Posts Tagged ‘Sustainability’
Starbucks or McCoffee? No thanks
Starbucks is spending big ad bucks to gain the upper hand in its coffee confrontation with McDonald’s McCafe. What’s important to me about this duel is the false — and ultimately unsustainable — choice this campaign sets up. (UPDATE: McDonald’s announces huge promotional blitz for McCafe.)
According to Ad Age:
The high-end coffee retailer is breaking a series of long form, full-page newspaper ads Sunday (May 3), designed to tell the brand’s “story” while warning consumers about the dangers of trading down. It’s all part of its effort to combat consumer perception about its prices and separate itself from McDonald’s expected mass-market assault for its McCafe launch. Starbucks’ print ads, designed on burlap-sack backgrounds, have headlines such as “It’s not what you’re buying, it’s what you’re buying into.” The ads lay out what separates Starbucks from the competition, such as its practice of buying fair-trade beans and providing health care for employees who work more than 20 hours a week.
Living in Portland, Ore., I can tell you that Starbucks doesn’t separate itself from the competition on the basis of fair-trade, health care or other laudatory practices. That is, if you consider Starbucks’ competition to also include the locally owned, independent coffee merchants and cafes, which we in Portland enjoy throughout our great city.
In the battle of national, publicly owned retail chains, mom & pop’s and larger independents are a complete after-thought. And yet they are the ones who suffer most, along with the communities that are so much better off for having them around. Think Wal-Mart and its devastating impact on local economies and small local businesses as it tries to mow down big-box competitors like Target. The loss of the local independents are simply collateral damage in the national and global business wars.
Assuming I had no other options, I would choose Starbucks over McDonald’s because it’s a more socially and environmentally responsible corporation. That’s what Starbucks wants to hear. What they don’t want to hear is that I actually have dozens of great coffee options and none of them involve McDonald’s or Starbucks. My choices are local and they’re sustainable. I don’t care to choose between who’s less bad. I want to support the business owners who genuinely care about my community because this is their community, too. Large publicly traded corporations ruled by the financial bottom line are “dead ends,” as one socially responsible investment advisor I know asserts. Starbucks may be more responsible than McDonald’s, but that doesn’t make them sustainable.
To borrow the Starbucks advertising punch line, what I’m “buying into” is local.
Time to retire ‘green marketing’
With Earth Day 2009 behind us, I have a suggestion: Let’s acknowledge “green marketing” has outlived its usefulness and put our energy into redefining marketing itself.
Green marketing had a good run. It has responded to the rising green demands of customers. And it’s helped raise the environmental conscience of many others. Unfortunately, marketing as it’s most widely practiced remains the fuel for unsustainable consumption. And green marketing doesn’t go nearly far enough to change that.
The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines green marketing three ways:
- (retailing definition) The marketing of products that are presumed to be environmentally safe.
- (social marketing definition) The development and marketing of products designed to minimize negative effects on the physical environment or to improve its quality.
- (environments definition) The efforts by organizations to produce, promote, package, and reclaim products in a manner that is sensitive or responsive to ecological concerns.
I added the emphasis to products to underscore the limitation of green marketing. Absolutely, we must develop and promote products that are ecologically sensitive and safe. And green marketing has encouraged more eco-friendly product consumption. However, it utterly fails to address two unsustainable conditions:
- Too much consumption by rich people and countries: According to the World Wildlife Foundation, the ecological footprint* of the United States in 2005 was 9.4 (global hectares per person); the world average was 2.7. For high-income countries it was 6.4; for low-income countries 1.0.
- Too little consumption by poor people and countries: Although progress has been made on reducing extreme poverty in recent decades, the World Bank estimates that 1.4 billion people still lived on less than US $1.25 a day in 2005.
Over consumption and inequitable consumption explain much of what troubles our world. If marketers really want to make a difference, they’ll look far beyond green products. And focus instead on how to curb the material cravings of the affluent and narrow the rich-poor gap.
We’re seeing signs of green marketing morphing into “sustainable marketing.” That’s an improvement. It situates marketing in a larger triple-bottom-line context: people, planet, profit. Sustainable marketing, however, implies there is something known as “unsustainable marketing” — which of course there is, most anywhere you look.
We need sustainability embedded in marketing. In other words, marketing — by definition — must be sustainable. There is no green marketing or sustainable marketing. There’s only marketing. And it’s sustainable. Or at least that’s the idea.
What does sustainability mean? I rely on the widely used definition from the Brundtland Commission**: “Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
The AMA, meanwhile, defines marketing (inelegantly) as “an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”
So marketing newly defined could appear something like this:
Delivering value to customers and managing customer relationships in ways that meet the needs of the organization and its stakeholders without compromising the ability of all humans, present and future, to meet their own needs.
Still doesn’t roll of the tongue, I know. But this alternative concept of marketing is profoundly different. No longer will it be enough to satisfy our customers for their benefit and that of our organization and stakeholders (especially shareholders). This business-as-usual approach to marketing has created too few winners and too many losers.
The world could look very different if marketers accept responsibility for ensuring their organizations (or clients) are not jeopardizing the ability of others to meet their needs. In other words, doing our jobs can’t mean satisfying customers, shareholders or bosses at a cost to the health of individuals, communities and environments now and for generations to come. How we avoid that won’t always be obvious. The point is to acknowledge there can be broad social and ecological consequences to our actions and lines we don’t knowingly cross.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the AMA and academia to get behind a new vision of marketing. They’ll follow the real practices of real marketers. Let’s show them the way.
*According to the World Wildlife Federation, “A country’s footprint is the sum of all the cropland, grazing land, forest and fishing grounds required to produce the food, fibre and timber it consumes, to absorb the wastes emitted when it uses energy, and to provide space for its infrastructure.” WWF also says, “If our demands on the planet continue at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we will need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles.”
** Friend Brian Setzler at TriLibrium informs me two key concepts are usually excluded or overlooked when referring to the Brundtland definition: “the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.”
Greenwashing is just the tip of the marketing iceberg
Greenwashing is a regrettable practice across the business world today. And I applaud initiatives such as the Greenwashing Index to prevent the practice from spreading.
I’m concerned, however, that greenwashing may be distracting marketing executives and educators from an even more distressing matter: The vast number of companies, large and small, that even today don’t give lip service to green or sustainable products or practices. They don’t pretend to be sustainable, don’t promise to become sustainable, don’t understand what it means to be sustainable and, frankly, don’t appear to care.
The marketing and advertising of these companies remain what they’ve always been: attempts to promote and sell products and services, without a hint of green gloss. They stress the usual customer benefits: greater value, quality, innovation, convenience, luxury, responsiveness, ROI and the like. But they make no claims to be more earth-friendly, socially responsible or otherwise green or sustainable. These businesses continue to do what they’ve always done, with no obvious regard or accountability for the environmental or social impact of their actions now or across future generations, except perhaps as required by law, rule or regulation.
I don’t know what percentage of businesses are making concerted efforts to become far more sustainable. I’d wager it’s a small minority. One reason the media features companies that embrace sustainability is they are the exceptions. If every company was going green, there would be no story. And one reason businesses tout the “greenness” of their products or practices (sometimes resorting to greenwashing) is they see a competitive or “first mover” advantage. Again, if all companies produced sustainable goods or services, that advantage disappears.
The point is too few businesses are serious about sustainability today. And that should have brand managers, PR counselors, ad execs, social media mavens and all other marketers up in arms.
I don’t want to minimize the seriousness of greenwashing — no company should be allowed an advantage through false or deceptive marketing. But who should worry us more:
- The few unethical companies (and their marketers) trying to pull the green wool over our eyes? Or…
- The many businesses making truthful, “non-green” claims that contribute to excessive or inequitable consumption and their inevitable byproducts: natural resource depletion, ecological damage, climate change, poverty?
Marketers committed to sustainability have a perfect opportunity in this worsening recession to drive home a critical point among their not-so-green peers: It’s time to examine the very role of marketers in fueling unsustainable economies and ways of living. Or stated more positively, how marketers can get on the right side of sustainability.
Ridding the world of greenwashing would be welcomed progress. Harnessing the creative and persuasive talents of every marketer on behalf of a sustainable world would be nothing short of awesome.
No recession in obsessive branding
Journalist Lucas Conley wrote his book, “OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder,” just before 2008’s financial and economic meltdowns. You would expect branding excess in an economic bubble. But what about in a near depression? If anything, Conley told me in an email exchange last month, the condition he calls OBD is likely to get worse.
“As for OBD in the current economy, I can condense my general observations down to a couple points: consumers are buying less and thinking more. The result of both is that brands are trying harder (either via marketing, discounts, redesigned packaging, etc.) to capture our attention, often driving greater desperation and obsessive branding. Why? When consumers buy less (cutting back on staples and skipping status buys) it means brands have to fight even more for a smaller piece of the pie. When consumers think more (Do I really need this salon shampoo? Isn’t the generic ibuprofen more or less the same as the pricier brand?), they tend to dispel brand myths and discover deals. And any time consumers do more thinking, brands have to fight harder to shortcut their logic with emotional appeals (faster and deeper than logic) or overwhelm them with more marketing, new packaging, etc.”
If Conley proves to be right, and I think he will, the extreme efforts of brands to occupy every nook and cranny of our lives will grow even more frantic and insidious in this rotten economy. And we’re not only talking about consumer products companies. Product and service companies of all stripes are running scared. They could resort to most anything to get customer attention.
Not that any of us would be so guilty, right? Conley says the marketers he interviewed for his book agreed obsessive branding was a widespread problem–it just didn’t apply to them. In other words, they know OBD when they see it; they just don’t see it in themselves.
How about those of us trying to operate our businesses and live our lives more sustainably? Are we better equipped to draw the line when it comes to marketing approaches that offer only the illusion of something innovative, better, unique? Or that deceive customers into believing we offer something they truly need, not just desire?
In this economy, devoted “greenies” in business are not exempt from diminishing prospects. Companies that in good times preach transparency and authenticity in their business practices may be challenged to maintain that commitment as sales rapidly disappear. Numerous incidences of greenwashing in recent years indicate even so-called advocates for sustainability are not above sleight-of-hand branding tactics.
Obsessive branding, Conley argues, distracts companies from what they ought to be doing–innovating. “Real change results from innovation that advances knowledge and improves quality of lives,” he writes. “Branding offers the satisfaction of a sense of change without the hard work.”
There are no shortcuts in the honest pursuit of sustainability. But businesses trying to be more sustainable will also become more innovative. And that will be their ultimate competitive edge.
Want to stand out in this dismal marketplace? Stick to the principles of sustainability. Lead with innovation. And when it comes to your brand, seek the middle ground between neglect and obsession.
P.S. A special note of thanks to McClenahan Bruer Communications, my previous agency, for hosting and introducing me to Lucas Conley last fall.