.
In my talks and interviews, I almost always mention Walmart, because that company is heavily driven by the profit motive—and has found it extremely profitable to lower expenses by paying attention to sustainability, and at the same time create new profit centers. For instance, Walmart is selling truckloads of organic food to people who would never set foot in a Whole Foods. While I still have many other issues with the company, ranging from labor practices and supplier policies to siting and closed-store-reuse, on sustainabiity, I have only praise.
And if bottom-line-driven, NON-treehugger company like Walmart can build a green path to prosperity, what holds the rest of us back?
