–> Positive Power Spotlight: Equality Business Advisory Council

–> Another Recommended Book: The Customer Delight Principle

–> Holiday Special: Principled Profit
Get a special deal on Principled Profit this holiday season, perfect for gift giving! Order 4 to 9 copies for just $12.95 each plus shipping (actual shipping if they’re all shipped to the same address, or $4.30 each if you’d like them shipped to different addresses), or order 10 or more copies and pay just $10.50 each plus shipping. For foreign orders, order 4 and pay $12.95 each plus $12 shipping, or order 10 or more copies and pay $10.50 each plus shipping. Please note if you’d like a gift acknowledgment included and/or autographed copies.

–> Do Your Holiday Shopping With Us–Discounts on Books for Your Favorite Entrepreneurs
With the holidays coming up, this is a great chance to save money on Shel’s books–they make fabulous gifts for the entrepreneurs, authors, marketers, and business managers in your life, or for those who’d like to be authors or marketers.

–> Friends and Colleagues Who Want to Help

• Marcia Yudkin is giving away a 12-page report,”33 Keys to Thriving During a Recession”
• Mark Joyner’s up to something mysterious (and no doubt extremely profitably to those who follow his advice)–and this time, he has the help of 668 people who entered their best thinking about the four most important areas to invest. Knowing Mark, my guess is that he’s talking about investing things other than money…
• Small Business CEO is a nice new magazine available online at no cost, from the good people at Healthy, Wealthy N Wise.

(Click here to continue reading)

–> Hear and Meet Shel, November/December 2008

–> Which of Shel’s Books is Right for You?

–> Latest Additions to the Websites

–> Administrative Information
Subscribe, unsubscribe, back issues, etc.

–> Don’t forget to play our games, at the top of any page on FrugalFun.com– no fees to play, prizes to win, and you help me continue to bring all this good information to you.

Published monthly since September, 2003 by Shel Horowitz
16 Barstow Lane, Hadley, MA 01035 USA
413/586-2388

Within my parents’ lifetime, six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis for the crime of being Jewish–including some of my mother’s cousins. As a Jew of Eastern European ancestry, I cannot be silent while one set of people is singled out for removal of the privileges of full citizenship–because we’ve already seen where that road leads. I speak out against injustice, and I speak out in favor of full citizenship rights for all classes of people: black, white, brown, or yellow…gay, straight, bi, or transgender…rich, poor, or in between…Christian, Muslim, Jew, or other religion…And I believe fervently that all people’s rights must be vigorously defended, and that our freedoms stop when they transgress the rights of others.

–>If I did not take this stand, I would have no right to claim any authority on ethics.

And I believe that committed life partners should have access to the same rights that many of us take for granted: from coordinating care in a terminal illness to playing an active role as a parent. The back of the bus isn’t good enough. Separate-but-equal is not equal, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1954.

In this context, I salute the Equality Business Advisory Council, a business coalition that sprang up to oppose California’s reprehensible Proposition 8–the ballot initiative that took away the right of same-sex couples to legally marry. Unfortunately, the ballot initiative passed.

I do not understand the anti-gay-marriage movement. As a man married to the same woman for 25 years, I don’t see how the right of two people who love each other to make a legal commitment that allows them to be full partners in any way lessens the marriage I have with my wife. I can’t see taking away that right as anything other than discrimination. And I live in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage has been legal for several years. I haven’t noticed that the sky has fallen. I can see only positive changes from this law–changes that materially impact only the families involved, but whose impact is huge.

The Equality Business Advisory Council included such well-known companies and organizations as MTV, PG&E, Levi Strauss & Co., and Google. Even the usually conservative Clear Channel joined in.  Apple Computer gave $100,000 toward the effort and issued this strong statement:

Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights — including the right to marry — should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8.

Google’s public statement opposing Proposition 8 was written by none other than co-founder Sergey Brin:

Because our company has a great diversity of people and opinions — Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, all religions and no religion, straight and gay — we do not generally take a position on issues outside of our field, especially not social issues. So when Proposition 8 appeared on the California ballot, it was an unlikely question for Google to take an official company position on.

However, while there are many objections to this proposition — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.

In all, the coalition included well over 500 businesses, community organizations, Chambers of Commerce, and media outlets, including 68 newspapers who wrote editorials opposing passage.

My thanks to fellow ethics blogger Chris MacDonald for telling me about this coalition, and flagging the Apple and Google statements I cited.

Another Recommended Book: The Customer Delight Principle: Exceeding Customers’ Expectations for Bottom-Line Success, by Timothy Keiningham and Terry Varva (McGraw-Hill/American Marketing Association, 2001)

This rather academically-written, MBA-oriented book emphasizes that merely satisfying your customers isn’t enough to build even loyalty, let alone the fervent ardor necessary for customers to recruit more customers on your behalf; you have to delight them. And the bar on delight keeps getting higher, because one of the factors leading to delight is that it’s unexpected.

In other words…when a new, delightful practice is successful, it is adopted by the organization, and then becomes an industry best practice–and then it stops being delightful, because the customer begins to expect it as part of a minimum service standard. So innovation plays a key role.

This I think is a crucial insight, and one that makes perfect sense.

Keiningham and Varva also point out a number of other interesting observations, all based in research (and many accompanied by various charts and graphs):

The ROI on improving delight is non-linear; certain little improvements may make a huge improvement in profitability, while others that cost more may have little effect, and the returns may shrink over time
It’s relatively easy to figure out which initiatives will offer the greatest return; just identify factors in the customer’s experience that the customer sees as of critical importance, but where the current satisfaction rating is low
Profitable delight initiatives often target high-dollar-value, low-cost clients
If your customer survey is self-serving and focuses on your wants rather than the customer’s, you won’t get the data you need to improve
Not everyone is delighted in the same ways, so segment your markets accordingly
Multiple touches, when handled correctly, can make a customer feel appreciated and welcomed and special (the importance of which I discuss in my own book, Principled Profit)

• To delight customers, you need employees who are at least satisfied
• Marketing’s primary role is not to shove products down people’s throats, but “to understand the wants, needs, and expectations of current and potential customers, feeding this information into the  business organization to help it create and distribute products or services that more closely address and answer these inherent needs,” and its secondary role is to form and nurture connections with customers
• Customer delight strategies look at a customer’s lifetime value and not so much at the current transaction
• Delighted customers not only proselytize to friends and colleagues on your behalf, they also spend substantially more

The book ends with three extended case studies of companies that benefited by long-term thinking and a delight-based retention strategy: Roche Diagnostic Systems, Toys “R” Us, and Mercedes-Benz USA. Roche and Toys “R” Us both needed turnaround strategies, but the case of Mercedes is especially interesting to me, because that wasn’t about fixing a broken system so much as incorporating delight into the corporate culture with a true focus on serving the customer–and creating an entire business unit, in its own building, to do so. This wasn’t cheap, in other words.

Among other things, Mercedes integrated eleven different databases, collecting different types of customer data, into a single system that anyone could access before interacting with a client (the company stopped using the word “customer” and stopped referring to its franchises as “dealers”). It also developed a strategic separation between client acquisition and retention functions (something Keiningham and Varva strongly advocate). Delight factors entered in not just providing emergency road service but also pre-trip routing services similar to AAA…a line of branded merchandise for sale…multiple touchpoints including anniversary of vehicle purchase and mileage awards at 100,000, 200,000, and 500,000 miles.

Does it work? After initiating the program, Mercedes was projecting an astonishing 86 percent repurchase rate! Even if their projections turn out to be inflated by 100%, a 43 percent repurchase rate is going to look mighty good for the bottom line.

For more on delighting your customer, see Shel’s award-winning book Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

–> FSIs: Shel Horowtiz’s Frugal Marketing Tip, Nov. 08
Today, as I brought in my newspaper, my eye was caught by a bright orange piece of paper. It was a Free Standing Insert (FSI). In the right circumstances, these can be far more powerful and sometimes less costly than traditional in-page advertising. Here’s when you might use it… (click to continue reading)

–> Friends and Colleagues Who Want to Help

• Marcia Yudkin is giving away a 12-page report,”33 Keys to Thriving During a Recession”
• Mark Joyner’s up to something mysterious (and no doubt extremely profitably to those who follow his advice)–and this time, he has the help of 668 people who entered their best thinking about the four most important areas to invest. Knowing Mark, my guess is that he’s talking about investing things other than money…
• Small Business CEO is a nice new magazine available online at no cost, from the good people at Healthy, Wealthy N Wise.

(Click here to continue reading)

–> Hear and Meet Shel, November/December 2008

–> Anatomy of a Promotional Offer
This is a real offer (actually two real offers) that I’m making to you–and then I’m going to analyze it and show you my exact thinking in constructing it. I think this may be extremely helpful in your own marketing, especially since I deliberately violate two key marketing rules. (Click here to continue reading)

–> Which of Shel’s Books is Right for You?

–> Latest Additions to the Websites

–> Administrative Information
Subscribe, unsubscribe, back issues, etc.

–> Don’t forget to play our games, at the top of any page on FrugalFun.com– no fees to play, prizes to win, and you help me continue to bring all this good information to you.

Published monthly since May, 1997 by Shel Horowitz
16 Barstow Lane, Hadley, MA 01035 USA
413/586-2388

–> “Savory Sixteen” a Frugal Birthday Alternative: Shel Horowitz’s Frugal Fun Tip, November

–> Do Your Holiday Shopping With Us–Discounts on Books for Your Favorite Entrepreneurs
With the holidays coming up, this is a great chance to save money on Shel’s books–they make fabulous gifts for the entrepreneurs, authors, marketers, and business managers in your life, or for those who’d like to be authors or marketers. (Click here to continue reading)

–> Friends and Colleagues Who Want to Help

• Marcia Yudkin is giving away a 12-page report,”33 Keys to Thriving During a Recession”
• Mark Joyner’s up to something mysterious (and no doubt extremely profitably to those who follow his advice)–and this time, he has the help of 668 people who entered their best thinking about the four most important areas to invest. Knowing Mark, my guess is that he’s talking about investing things other than money…
• Small Business CEO is a nice new magazine available online at no cost, from the good people at Healthy, Wealthy N Wise.

(Click here to continue reading)

–> Hear and Meet Shel, November/December 2008

–> Which of Shel’s Books is Right for You?

–> Latest Additions to the Websites

–> Administrative Information
Subscribe, unsubscribe, back issues, etc.

–> Don’t forget to play our games, at the top of any page on FrugalFun.com– no fees to play, prizes to win, and you help me continue to bring all this good information to you.

Published monthly since May, 1997 by Shel Horowitz
16 Barstow Lane, Hadley, MA 01035 USA
413/586-2388

Down to Business

• Busted — Business Planning Excuses
• Logo Concepts
• One Great Site is Better Than Tons of Bad Ones
• Stop Pitching Everybody and Nobody and Start Selling to Your Target Market
• How to be a Great Social Networker
• How Poor Usability Can Kill Your Copy and Conversions
• What Customers Hate About You
• Promote Early, Forcefully, and Fast
• Are You Making This Mistake?
• Is Your Marketing Killing Your Product?
• The Lurking Danger in your To-Do Lists
• A Short Course in Media Publicity
• Don’t Waste Money on Wretched Advertising!
• Just Follow This 7-Step Marking…
• How to Have More Fun in Your Business
• Here’s a Good Idea: Profit From the Next Wave of Info-Publishing
• ‘Knew’ and ‘New’ Factors…
• How to Sell to Anyone
• Fortin on 3-Part USP
• Consulting for Results
• How is Your Business Different?
• Managing Customer Criticisms and Complaints
• Fifteen Things the Media Hates
• Fifteen Things the Media Loves
• Fast and Cheap Banner Testing With Google AdWords
• Social Networking: The Five Biggest Mistakes Nichepreneurs™ Make

Peace & Politics

• Action Day
• Rovian Politics Chose Sarah Palin
• Wild Weather Creates Chances for Political Progress
• Templar Trail
• Home of the Brave

Frugal & Fashionable Living

• Save Money on Home Energy Costs this Winter
• Dusting Off the Old Crockery Cooker
• From Toxic to Healthy and Safe Cleaning Products Guide
• Individual Choices Can Have an Impact on Global Climate Change
• You…An Uber Shopper?

Ethics Articles

• Win the Battle, Loose the War
• Social Entreprenuership
• Hometown Advantage
• A New Social Era
• Start With the Truth

French onion soup, complete with Gruyere cheese and sliced baguette…bread pudding with artichokes and spinach, and three kinds of gourmet bread…made-from-scratch, hand-rolled butternut squash ravioli with an intense, buttery mushroom-cranberry sauce…and home-made oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies for dessert.

That was the menu for my son’s “savory sixteen” birthday party. He, his older sister, and three friends spent a whole afternoon cooking, and then served us (and themselves) a fabulous repast, on our good china, complete with cloth napkins.

The ingeredients cost about $100 (certianly less than seven people going to a fancy restaurant) and we have tons of leftovers, incuding a full casserole’s worth of bread pudding (they made two).

And he and his friends had a great time! They got to be creative, to explore their passion for food, to step out of the usual 20 dishes that we all have in our repertoire, and to hang out with friends. Some of the kids are still talking about it two weeks later.

Today, as I brought in my newspaper, my eye was caught by a bright orange piece of paper. it was a Free Standing Insert (FSI). In the right circumstances, these can be far more powerful and sometimes less costly than traditional in-page advertising.

Here’s when you might use it:

• Your product or service has broad general appeal–like pizza, gasoline, laundry
• You’re promoting a time-sensitive event that cuts across demographics, like a county fair, a sports event, a carnival, a restaurant festival
• It makes sense to use a coupon
• The newspaper you’re planning to use has at least some days when there are no other FSIs
• A high-impact graphic can convey your message quickly: a line drawing, a chart, a cartoon, or a high-contrst simple black-and-white photo
• You want to target a certain neighborhood (FSIs are much easier to segment than space advertising)

Use a bright color, either letter-size or half-letter-size (5-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches, in the U.S.). Investigate whether you should have the newspaper do the printing, or whether you should print elsewhere. And set up everything in plenty of time to work out glitches.

For more on cost-effective high-return advertising, have a look at my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Finalist). Right now, if you’re in the U.S., you can get free shipping on any (or all) of my marketing books, which make great gifts. Just visit http://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart and enter FREESHIP as the promotional code.

Thursday, December 11, 1:00 p.m,. ET/10 a.m. PT - Cross-Marketing: How to Turn Competitors and Complementary Businesses Into Partners Webinar for http://www.youspeakeasy.com

Friday, December 12th, I am the featured Inspirational Luminary on InspireMeToday.com. InspireMeToday.com is a website that provides the best inspiration daily, each day from a different Luminary from the fields of empowerment, health, business, family, loving relationships and more. You’ll enjoy reading my my personal 500-word text of the best things I’ve learned in life, as well as the 30-minute interview with me by Gail Lynne Goodwin. There’s normally a fee, but as my gift to you, just click here to access the inspiration for free!

Thursday, December 18, 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT - Book Marketing: Radio Interview with Dr. Charlotte Thompson, http://internetvoicesradio.com/Arch-DrCharlotte.htm

Friday, December 19, guest blogger for Logoworks. “Green Principles as a Success Strategy” (don’t have the link yet, sorry)

Friday, December 19, 5:30 p.m. - Western Mass. Tweetup, The dirty Truth, Main Street, Northampton

Principled Profit: The Good Business Radio Show, alternate Mondays, 4 p.m. Eastern, over http://www.valleyfreeradio.org (in the Northampton, MA area, 103.3 FM). 12/15, Loretta Gregorie, 10,000 Villages; 12/29, First Night Northampton

Replay of my book marketing teleseminar for HappyAbout.com at http://happyabout.info/hidden/HappyAbout-MarketingTeleseminar03-ShelHorowitz.wav, which covered
1) Your web presence
2) Online community participation
3) 4-5-day Amazon Push
4) Various techniques to drive book sales

And if you want to plan ahead… I’m doing another teleseminar for Gail Richards of AuthorSmart on book marketing, February 10, and one on cost-effective direct mail for Lorman Educational, March 11. I’m speaking live at CAPA University in Hartford May 9. Details will follow, probably in January.

Replay of my Webinar, How Ethical Business Practices Can Drive Your Success, for B2B Power Exchange:

• Why ethics makes your business stronger
• What Johnson & Johnson understood about crisis management that Ford had no clue about
• What the REAL Arthur Andersen would have thought of his company’s role in the Enron scandal

And plenty more: <a href=”http://www.b2bpowerexchange.net/video/video/show?id=2069901:Video:5206″>http://www.b2bpowerexchange.net/video/video/show?id=2069901:Video:5206</a>

Follow me on:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/shelhorowitz
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=536574918
• Plaxo: http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/profile/show/128849525442/

1.Real-Life Law of Attraction Success Stories: Real Stories of People Manifesting Health, Wealth, and Happiness is the name of a brand new and very nice book released today by Rich German and Robin Hoch. Whether it’s weight loss, career success, or recovery from major illness, this book has something to offer anyone with a goal. The offer was supposed to be over by now, but as of today (December 15), the above link still includes a big 70-item bonus package, including an article by me. Oh yes, and a percentage of every book sold goes to the Boys & Girls Clubs.

2. Been putting off starting your blog? Get a ton of free advice from the recognized experts: Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff, a/k/a The Blog Squad (is that great branding or what?). They’re doing a free call just for my subscribers, January 8, 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT.  Click here to register.

3. Marcia Yudkin is giving away a 12-page report,”33 Keys to Thriving During a Recession” that she wrote at the request of a few clients. It is available for downloading at no cost, and you also have permission to share the report. Download it at http://www.yudkin.com/recess.htm

4. Another recession-buster from Biana Babinsky: the no charge report, “5 Keys For Getting Clients
During Recession.”

5. Small Business CEO is a nice new magazine available online at no cost, from the good people at Healthy, Wealthy N Wise. They’re featuring one of my articles right now, Five Ways to Increase Profitability By Doing the Right Thing. The rest of the mag is at http://www.SmallBusinessCEOMagazine.com

6. My friend Susan Daffron has a nice new book called Publishize:How to Quickly and Affordably Self-Publish a Book That Promotes Your Expertise. . Unfortunately, the launch bonus package seems to be gone.

7. Radio host David Ewen writes, “Hello, at COS Radio we are looking for guests to join us on Book World News. On this weekly show, we talk about what is new in publishing, book marketing, and anything else new in the book world. We talk about anything from inside an independent press, book events, new technologies, new ideas in marketing, etc. In the past we’ve had great guests like Google Books, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly. Our shows can be found on www.cospRadio.com To be a guest on our show, email TodaysAuthor [AT] yahoo.com.” I’ve been a guest on his show as well. If you haven’t done radio before, this is an easy and safe way to get your feet wet.

8. For all you eco-frugalists out there: Reena Kazmnan of Eco-Artware, a friend and occasional client, just posted a video, 8 ways to wrap a present using old newspaper.