Author: Drew Neisser

Hi MFG fans, this is David Castillo from Renegade filling in for Drew while he is away on vacation. No worries though there is still plenty to report from the front lines. Lets get started shall we? A lot has been said about harnessing the sun as a prime source for alternative energy. Yet not much has been said about using the Moon to advance the green cause, until now. PSFK recently wrote a post about pioneering new lunar resonant streetlights that respond to ambient moonlight to save energy and minimize light pollution. The Civil Twilight Design Collective developed these green streetlights and have been getting a lot of buzz due to their big win at the Metropolis Next Generation Design Competition. Digging further into their website I really like the way they frame the reasoning behind why cities should adopt their street lights and people should get behind them. These three statistics provided by them really boil it down for me.

* Streetlights account for 38% of all electricity used for lighting
in the U.S.

* That energy produces 300,000,000 of carbon emissions per year

* Streetlights are the largest factor in light pollution, which
prevents 2/3 of Americans from seeing stars or moonlight.

Notice their two-pronged approach. They are not just trying to show people that their product is *enhancing* streetlights to save energy but to make the world we live in a more beautiful place. I think the latter is a great way to *engage* people. Most people know green is good, but green is beautiful might be something they need to be reminded of.

For years, the prevailing wisdom was “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Now, for many products, its only about the cover. A New York Times article (by the most appropriately named journalist in the world, Louise Story) provides an excellent overview of this trend noting how marketers like Pepsi, Kleenex and Coors Light are enlivening their packaging with increasing frequency.

“It’s an inexpensive way to really deliver that newness to people’s homes,” said Becky Walter, director for innovation design and testing at Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Kleenex, Huggies and other brands. “It’s not like they have to go out and purchase new furniture.”

Evian is among the marketers using packaging to add a sense of luxury to ordinary products — its new “palace bottle” water, for example, is being sold in restaurants and hotels. The bottle has an elegant swanlike neck and sits on a small silver tray. Technology is also driving the changes — like the thermochromatic ink in the Coors label that changes the color of the label’s mountains with the temperature of the beer bottle.

Now ordinarily, Marketing for Good encourages genuine product enhancements as a means of gaining competitive advantage. In packaging, this can mean designing a better pill bottle like the folks at Target did a couple of years ago. Or it can mean turning the ketchup bottle upside down in order to make it easier to use as Heinz has done. But even a sprucing up of the outside can be meaningful. A highly stylized soda bottle offers a brief moment of self-expression and individuality. For the design conscious, a patterned Kleenex box that compliments a particular decor is vastly preferable to a plain gray box.

One of our clients, Panasonic, is taking this idea of self-expression to the electronics world, offering decor-conscious consumers their choice of 12 special color phones online. It used to be that phones were simple considered utilitarian devices that came it in black, white or silver. Not so anymore. A growing group of consumers are seeking just the right color for all the “accessories” in their home from their Kleenex box to their kitchen phone, and Panasonic is capitalizing on this trend.

Marketing for Good is prepared to embrace any product enhancement big or small even if it simply means empowering a consumer’s particular sense of style and self-expression like adding a perfectly matching “moss green” phone to their “moss green” library. So yes, in a new world of self-expression and individuality…this phone’s for you!

I have always liked the notion that a rising tide lifts all ships. It’s so easy to visualize and has been proven to be true in a number of marketing categories. Certainly one would expect the hybrid market to be just such a rising tide. The truth is that while hybrid sales are way up, one vessel is leading the fleet and that’s the Prius. MediaPost had a helpful article last week that clarified why Prius continues to dominate and why some other brands like the Honda Accord hybrid have failed:

Although there are now 11 hybrid models for sale in the U.S. market, Prius still accounts for over 50% of all new hybrid vehicles bought in the U.S. According to J.D. Power & Associates, it will continue to dominate.

The key factor here is that hybrid drivers want everyone else to know they are driving a hybrid. There is no mistaking a Prius. It looks different and it sounds different (basically noiseless when it is in full electric mode something most hybrids can’t do). On the other hand, the weak selling Civic hybrid looks just like a Civic. Also from MediaPost:

Dan Gorrell, president of Auto Stratagem, a research and consulting firm in Tustin, Calif., concurs. “Consider the hybrid Highlander (SUV). It hasn’t sold well, partly because it violates a major issue: you need to look different. A lot of why people are buying hybrids has to do with being noticed; it’s a self-esteem issue.”

A secondary issue is the price premium consumers are willing to pay for a hybrid. Toyota continues to offer cash incentives to drive sales of their four hybrid models. Turns out that $2400 is about as high as consumers are willing to go. Honda found this out the hard way offering the now discontinued Accord hybrid for $3700 more than the standard model.

Marketing for Good is delighted that all the car companies are racing to join the hybrid market. This will ensure pricing pressure that will hopefully lead to mass adoption. That said, we don’t expect that all the companies will do well in this market even if they are trying to do good. The Prius is leading the category for good reason. It was first to market with a distinctive design that screamed “hey I’m green.” Subsequent entries from competitors have not been able to match either the design or the performance. For the time being, American consumers want their hybrids as stand-alone brands and not simply as a dealer option. Until Detroit and other automotive manufacturers start producing hybrids that lead the market (i.e. design, cost, mileage, comfort) then I’m afraid this particular rising tide may only lift the good ship Prius.

With the notable exception of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, bankers have historically been depicted as bad guys in movies. In Mary Poppins, for example, the bankers were downright scary and Banks family doesn’t find genuine happiness until the father quits his “miserable” banking job. I wonder if recent developments will encourage Hollywood to find alternative industries to vilify and maybe even make a movie or two about good bankers.

The first stop for this screenplay would be Muhannad Yunus, the Bangladeshi banker and economist who won the Nobel Prize for creating a way for thousands of poor entrepreneurs to get small amounts of cash to start businesses. By establishing Grameen Bank, Mr. Yunus created an entirely new banking segment called microcredit that has now been emulated in 23 countries around the world including the United States. According to Wikipedia:

Many, but not all, microcredit projects also retain its emphasis on lending specifically to women. More than 96% of Grameen loans have gone to women, who suffer disproportionately from poverty and who are more likely than men to devote their earnings to their families.

If Mr. Yunus work is an Academy Award-winning epic, staring Ben Kingsley, then the folks at Prosper might inspire an enjoyable box office hit with a likable leading man like Hugh Grant. Prosper, like Grameen, is a new way to help people who need money get money but unlike Grameen, they are not a bank:

Prosper, America’s first people-to-people lending marketplace, was created to make consumer lending more financially and socially rewarding for everyone. The way Prosper works is intuitive to people who have used eBay. Instead of listing and bidding on items, people list and bid on loans using Prosper’s online auction platform.

It goes without saying that capital is essential to capitalism. Yet, traditional banking approaches have not always helped all those who really need it. Money, placed in the right people’s hands at the right moment, can be the difference between a self-sustaining future or a life of poverty, a world-saving invention or the status quo. While I don’t believe Gordon Gecko had it right with “greed is good”, a little green (as in cash) can do a lot of good. I will be watching with interest to see how Prosper helps others prosper.

If you happened to be up late and didn’t blink, you might have seen me on Nightline last night. The story was about Burger King’s “risky” and successful effort to differentiate themselves from McDonald’s. First, let me say that it was an honor to be included in a story that mentions Crispin Porter Bogusky, the agency responsible for BK’s advertising and the best in the biz as far as I’m concerned. They have consistently produced the most entertaining and engaging work in the fast food industry including their recent Western Sandwich and The Simpsons campaigns. If you are a student of this business, I’d recommend studying both of these efforts including the highly viral online components (i.e. Pet Mustache & Simpsonsize Me) which are both hilarious fun.

One of the issues that came up in my interview with Nightline (but didn’t make the final story) was the ethics of fast food marketing. The reporter asked for my thoughts about a fast food company that actively and successfully promotes “unhealthy” foods. I responded that consumers are not helpless zombies somehow under the spell of evil fast food advertising. I believe consumers have lots of choices when it comes to food, healthy and otherwise. I mentioned the fact that McDonald’s has been offering salads for several years and yet consumers still choose burgers most of the time.

Burger King has made the conscious decision to promote higher calorie/higher fat options since this is what their target audience seems to want. While it is unfortunately that many Americans elect to fill their diets with unhealthy options, I respect their unalienable right to do just that. Subway, among others, has made some headway offering lower fat options. If consumers really want healthy options, then competitive advantage is to be gained by the fast food restaurant chain that can deliver great tasting food that is also better for you and reasonably priced. Opportunity knocks and I will certainly celebrate any company that enhances their offering as such.

The point of all this is that sometimes we have to take the good with the bad. I have no problem acknowledging good (in this case entertaining) marketing when I see it even if it is for products that are less than good for you. Burger King advertising over the last four years has helped grow their business but not grow the category so really they are simply getting their target to eat at BK more often than Wendy’s or other equally unhealthy options. Should we really hold Burger King responsible for making young American men fatter as a result of their clever advertising? Last time I checked, no one is forcing anyone to eat anywhere.

That said, I do think leading fast food restaurants would be wise to take a cue from cereal/food companies like Kellogg’s and curtail or revise their kids marketing efforts. Getting kids to eat better is a “whopper” of a challenge that will take the unified efforts of parents, schools and food companies. Perhaps I’m talking out both sides of my mouth here so straighten me out if you feel otherwise.