Recycled brands: green positioning, worm poop, and marketing accountability

I was walking thru the aisles at the local Super discount-department-store-with-concentric-red-rings-that-look-like a, um, target, when an oddly deformed form factor for a consumer brand grabbed my head, twisting it in place, while the rest of me kept walking a few steps. Hanging at eye level were what appeared to be food package wrappers. Not packages, but wrappers. Empty. Like you see run over in a parking lot...or next to a trash can. On closer inspection, they turned out to be folders and pencil bags for use by school children.

$1.00 Wrapper Trapper and Pencil Cases

Terracycle has an idea for what it calls eco-capitalism. It started with fertilizer made, not from petro-consuming, nitrogen-producing chemical processes, but from worm poop (here). Now, it's targetting the children of America and their back-to-school-shopping parents.

So what?

Much green washing backlash has been whipped up against brands attempting to claim in-name-only environmental cred (see The Truth about Green Advertising here). And while sloppy and disingenuous claims are easily spotted by all but the most uninterested, one can certainly appreciate marketers calling attention to brand attributes that, though always present, have only recently held more massively appealing appeal.

But what happens when a brand built on consumption crosses paths with a concept built on reducing, reusing and recycling...Is there such a thing as win-win in a zero sum game? I think so.

Terracycle has enlisted food + packaging manufacturers to support collection and recycling of their empty product containers. Terracycle remanufactures the recycled packages into useful things...like folders and pencil pouches. Terracycle pays people to collect the packaging, underwritten by the brands whose packaging is being collected.

Here are three impacts on marketing enabled by this approach:

1. Brand stewards in affiliated companies can move upstream...beyond simplistic notions of logo placement and copy conformity to higher-order notions of demonstrable commitment and real action...the logo doesn't have to add a snipe noone believes [e.g., 'now with ecogreenalism']...the new product embodies it. Besides, who can control where your logo will show up when it's a trapper-keeeper.

2. Measurability is built in to the recycled product...success need not be measured solely on awareness and perception of a brand's greenality. Instead, financial metrics (cost reduced/sales repeated), participation metrics (groups collecting, wrappers returned...a boxtops for education program that doesn;t stop at the top of the box) and environmental metrics (pounds of waste stream diverted) are all additions to a balanced scorecard of key performance indicators available for marketing's use (more on that here).

3. Marketing to consumers can coexist with marketing to less consumption. The brands involved in the Terracycle program lend more than words to ideas of sustainable living. If you want to do your part, you can do it by generating demand (for the recycled product) or by providing supply (collecting recyclable material). You need not live in a damp, dark cave to do your part to save the world. And you won't have to give up your cookies either.

In the end, we're all worm food. But brand marketers who can find ways to sell us ourselves as the answer may just be the future of eco-marketing.

Crop texts farmer: Snd wtr pls

For years, some people have talked to their houseplants in the belief that it will help them grow healthier and happier. But now, a company in Colorado is intent on helping entire fields of plants talk back.

Agrihouse of Berthoud, CO, is preparing to market a sensor-based technology to farmers that allows plants to send a text message to a mobile device with a request for water...or a message that 'we're fine, thank you'. Unlike other remote sensing applications in production agriculture that measure soil moisture, the Agrihouse solution actually purports to measure the internal moisture content of the plant by placing low cost sensors on plant leaves to measure turgidity.

Image from Agrihouse. More information, including video, here.

According to Agrihouse, this unprecendented level of precision takes out much of the guesswork in irrigation decisions and could save a typical 130-acre center-pivot implementation "enough water to supply 40 households for a year" in addition to significant savings in pumping costs (i.e., energy).

So What?

Interesting you say...if you are a farmer. But what does that mean to marketers? Three things:

1. Always-on, mobile technology (see here and here for a couple of related priors) is an opportunity in every industry. Marketers who look to remove cost, time and place as obstacles to the customer's experience can find the tools in ever-less-expensive technology. Any marketing effort that doesn't look to lower costs, reduce time, or enable efficiency in an implementation of technology is missing opportunity.

 

2. Sustainability is an opportunity in every industry. Marketers who consider ways to help their customers do more--with less--for longer--will find an increasingly receptive audience in the post-disposable world view. Technology can provide the means when the end goal is to be there for the duration.

3. People are strange...when you are the stranger. No matter what the person's occupation, stereotypes get in the way of good marketing. Good marketers, on the other hand, try to put themselves in the shoes of others (one of our five themes!)...recognizing that it is not the same as being someone else. Just as farming might be a surprisingly high-tech business (prior) to those outside of it, we all have surprisingly rich and varied qualities that technology can serve. Smart marketers look to engage us where we are different...not rely on least common denominator stereotypes.

Speaking of strange, here's a look through one of musical history's stranger Doors:

 

Sustainability and Social Media: Accelerating change

Sustainability and social media are two hot topics in the world. And while many of the challenges facing human society require highly technical communications, the rise of social media enables peer-to-peer communications around oftentimes technical knowledge domains.

The panel discusses the application of knowledge and community-thru social media-to faciliate human sustainability.

Let the panel begin...

Some Definitions:

What is sustainability? being able to maintain a process or state. For humans, using no more resources than we can replenish.

It's also about using resources in a way that doesn't diminish a resources' ability to replenish.

For much of human work, this means applying knowledge rather than labor.

Social media is publishing...PLUS participation and interactivity. 

Types of Social Media and Sustainability (Lebkowsky)

Types of social media applications to sustainability:

• Knowledge Production + Sharing . 
  
• Robust advocacy
  
• Crowdsourced knowledge
  
• Communities of efficiency
  
• Guerilla R+D

Examples include 350.org around awareness building, BrightGreenLiving wiki, and MyHerefordshire.com.

Who is Max Gladwell?

MaxGladwell.com He beleives that there is a heroic, green living component that is consistent with  entrepreneurship...which is where much of the social media domain resides. 

The idea that where social media and green living overlap is the opportunity for creating change in our agricultural, energy and transportation systems. Social media represents a change in the information systems...sustainability and social media share much of the same DNA. 

Green OR sustainability (McElhenney)

Reduced costs, increased productivity use less energy and water.

Reduced environmental impact.

Improved health.

These are the reasons for green living and it's corrollary--sustainability

Social media is just PR with new tools [except that you are your own gatekeeper!].  

Greenwashing: Companies disingenuously spinning thier product and policies as environmentally friendly.

How do greenies connect? Communities, Twitter, In person, By Affinities and Passions [just like the rest of the world].

What can we do? Connect, speak out, discover and share solutions, and join forces. When joining forces, we can demand accountability, ask questions, and reduce, recycle, reuse and retweet.

[And now the twitterers are revolting...'Terrible panel'; 'What about the electricity that social media uses?'...there is a certain assertive quality of the panel that the twitterers are asserting their right to challenge].

Change.org (Emily Gertz)

Not everyone has the means, opportunity and desire to transform the energy system...and yet 'what I can do at home' may be too small.

For example, it's not how much energy is used, its how the energy is generated. Some sites like 'The great sunflower project' allows citizen science to monitor bee pollination patterns. These and other crowdsourcing sites represent social media in action on a small scale, where the additive effect is large.

Tweetawatt integrating a device  with Twitter to enable your house to send tweets on how much power is being used in a house...the idea of competition among Twitter followers to use less is an idea enabled by social media.

Questions + Discussion:

[A rather contentious discussion about the imperfection of the sustainable solutions].

It's not that green is too expensive, it's  that dirty is too cheap.

[One thing that is clear from this panel is that there is a great deal of diversity on the definitions and approaches required. Imperfect solutions to imperfectly framed problems may, in the end, reflect the imperfect people we are. Social media can't fix that]