I may preach a lot about sustainability, but I am no angel. I would count myself as someone who is quite sustainably conscious. I’m not particularly proud of this list, but it’s one that I thought I’d share regardless.

1. I fly on planes. For work, for vacation, etc. I feel so guilty whenever I step foot on one. I feel like I should be going on a plane to preach sustainability or to help plant trees or at least buy some carbon offsets. Do I still get on planes? Yep.
2. I am so lazy that I’d prefer a direct car ride over transit or riding a bicycle. I’m pretty sure my carbon foot print is huge.
3. I stay up really irregular hours and use up tons of electricity (case and point: look at the time that this blog was posted.)
4. I always forget my water bottle/thermos at home and end up buying some kind of drink with a disposable cup
5. I take the water we have here in Vancouver for granted.
6. Composting is a great idea, but sometimes a compost is too far away or I’m too lazy to wait to compost whatever I have that’s compostable
7. I am the worst person when it comes to buying cosmetics and never using them or only using parts of the product and then shove it in a drawer.
8. I don’t like wasting food, but I find I sometimes I am confronted with a lot of food. I think it’s super important to be aware of how much I can eat. However, I can’t control a lot of the portion sizes in restaurants.
9. I realize that red meat isn’t the greatest for the environment. This is especially true with how it’s produced and how much that production process goes into global warming, but it’s just so easy to prepare and is so much cheaper as well though! I consider going vegetarian all the time. I have been a vegetarian for about two days in a row before caving in to eating meat again though. It’s a love hate relationship.
10. I love the newer model of things I have. I will find an excuse to upgrade my laptop or to get a new jacket or anything that feeds into materialism.

I suppose that it’s all about finding the right balance between things I do, finding the passion to do these things properly and taking the time to educate myself. It took a lot to confess this, so please don’t rip me apart too much. I’m working on it though!

There’s a running joke reference in class after I made a reference to a shampoo bar from Lush that I’m the “Lush” girl in class. Yes. I love Lush. I think they’re an amazing example of a sustainable company that walks and talks it in their values.

I had the opportunity to see Brandi Halls talk at the 2013 Chasing Sustainability Conference. She is the PR manager of Lush and also aired in an episode of undercover boss for Lush. This is when I first discovered them – I had always seen the stores around, but the smell was always so intense when passing by that I thought I would suffocate if I ever walked into the store. (It’s actually not that bad!)

I’m just going to do a quick review of some of their products with a sustainability lens:

1.      Shampoo Bars

a.      Pro: It’s really easy to use and it works. You just have to lather it up and grab the bubbles as your shampoo.

b.      Pro: It’s one bar that’s worth 3 bottles of shampoo = cost savings + saving bottles from going to landfills

c.      Pro: Smells really good (and a lot of variety of smells you can pick from)

d.      Con: Might take more water than usual to lather up the shampoo bar

2.      Toothy Tabs

a.      Pro: Packaging is recycled paper mini boxes with little toothpaste tabs inside. Saves the toothpaste container from being a plastic tube or container that could result in difficulty of getting toothpaste when there’s only a little bit left. More efficient usage of product and less waste going to the landfills

b.      Con: some of the flavors still need a bit of work

c.      Con: behaviour change on using a tablet instead of toothpaste

3.     Face Scrubs

a. Pro: If you bring in 5 of the scrub bottles you can get one free

b. Con: Encourages more consumption with the pro mentioned above

c. Pro: Made with super fresh ingredients and works really well

d. Con: Since the ingredients are so fresh, the scrub has to be refrigerated an only lasts for about two weeks

It’s just interesting to see the kind of company that talks about sustainability that sells products en mass. More of a good thing can’t be bad, right?

Valentines Day. Christmas.  Birthdays. These are all excuses to be materialistic fabricated by very talented marketing. It’s interesting how it is a social norm to buy something for someone on any one of these days

–        Roses or stuffed teddy bears for your significant other on Valentine’s Day

–        A gift for every close family and friend for Christmas and maybe even a Christmas Stocking to go along with your gift

–        A cake for someone’s birthday along with some kind of personalized meaningful gift

Companies make big bucks from these fabrications.

If you want to buy roses on Valentine’s Day you should be prepared to pay double or even triple of the regular price of a rose, but why do you have to get flowers on Valentines? Why is there such a high demand for this one day?

Christmas is that time of year where you are too broke after buying everyone gifts. Take a step back. Realize that Christmas is a Christian holiday that is to celebrate a savior being born into the world. In fact, if you wanted to practice a gift giving holiday we should call it Hanukah, not Christmas. During Hanukah, you have to give a gift to close people in your life for seven days straight.

Birthdays are supposed to be a celebration of how strong your mother was bringing you into this world.

It’s just interesting to take a step back and realize that if everyone consumed like us (in the North American context) that we wouldn’t be able to sustain all of our consumerism. I guess all I’m trying to say is that if you are really close with friends, family or a significant other, you should not need any holiday or excuse to act differently as a consumer. They are special every single day. Super corny, but how much less waste would the world have if you didn’t get all of your Christmas presents last Christmas? Seriously – do you even remember everything you got for Christmas? Do you still use everything you got from your birthday? These Fabricated Materialism days are great for encouraging unnecessary consumption that will most likely end up in a landfill.

For this reason, I don’t give gifts unless I see something practical that someone I know needs.

As an active business student I go to events that have booths all the time. In fact, this morning I went to a career fair. It’s always interesting to see what booths are at these types of events – even more interesting is the types of swag that they offer. I feel that they use swag to lure students to their booths. Swag is the first point of marketing contact and could make the difference between any student going to a booth they’ve never heard of.

Companies that pride themselves on sustainability have standard prizes. Every business student has some kind of :

–       reusable bag with the company logo to discourage use of plastic bags

–       pens (that might be made out of recyclable/compostable materials)

–       Notebooks made from recycled paper

–       Water bottles with the company logo on it to discourage consumption of plastic water bottles

It’s interesting that all of these companies are almost lacking innovation in this area. It’s the first point of contact with students, and yet even a simple thing such as swag has been standardized and can’t really be differentiated.

However, I found the anomaly today at a career fair. I walked up to a booth where one of the representatives of the company presented me with a small package, “We don’t believe in swag, because it’s just more consumption. Instead, here is one dollar. You can keep the dollar or write your name and number on the back to have it put into a pool of money where half the money will go to charity and the other half will go to a random draw of someone who donated to this pool of money with the dollar.”

I was so impressed. I was hooked. Screw swag – this was the way to go to show your values. My bag was already filled with too much stuff from other companies. They differentiated themselves in a way that I could appreciate. Needless to say – I will be contacting Traction on Demand because I know they have a culture I can respect. (Plus they get free marketing from this blog post from an impressed student who loves social sustainability.)

I sincerely hope companies can follow suite in something similar that provides as much value and as much of an impression as this company.

We discussed in class how there are certain industries that have been associated with sustainability for a while, such as household cleaning products. However, industries such as technology are still trying to set benchmarks with how fast the industry is changing from day to day never mind incorporating sustainability.

I have a little bit of knowledge in the technology sector which I find that a lot of people don’t realize that might affect their perspective with technology and sustainability. This blog post touches more on the social side of technology rather than the resource side of technology. I think this is relevant to marketing because of the research phase that consumers do, or don’t do that might affect their decision of what technology to use or how to use it.

Google is a company that exists for profit. The browser, Google Chrome, is competing against not-for-profit search engines such as Mozilla Firefox. As a consumer I find it kind of scary about how much information Google is amassing with each search, action, email, etc. (never mind what websites you go to!) So I personally use Mozilla Firefox which was created by the people for the people.

Privacy is an interesting transparency that online companies now have to consider. Companies like Facebook got into a lot of trouble for almost hiding the fact that whatever you post on Facebook does not belong to you, but to Facebook!

In the business context, a company’s social media profile puts pressure on them to respond faster to complaints. One wrong word from a company on their Twitter account or on their Facebook could cost them a lot of consumers because of how viral the internet is. However, the internet is a powerful marketing platform. An example is the crowd sourcing ability with technology for political campaigns.

On the flip side, it’s also interesting how consumers also have to consider their own actions when interacting with technology. Before, you could get away with doing something because social media wasn’t around to spread it rapidly around the internet. In modern times, however, whatever you put on the internet is not as secure. A lot of companies actually look at online profiles before hiring an employee to fit with their culture.

I stumbled upon a news article on Facebook that was trending last week. It was a store in LA that opened up as “Dumb Starbucks” It had everything the same as the internationally recognized successful brand Starbucks, except it had the word dumb in front of everything.

The thing is – people were raging at how creative this was. Attention was plentiful and success was evident by the number of people talking about it. It was an obvious “parody” that is protected under the intellectual property law. It was open for about three days before it was under fire from the LA Health Inspection and shut down.

The person who came up with this said the following in a Jimmy Kimmel Interview:

“Technically, legally speaking, we’re an art gallery, and the coffee we’re selling is considered the art and art galleries don’t need health permits,”

This whole ordeal had me thinking about ethics. I will admit that this was a creative stunt that fell within the boundaries, but something about it is off. It does not seem right that the law would support something like this. I understand that mockery is parodies are for entertainment and should be preserved, but this is pushing it for me.

I think that what bothers me is the fact that people feel the need to be “more creative” and to “Push the boundaries” in order to be noticed. People were entertained by the idea of “Dumb Starbucks” and in some ways it has shock value to capture the attention of people like myself. (The shock was that it was legally allowed to operate under that name.) Ethically it is in the grey area for me. Piggybacking on another companies success/hard word to market yourself is something I’m not a huge fan of. (E.g. when Nike used ambush marketing at FIFA and got more hits than Adidas even though it was sponsored by Adidas.) It’s creative, but it’s not ethical and it’s undermining.

This was a positive publicity stunt for Starbucks despite it being mocked for the sake of a parody. It gets their brand noticed more, but it wasn’t (to my knowledge) instigated by them. In almost any other case I would’ve thought of this as a marketing ploy to catch my attention.

Sources:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/12/dumb-starbucks-trademark-lawyer
http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/World-Cup-Daily-061710.aspx

There are so many excuses to around using/practicing Sustainability in business.

1. There is no common definition for the word sustainability itself.

2. You could say that it’s too difficult to make a metric of your sustainability.

3. You could also say that it is hard to set yourself apart from being categorized as a “greenwasher.”

4. You want to make a profit, but that might or might not encourage consumption of more goods.

… and the list goes on. Sadly, I was introduced to another one that adds to this list. One that I was not expecting. It is more focused on a green product though, not so much to any of the other various businesses areas that sustainability applies to.

After writing my previous blog post on a green product, I had a comment from Noah that left a study. This study outlined that if you purchased a green good you were more likely to feel justified to perform activities such as cheating or stealing.

http://environmentportal.in/files/Do%20green%20products%20make%20us%20better%20people.pdf

I was fascinated but disgusted at the same time. I have always thought of sustainability hand in hand with ethics… so why is it that it’s a reversed correlation here? I’m sure that the intent for companies to have such green products is not for people to feel entitled to doing something not so great after.

Looking at the stages of consumption, this focus is on the post-use. I guess consumers feel like they’ve done a good deed that will  offset their bad deed, but there are enough bad deeds out there! I hope that there is a way to show that the efforts of the big business players in sustainability can offset blips such as this one. (I’m not sure if there will be a way to measure this in future or not…)

My respect to the companies that are currently engaging in sustainability is infinite. There are so many hurdles that businesses have to overcome to label themselves as “Green” or “Sustainable.” I’m glad they still exist and that there is a contribution to the fabric that is good in society despite the uphill battle that they seem to be a part of.

I first heard about this product through a classmate. We were randomly put into a group together for a project management course. We had to come up with our own project and we considered doing something with SmartKlean. It was the first I had heard of it. My group member who introduced this idea said that it worked and he was telling all his friends about it. When we asked him where he had heard about this product from he mentions that he heard about it from his room mate.

Even though this classmate was a friend and he had mentioned this awesome product to me, I automatically was skeptical about this product. I realized that I was skeptical because it sounded too good to be true.

I did more research into this product and found their website to be clean, inviting, and most of all, touches on almost all aspects of sustainability. (www.smartkleancanada.com)

The most interesting things I found while researching this mysterious ball were:

1. This companies complete dedication to sustainability. They not only make the dedications of “Economical, People-Friendly, Earth-Friendly and Authentic” they also go through the notions of explaining each one. For example for the Earth-Friendly one, the mention how they do not ship through e-bay or Amazon.

2. Vloggers and testimonials of all kinds supported that this product works. I guess my skepticism stemmed from how this product was almost too good to be true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcrEwct5wY0

3. I could potentially spend $12.73 on 96 loads or $48.41 for 365 loads…

… or I could buy a SmartKlean now at London Drugs or off of their site for $25.

This goes back to class as to how we talked about how in The Green Marketing Manifesto by John Grant he mentions that your product comes first and green comes second. The fact that this product works is amazing. The fact that it has sustainability bonuses is even more amazing.

Anyway – I am sold. Are you sold?