For my last blog post, I thought I’d write down some of my biggest takeaways from my semester with sustainability. I took Sustainability Marketing because it sounded interesting even though I wasn’t the most sustainability focused at the time. I recycled when I could, I would read environmental news sometimes, and I’d try my best to reduce waste in my life. But generally, I wasn’t as engaged as I could have been. I also had no specific plans to integrate sustainability in to my career.

Throughout this course, I learned that innovation and sustainability will go hand in hand in the future. It will be a competitive advantage for companies who choose to lead the pack today and innovate in a way that has positive externalities for the environment and society.  As resources dwindle, the least resource intensive products will conquer. As consumers increase their social awareness, the ethically sourced products will conquer. This course has provided me insight in to green consumer segments and targeting strategies that will help me be an innovative and sustainable professional.

I also learned that green products must be great first. With all the examples we discussed in class, this now seems intuitive but we face a market that has been saturated for years with lower quality green products. It is an uphill battle staged against consumers who are downright convinced green products don’t compare to their less green counterparts. Our products must be the best and the greenest to win over the most skeptical consumer.

A personal takeaway, that wasn’t necessarily in the syllabus, was that sustainability is an ever-evolving topic that we must always continue to educate ourselves on. We are far from knowing all there is to know about the environment and we most likely never will. Nothing is black and white. We must never be complacent in our knowledge but rather always seek out more. Innovation will be based on the most up to date knowledge of the environment and the things we are doing today will probably be outdated and replaced by much better practices in the future – we have to always be ready for that change.

Not only is sustainability ever evolving, it’s a complicated mix of both science and opinion. I don’t mean the climate change deniers when I say opinion, rather I mean everyone else’s opinions. We each have different hierarchies in our mind of what is most important – whether it’s our planet, our people, or even our animals. It is nobody’s place to set out a hierarchy for all. Rather our companies should reflect a purpose that is inherent to our business practices, our workforce and most importantly our consumer. There is no perfect and so there is no company that can stop striving to be better.

Thank you to everyone in the class – I learned a great deal from our discussions and will take it all with me in to the workforce. See you on the forefront of sustainable innovation!

When we discussed customer cost in class I immediately thought of the clothing company, Everlane, who I had just purchased a sweater from online a day before. In class, we had discussed how important pricing is for the differentiation of the product. In most instances, price is a reflection of the quality of the product. Usually, a lower price indicates lower quality or lower demand and subsequently a subpar product. Everlane takes this notion and turns it on its head.

Everlane sells quality clothing items online at a reduced price while utilizing unprecedented honesty in its marketing and web content. They call it ‘Radical Transparency’. They give in depth information on all of the factories and distribution centers they use as well as the cost at each step of their supply chain, focusing on the relationship they have with these companies and their focus on ethical labour practices. This is done for each product so when you are looking at one of their backpacks for example, you can see it was made in the Dongguan factory. You can also see the cost of materials, hardware, labour, duties and transport.

On top of all this, they show their markup and compare it to the ‘traditional retail’ markup. This is the part of the process that allows them to utilize price as an indicator of quality (the traditional retail markup) while still using lower pricing as a differentiator. While their backstory sounds quite altruistic, this is a genius marketing ploy that has worked in their favour.

We talk about how consumers are willing to pay higher prices for quality goods but they often don’t know the quality and cannot act out this rationality in the way they think they do. So for a company to not only showcase quality and be transparent in its pricing but to also do so at a reduced price for consumers is a surefire success.

They have room to grow in terms of environmental sustainability, but with a clear focus on radical transparency – they need to make sure that whatever they do, it is the correct path to take, as they cannot hide anything. No ‘Shaded Green’ for Everlane.

What do you think of Everlane?

Our in-class discussion of partnerships in sustainability was quite interesting. I hadn’t realized how many companies there are working together on environmental and social initiatives. Most of our discussions revolved around large companies in partnerships with other large firms or non-profits, presumably due to the fact that their emissions are much larger and important for the overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and waste. But growing up with a small family business, I was more interested to see what initiatives there were, if any, for smaller firms to form partnerships.

After conducting some research online, I found several articles about a ‘partnership’ of 24 small breweries. They came together to sign a ‘Climate Declaration’, which media purports pledges them each to take their own actions to reduce emissions and to support political action at the national level in the US. These news articles stated that these breweries are recognizing that their business is currently inefficient with large usage of energy and water. As well, the hop and barley needed for beer is sensitive to climate change, so supporting political action that goes further than their own reduced emissions is important since such small brewing companies can hardly make a large enough impact on their own.

This climate declaration is organized through a third party non-profit organization called Ceres and doesn’t even have any commitment attached to it. The declaration has been signed also by several other businesses in the US. It is simply a statement that climate change is a real and an important issue in the US to show that American companies are in support of climate change policy. While the President has tweeted positively about it, the efficacy of the declaration is unknown. It does allow small businesses to have a voice along with larger firms, which is nice to see. But it also acts as a statement to consumers that these companies are in fact doing something sustainably when in reality, they could only be hiding behind the declaration itself.

What do you think of the climate declaration? Just buzz or real game changer?

Read more about it here:

Why this company signed the declaration.

Oregon’s Breweries join the declaration.

Ceres talks Breweries.

When we discuss sustainability communications in class, it always seems focused on showcasing benefits and value for the consumer. The consumer holds a lot of power in this way and so any advertising or messaging is done to please the consumer. Shaming the consumer with pictures of dying animals or messaging that talks about environmental harms has been proven ineffective. But what about shaming them with much harsher language?

An anti-littering campaign in Toronto caused quite a stir online last year when it was revealed. The ads showcase pieces of distinctly branded trash on the ground with the package lettering spelling out different insults for the type of person who litters like ‘Dipstick’ or ‘Lowlife’. The copy on each ad reads “Littering says a lot about you”. These ads spread across the Internet rapidly last summer on Tumblr, Reddit, and other media outlets. It received 130,000 notes on Tumblr within 24 hours of being posted. On top of that, I found these ads on Tumblr today, which means that they are still floating around even months later.

Unfortunately, the ads had to be pulled from use in the city only a month later due to copyright infringement cited by several of the companies who’s products were used for the trash. But no matter, the ads have clearly had a second life online where many people have since seen them.

It is hard to say whether this type of advertising is all that effective. The ads are very unique and tonally interesting. They are abrasive without being harsh or preachy but this may not have any direct relation to decreased littering behaviour. I personally enjoy these advertisements but I think I fully appreciated them when I could see them all at once in a sequence online, rather than individually on the street or in the subway. I also enjoyed the fact that something Torontonian was receiving positive attention for once. I’m also not sure that Toronto is facing the right littering problem. In Toronto, the trash and recycling bins downtown are often overflowing and messy or there are too few or far between when you need one. Increasing the accessibility of bins and how often they are emptied is probably more important.

What do you think of the ads? See the rest below. Continue reading →

We’ve discussed it several times throughout the course, and I’ve even discussed it in my very first blog post, but it bears repeating that innovation is essential to future sustainability. One example of such innovation is incredibly interesting to me and it is urban indoor farming. While several groups are planning such farms, the world’s largest indoor farm already exists in Japan and is toted as 100 times more productive than traditional farming methods. Custom LED lighting helps plants grow two times faster, shortening the day/night cycle. The plants grow on a series of shelves with highly regulated temperature and humidity.

While this lives on the opposite end of the spectrum from locally grown foods, it’s potentially more in line with current projections of overpopulation and growing urban areas. But with other innovations in food not always living up to expectations (GMO’s), it will be interesting to see whether indoor farmed foods will have different genetic properties making them more or less healthy. It is also questionable whether production of the special LED lightbulbs, the shelving units and the massive buildings themselves will be sustainable. In the particular case above, the farm is housed in a factory building left vacant after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. I am sure there are numerous buildings like this, especially in other areas affected by natural disasters, which could become much-needed local producers of fresh produce. Other indoor farming firms suggest utilizing existing public basements, as well, while some designers are interested in creating new vertical structures.

Examples of innovation like this are not only usually fascinating projects but they are key in creating discussion around climate change, sustainability and the environment. When surfing through environmental news online, I use a variety of sources like The Guardian or Reddit, and the discussions usually surround environmental innovation rather than much of what we discuss in class, including partnerships or small projects, which have much less viewership online. I find it quite interesting that the sustainability conversation is potentially biased towards the more novel solutions rather than the best solutions – what do you think?

During our class on sustainability partnerships, I looked in to a partnership called Bonsucro. Supported by the WWF, Bonsucro is a global non-profit that utilizes a certification scheme to help induce sustainable production policies for the sugarcane industry, which is a major source of pollution and waste.

Bonsucro – Logo

While seemingly boring at the time, it led me to a really interesting article, by The Guardian, on Bonsucro and how different groups perceive its effectiveness. The insights can seemingly be broadened for most partnerships of this sort that involve large corporations and a certification process.

The Guardian’s, “Sustainable sugar: Coca-Cola and BP signed up but will it go mainstream?”

Bonsucro has certified 3.66% of the global market for sugarcane since its inception with major members including Coca-Cola, Bacardi, Ferrero Group, BP and Shell. While this is seemingly impressive, the former CEO Nick Goodall had projected 5% by 2014 and 20% by 2017.

Where my interest lies, is in the fact that the article states some feel the opposite about the penetration rate of Bonsucro. The article says some believe that this market share of 3.66% has been too fast to be credible. Jason Potts, co-author of The State of Sustainability Initiatives Review, believes the fact that Bonsucro was positioned as “mainstream” eluded to the fact that it would have minimum requirements for certification so that penetration in to the market could be large-scale.

The Guardian article reads like there are several more people than just Jason Potts that feel this way but when trying to find them, my research came up blank. That being said, it does seem like a reasonable assumption to me that any partnership that involves large firms like Coca-Cola from the outset will be influenced to not radicalize the certification process but rather keep it attainable for these companies. But without giant corporations supporting the partnership, penetration of these certification processes is next to impossible.

This is potentially why there are so many certifications that don’t work in the way that they should – there needs to be a fine balance between corporate support and corporate influence. In my mind, it comes down to whether corporate leadership truly has altruistic intentions and will support certification that is actually as rigorous as needed for truly sustainable change.

Not often (if ever) do we like to think about death. It’s not a topic we are generally willing to discuss at length and far too often we leave ourselves unprepared for its arrival. And so without much thought, we go through the motions of the same post-death rituals that have been done for years and years.  While different cultures have different ways of mourning/celebrating the life lost, the majority of bodies in North America are buried or cremated.

The intense emotional and personal attachment to the deceased person means any notions of sustainable behaviour go out the window and we choose burials that involve massive amounts of wood and steel products for coffins and highly toxic embalming or we choose cremation that emits 540 lbs of carbon dioxide in to the atmosphere per body.

The idea of a loved ones body decomposing is unimaginable to us. So much so, we’d rather they be burned to ash or filled with toxic embalming fluids – a seemingly irrational way of thinking about death.

Enter the Urban Death Project. Still in the design phase, with a Kickstarter soon starting, the Urban Death Project seeks to add a third alternative for honouring your deceased loved one – by letting them decompose. In the middle of these proposed decomposition centres is a large core where bodies are gently decomposed among wood chips and sawdust.

Image by Katrina Spade for the Urban Death Project

The idea still has much to be fleshed out, well past just the design. This type of sustainable service would require a complete overhaul of the way we think of death. For some, it would be an appealing concept in that our bodies are returned to a natural cycle and will be part of the Earth again. While others, especially those with differing views of afterlife or reincarnation, would be incredibly hard to convince that there is even an alternative to their burials and cremation.

It will be an incredibly hard task to market this idea and I’m interested to see what happens. Leave your own reactions in the comments!

For more info on the Urban Death Project click here.

Check out these articles on the Urban Death Project:

The Architect Who Wants to Redesign Being Dead (The Stranger)

What to do with our bodies after we die? (Huffington Post)

* “It” being the packaging it came in.

One of the coolest innovations we’ve discussed in class has to be the idea of food packaging that lasts as long as what it contains. Made out of materials such as beeswax, seaweed and caramelized sugar, these containers are supposed to last as long as the food inside and then dissolve at use, wither away or be eaten along with what is inside.

A Swedish design firm, Tomorrow Machine, has created some impressive designs that may not be the most practical but sure look great. The ingredients used may not be sustainable if production were to grow, the packaging may prove too fragile for effective transportation and there could also be health concerns. As a design firm, they haven’t completed the puzzle of logistics surrounding this concept but they’ve helped open up a dialogue around it, which is an important step in the right direction.

Tomorrow Machine

In terms of the ‘Five I’s of Green Marketing’, as discussed in class, this concept has the potential to be a hit. While it’s a new innovative technology, it’s also fairly intuitive to use and incredibly inviting as it offers a sustainable way to entertain single-serving packaging. It’s novelty can move consumers to read up on it and become informed and it is a fully integrated collaboration of technology and commerce.

To be sure, there could be a psychological barrier that holds consumers from purchasing. Consumers may be worried about a number of things including the fragility, taste, safety and mouth feel of the product. Combating these fears would be the main focus of any marketer willing to take it on.

A few startups have begun to take the task on. Loliware has created edible cups while WikiPearl has designed edible spheres for soft foods.

Loliware

WikiPearls

It’ll be interesting to see how these ideas are scaled and whether the demand will be there when it happens. Leave your thoughts below!

Here are a couple great sites/articles to find out more:

• Waste-free, Willy Wonka packaging is coming but are consumers ready for it?
• Drink up, then eat the glass – the trend for edible food packaging and tableware
• Loliware Biodegr(edible) Cups
• WikiPearl
• Tomorrow Machine

At the forefront of our discussions in class is the need for innovative thinking to create large-scale change. New technologies and changes within the procurement process will allow companies to provide their goods to market more efficiently in terms of both their bottom line and their sustainability efforts. You’d be hard pressed to find someone to disagree that innovation is not a necessary factor in creating positive sustainable change. But hasn’t innovation ever led us astray?

“It is unacceptable that shipping remains one of the most polluting industries in the world.” – Simon Birkett, Clean Air Campaign 

If we look at freight shipping on the high seas, it is in clear need of innovation. In fact, shipping is responsible for 3.5% to 4% of all climate change emissions. The last major innovation in shipping was the use of diesel power, and before that it was steam power. These innovations have pushed us to our breaking point, and for this reason, governmental sanctions are being developed and implemented to curb the emissions they have caused. Until recently, shipping innovation has been devoid of sustainable benefits. So to move forward, we might just have to go back in time.

Several new designs of cargo freighters have brought back the sail in hopes that wind power will cut fuel usage. These new hybrid ships have metal sails and computer algorithms to take advantage of wind power at optimal angles. One design from the University of Tokyo promises to cut fuel usage by 30%.

If innovation in the shipping industry today involves what many believe to be antiquated technology, the sail, should we look in to the past for more of our answers to questions of sustainability? It’s a novel concept but what if other discarded technologies can be updated and innovative when combined with new computer technology. Innovative thinking is hard to come by. If anything, studying ancient farming techniques, or what have you, will spark the innovation we’re all so mad about.

Check out these articles to find out more about the different ways that sails are making a comeback:

• The Cargo Ships of the Future Will Be Galleons With 20-Story Sails
• Next-Gen Cargo Ships could use 164-foot Sails to Lower Fuel use by 30%
• Sailboats ship Freight to Manhattan for First Time in 60 Years
• Wind set Fair for Sail Power’s Return

Welcome to my blog on Sustainable Marketing! Make yourself at home, leave a comment or two and enjoy.