Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
Shopping ’til we drop on Earth Day
Earth Day is nearly here. Just in time for retailers and producers to stoke the consumption of all things green and revive their flagging fortunes in today’s tough sales environment. Advertising Age (reg. required) asks, “Is Earth Day the New Christmas?”:
As April 22 approaches, marketers of all stripes are bombarding consumers with green promotions and products designed to get them to buy more products — some eco-friendly, some not so much. And while that message seems to contrast with the event’s intent, the oxymoron seems to have been lost on marketers jumping on the Earth Day bandwagon in record numbers. This year it seems that just about everyone has found a way to attach themselves to what is fast becoming a marketing holiday that barely resembles the grass-roots event founded in 1970.
Leave it to American commerce to dress up consumerism on a day that is meant to remind us of the harmful effects of excessive and inequitable consumption. If business and industry wanted to make a sustainability statement, they would close up shop on Earth Day and challenge us to buy less and give more. Oh wait, isn’t that what Christmas is supposed to be about?
Tags: Advertising Age, Christmas, Consumerism, Earth Day
Posted in Business & Economics, Consumerism, Marketing, Sustainability | No Comments »
Is a green Wal-Mart good enough?
By now you’re probably aware of Wal-Mart’s efforts to green its business practices and its image. If you haven’t, you probably will soon. The company that a business professor I recently met called the 13th largest economy in the world has launched an advertising onslaught tied to Earth Month. According to Wal-Mart’s news release, its national advertising campaign includes print, television, radio and online ads and a 16-page insert in May issues of several consumer magazines. Brandweek says the company calls it “the most comprehensive environmental sustainability campaign” in its history.
No less of an environmentalist than Paul Hawken, speaking at his book-tour event in Portland last year, said Wal-Mart was indeed serious and sincere about sustainability. The professor I mentioned supports Hawken’s assessment. She is among a group of academics taking part in Wal-Mart’s green initiatives and is a regular visitor to Wal-Mart’s home in Bentonville, Ark. The company’s new-found green zeal is apparent on its website:
Wal-Mart’s environmental goals are simple and straightforward: to be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy; to create zero waste; and to sell products that sustain our natural resources and the environment.
What to make of all this? This is Wal-Mart we’re talking about, the company so many, including me, have good reasons to despise. I’m on the board of a Portland nonprofit that actively supports locally owned, independent businesses and encourages people within our community to do the same. This in the face of out-of-town big-box retailers — Wal-Mart being the poster child — that have decimated so many local independent businesses and left their communities poorer for it.
Still, if Wal-Mart — given its staggering size — is successful in using only renewable energy, producing zero waste and greening its supply chain and the products it sells, it would have an enormously positive impact on the global environment. Or so it would seem.
Something, however, doesn’t add up for me. Green or no, Wal-Mart hasn’t backed off using low prices to beat its competition (including the Mom & Pops in your town). The message it’s sending is you can have it all. “Save Money. Live Better.” — it’s new slogan promises. Wal-Mart will drive its suppliers to go greener, but it will still expect the lowest possible prices from them. That protects its profit margins and enables its customers (in theory) to save money. But someone or something has to pay for Wal-Mart’s margins and our low prices — as has always been the case.
What do you think? If Wal-Mart achieves its environmental sustainability goals, will it have earned your admiration, maybe even turned you into a customer? Is going green enough? Or do you, like me, view sustainability as far more than going green? What about the matters of social and economic equity? Wal-Mart’s lower prices and business practices mean lower wages, loss of independent businesses and the community diversity they bring and the leakage of dollars out of local communities and into the coffers of Wal-Mart headquarters. Should we just chalk that up to the free market doing its thing?
Tags: Brandweek, Earth Month, economic leakage, equity, Paul Hawken, Sustainability, Wal-Mart
Posted in Business & Economics, Consumerism, Marketing, Sustainability | 1 Comment »
Marketing for a sustainable future
Those of you who’ve visited this blog before may see a slight change in emphasis in future posts. I’ll be exploring more frequently the personal and professional interest I have in marketing’s role in a sustainable future. Some would say marketing is antithetical to sustainability. As a long-time marketer, I don’t believe that. However, I also know that marketers shoulder great responsibility for supporting companies, products and business practices that are fundamentally unsustainable.
I don’t believe marketing, by definition, is the problem. One marketing executive I know believes in the Peter Drucker objective of marketing: to create and keep a customer. Sounds simple enough. And non-controversial. It says nothing about creating demand for material products we don’t need and end up throwing away in gigantic landfills. Nor supporting businesses that indulge in wasteful and polluting manufacturing practices. Nor ignoring an economic system that places shareholder interests far above those of the environment and the larger human community.
As marketers, we have choices in who, what and how we market. We can create awareness, build preference and generate demand for organizations and products that do good, or at least no harm. Or we can put our talents in creativity and persuasion to work for the bad guys. I believe it’s time for marketers to awaken to our capacity to change the world for the better and to make conscious choices about how we are going to employ our skills and ourselves.
There are organizations and businesses trying to do the right thing for shareholders, customers, employees, communities and the environment. These are the employers and clients we need to be supporting. If that isn’t a practical option for you as a marketer (since you need a job and income), then do what you can to change the marketing — if not the behavior — of your employer or client. Stand for sustainability, even if you stand alone.
For better or worse, marketers are perhaps the most visible storytellers of our time. The stories we craft and publicize are meant to move people to act, and very often they do. The question we must face is whether the actions we instigate support or jeopardize a sustainable future. If you don’t know the answer, then consider the physician’s maxim: First, do no harm.
Tags: do no harm, Marketing, storytellers, Sustainability, sustainable future
Posted in Marketing, Sustainability | No Comments »
Spread of fashion undermines sustainability
One of America’s foremost critics of our consuming ways is Juliet Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College. I had the pleasure of hearing her speak this week in Portland.
Among the many observations that jumped out at me in her lecture was what she called “the aesthetization of American life.” Not sure that’s a word, but the point is fast-changing fashion, long the staple of the apparel industry, is now central to the selling of many retail products. In recent years, furniture, cellphone, home electronics and other manufacturers have joined clothing makers in emphasizing the design — or aesthetic appeal — of their products. A New York Times piece yesterday, appropriately headlined “Hoping to Make Phone Buyers Flip,” helped make Schor’s point:
Like fashion or entertainment, the cellphone industry is increasingly hit-driven, and new models that do not fly off the shelves within weeks of their debut are considered duds.
I like attractive, well-designed products as much as the next person. However, when it becomes industry’s prevailing practice to change product designs with the season and encourage us to discard perfectly good items because they are no longer “fashionable,” then we have a problem. Making more of the products we buy fashion statements only encourages us to purchase more. This may bolster the financial bottom lines of producers and retailers. But it puts the world’s environmental bottom line further in the red.
To illustrate her point, Schor projected a graph from the World Wildlife Foundation’s Living Planet Report 2006. You can access the report here. According to the WWF:
The Living Planet Report 2006 confirms that we are using the planet’s resources faster than they can be renewed — the latest data available (for 2003) indicate that humanity’s Ecological Footprint, our impact on the planet, has more than tripled since 1961. Our footprint now exceeds the world’s ability to regenerate by about 25 per cent…This global trend suggests we are degrading natural ecosystems at a rate unprecedented in human history…Effectively, the Earth’s regenerative capacity can no longer keep up with demand — people are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste into resources.
WWF offers several alternatives to our unsustainable (and potentially catastrophic) “business as usual” course of human development. If you’re wondering what you can do, start by examining your consumption choices. Resist the urge to stay at fashion’s leading edge, no matter the product. Buy less stuff. When you do make purchases, reward producers and retailers who embrace sustainability.
And if it’s aesthetics you value, ask yourself this: What better designer than Mother Nature?
Tags: aesthetization, consumption, Ecological Footprint, Juliet Schor, Living Planet Report, Sustainability
Posted in Business & Economics, Consumerism, Marketing, Sustainability | No Comments »
Green innovations offer hope in an e-wasted world
I maintain an ongoing love-hate relationship with consumer electronics. I hate the constant promotional bombardment by electronics manufacturers for cellphones, flat-panel TVs, mp3 players, games and countless other digital distractions. I also hate the waste stream produced by household electronics. Last month, the New York Times Magazine published an excellent piece on this, “The Afterlife of Cellphones.”
While many of us try to recycle our phones, the reality is they too often eventually end up randomly disposed of in developing countries, exposing human and other life to dangerous materials. According to the Times:
In a study published last year, 34 recent-model cellphones were put through a standard E.P.A. test, simulating conditions inside a landfill. All of them leached hazardous amounts of lead — on average, more than 17 times the federal threshold for what constitutes hazardous waste. Under a stricter state of California test, they also leached four other metals above hazardous levels.
The E.P.A. says modern American landfills are designed to keep toxics stewing inside from leaking out, so they don’t contaminate surrounding soil or drinking water. But landfills do fail, says Oladele A. Ogunseitan, an environmental-health scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and an author of last year’s study. More important, he notes, such landfills don’t exist in the developing world. In many places, garbage is tossed into informal dumps or bodies of water or burned in the open air — all dangerous ways of liberating and spreading toxics.
The article doesn’t paint a completely hopeless picture. Industries are developing to reclaim precious metals from e-waste and to refurbish used cellphones and resell them to those who can’t afford new ones. The latter, in theory, reduces the need to make new phones and the energy and materials consumed to produce them.
Which brings me to what I love (I use the term very loosely) about consumer electronics: the innovation harnessed and applied in their design. The innovation I care about most is reducing the environmental impact of electronics. CNET gives coverage today to the Green Gadgets conference in New York. Check out some of the product innovations that promise to do less harm and in some cases improve the quality of life for some of the world’s poor.
My favorite is SunNight Solar’s solar flashlight. The company is also focusing on social issues by encouraging their customers to buy and give one of the flashlights to a person in a developing country for every one they buy for personal use. According to CNET, “The goal is to reduce the use of kerosene lamps, which are unhealthy and dangerous.”
Technical and social innovations like these from SunNight Solar are what give me hope.
Tags: consumer electronics, green, green gadgets, hazardous waste, innovation, The Afterlife of Cellphones
Posted in Business & Economics, Marketing, Sustainability | No Comments »
Challenging the claims of drugmakers – finally
Arguing the merits of cholesterol-lowering medications wouldn’t seem to fit a blog devoted to issues of social, environmental and economic sustainability. But I can’t ignore a fascinating cover story by BusinessWeek that raises serious questions — finally — about the benefits of statins, especially among those who’ve never suffered a heart attack. I’m not a conspiracy theory type, but I’ve watched with growing suspicion the actions of statin producers and their surrogates who seem hell-bent on convincing all Americans they should be taking their drugs.
Congratulations to BusinessWeek for finally drawing attention to the serious questions behind claims of statin producers that have gone virtually unchallenged in the mainstream media:
Americans are bombarded with the message from doctors, companies, and the media that high levels of bad cholesterol are the ticket to an early grave and must be brought down. Statins, the message continues, are the most potent weapons in that struggle. The drugs are thought to be so essential that, according to the official government guidelines from the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP), 40 million Americans should be taking them. Some researchers have even suggested—half-jokingly—that the medications should be put in the water supply, like fluoride for teeth. Statins are sold by Merck (MRK) (Mevacor and Zocor), AstraZeneca (AZN) (Crestor), and Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY) (Pravachol) in addition to Pfizer. And it’s almost impossible to avoid reminders from the industry that the drugs are vital. A current TV and newspaper campaign by Pfizer, for instance, stars artificial heart inventor and Lipitor user Dr. Robert Jarvik. The printed ad proclaims that “Lipitor reduces the risk of heart attack by 36%…in patients with multiple risk factors for heart disease.” So how can anyone question the benefits of such a drug?
Read the article and find out before you ask your doctor about Lipitor.