Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet

Interview by Mike Sullivan of Sully’s Blog

Shel Horowitz has been an entrepreneur for more than 30 years and has the background and skill set to prove it. As a teenager, he started doing publicity and marketing for grass-roots community organizations with zero promotional budget and hand delivered press releases on his bike. In 1981, he founded Accurate Writing & More with an initial marketing cost of $12 and a total start-up under $200. He promoted the business and grew it to the largest of its kind in a three-county service area. In 1985, he published the first of six books on low-cost, high-impact marketing. He launched 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. An environmental and social justice activist since 1972, he organized the group that stopped a very destructive housing project planned for a local mountain. This required enormous amounts of both organizing and marketing, involved thousands of people in an area with a total population of just 5000 in the town. This battle was won in just 13 months.

His latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson. The book was #1 on Amazon’s category list and had been on that list six of the seven months since its release. It was only the fifth book to be named a Groundbreaking Indie Book by Independent Publisher magazine, and has been resold to publishers in Italy and Turkey so far. The book is designed to increase profits while improving the planet.

MO:

Your book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green has a five star rating on Amazon and has received some great praise and reviews. What is it about the book that is so well received? Are we at a better place today when it comes to business and doing what’s right for the planet?

Shel:

I think the world is finally ready for this message. Climate change is on everyone’s lips, and catastrophes like Katrina, the Asian tsunami, and of course the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf have shown us that failure to act will mean failure of the planet, or at least of humans’ place on it.

Why is the book getting good notices? Because the book combines practical, actionable advice on both going Green and marketing to the Green customer with some more visionary stuff about the kind of society we want to build…because it focuses heavily on marketing methods that not only work better but cost less…and because my co-author Jay’s Guerrilla marketing brand is extremely well respected.

MO:

Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green is endorsed by Stephen M.R. Covey, a highly praised and respected business man and author of many books, including the popular The Speed of Trust. He states in the foreword, “This tremendous book is thoroughly grounded in both character and competence.” How do you feel about such praise from a man like Mr. Covey?

Shel:

I’m delighted! Especially since I love his book, which is all about building trust through both character and competence. When he was working on the Foreword, his assistant reported that as he was reading the manuscript, he was saying things like Yes! Absolutely! I’ve always placed a high value on obtaining the endorsements of people who carry influence, and have gotten more than 80 endorsements for one of my books, and 50 for another.

MO:

What’s your reaction to BP and the recent oil disaster. Could the executives at BP have benefited from reading this book? How would you have consulted the company if they had asked for your advice?

Shel:

Absolutely! I’ve blogged several times about the BP disaster, both on the environmental and the marketing sides. If ex-CEO Tony Hayward had read this book, he would have first of all been much less likely to oversee an operation that appears to have deliberately cut corners and risked the safety of its workers, the livelihood of its neighbors and the health of the planet. I would hope he would have made very sure that technology was in place to fix any problems that did occur–the inability to think and plan ahead was one of the most troubling things of the whole fiasco (and should give serious pause to anyone who advocates nuclear power, where we also don’t have solutions in place to deal with anything remotely approaching a worst-case accident, and where the consequences would be far worse than they were in the Gulf). It’s also troubling that government regulators allowed this and the many other similar rigs to go online without being prepared to deal with a catastrophe.

Hayward also was a study in how NOT to respond publicly. He had a horrible case of foot-in-mouth disease. He seemed far more concerned about the impact on his personal life than with fixing the situation. I would think if he’d read the book, or if I’d had him as a consulting client, he would have immediately started with a deep and sincere apology, a list of the specific remedies he was deploying, and an announcement of a remedial fund, long before the government stepped in to require it.

Another sad thing is that a prior BP CEO was one of the more environmentally aware oil executives. Not that the company’s record was spotless under his administration, but at least he understood the issues. I’m not at all sure that Hayward understand what he did and why it was a problem.

MO:

When you founded “Save the Mountain” in an attempt to stop the development on a local mountain, I imagine that you had to summon every ounce of your business, leadership and entrepreneurial skills to raise the money and gather the people to support the cause in such a short length of time. Can you tell us how you did that and which skills you feel benefited the cause the most?

Shel:

This 13-month campaign involved everything I knew about both organizing and marketing–but I also had a lot of help. I was able to assemble a large core group of some 35 people, all of us working on different aspects. Some on things like endangered species, some (not me, though) on fundraising or legal avenues, some on lobbying, me on publicity. Our biggest challenge was not to build opposition to the project; we had a near-total consensus county-wide. The challenge was overcoming the false perception that we, the people, were helpless in the face of the juggernaut. Once we conquered that perception, once we were able to move past the question of why were we bothering to stop the unstoppable, the public discourse changed to which of the many avenues we were pursuing would actually put the last nail in the coffin. My organizing and publicity skills were crucial in getting the 70 people to the first meeting, in getting more than 70 print and a few dozen broadcast media stories, in repeatedly turning out 400+ to public hearings, and in keeping the issue alive in the public eye as we built momentum. It was very exciting. I thought it would take us five years, but we won in just over a year.

MO:

You have also founded the Business Ethics Pledge, a pledge designed to change the business world. The pledge currently has signers from over 30 countries. Tell us a bit more about the pledge and the results you have seen.

Shel:

This is a ten-year campaign to get 25,000 business leaders to sign the ethics pledge, in the hope that this would be enough to create a ripple through society and make crooked business practices as unacceptable in a few years as slavery is now. Interestingly, while it doesn’t look like we’re going to make our numbers, I do see ripples in society, much lower tolerance for the kinds of crooked business practices that were all-too-common even just a few years ago. While we haven’t yet reached the point where the crooks and con artists are social pariahs and isolated in the business world, I do think we’re seeing a shift, and I like to think I had at least a little to do with that :-).

MO:

Where do you feel your entrepreneurial drive comes from? You’ve been very passionate about what you do and what you stand for. Does this come from your upbringing?

Shel:

I’ve always been driven by a passion to leave the world better than I found it. I came to marketing originally through activism. Since I had some journalism training, I was usually the one to deal with the media in the various activist groups I was a part of. In the last ten years, I’ve really been trying to weave together these two strands of my life, the marketer and the activist. The book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, is very much a synthesis of those two huge pieces of my life, and I’m hoping it’s only the first phase of reaching a much larger audience with this message that Green business costs less and works better. I’m also starting a trade organization for Green marketers, and working on a plan to turn myself into the go-to commentator for Green business.