Waste Management is not in the garbage-hauling business, thank you very much. It’s actually an environmental services company. That’s the brand-bending message contained in the $25-30 million a year the company spends on print and TV ads. To reinforce its message, the New York Times report, the ads highlight:

“… the amount of energy it generates from burning trash each year (enough to power one million homes), the amount of acreage it has set aside for wildlife habitats (more than 17,000 acres), the number of trees it has saved by recycling paper (41 million last year). It printed some of those facts on the sides of its trucks — all of which are now painted green, of course.”

From a marketing standpoint, the company has its work cut out for it. Not only must it overcome a Tony Soprano-style image, there are still memories of those embarrassing Enron-style accounting strategies it employed in the 1990s. And WM’s target audience is about as fuzzy as they come: influencers:

“(They’re) the people who attend public hearings about landfill expansions, who try to have recycling legislation enacted, who lobby their churches or municipalities or school districts to be customers of “green” companies.”

Now the company is pushing its message beyond TV to the Internet. It’s buying ads on several leading newspaper sites including the NY Times, and is negotiating with broadcast and cable stations to put links to its site on their Web pages.

The broad reach and accessibility of the Internet is important, said a company spokesman, because “our goal is no longer just to educate, but to also create a preference for our company over our rivals.”

Sounds like marketing to me…

Wouldn’t it be nice if your business had no competitors? Imagine — if customers wanted to buy what you were selling, they’d have to buy it from you. Or do without.

Think again. If your small business really had no competition, something would be very wrong. It could mean there’s simply no market for your product or service. Maybe others tried it and failed, or customers simply don’t want it. As old-time movie mogul Sam Goldwyn put it, “If people don’t want to go see your picture, nobody can stop them.”

Besides, people often grow to hate companies that don’t have competition. Look at Microsoft (especially in the past). Look at the growing grudge many people have against Google. (Not only for their past privacy intrusions but now — yikes! — their takeover of DoubleClick. If that doesn’t prompt you to start dumping your browser cache and deleting your cookies, I don’t know what will.)

Maybe the best example is cable television. You could hear the cheers all over New York after the stranglehold monopoly of cable systems within apartment buildings, condos and co-ops was struck down by the FCC.

Now if only those of us living in small cities had the same choices. For many of us, we have two options: one overpriced cable system — bloated with hundreds of channels we don’t even watch — or rabbit ears. Do I really have to pay $100+ a month to watch Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert a few times a month?

I wish I had a competing cable system to choose. I know that would drive down prices. Or maybe someone will finally introduce something all cable systems hate and fear: a la carte pricing. That is, you pay only for the channels you want. For most of us, that would probably be 10 or 20, not 200.

Actually, when it comes to television, this guy probably has the best idea.