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Marketing peak oil

by Paula | 4 May 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: marketing, peak oil

TOD has a post up this week titled Peak Oil and Mass Communication, a guest post by blogger Kurt Cobb of Resource Insights. Cobb’s thesis and question: mass media is not especially well suited to deliver the message of peak oil; what can be done to overcome its limitations?

Those of us with business backgrounds recognize his post as the articulation of a classic marketing problem. Unsurprisingly, neither Cobb nor any of his commenters have (as of this writing) brought up the concept of marketing, with the exception of one disparaging remark regarding the marketing that needs to be countered in order to deliver the peak oil message.

The purpose of marketing is to develop and deliver a product message in a memorable way, with the end goal being increased sales. Technology companies, especially, struggle with how to market complex products in such a way as to be apprehensible by the general public. Any mass media campaigning to raise awareness of peak oil is, in fact, a marketing exercise that requires a marketing plan.

A standard small business marketing plan starts with an assessment of the following:

• Company
• Product
• Customers
• Competition
• Goals
• Budget

Since the peak oil issue is not structured like a typical small business, I would suggest the following assessment modifications:

• Who is delivering the message? (ASPO, Transition Towns, a consortium, or… ?)
• What exactly is being promoted? A book, a conference, a website, or… ?
• Who is the target audience for the message?
• Who already has the attention of the target audience, and who will fight to steal back whatever attention you garner?
• What is the goal of the marketing campaign: to increase awareness, to increase website traffic, to effect lifestyle changes, or… ? How will these changes be measured, and how will anyone know if goals have been met?
• Budget — how much money is there to spend on such a campaign? Where will it come from? Will it create a return on investment in dollars, or in some other way? How will alternative returns be measured?

The actual message and the channels used to deliver the message will depend upon the findings of the assessment. Given my experiences with the peak oil scene for the past eight years or so, I would probably suggest the following strategy:

• Who is delivering the message? A consortium of respected organizations and individuals.
• What is being promoted? A website, a DVD, or a motion picture that explains peak oil and its responses in more detail.
• Who is the target audience? Those who are nominally eco-aware and/or nominally conspiracy-minded (think “Da Vinci Code” and “JFK”) — a huge swath of the public.
• Who is the competition? Basically the entire culture. A specific competitors list would be much too long for a single blog post.
• Campaign goal? Primary goal is to drive traffic to the website; to sell the DVD; to drive audiences to motion picture screenings. Secondary goal is to motivate lifestyle changes consistent with the realities of energy decline. (This would actually be the primary goal of the website/DVD/film.)
• Budget? Unknown, but very small for sure.

Fortunately, a recent example of a similar campaign exists — Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. While Gore’s film leaves much room for criticism, it did in fact do more than any previous campaign to raise awareness of global warming and the results are everywhere visible in the explosion of “green” consumer product offerings following the picture’s release. The pattern Gore’s film followed was: promote the film; let the film do the explaining; then drive traffic to the website, or to other websites with which the film producers had established strategic partnerships.

Given budget constraints, the most effective marketing channels for a peak oil campaign would almost certainly be internet-based. But forget pay-per-click search engine ads and banner ads on any but the most tightly targeted websites. These simply will not produce enough results. Email campaigning, podcast sponsorships, do-or-die search engine optimization, and organizing a web-based “street team” to promote the website/DVD/film at relevant blogs, discussion forums and the like, would be a good foundation. Of course, it always helps if your media product wins Academy Awards, but failing that, entrance into various competitions is always a good way to get exposure.

This strategy can also be modified for use at the local level. How about a peak oil film series with guest speakers and a supporting website? Marketing channels locally would be more viral and very low cost. For example, any peak oil aware small business owner would probably be happy to promote a peak oil film series to his or her mailing list, or to put promotional flyers in customers’ shopping bags; a chain email could be used to spread word around town; even a PR stunt to grab the attention of local media would work.

While I have no expectation that anything like this might happen on a national level — peak oil folk are rather quite averse to getting their hands dirty with unclean business — I’d be thrilled to participate in such an effort. Please feel free to contact me if you have such ambitions.

[Review, sort of] “Weblogs and New Media: Marketing in Crisis” by Charles Hugh Smith

by Paula | 15 October 2008 | permalink | comments
Tags: review, marketing

Before I get any further into blogging I want to take a few minutes to discuss this little book. Weblogs and New Media: Marketing in Crisis has had a profound impact on my professional life and my business, and in fact was the primary motivator behind my decision to launch this blog. Much of what I have to say and many of my current business ideas derive from this work. It would be hard to overstate my enthusiasm for W&NM.

I stumbled across Smith’s website, oftwominds.com, over the summer when it got linked from one of the crashblogs I read. I discovered there the generous excerpt he had posted to promote W&NM prior to its release. It did not take long to read, but by the time I had finished, my entire business weltenschaung was shifted to a different place.

Up until that point my business had been suffering from the “dual reality syndrome” peak oil aware people routinely deal with. That is, getting by in the present means carrying on business as usual without acknowledging that Western civilization may well disintegrate in the next decade or so. This is bad enough in any case, but as owner of a little web design firm I’m responsible for helping our clients improve sales and customer retention via the web; I wanted to tell these clients about peak oil and other economic threats looming on the horizon and advise their digital projects accordingly. Deviating from business-as-usual would have cost sales, however, and given my barely detectable profit margin I simply could not afford the risk. I came to feel like the quintessential slimy sales person making my living off other peoples’ future distress. It was intolerable. I began turning away work from businesses that would clearly fail once the descent began in earnest. How could I take their money when they might need it sooner than others to keep their kids fed?

I tried retooling my business to support the “buy local”/locavore niche. I immersed myself in its issues beyond the overlap with peak oil and became rather knowledgeable about it. I developed ideas and even brought a couple to fruition. But in the end it went pretty much nowhere. Few in my area are interested in “buy local” once they leave the farmers market with their hemp sacks of vegebling.

What could I do? I was stuck. It was looking like back to slimy businesschick mode when I found Smith’s unassuming gem. Within his concise and incisive excerpt I discovered the following sentence:

The Standard Model of advertising and marketing will produce fewer and fewer results as it fails to map the profound demographic, energy, cultural, technological and financial cycles which will dominate life and business for decades to come.

This was the key — everything I’d been doing wrong suddenly came into alignment. In this one sentence Smith identified the exact problem I’d been having trying to conduct business in a reality other than the one I know to be true. It wasn’t just that peak oil, the Kondratieff cycle and other problems were about to wreck the economy; the problem was that I was actually hindering people from financial sustainability by perpetuating the Standard Model. I knew this already on a gut level of course, but lacked the language to articulate the problem.

In the print edition, Smith goes on to examine the Standard Model in the context of decline and makes a convincing case as to why it will fail utterly. Marketing and advertising in their current forms are essentially the art of lying ever more convincingly about the social worth of this or that widget. It is intrusive, obnoxious, and generates sales by nurturing unrealistic expectations that the given widget is designed to not fulfill, thereby spurring future purchases.

In a world of ever-shrinking incomes and ever-increasing insecurity, people simply can’t waste their money on unfulfilled expectations. Mythologies of prestige, sex, and enhanced personal well-being will fall by the wayside along with whatever product or service these were designed to sell. Businesses that pull through will be those that treat their customers as co-creators in the business project. The Prime Directive, according to Smith, is to “clear a space for trust, honest dialogue, and meaningful contribution,” in contrast to the Standard Model’s insistence upon “staying on message.” Staying “on message” is inherently deceptive and voids any trust that might otherwise grow between a business and its customers.

What a relief to find such things articulated so clearly. In my work and in my business, I have been hamstrung by my belief that I needed to stay “on message” as it stands for business as a whole: namely, that everything is just grand and will be so into perpetuity. I can’t help but wonder how many other small business owners feel caged by the same unconscious belief. According to the Standard Model, associating one’s business with something as dark as peak oil is a profound risk for all except those selling survivalist gear. Who’s going to buy pizza, or cars, or Egyptian cotton linens, when industrial civilization is slated for expiration? And yet, Smith uses these very examples of businesses that can survive if they play their marketing cards right — that is, if they patiently nurture the authentic relationships required to grow a clientele loyal through even the harshest crises.

Prior to reading W&NM I did not have much hope. To be honest, I still don’t — but I do have something I didn’t before, and that is a logical, realistic framework within which I can continue developing my business and serve my clients better, a tool that gives me a much better shot at pulling through than I had before. It is a very empowering thing.

As far as I’m conerned, W&NM is the business manual to have heading into decline. Smith doesn’t hold the reader’s hand, but rather provides a framework within which astute entrepreneurs will be able to determine their own appropriate processes. Such is the case for me — Smith is so obviously correct that I am backing away from the Standard Model of propaganda in my own marketing and taking the risk of associating my business name with peak oil. In other words, I’m risking honesty and vulnerability in the interest of cultivating authentic relationships with my clientele.

To quote Smith:

Can this be profitable?

Perhaps the best answer is another question: in an era of crisis and turmoil, is there any other way to be profitable? I believe the answer is already abundantly clear: no.