Sustainable Brands Boot Camp report: Designing communications that resonate

02.22.2010
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Effective marketing starts with people. Because understanding your customer is crucial for the success of your sustainable brand, John Marshall Roberts devoted most of his Sustainable Brands Boot Camp session* to psychology and the understanding of your audience’s worldview. To design effective communications you must understand how your audience makes sense of the world — [...]

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What does sustainable design mean to you?

02.20.2010
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That’s the central question of SHIFT: A Green Salon, a quarterly pecha kucha AIGA Portland holds as part of its sustainability initiative. SHIFT aims to “share and inspire sustainable design”, which is precisely what the 10 speakers did at Ziba Design’s auditorium last Thursday evening during their respective 5-minute presentations.
The presentations ranged from execution aspects of design to more [...]

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Email and your sustainable marketing mix, Part 2

02.18.2010
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Email predates the Internet. Decades of experience make it hard to say anything new or non-trivial about it and how to use it for marketing. But what about sustainability? Now that you know that email can be nicely integrated into your sustainable marketing mix, how do you actually do it?
As I outlined in my post [...]

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Sustainable Brands Boot Camp report: Green marketing done right

02.17.2010
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Last Friday’s Sustainable Brands Boot Camp session* focused on green marketing. My favorite green marketer, Jacquie Ottman, gave her version of green marketing done right.
Though my post-modern self would prefer to say “successfully” or “effectively” instead of “right”, Jacquie’s version of green marketing follows the basic rules of marketing regardless of its hue:

Get the product [...]

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Email and your sustainable marketing mix, Part 1

02.16.2010
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A recent question on LinkedIn Answers – Direct Marketing asked: “E-mail marketing – redundant direct marketing tool?” All 11 respondents, including mine, answered largely in the negative.
The ascendancy of social media spells anything but death of email. On the contrary, email marketing can be effective as a direct marketing tool, though its emphasis has shifted, [...]

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Review: “State of Green Business 2010″

02.12.2010
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“We’re still here.”
Thus begins Greener World Media’s State of Green Business 2010. According to the report, the survival of green business and its representatives is good news. Of course, you can look at survival as proof of endurance, which is what the report does, in cautiously optimistic terms.
The report, written by GreenBiz.com’s Joel Makower and [...]

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Making marketing environmentally sustainable: A model

02.09.2010
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This is the third post in a series on improving the environmental sustainability of marketing communications. Previously: Measurement, Part 1 and Part 2. Today: An outline of a model for making it happen.
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After establishing through measurement the environmental footprint of your marketing communications, it’s time to start the reduction process. The 5-step model outlined here [...]

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Review: Crowds are us

02.05.2010
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How times change: In the 110 years between the work of Gustave Le Bon (1895) and James Surowiecki (2005), crowds went from embodying stupidity to being wise. Compare and contrast:

Le Bon: “In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated. [T]he crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual.”

Surowiecki: “[U]nder the right [...]

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Blue oceans and sustainability: How to affect change from within the system

02.03.2010
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How can systemic change toward sustainability happen from within the existing system? How can sustainability take advantage of the blue ocean strategy?
Systemic change as a revolution
After the fall of state socialism in my country and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, stories emerged of many newly-prominent individuals’ life journeys: they claimed to have joined the [...]

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