John Shegerian, Co-founder, Chairman & CEO, Electronic Recyclers International
Tatyana Kjellberg, Manager of Strategic Programs, Product Take-back, Hewlett-Packard
Brenda Mathison, Director of Environmental Affairs, Best Buy 

This presentation took place against the backdrop of a June 2, 2008 press release from Best Buy, announcing an electronics take-back test program being launched in 117 stores.

The session was well-attended, and hands competed to ask questions.

Best Buy has been around since the 60’s, and that leadership is still there today. When Brenda Mathison started there 6 years ago, there was no formal sustainability plan. But the leadership never said no, and now she and 4 people form a compact corporate sustainability team at Best Buy. But in her words, “We also have the largest team at Best Buy.”

Regarding their new take-back plan, Mathis compares the consumer electronics situation with the re-thinking of the medical waste stream the 80’s. It’s not a new model. Consumer electronics is the fastest-growing waste segment in the world, and it would cost 300 times the value to mine these resources from the earth. This makes these corporations the new urban miners. But this initiative will fail if the H-P’s of the world don’t participate, if marketers don’t participate, and if recyclers are not on board.

Tatyana Kjellberg pointed out that as a manufacturer, HP is not neccessarily a recycling expert. They have to talk to recyclers to learn their processes and understand how they work, and make sure the recycling is happening thoroughly and responsibly. Not just e-trash being shipped to the third world as an exported toxic disaster. (See Green Briefs article, e-Waste, a Toxic Time-Bomb) They are also making progress on the product design front, with simple things such as ensuring the use of screws is minimized, and that the same kinds of screws are used as much as possible to help easy disassembly.

John Shegerian, CEO of Electronic Recyclers International also offered some thoughts. “California has recycled 200 million pounds of e-waste in 2007. What needs to happen is a landfill ban, and then an export ban to keep it from just being shipped overseas.” But he’s not optimistic, given the current demands on Washington, that this type of legislation will be coming any time soon.

Attendee Richard Franklin, from Envirobrand asked a HUGE question. Will the recyclers and retailers be ready for the avalanche of response?

Mathis shares his concern. On the warehouse side for Best Buy, 14 Distribution Centres across the country feed 942 stores. This means trailer-loads of stuff going back to recyclers, which is good. But it’s not without its challenges. Material flow is one of them, including avoiding a land-rush to drop off items, (as might happen with a time-limited event-based program) Best Buy works very carefully with their messaging to ensure people think of dropping off whenever it’s handy. In some cases, they are enabling customers to circumvent the warehouse, or even recycling, entirely. On the Best Buy web site customers can find out if there is re-use value in the item. If so, Best Buy will actually pay them for the product. If not, they can print off a label and send it directly to Best Buy’s recycler.

“We’re not perfect.” Says Mathison. “We’ve learned a lot in 4 days, and we appreciate the accolades, but we still have a lot more to learn.”

 One in a series of articles on Lorne’s Sustainable Journey to the Sustainable Brands 08 Conference in Monterey CA. Click here for the full list of sessions, or here for the ‘Fear & Loathing’ road trip journals.

Paul Polak, Founder, D-REV

In 2005, The luxury goods market was worth $455 billion.
$7 billion was spent on haircare products alone.
Corporations spent $140 Billion on advertising in the US alone.
Yet, median household net worth rose only 2% in 2 years. Ours is the very pinnacle of expenditure and wealth, yet this is a saturated and mature market.

What about the other 90% ?
Polak’s presentation made it clear to me that we really know next to nothing about these people. They don’t need Viagra, Botox, or mousse. They need products to help them work their way out of poverty. After interviewing 100 1-acre farmers a year for 25 years, Paul Polak, founded D-REV – to create a design revolution by enlisting the best designers in the world to develop products and ideas that will benefit the 90% of the people on earth who are poor, in order to help them earn their way out of poverty.

Polak then introduced us to some of his friends and teachers – just a few of the 1.2 Billion people who live on $1 day or less, and the 3 Billion people who live on $5 day or less. In the world’s 525 million farms, 85% are less than 5 acres, representing half of all farms in developing countries. Therefore, small farmer prosperity is the key. Yet, says Polak, we must first rethink the 3 great poverty eradication myths:
1. We can donate our way out of poverty
2. We can end poverty through national economic growth (most growth affects cities – the vast majority of poor people live in rural areas and seldom benefit)
3. Multinationals as they are now will end poverty (the closet socialist in me loved this one)

Affordability isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.
You can’t just make cosmetic changes existing first-world products. According to Polak, in order to find solutions to the world’s biggest problems, you have to go where the action is. You have to talk to the people who have the problem, and really listen to them. And you have to learn everything there is to know about the specific context.

Polak and his team had some great examples of product designs successfully developed with this criteria. One was a hanging irrigation bag, which is filled with water (usually hauled from off the farm) which the farmer than customizes by punching holes in the hose to trickle-water their particular crop. Total cost: $3. Better yet, local distributors sell them and make their own profit, becoming entrepreneurs in the process. And hopefully moving from the $1 a day category into the relative luxury of the $5 crowd.

Marketing these innovations takes thinking as well. Take the treadle pump. This is basically a primitive Stairmaster that pumps water to crops. Every 1-acre farmer should have one. Yet without significant media, (or even literacy) how do you get the message to your geographically distributed target market?

Advertising for the other 90%
In small villages, they hired local troubadours to write a song about the treadle pump, and spread its virtues wandering-minstrel style.
Launching in Bangalore, the team created a full Bollywood movie, with famous Indian actors, and played it outdoors to audiences of thousands. Apparently all of these movies feature a wedding, a near-suicide, a happy ending and a lot of dancing.
The film begins with a girl betrothed, yet her father is a farmer too poor to provide her dowry. She falls into the clutches of the dowry bandits and nearly commits suicide. At intermission, local dealers display and demonstrate the treadle pump, which also appears in the second half of the film, saving the day for the poor farmer and his daughter. Everybody dance.

I talked with Kurt Kuhlmann, who showed me some of the other simple innovations, like a low-power UV filter that can purify water a liter at a time, and a solar powered light that is nothing more than a power cell, an LED and a clip stand. All of which illustrated the key point that design is a process of creative problem solving.

Visiting their web site, however, I found few resources that would help me as a designer, engage with their cause. As not everyone can travel to these communities and spend time with these people, I would challenge Polak to take some of the learning his team has amassed and use it to create design briefs that designers can use back here in New Rome. Because Polak’s vision deserves to be spread further.

“90% of designers work for the richest 10% of customers. “Before I die I want to see this silly ratio turned on its head.” Paul Polak

One in a series of articles on Lorne’s Sustainable Journey to the Sustainable Brands 08 Conference in Monterey CA. Click here for the full list of sessions, or here for the ‘Fear & Loathing’ road trip journals.

Janet Eden-Harris, Averil Doering, Umbria

 The irony of blogging from a blogosphere session was too much for me to resist, but this actually ended up being one of the most relevant presentations I encountered. Janet Eden Harris opened with an introduction to the scope of the blogosphere as Umbria defines it, which goes beyond wordpress-style blogs to include message boards, MySpace and doubtless other public forms of electronic publishing too hip for me to know about. This currently totals some 112 Million blogs. (Meaning you are reading just .00000001% of them right now). One quarter of adults online blog occasionally or frequently. 60% of people online in the US read blogs and 50% are over 30. 63% of authors are female. Another impressive stat from the Dragon: Chinese has recently eclipsed English as the planet’s most popular blogging language.

It is also important to distinguish between survey responses and the kind of blog conversations that happen online. These comments will be unaided, spontaneous and, in some ways, a more accurate gauge of attitude.

Umbria collects and processs 3 to 5 million blog posts every day. Through natural language processing and machine learning, they are able to analyze syntax, grammar, and phrases  to ‘tag’ bloggers with a demographic and subject-related identity. (Basically it’s a computer that can tell the difference between a Mall Rat (OMG!) and someone writing for the Harvard Law Review)

Now, this can sound pretty Orwellian. Umbria is quick to point out that they only monitor completely public sites, and respect all password-protected content. Personally, I’m not worried. If there’s even one machine out there taking the time to read my ramblings, I’ve just doubled my subscription base.

For this presentation the topic was Sustainability in the Blogosphere. Who mentions it, what they are talking about and what are their attitudes.

Top sustainable subjects, in order of popularity:
Energy & fuel
Automotive
Food & Beverage
Transportation & Travel
Apparel
General Packaging
Retail
Lighting
Electronics
Paper products
Appliances
Pharma

Segmentation:
My regular reader knows I love to carve up the green consumer pie chart. Umbria had one of the most interesting breakdowns yet, plotting peoples’ attitudes on a quadrant chart consisting of one axis measuring belief in global warming (agree/disagree) and one axis measuring sustainable behaviour (action/inaction).

Here are the categories:
Along with Jan-May 2008 percentages of the measured sample:
Negators 14%, Rejectors 8%, Apathetics (who cares), Skeptics 13%, Uncertain 10%, Shifters 19%, Activists 9%, Idlers 15%, and… The Guilty 13%

“Quit negating my rejection, you shifter…” Attitudes within the groups:
Negator: Thinks Global Warming is a scam and works tirelessly to convince others. Misguided evil.
Rejector: Won’t recycle until we’ve run out pof land to fill.
Apathetic: Who cares?
Skeptic: Doubtful of the issues, doesn’t try to brainwash others.
Uncertain? Maybe started to believe with Al Gore, but has been swayed into paralysis by plethora of conflicting news. 
Shifter: Climate change is an issue and we can do something about it.
Activist: Climate change is a critical issue – can sway from optimistic to pessimistic
Idler: “I can’t make a difference, anyhow.”
Guilty: Knows the issues but does not do anything. (Might stick their head in the oven, but that would be a waste of gas)

Overall, consumers have a challenging journey ahead when it comes to sustainability.
1. Awareness
2. Understanding 
3. Accountability & Personal Relevance
4. Action

What benefits do these people desire?
Seamlessness – Sustainable solution must be part of what they already do
Productivity – Sustainable cannot lose functionality
Social Connection – Sustainability is bringing people together
Going from individualistic to collective mindset
Inspiration – People are excited that sustainability will solve the problem.
Optimism! People are out there talking about solutions that are fun, abstract.

Keep in mind that these are people talking about sustainable issues, not pro’s covering Sustainable Brand Shows. Blogs are part of their journey. People are getting personal satisfaction from acting sustainably. Which is the first step to building a more competitive mindset to really drive change.

One in a series of articles on Lorne’s Sustainable Journey to the Sustainable Brands 08 Conference in Monterey CA. Click here for the full list of sessions, or here for the ‘Fear & Loathing’ road trip journals.

JoAnna Abrams Founder and CEO, John Burshek, Chief Research Officer, MindClick

This research organization clearly presented the chasm developing within the sustainable marketing space:

The Chasm:
66% Believe business needs to change. 16% believe business is doing so.
77% are engaged in green actions 40% don’t believe it’s going any good
Majority understands terms like Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Few know Certified, Sustainable, or Carbon-Neutral.

So what will it take to bridge the Chasm?
1.Push the envelope on product innovation. Your customers are probably more ready for a bold approach than you think.
2. Position and package based on understanding the ‘green’ perspective of YOUR target audience. Find out what they know and think.
3. Use understandable, trustworthy, believable messaging. Be mindful of the balance between delivering ‘basic’ benefits and ‘green’ benefits. For instance, says Burshek, “Global warming is too ‘polarizing’ an issue. ‘Eco-friendly’ or ‘Reduce reuse recycle’ leaves nothing for people to shoot at.”

Abrams and Burshek also featured this direct quote from the respondents which said a lot:

“Even though I don’t buy into the global warming mumbo-jumbo, I still like to do things that are good for the environment.”

Heck, we can probably even sell that in Alberta!

One in a series of articles on Lorne’s Sustainable Journey to the Sustainable Brands 08 Conference in Monterey CA. Click here for the full list of sessions, or here for the ‘Fear & Loathing’ road trip journals.

Erin Carlson – Director, Yahoo! For Good, Yahoo! Inc

This presentation, for me, was a great example of how a mainstream property can make sustainability work. Yahoo! Green is the most trafficked green website on the planet, billing themselves as the one stop shop for the Conscious Consumer. At a more visionary level, their goal is to inspire 600 million people to be green in their daily lives, and may be one of the few media prpoperties left with enough reach to do so. Likewise for marketers, Yahoo!s sheer traffic levels (hundreds of millions of hits daily) lets them offer a look at green consumer interest that few can match.

This wasn’t the core of Ms. Carlson’s talk, but I liked these bits, based on site visitor clicks on various articles and features.
1. People don’t want to hear about doom & gloom. Positive stories draw better.
2. Don’t rely on celebrities. People are suspicious of the ‘backroom deal’. The example given for this was a story on Brad Pitt’s New Orlean’s housing efforts was dwarfed by the story of a 7-year old in Topeka selling reusable shopping bags for charity.
3. Optimistic sustainable innovations and suirprises get great response. Like this article on the air-powered car.

They have also had success integrating their products and services with inspirational programs like ‘Be a better planet!’ (finding and rewarding America’s greenest city or town) using Yahoo! Mobile Service. And because of their frequency of use, they can readily capitalize on spikes in green consumer interest, like Earth Day.

At the end of it all, I asked Ms. Carlson if Yahoo! had a sustainable-consumer interest-monitoring service that marketers could tap into in real-time. She replied that they did not. Take that one for free, Yahoo! For Good.

One in a series of articles on Lorne’s Sustainable Journey to the Sustainable Brands 08 Conference in Monterey CA. Click here for the full list of sessions, or here for the ‘Fear & Loathing’ road trip journals.

Steve Pinetti, SVP Sales and Marketing, Kimpton (Earth Care) Hotels
Jeff Slye, CEO, BEC & Strategic Advisor, Business Evolution Consulting

Kimpton has long focused on quality of service and creating a guest experience, helping guests maintain their lifestyle while on the road. But since 2005 they have gone even further with their EarthCare program.

Founded by Bill Kimpton 1981 A privately-held company, the leading collection of boutique style hotels in US. 43 hotels in US and Canada. (including Pacific Pallisades in Vancouver) As a smaller chain, Kimpton has the flexibility to experiment. The Triton Hotel in Los Angeles started with an ‘eco-floor’, featuring all organic products and recycling in every room. The program spread, and was formalized in 2005 as EarthCare – a name actually brought forward by a member of Kimpton’s green team. Its mission: “Support a sustainable world by using non-intrusive, high-quality, eco-friendly products and services at all Kimpton Hotels”

Now EarthCare  represents over 40 different daily practices in place at all Kimpton Hotels, including a program that is as simple ass it is successful; Recycle bins in all guest rooms. Says Pinetti, “It puts EarthCare ‘in the face’ of our guests, and it also allows them to participate. We have great feedback on it.” Another key to success has been partnership with a third party NGO. The Trust for Public Land benefits from a special reservation code offer that sees $10 per room night donated when customers book on-line with the TPL reservation code.
EarthCare has had great impacts on the brand, with positive effects on brand equity, employee values, guest values and the bottom line. Pinetti claims 18% of guests book with Kimpton specifically as a result of their sustainability initiatives. But Pinetti sees their role as a larger one.

“We’re starting a ripple of innovation. We want other hotel chains to take it on.” 

One in a series of articles on Lorne’s Sustainable Journey to the Sustainable Brands 08 Conference in Monterey CA. Click here for the full list of sessions, or here for the ‘Fear & Loathing’ road trip journals.

Eric Ryan – Method

This presenter reminded me of the dot-com junior CEO’s of the 90’s. Young, hip, dressed down with hair to match. And a company success story that makes one jealous. A lot. Method started with 2 guys in a flat somewhere around 2001. (Young eco-entrepreneurs take note: Their first meeting with Target stores resulted in one buyer saying, “Not a snowball’s chance in hell.”)

Their theories:
Make the cleaner look good on the counter… so you don’t have to put it under the sink. Don’t put biodegradable or non-toxic on the outside of the bottle (to begin with), because people still think green doesn’t clean.
What’s healthy for your home is healthy for the planet is sits on.

The majority of the marketing message revolved around creating culture, rather than share of voice, focusing on their most valuable customers.  To do this, they hired an in-house PR person and added their most loyal customers to the media list to receive all of the latest news, launch kits and samples normally reserved for the mainstream press.

In one telling example of community-building and proof of product need, the Method team ran a series of events at stores where customers could bring in their old-school cleaning products and trade them for some Method. After the event, they called the municipality to help them deal with all the old traded-in products. They ended up classifying the pile as hazardous waste, and calling in the haz-mat disposal team.

Love the Swiffer but hate the disposability?
Method also continues to push the new product envelope. Their O-Mop floor cleaning system features a corn-based microfiber cloth that also cleans better. And now the whole thing is available in biodegradable packaging. Of course their culture extends throughout their world. Their entire head office is LEED Certified (green-built) yet it looks incredibly modern and clean. As Eric says, “When you get the culture right, everything else is easier.”

One in a series of articles on Lorne’s Sustainable Journey to the Sustainable Brands 08 Conference in Monterey CA. Click here for the full list of sessions, or here for the ‘Fear & Loathing’ road trip journals.

Patrick Gregston Producer, Ceilings Unlimited

Gregston is a film producer whose credits that include the post-apocalyptic Kostner fest, Waterworld. He is now creating a new documentary, Ceilings Unlimited (aviation term for blue sky) in association with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a federal agency focused on the condition of the oceans and the atmosphere.

His vision is one of entrepreneurial optimism. A term I have used in earlier posts, and which seems to be a recurring theme at this conference.

As a filmmaker, he paints the climate crisis in dramatic terms:
Act 1: We meet our heroine, she is in peril
Act 2: You find out that she is in worse trouble than you thought
Act 3: The peril is resolved and the heroine is transformed – either she dies, or lives happily ever after.
And we know which kind of endings do better in Hollywood.

He criticized the usual bipolar reduction of possibilities: Either doom & gloom or climate denial. In scientific terms, climate is a set of possibilities. Every possibility has a probability. The result: a bell curve with a big fat part in the middle. Right now, too many people are focusing on the little wedges at the fringe.

“The public is fatigued with fear.” States Gregston. His solution is a film that presents players who are trusted friends, proactive ‘actors’ with ‘skin in the game’, and who deliver p;ositive stories. The presentation opens and closes with some moving preview clips from the doc. Gregston himself remarks, “(Dealing with Climate Change is…) not a rock we are pushing uphill. It’s a snowball we are chasing. It should be fun.”

I myself am rooting for the happy-ever-after ending.

One in a series of articles on Lorne’s Sustainable Journey to the Sustainable Brands 08 Conference in Monterey CA. Click here for the full list of sessions, or here for the ‘Fear & Loathing’ road trip journals.

Andrew Winston, Author

The author of this iconic green tome is very personable, in that salt-and-pepper-haired-smooth-presenter kind of way. His presentation was top-line (buy the book) but he did update on some new trends that have emerged in the last 8-9 months.

One is that Discovery Network announced it is changing to 100% green coverage, with the launch of Planet Green channel. Obviously media companies believe there will be ad dollars and stories to tell for the long term.

Another trend he identified was the bundling of data with products. More and more products carry stories on how they were made, how much carbon was embodied, the conditions for workers etc. And as the movement progresses, only the products with the best stories will get shelf space. As an example, he showed a Dole Organic banana sticker with a number on it. At doleorganic.com, when you enter the number, Google Earth will show you the very farm where your banana was grown.

He pointed to Wal-Mart putting ‘traceability’ into toy manufacturing demands. Setting standards higher than those of the government. In Wiston’s words, “These changes are rippling through the economy.”

But it goes even deeper.

Risk assessors – big banks, insurance, etc, are much more careful about what they will invest in (like regular coal plants). When the money people tighten up the cash in the face of risks( like looming carbon taxes) business will respond. New limits to growth are rekindling the Malthusian fears of the ‘70’s. The costs of living our lives is going up fast. And it’s not going away.

So how will companies companies create value and turn Green to Gold?

The same ways as always, Winston says. Reduce Cost, Reduce Risk, Create Real and Intangible Value.

And that’s no fad.

One in a series of articles on Lorne’s Sustainable Journey to the Sustainable Brands 08 Conference in Monterey CA. Click here for the full list of sessions, or here for the ‘Fear & Loathing’ road trip journals.

New Belgium Brewery
Greg Owsley, Chief Branding Officer.

On my first night in Monterey, I stopped by a local liquor deli to stock my mini fridge. Not seeing anything ‘natural’, or ‘organic’, I settled on Fat Tire Ale, a character beer I had tried and liked once in Colorado. Little did I know I had chosen a beer from one of the nation’s most sustainable companies, and that by the end of this conference I would be a lifelong fan of the brand, their ideals, and their marketing.

Fat Tire Amber Ale is the flagship product of New Belgium Brewery, who presented their brand ethos on Wednesday in the person of Glen Owsley, a Redford-jawed Colorado type who looks like he could’ve just stepped off a cruiser bike himself.

The great thing about this brand is that the quirky, off-beat personality was not grafted on by a team of award-hungry ad agency creatives. It comes directly from the culture of the people that inhabit the Fort Collins brewery. From square one they were shooting for a more sustainable model. “We had a triple bottom line before we even knew what that was”, claims Owsley, “We’re eco-worriers.” Wind-power, efficient brewing equipment, extra waste water treatment and more. They had so many sustainable initiatives, they decided to write a song about it, and produce a music video… of sorts… called Something Good.

New Belgium initially followed a path taken by numerous craft brewers – start with a good story, create a funky name and let the grass roots take hold. Greg calls this the ‘Aw Shucks’ marketing approach. But that approach can only go so far. Chief Branding Officer Greg Owsley sums up hitting that wall. “We were too big to be small, and too small to be big”. So he took them mainstream with a television ad that ran in 2005 and 2006 that launched the tag line “Follow your Folly. Ours is beer.” This gave them some momentum, but they soon realized it was still not enough. “If we wanted to have real impact, we needed to look at our ripple, not just our splash.” Says Owsley. So they got to work mixing their branding with sustainable activism. Through the process, they refined four key adages of sustainable branding:

1: Walk before talk.
2: Admit our flaws.
3: Go with your soul.
4. Make ripples.

These tenets were brought to life through the fantastic photocollage illustrations of Fat Tire’s print-based brand campaign, but the majority of press and customer attention has come by as a result of some truly inspirational rituals, sponsorships and events. Their genuine cycle culture (employees get a free cruiser bike after their first year of service) led them to sponsor the world’s largest traveling bike festival, The Tour de Fat, this year held in 11 cities. Their newest initiative, Team Wonderbike, has 11 of their loyal fans going to a whole new two-wheeled level by trading in their cars for a new bike from Fat Tire.

Their environmental cause celebre is to save rivers. By getting naked. This tongue-in-cheek approach to cause marketing is a smart way to communicate on serious issues without getting preachy. It also gives the ads permission to be a little riskier as well.

So does this all move beer? Seems to. But if not, they are at least changing the world one trade-in at a time.

“We like to lead the parade: If it’s not fun, it’s not sustainable.”

One in a series of articles on Lorne’s Sustainable Journey to the Sustainable Brands 08 Conference in Monterey CA. Click here for the full list of sessions, or here for the ‘Fear & Loathing’ road trip journals.