By Shel Horowitz

(Excerpt from Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World by Jay Conrad Levinson and Shel Horowitz)

The flip side of the buy-local movement is that in our increasingly globalized economy, enormous opportunities are opening for nimble companies who can make sharp turns in the global arena. Mark Schapiro, Editorial Director of the Center for Investigative Reporting and author of Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power, noted in a radio interview that because environmental and safety standards for cosmetics/personal care products are much tougher in the European Union than in the United States, the few US companies that meet the stricter requirements have access to the entire EU market.

Eventually, Schapiro says, US consumers will discover the tougher labeling and ingredient standards and demand them. “There are levels of disclosure required on European products that are not required on American products. We live in a global economy. So that information is going to start making its way back here to the United States. And I think it’s going to start creating some interesting tensions when people start seeing information disclosed there that’s not disclosed here.”

Extrapolating from that, it seems obvious to us that the first US cosmetics company to start heavily marketing its own compliance with the European standards, and what that means for consumer safety and environmental protection, could score a huge first-mover marketing coup even in the US market, and cast doubt on the offerings of many of its competitors.

In other words, the more your company holds to high ethical and environmental standards, the more you can sell in the global economy. So educate your customers on the importance of dealing fairly with suppliers in developing countries and offer fair-trade certified products they can feel good about. Sell organic clothing, craft items that benefit a women’s educational co- op, natural and renewable building materials, traditional toys that are guaranteed to be safe, or even recordings of indigenous music from around the world—and show how you’re giving back to the communities that supply you and those that purchase from you. Consumers will support you!

We’ll look more closely at global marketing (both in green and nongreen sectors) in Chapter 16.

Green/social change business profitability expert Shel Horowitz, “The Transformpreneur^sm,” shows you how profit by greening your business, turning hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance, and marketing these commitments. Reprinted with permission from Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (with Jay Conrad Levinson; Morgan James Publishing, 2016). The book highlights profitable and successful socially responsible strategies used by companies from Fortune 100 to solopreneurs.