From the monthly archives:

July 2009

Book review: “Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top”

07.31.2009

“Following the green path, especially in hard times can lead your company to higher profits and sustainable advantage.” That’s the main premise of Andrew Winston’s new book Green Recovery. The tricky word is “can”, which Winston addresses by outlining four basic strategies for riding out the recession and emerging ahead of the game.
Get lean. To [...]

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Servant leadership in internal sustainable marketing

07.30.2009

I recently attended a talk on servant leadership by Geoff Guilfoy, Executive Professor at Willamette University’s Atkinson Graduate School of Management. As I sat at Willamette U’s Portland Center, I realized that servant leadership aligns with sustainable marketing and its social bottom line.
Servant leadership centers on people and building healthy relationships with them. People are [...]

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Egotism and altruism in marketing

07.29.2009

Sustainable marketing is altruistic marketing.
Traditional marketing looks at the world through the eyes of the company and its bottom line. How does the sale of a product or service benefit us? What can we do to sell more or to more markets in order to grow? How do we beat the competition? Traditional marketing [...]

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Are you experiencing sustainability fatigue?

07.28.2009

One of the marketing barriers to mass adoption of sustainability I identified in a recent post was saturation: sustainability has been so omnipresent people no longer register it, or choose not to.
The ubiquity of the sustainability discourse has had another effect: the dilution of the word’s meaning. As DR Wright commented about the term on [...]

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The soft sell in sustainable marketing

07.27.2009

The soft sell is a marketing conversation that omits the ask. The conversation may still be about a product/service, but the call to action – purchase – is only implied.
Soft selling focuses on cultivating relationships with your customers. A relationship becomes a precondition to the sale. This not only extends the sale process, but also [...]

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Solutions for sustainable consumption: Creativity

07.26.2009

“It seems that the more time I spend creating and being creative … the less I need to acquire things. [It] is a far better experience than the momentary gratification of a new thing. You probably find this, too – the less you buy, the less you want.” –Valeria Maltoni
A while back I read an [...]

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Portland’s Designgate and the place of spec work in a sustainable economy

07.25.2009

Despite the summer heat, Portland’s creative community is incensed. What’s going on?
Designgate
On July 13th, the City of Portland launched the PortlandOnline.com Design Concept Contest, which started on July 19th and which is part of the larger and much-needed Refresh Project to redesign the 100K+ page site. Essentially, the contest invites individual designers or firms to [...]

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Book review: “Living Above the Store: Building a Business That Creates Value, Inspires Change, and Restores Land and Community”

07.24.2009

Living Above the Store is a guide to building a restorative, eco-centric business based on the case study of the author’s company. Though the book talks about a single company, it translates the experience into a model applicable across the board.
The journey toward a restorative business entails five stages – recovery, restraint, synthesis, covenantal action, [...]

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How does social media fit into sustainable marketing?

07.23.2009

In short, very nicely. In fact, the answer is right there, in the title. What unites social media and sustainable marketing is their focus on humans. Let me count just three ways social media and sustainable marketing align:

Relationships and community. Social media and sustainability are not only great equalizers (see 3Ds), they both focus on [...]

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