At the Bus Stop with Shel Horowitz, green copywriter, marketing consultant, author, speaker. By Willi Paul, PlanetShifter.com

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At the Bus Stop with Shel Horowitz, green copywriter, marketing consultant, author, speaker. By Willi Paul, PlanetShifter.com.

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I think Jack Capitalism and Eli Sustainability are headed for a blow-out, down and dirty fist fight in the months ahead? Ready?

I think they'll kiss and make up. But not the version of capitalism that dominates our landscape now. Not big corporate oligarchies focused only on single-bottom-line profits at the expense of the quality of life of those employed by them or living near them. Predatory capitalism will give way to conscious capitalism, and that will look very different. You can see this starting, when even a company with as despicable a social record as Wal-Mart has discovered that bottom-line profits improve dramatically when they design for sustainability, when they bring inexpensive and high quality organic products into the shelves, and when they show corporate caring in the aftermath of Katrina. Wal-Mart had selfish reasons for making these evolutions, but as this stuff is implemented, the corporate culture will inevitably change. Sooner or later, there will be enough pressure from within the company, as well as its customers, that you'll see far greater shifts. Taking it to its logical extreme, you might see Wal-Mart becoming a champion of ending sweatshops, even though the company currently is a major beneficiary of those working conditions.

How many folks have signed the Business Ethics Pledge? How do you measure its impact or success?

The number of signers is very small. But I do believe in the "hundredth monkey" idea that you can seed change in a society with a small number of people. My original goal was 25,000 signatures, and the Pledge is a long way from that. However, I have seen the ideas of the Pledge begin to percolate through society. I started the Pledge in 2004. I see tremendous difference in society's consciousness from 2003, when I released Principled Profit (my first book on this topic), and today, as the new book comes out. Everybody talks about carbon footprint, there are dozens of popular websites addressing both the environment and ethics, the Copenhagen summit was in mainstream US news...I like to think the Pledge and PrinProfit had at least a little bit to do with this enormous seismic shift.

Why the "frugalist" moniker, Shel?

The first online brand I developed was "the king of frugal fun," back when I was actively promoting my 1995 book (now an e-book), The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty With a Peasant's Pocketbook. I've always seen frugality as linked with Green and ethical stances: if you live more lightly on the earth, it's cheaper. If you spend less, in many cases you're also living more lightly--such as buying used or using a smaller vehicle or sharing a large purchase. I'm fully aware that it's possible to be cheap in unethical ways too, but I'm here to tell you there are plenty of ways to be frugal that are very much a part of the Green lifestyle.

Your new book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), deals with honesty, integrity, and a commitment to environmental sustainability are important-but market share is often the wrong metric entirely...that long-term relationships are better than a one-time sale...and that competitors can be among your best allies. Give us some examples from your "putting people first" paradigm shift.

A classic example is Southwest Airlines. In spite of the very people-unfriendly policy o open seating (and in the old days, a great unfairness about who got to choose first--but they've fixed that), Southwest was the first airline to convey the impression that it actually cared about its customers, and that flying could actually be fun. It was also the first to take seriously the challenge of minimizing ground time and thus delays, with a much better on-time record than many of its competitors for quite a while. It was not surprising to me that Southwest was the only US airline to stay profitable after 9/11.

Another example is Johnson & Johnson. Back in 1982, when seven people died from poisoned Tylenol, the company could have chosen to be like Ford and try to wiggle out of any responsibility. After all, the poisonings were not their fault; someone had tampered with the bottles *after* they'd left the factory. But instead, J&J chose to do everything in its power to show real caring: massive PR and advertising blitz asking people to stay away from Tylenol, bring it back for a refund, take no chances. I've seen figures of $100 million in pulled product and $212 million in overall cost, which included developing tamper-proof packaging. These are scary numbers even for the Fortune 500. But what happened was this outpouring of genuine concern for its customers, the willingness to go far beyond what anyone was expecting, turned J&J into one of the most trusted brands in the world. Their financial recovery was amazingly quick.

Is sustainability like a new religion?

Ha, ha ha. It's actually a very old religion. There have been people espousing it for a long time: pioneers from the 1930s like Ralph Borsodi and Helen and Scott Nearing, and you can even find elements going back to people like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. You can go all the way back to the Joseph story in the Old Testament and interpret that as a story about sustainability (preparing for the divinely revealed famine). But yes, there's a certain "gospel" feeling to it, especially among those who've made very extreme lifestyle choices (which I have not--I've just made choices to Green my lifestyle and feel no need to go off and live off the grid in a yurt somewhere. But I do generate a portion of my electricity and nearly all my hot water, from solar systems we've installed.

What green songs, symbols and stories are you using creating / promoting these days?

In the speech I'm giving in February in Davos, Switzerland, called "Communicate the Value in Your Values and Turn it Into Sales: Effectively Marketing Your Social / Environmental Commitment," I use the paper company Marcal as a case study. Marcal has used recycled paper for almost 60 years--but it's only been since April that the company's packaging and marketing went out of its way to call attention to it as a major marketing benefit. I'm not at all surprised that it's become quite popular in its category.

I've been talking for 30 years about issues like conserving water and energy, Green urban gardens, and more. Would love to find some great song that really tells a story about that message. There are a number I know that tell people what they should do, but I don't know one that makes it human and personal through a story, much as Fred Small or Holly Near have done for other issues.

Is not the sustainability movement a cry for the next level of human consciousness? How do you define evolution in 2010 on out?

We as a species have to learn to play well with others--both within our species and outside it. The time is long past where we can expect wars to solve problems; they create them. We should be looking, as a species, at achieving lasting peace by eliminating global poverty, but doing it in ways that sustain and even enrich the environment. And there are wonderful technologies being developed: houses out of rapidly growing bamboo, sometimes even using the live tree without killing it...John Todd's work on water purification systems that use the heat of the sun or pollution-eating plants to cleanse the water...Amory Lovins' ability to look at an energy system holistically and see where you can chop out 80 percent of the energy use for the same time and money you might have spent to trim 5 percent....the way developing countries are bypassing old technologies like fossil heating and going straight to solar...it's a very exciting time.

What do you take-away from James Cameron's Avatar?
It's on my list to see. (See Willi’s review)

About Shel -

Shel was still a teenager when he started doing publicity and marketing for grass-roots community organizations with zero promotional budget. There wasn't even money available for stamps, so he used to hand-deliver press releases on a three-speed bicycle, Trained as a journalist, he first became aware of the power of the news media when a local paper refused to print meeting notices he wrote for a controversial group—but gave extensive news coverage to its refusal. Now, for over twenty years, he's helped businesses, nonprofits, and community groups get their message out to the public with little or no expenditure.

After finishing Antioch College at age 19, Shel had to come to terms with his own work history: career paths not only in writing and marketing/PR, but also in radio, teaching, arts, food service, office systems, community organizing, and environmental issues. Putting together his own first résumés led to a new career direction: résumé writing and career services. Shel quickly realized he had the ability to discover a job candidate's best strengths and present them so those are highlighted while weaknesses are downplayed. In short, he turned résumé writing into a marketing function.

A native of New York City, he returned there to work at two literary agencies as a manuscript reader, and then worked for a year and a half as a VISTA Volunteer community organizer with the Gray Panthers. Pursuing poetry on the side, he became very active in the New York open poetry scene, and met Dina Friedman at an open reading in Greenwich Village.

The two left New York in 1980, spending a year in Philadelphia before settling in Western Massachusetts in 1981—and founding Accurate Writing & More with an initial marketing cost of $12 and a total start-up under $200 (most of it for a 13-year-old IBM Selectric typewriter). They married two years later. Daughter Alana was born in 1987—the same year Dina joined the business—and son Rafael followed in 1992.

Drawing on the marketing he'd practiced in and after college, Shel began marketing his own business locally, and grew it to the largest of its kind in a three-county service area. In 1985, he published the first of three books on low-cost, high-impact marketing. Gradually, he expanded his practice to marketing for other businesses and nonprofits. He began using e-mail as a marketing tool in 1994, set up his first website in 1996, and quickly developed a reputation internationally as a skilled copywriter and marketing strategist who knows how to stretch a marketing dollar. His client list now includes accounts in Europe, Asia, and all across the U.S.; his books have sold to dozens of countries, and one of them has been translated into Korean.

And as an environmental and social justice activist since 1972, he has used these skills pro bono for a number of environmental and social change organizations—especially a group he founded called Save the Mountain, which mobilized thousands of people (in a rural county) and rapidly beat back an "unstoppable" poorly-planned development on a mountain abutting a state park; this was a campaign that combined everything Shel knew about marketing and community organizing, and drew on the skills of many others that he recruited into the organization.

Following the success of this campaign, Shel looked at a bigger canvas, and founded the Business Ethics Pledge to make future Enron and Madoff scandals unthinkable. So far, he has signers in more than 30 countries.

Shel now offers not only copywriting and strategic marketing planning based in Green principles, but also helps unpublished writers become published authors. Five of his eight books have won awards and/or been republished in other countries, including his most recent, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (John Wiley & Sons, 2010, co-authored with Mr. Guerrilla Marketing himself, Jay Conrad Levinson).

This new book states that honesty, integrity, and a commitment to environmental sustainability are important—but market share is often the wrong metric entirely...that long-term relationships are better than a one-time sale...and that competitors can be among your best allies.

The book provides dozens of examples of companies large and small that have succeeded by putting people first: familiar names like Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Southwest Airlines as well as numerous entrepreneurs who are successful in their own niches, even if not widely known.

Connections –

Shel Horowitz
shel at principledprofit dot com
413-586-2388