Creative Anarchy cover (green side)For a non-visual learner like me, Creative Anarchy is a mind expander. The author has brought together ideas from design studios around the world, many of which offer very non-traditional approaches.
The book has two key principles. The first is that rules are made to be broken. The second is that in order to break the rules, you must understand them.
For example, a common rule in book publishing is that books have both a front and a back. However, this book has two fronts. The larger, green, side is more or less about the rules. The thinner, red, side is about breaking those rules.
It makes fascinating reading.
However, as someone who occasionally hires graphic artists, I find that I generally insist on two rules that only get lip service here. First, I believe that it is usually important to write copy before considering the design. And secondly, I believe that any visual representation should enhance the message. Some of her examples do this beautifully and creatively, while others left me scratching my head and saying huh?
Value is about not just price, but quality. This busy market obviously understands.If you want to market on price, look at words like “affordable” and “value.” “Cheap” can be deadly.
As a service provider, I did lead on price for a number of years. Back in the days when much of my business was resume writing, I used a simple half-inch in-column ad in the Yellow Pages (remember them?) with the slogan “Affordable professional resumes while you wait.” The year they changed it without permission to “Affordable professional resumes while U wait,” I successfully argued that proper grammar was a key selling point in my line of work and they killed it—and got the cost of the whole year’s ad refunded. I turned out to be wrong; that ad brought me plenty of clients. But I personally would not patronize a writing service whose face to the world was ungrammatical.
Those ads ran in the 1980s and 1990s, and resume writing is only a tiny fraction of my current business. These days, I stress value, not price–for all the services I offer. Some are still quite inexpensive, like writing a press release or book cover—or, for that matter, the occasional resume I still write. Others, including strategic consulting on green and social change profitability as well as book publishing consulting, can be fairly pricy.
I would have moved away from marketing on low price anyway, as my business matured. But if I hadn’t, my business would have dried up. The market is very different now. Nobody is a prisoner of their own geography any more. I can’t compete on price with some clown on a bottom-feeding service bidding site who throws an article into a word-blender and spits out crap for $5 a shot. But I sure can compete on value and quality.
As a consumer, I’m price-sensitive on some items, but quality will trump price, and so will politics. Yesterday, I spent $40 or $50 at the farmers market. I could have bought the (theoretically) same items at a supermarket for half the price, but not the organic/local/fresh choices I purchased. But I also stopped at the local independent discount store and picked up some just-past-date polenta for a buck. I cooked it last night and it was fine. I have a less gourmet one in my fridge that I paid $3 for at a different store and it doesn’t expire until November, which means the one I ate tonight was probably packed last summer. But that’s OK, it was fine.
I learned all the way back in the 1980s that price and value were not necessarily the same. After a couple of bad experiences with cheap electronics, I started buying better quality components for my stereo, better telephones, and so forth—and being much happier with my purchases. I learned that I could get a good deal through a remainder catalog, and that a $100 item with an original list price of $300 was generally going to be a much better value than a $75 item that had never sold for more than $100. And when I bought my first computer, I went with the expensive but easy-to-use Macintosh and was very happy I did.
I will shop at that local discount store, but I won’t shop at that very famous low-price big box store beginning with a W. While I recognize that they are among the best in the industry on sustainability (something very important to me), I’m also painfully aware of how much I dislike their store siting and closing policies, their community relations, labor practices, supplier practices, and a bunch of other stuff. Plus, I’ve heard that the quality is often less than stellar. I give them kudos in my speeches for, among other things, developing a massive market for organic foods among people who have never been inside a Whole Foods. But I personally choose not to shop there.
But I’m perfectly happy to drive inexpensive, functional cars. Right now, we have a 2004 Mazda, bought new for $17K, and a 2005 Toyota Corolla, bought at six years old but with only 26,000 miles on it, for $10K. I expect both to last several more years. When we bought the Corolla, one of our other options was a used Prius with 99,000 miles, for $12K. The Corolla seemed like a MUCH better deal. It wasn’t the lower price so much as having only 1/4 as many miles.
In short, as a consumer, I’ll definitely factor in price, but it won’t be the only factor. How about you? As a business owner and as a consumer, how does price factor into your decisions.
Today, I encountered a post from an Internet friend who lives in Israel, urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netenyahu to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities.
The post made me feel queasy. My original response was a desire to scream and yell that this was racist. Fortunately, I had enough self-control not to give into that stupid and unproductive urge. I also didn’t want to start a firestorm of negative attacks on me because I had the temerity to disagree with a view that I felt was both racist and extremist. And yet I wanted to confront this way of thinking and not let it go unchallenged.
So instead, I thought for a couple of minutes about what type of response would actually be heard and not blocked out—what could actually advance a dialog. (I will confess that I haven’t always been skilled in that type of response, but I think I’ve gotten much better in the past several years.
And this is what I finally wrote—knowing that my friend is deeply religious, and that an appeal to his religious convictions might actually get through.
Even as poor a student of the Torah as I am knows that God does not want to see innocent blood shed. Your recipe for Bibi would leave hundreds of thousands dead and the Middle East–including Israel–in flames. Possibly the entire world. I urge you to think carefully about unintended consequences.
And amazingly enough, this actually did open a door for some mild and thoughtful dialog. Not a perfect outcome but one I could feel reasonably good about. I had used the marketing principles I teach, and given the right message for the audience.
The famous globe at the Epcot Center entrance On my fifth trip to Orlando, staying 3 miles from the Walt Disney World entrance, I figured it was time. So I arranged for press comps and spent half a day at Epcot (the logical park for someone into both travel and outer space). I had low expectations, but the experience fell so far below those low expectations it was shameful.
I’d always thought that the travel half of Epcot attempted to recreate the experience of being in many different parts of the world. They featured exactly 11 countries, eight of which I’d been to. Nine of those 11 were exclusively about shopping and eating. Two actually had an educational exhibit (one of which, in the Japan pavilion, was quite well done but only took about 30 minutes to go through the whole thing). We did catch one excellent performance by a Chinese dance troupe. On the space side, the simulated space ride was excellent, but the rest of it was pretty mediocre, and the lines were very long. And considering that almost all the space exhibits had corporate sponsors, you’d think they could do something about the very high admission fees.
I’d experienced a similar space simulation 40 miles away at the Kennedy Space Center, a much more interesting park overall, and considerably cheaper, to boot. In fact, we liked Kennedy so much, we went back the next day to see the parts we’d missed. If you’re going to Orlando and you’ve got a personality like mine, it’s a better bet.
The whole experience made me very grateful that neither of my kids ever showed any interest in going to Disney. They’d much rather come with us to places like Denmark, Italy, and California (we live in Massachusetts).
Real places, in other words. Disney is a marketing machine that has very little to do with recreating reality.
Ooops! I’ve been reviewing my blog posts over the past several years, mining material for my next book. And I’m embarrassed to find this post, dated March 14, 2012, promising to report back on the results of a concentrated effort to get search engines to notice a particular page—in this case, the page for my resume writing services (once the mainstay of my commercial writing services, but now a considerably smaller percentage of my work).
So, better late than never, here are the results:
Whether it was the strategy I discussed in that post or something else, I’m pleased to report a definite uptick in inquiries (most of which come by phone, interestingly enough). Last year, for the first time in a long time, resume clients who found me by looking outnumbered those referred by past clients or colleagues—and virtually all of those were via Google or an online Yellow Pages (I think there were one or two who found me in the paper Yellow Pages). And while it’s still a very small part of my business, the overall number was significantly higher last year.
I just took a first stab at writing an Environmental and Social Change Business Bill of Rights. Adopting these principles would level the playing field and enable green, socially conscious businesses to compete as equals—and in that competition, they will win almost all the time.
But this should not be just me spouting off. I got the discussion started, but I want to learn what others would be important in that kind of a campaign (and who has energy to work on it.
Also, I’ve got seven points here. If we continue to model it after the US Bill of Rights written by James Madison (who later became President of the United States), we need ten What did I leave out?
We, the people of Planet Earth, hereby declare that every nation and the planet as a whole have certain inalienable rights, including Life, Sufficiency, Peace, and Planetary Balance. To these ends, we call upon the governments of the world, at all levels, to establish these rights through mandating the following policies:
1. Manufacturers shall take full responsibility for their products at all stages in the product lifespan, including manufacturing, distribution, use, collection, reuse, disassembly, recycling, and disposal. Retail and wholesale channels shall accept used products and convey them back through the supply chain to the manufacturers.
2. Passing off costs to others, as externalities, is not acceptable. Pollution, waste, destruction of others’ property, etc. will be paid for by the entity that causes it.
3. All new construction or major renovation shall meet minimum standards of energy, water, and resource conservation, as well as fresh air circulation. Such standards shall be incorporated into local building codes, meeting or exceeding LEED silver or stretch codes.
4. All newly constructed or significantly renovated government buildings shall be Net Zero or Net Positive in energy and water use, producing at least as much energy and water as the building uses. Private developers shall receive incentives to meet this standard.
5. All subsidies for fossil (including but not limited to oil, diesel fuel, airplane fuel, natural gas, propane, and coal), nuclear, or other nonrenewable energy sources shall be phased out as soon as practical, to be completed within a maximum period of three years.
6. All subsidies that promote fossil-fuel-powered vehicles over cleaner alternatives, including subsidies to infrastructure exclusively or primarily for their use, shall be phased out as soon as practical, to be completed within a maximum period of ten years.
7. Average fleet vehicle mileage standards shall be increased to 70 MPH for passenger vehicles carrying up to six people, and to 40 MPH for trucks and buses within ten years. Non-fossil-fuel vehicles shall be designed to make a contribution to stationary power needs.
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.
How much real news went through these cameras? And how much goes through today’s?
When I’m in airports, fitness centers, and other places that force-feed TV news, I’m always astonished that anyone takes it seriously. Even in the 60s when they had real news staffs, it was so superficial. I read somewhere that an entire 1-hour newscast transcript would only fill a couple of columns on a page of the NY Times.
These days, it’s far worse than “if it bleeds, it leads.” Murder, mayhem, celebrity gossip, and an astonishingly small amount of actual news, and even less serious analysis. And those are the serious networks. Add in a serious case of propaganda and distortion and you can’t be surprised at how little most Americans understand their world, if they accept what’s fed to them by the medium they’ve chosen to “consume” the news.
Of course, the good news is that anyone who wants to educate themselves now has unlimited choices from around the world. My favorite newspaper these days is London’s The Guardian. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actual paper copy.
In the 1980s, I used to subscribe to a magazine called World Press Review, which featured reportage on the same story from 8 or 10 different papers around the world; it was like a one-stop course in media literacy and the nature of 1) matching message to audience, and 2) shaping the audience through the message. Since I made (and continue to make) my career as a marketer and a journalist, these were crucial lessons.
However, it was a monthly, and the stories were at least three months old by the time they got to my mailbox. Of course, technology has passed it by now, and I don’t miss it; we can easily get the same effect by viewing the same story on NPR, Fox News, Al Jazeera-English, the New York Times, Paris Match (which Google will even translate for you, sort of), and your local newspaper.
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.
Many years ago, I signed up for a Discover card for some very specific reason (it may have been in connection with buying an appliance from Sears, which owns Discover). I use this card so rarely that at least twice, when I’ve received replacement cards, I noticed that I had never bothered to activate the one that was about to expire.
So I was extremely amused to get a very hypey 4-page mailer—it looks like the copywriter studied all the greats and completely misunderstood the lessons—that begins (bolding and underline in original—see picture),
Headline of the lying letter from Discover
YOU’RE ABOUT TO BE REWARDED … The Loyalty You’ve Demonstrated The Past 14 Years Has Earned You This Exclusive Invitation.
How Exclusive? Fewer Than One Discover® Cardmember In Five Is Receiving This Mailing.
And then it goes on to tell me I qualify for fast-track balance repayment that could shave a year and several thousand dollars off my repayments.
What’s wrong with this picture? Let me count the ways:
As I mentioned, I’m not a loyal customer. I don’t even keep this card in my wallet. So I don’t believe the copywriter’s attempt to make this offer sound exclusive.
Even if this were my primary card, I’m not exactly bowled over to learn that 20 percent of a user base in the millions is getting the offer. Exclusive? Ha ha ha.
One more way to assure me this is nothing resembling the exclusive offer it pretends to be: the invitation code (required to participate in the program)—is 23 characters long, not counting hyphens.
The lack of segmentation—OK, so this is the mailing manager’s fault, rather than the copywriter’s—is appalling. I never carry a balance. On ANY of my credit cards. I use them as 20- to 50-day access to funds without accruing interest, an easy way to track my purchases and save on postage (by paying one bill on line rather than a bunch of bills with mailed checks), and oh yes, a way to get air travel by accumulating frequent-flyer points for stuff I was going to buy anyway. So under any circumstances, I’m not even in the target market for this “exclusive” offer.
The text of the letter is actually a strong argument against running up credit-card balances. It shows just how much this costs—something many consumers barely think about. The takeaway I get from this letter is don’t buy what you can’t afford, and pay your bills on time and in full, as I do, so you never pay these exorbitant charges.
The meme of “make 2015 the year you took control” is ludicrous. You want to take control of your credit card debt? Pay off your balance and stop running it higher. Switching from five to four years of repayment servitude doesn’t cut it.
Finally, the visual layout is a real turn-off. The thing is just drowning in too much bold, too much underlining (and the underlining is inconsistent—either underline the individual words or the phrases including the spaces, but don’t mix them), too many call-outs in a fake-handwriting font (does the designer really think we’re going to be fooled by the slight bowing in the underline?).
Page 1 of the lying letter from Discover
Oh, yeah, on page two, which is even more cluttered with bold, underlining, and “handwritten” pull-outs, a footnote mentions that not everybody gets the spiffy 6.99% APR that “Jim” gets. Some people are going to pay usurious rates of up to 18.99%—YIKES!
It’s letters like this that give marketers a bad name.
This letter actually did inspire me to take action. First, I’m writing this blog. I get to use them as an example of how not to do direct mail. And second, I’m finally going to cancel my Discover card. I don’t choose to do business with companies that lie to me.
By the way, if you’d like marketing that doesn’t scream, doesn’t lie, addresses its exact target audience and effectively differentiates your products and services, give me a call at 413-586-2388 (8 a.m. to 10 p.m., US Eastern Time) or drop me a note. I make my living as a marketing and profitability consultant, with particular emphasis on green/socially conscious, businesses, independent small business, and authors/publishers.
