Category: Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , ,

I received this tweet from a stranger today:

@shelhorowitz , please follow me, and check me out. Thank you. [URL]

To which I tweeted back:

Give me a reason

As a marketing consultant and copywriter, that’s one of my mantras. I think “because” is one of the most important words in marketing. I’m always probing the why with my clients, and using that to create compelling marketing strategies and materials.

The days of “oh, look at me, I’m so cool, I have a website” were probably gone by about 1996, if not before.

Your prospects are busy people. They want to know why before they click on your link. They want to know why before they give up even 30 seconds of their time.

Specifically, they want to know the benefit. Will you make them laugh? Give them a tool they need? Solve a problem? Give them celebrity gossip? Help them go green (as I do)? Make a specific offer. They will thank you—and some of them, the right ones, will visit.

This will serve you well in any marketing medium: advertising, freebie information, socialmedia, and lots more, as well as your website.

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

In my post yesterday on oil-industry and think-tank funding of climate deniers, I deliberately used the term “catastrophic climate change” instead of the more common phrase, “global warming.”

You may be wondering why:

  • “Warming” is a joyous word, with happy connotations. Think about “warm-hearted” friends or a “warm lead” in sales—but climate change is nothing to be joyous about
  • “Warming” implies a gradual shift, nothing to be very concerned about, just a natural evolution—rather than the reality of intense and cataclysmic storms
  • The weather patterns are not all heat-related—right now, for example,  millions of people are freezing in Europe
  • It’s hard for many people to make the connections between rising temperatures and the major weather events they influence—such as the human interventions that turned Katrina from a “normal” hurricane into one of the most destructive storms ever, only to be surpassed by the Indian Ocean tsunami a few months later

As change activists and marketers, we need to own the language we use, to frame today’s realities in messaging that is easy to grasp and hard to distort. (George Lakoff, among others, has written very eloquently on this.)

I heard one speaker several years ago suggest that “global roasting” would be more appropriate—his graphic description of what we can expect is essential reading for climate activists for the wreckage that our planet will become—but even that doesn’t do the problem justice.

Even the phrase, “climate change,” is not enough. “Catastrophic climate change,” with its extra alliterative power and clear focus on potential disaster gives people a frame they can grasp. I suggest we use this term in our messaging.

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

In the Dumb and Dumber department: I opened a letter marked “Personal Correspondence,” knowing full well that it was not. It used a very obvious handwriting font, nonprofit bulk-mail indicia instead of a postage stamp, and a sprayed barcode, and on the back was a Washington, DC mailing address with no name.

Personal correspondence, my arse! I opened it up because I wanted to find out who was lying to me.

Turned out to be a charity group that works on gay and lesbian rights issues, a group I’ve previously donated money to. Inside, there was no longer any attempt to look personal. It was a fairly standard fearmongering letter, some slick full-color inserts and a decal. I separated the decal into the trash, put the rest of it in the recycling—but I kept the postage paid return envelope. I’m going to print this blog post and mail it back to the org at their expense, to make a statement that I don’t like being lied to, do not condone unethical marketing even from causes I support, and to make it a few cents more expensive to treat me as a fool.

Doesn’t anyone vet this stuff before it goes out?

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

In Part 1, “Steve Jobs Introduces the first Macintosh, January 1984,” I discussed why “the computer for the rest of us” was such a big deal at the time. Now, I want to show you how the Mac allowed me to completely reinvent an old business model and dominate my local market for ten years. You might find some marketing lessons you can apply to your own business.

In 1984, when I bought my first (and one of the first) Mac, the bulk of my work was typing term papers and writing résumés. The difference for résumés, even with the dot-matrix printer that was all the Mac had back then, was amazing. Being able to bold or italicize, having the words appear on the screen exactly where they’d show up on paper, and most importantly, knowing exactly where the bottom of the page was and being able to adjust typographically to make things fit—W O W !

Up to that point, I would write a draft of the resume without worrying about formatting during the first interview, send the client away, type it up on an IBM Selectric typewriter (which sometimes took two or three tries, although it got better when I realized I could type on legal-size paper for photocopying onto letter-size and not worry so much about matching the top and bottom margins), and then bring the client back in to review the final product. Changes either required whiting out the error with a special paint, letting it dry thoroughly and very carefully inserting the correction, or retyping the whole bleeping page.

Now, here’s the lesson: Having access to this better technology meant I was not only able to change my business model, but create an unstoppable marketing advantage—and even back then, I was thinking like a marketer.

I went into the Yellow Pages with a little half-inch in-column listing that said “Affordable professional resumes while you wait.” (Couldn’t do accent marks in the Yellow Pages at that time.) Almost instantly, I had the busiest résumé shop in my whole three-county-area. And that slogan was my USP (Unique Selling Proposition) for the next decade. Résumés were not only more lucrative but a lot more fun than typing term papers, and within a few years, they (along with the growing percentage of students who had access to a computer) pretty much pushed out the term paper portion of my business. We rode the résumé train as the bread and butter of our business until Windows 95 started to catch on, with a résumé template that let people think (incorrectly, in most cases) that they could do their own résumés. And oddly enough, none of my local competitors offered the while-you-wait service that attracted so many people to us.

If you missed part 1 of this two-part series, https://greenandprofitable.com/steve-jobs-introduces-the-first-macintosh-january-1984

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

This is quite exciting: solar systems for remote, off-grid areas in developing countries, set up with near-zero upfront investment and a pay-as-you-go model, converting to full ownership when the system is paid for.

If you’ve read The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, this will make sense right away. If you haven’t read it, you might want to grab a copy. This is the future: bringing technology to the poorest of the poor, not as charity but as a profitable business model that maintains affordability even among customers who have almost nothing.

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

The other day, I was checking my e-mail from the B&B I was staying in during a short visit to the Ft. Meyers, Florida area—and what do I see but a spam mail with the headline, “Sanibel Vacations.”

Normally, I’d delete this unread. But as it happens, Sanibel was about fifteen minutes’ drive from where I was, and I was planning to go there the following day. I actually opened up the e-mail, to discover that it was about lodging options. Not of interest; I was very happy with the B&B.

In the same batch, there was quite a bit of other travel spam: Hawaii, Italy, and I forget what else. These show up every day. But I don’t remember seeing spam about Sanibel more than once or twice in the past. Could this ad actually have been triggered by my logon from so close by the previous day, or was it actually random? It didn’t occur to me to check the sent time or other clues before hitting delete.

I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to get a popup or banner ad; that’s old news. For years, for instance, Facebook thinks I live in Alaska part of the time, because my virtual assistant sometimes logs in for me, and that’s where she lives. I regularly see ads from both Alaska- and Massachusetts-based advertisers. And I’ve noticed that my son the oboist will get classical music ads, while I get business and environmental messages, even though we log on through the same wi-fi network.

But this wasn’t a popup; it was an e-mail. Which means if it wasn’t an accident, someone has developed a rather scary system that matches a network’s IP address, an offer the robot thinks is relevant (which didn’t happen to be true this time—but would have been if the ad had been for restaurants or attractions)—and the address I was checking in Mail2Web, which doesn’t happen to run through my Gmail account and is not the dominant address associated with my iPad (I don’t expect any privacy when Google is involved).

To make it even more spooky, I’m writing this on the airplane back homeward, and this month’s Southwest Spirit has an article on predictive marketing, of all things, and the coming revolution in targeting enabled by smartphones. I have an old-fashioned dumb cell phone that never goes online, and I don’t have the phone features enabled on my iPad. Yet I got that particular ad.

Just a coincidence? I really don’t know. What do YOU think?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, propaganda Tagged with , , ,

Paul Loeb, one of the most interesting commentators in the sustainability/progressive politics world, posted a provocative article on Huffington Post:  “If You Care About Keystone and Climate Change, Occupy Exxon.”

This resonates in a lot of ways. ExxonMobil is so clearly complicit in the conspiracy to block meaningful action to counter human-caused/human-aided catastrophic climate change—directly behind much of the this-isn’t-our-problem propaganda and junk science. And the tar sands/keystone pipeline projects are so environmentally damaging.

There’s also a lot to be said for the Occupy movement getting more specific. Just as we know that the real wealth is concentrated in 1% of the 1%, so the movement can identify a few particularly rapacious corporations, and ExxonMobil certainly qualifies.

But I do have two concerns about picketing gas stations: First, the impact on the poor shlubs–local business owners–who bought the wrong franchise. I don’t know if there’s an easy way to target those stations that are corporate-owned rather than locally owned. And second, the health effects of breathing gas fumes for an extended period. However, the gas stations are a lot more VISIBLE than corporate offices or refineries. I’m wondering if maybe ExxonMobil could be occupied from the town squares and busy intersections, perhaps government offices such as EPA–but with signage clearly focused on the issue.

What do you think? Please post below.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, General Commentary, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Publishing, Uncategorized

This is a guest post by Edward Hasbrouck, author of The Practical Nomad, in a rebuttal to Amazon’s latest blow against independent bookstores: getting its customers to spy on them for price checks and then buy online. Remember: when big dogs attack, we are stronger in a circle than standing alone.

Here’s Edward now.
—Shel Horowitz

Amazon.com wants you to browse your local bookstore to find the books you want, then go to Amazon.com to see if you can get them cheaper online. Why not turn the tables? Go ahead and browse the reviews on Amazon.com to find books that might interest you—then order them from your local bookstore, where there are no shipping charges and you can pick books up at your convenience without having to wait at home for a delivery.

The links from both my own Web site (Hasbrouck.org) and my publisher’s site for my book series (PracticalNomad.com) go to Powells. if you sign up as a Powells.com “affiliate”, and include the appropriate code in your links, you also get a cut of sales referred from those links. Small, but royalties on book sales are also small, and every penny helps. It took some effort to get my publisher to link from their site to Powells.com for my books instead of Amazon.com (their default), but eventually they agreed.

You can also create direct links for a specific book from Indiebound/Booksense, a joint online marketing effort of local independent bookstores. If someone follows the link, they can find out what store has the book in stock nearby, or request that a copy be sent to a store near them for pickup. And as with Powell’s, you sign up with them as an affiliate to get a small referral commission.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life

Yesterday was a challenge to find the bright side of things. But proving that I am in fact a PR guy, here’s how I spin it:

  • My e-mail started working again by itself, and the 16 hours it was down is nothing compared to the 55 hours without power after the snowstorm (though I’d have rather done something else with the hour-plus of testing I did)
  • When I finally got through to person #5 on the 40-minute tech support call, he not only got my fax working properly in just a couple of minutes but he was a pleasure to talk to
  • I used a big chunk of the on-hold time to go through two weeks of Twitter new-follower profiles and follow back the interesting ones
  • I actually liked the guy who came to do a $69 duct cleanout and tried to bait-and-switch me into a $1900 home repair project (and Groupon offers a satisfaction guarantee, so I should get my $69 back)
  • Despite waiting until almost the end of the month, I went late enough in the day for my car inspection sticker that nobody was ahead of me
  • It was a beautiful day and I got a nice hike in the woods
  • Before all this craziness started, I got a nice piece of client work completed early in the morning

    • I decided decades ago to have a happy life, and it was an excellent decision. I see days like this as merely a reminder of that resolve, even if I do feel rather heavily tested at the moment.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Business, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , ,

    Maybe once or twice a year, I actually get an unsolicited bulk e-mail that is targeted, relevant, and has a subject line that makes me open it. nd while I absolutely detest spam, I don’t object to this. If I am exactly the right audience for an offer, it’s not spam; it means a company is doing its homework and compiling a list of actual prospects.

    This morning, I got one with the subject, “recycle related/reuse and swap search engine.” Since I write about the environment and have a 40-year commitment to encouraging reuse, I opened the e-mail.

    This is an excerpt:

    ecofreek.com is a search engine that searches the web for free and ‘for swap/trade’ items people no longer need from over 45+ major sources, providing the most diverse and accurate results anywhere in the world.

    Also included are items for trade like books, sports equipment, antiques, automobiles, bicycles, motorcycles, CDs/DVDs, computers, property, seeds/gardening supplies, and lots more.

    We also encourage people to exchange and re-use items though our search engine and also our ‘places to give things away’ section. Feel free to recommend us new resources as well, we have a section we link to other environmental/green sites.

    We hope you enjoy your experience at our site and welcome any and all feedback.
    Please contact me for any questions about our site/service or working together.

    Sincerely,
    Nicole Boivin – Founder

    She also included her personal e-mail and phone number.

    So I went over to look, and I like what I found (mostly).

    As a longtime participant in Freecycle.org, I was interested to compare. I found several major differences:

    1. The search engine is elegant and allows you to choose a geographic area ranging from your own town or US state to anywhere in the world. Freecycle restricts you to your own community.

    2. Ecofreek is web-based, rather than e-mail-driven, which means you can search for what you want instead of just posting a wanted or offered notice and hoping for response.

    3. Freecycle is about gifting. While gifting is an option at Ecofreek, swaps are also encouraged.

    I did get very weird results when I clicked a suggested link (not a database result) for free samples of Kashi. And I do see that this site will need to be prepared to deal with people spamming the message boards (I saw one or two noncommercial spams). But I think it’s a good addition to the frugality and environmentalism toolbox.

    And I will write to Nicole and ask her how I get listed in the environmental section she referred to.

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