I don’t know whether these radio spots were in the works prior to these recent events, but for the sake of the agency that developed them, I hope they were.  Given the concerns people are likely to have around bus safety, those spots are doing more harm than good. I don’t even recall if they mentioned safety, but I do remember my first thought in response to “Why aren’t you riding Greyhound?”, and I suspect most people’s reaction would be similar – “I don’t want to get stabbed or decapitated!”

Greyhound should be running a series of damage control ads much like Maple Leaf has been doing since the Listeriosis outbreak and reassuring people that its safe to take the bus -  not reminding people why they’re not.

Partner with Woodbridge Ontario’s Gantz toys, makers of Webkinz for a special edition Webkin that is given only to kids that enroll in the zoo’s summer camp program. The special edition ZooCamp Gorilla (or other endangered species) unlocks special games based around that animal’s geography, physiology, and ecology.

Summer Zoo Camp registrations fill up, and kids leave with new friends, memories, and a new appreciation for an endangered species.

One for other local zoo’s to duplicate as incentives for their own summer programs.

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to attend a CMA Ottawa presentation on The Six Sins of Greenwashing with TerraChoice’s President and CEO, Scott McDougall. Scott discussed the research his firm did behind the usage and recognition of misleading eco-marketing practices, the results of which they summarized into what they call “The Six Sins of Greenwashing“. They surveyed six category-leading big box stores and identified 1,018 consumer products bearing 1,753 environmental claims. Of those 1,018 products, all but one made claims that were demonstrably false or that risked misleading intended audiences.

Incidentally, TerraChoice also does product validation for the EcoLogo certification program, so if you’re interested in EcoLogo certification, get in touch with them. Onward.
The “Six Sins of Greenwashing” are ordered by the frequency that they were found to have appeared in the marketplace sample.

1. Sin of the Hidden Trade Off
   This “sin” was found to have been the most common, whereby the marketing would focus on only one or two environmental issues, and completely ignore.
   Bottomline: Include all of the environmental impacts of a product even if they are negative impacts. Consumers will find out if you’re trying to hide something.
2. Sin of No Proof
   Not providing evidence of the environmental claims the product makes.
   Bottomline: Backup environmental claims with proof on the packaging or on your website or with respected certifications such as EcoLogo.
3. Sin of Vagueness
   Products that make vague claims like “environmentally-friendly” – what does that even mean? That it doesn’t harm the environment….very much?
   Bottomline: Include details of all environmental impacts of the product from the sourcing of materials, to the manufacturing processes, to the use, and eventual disposal of the product.
4. Sin of Irrelevance
   Advertising environmental claims that are irrelevant. Claims like “No CFCs!” are irrelevant when CFCs were banned 30 years ago.
   Bottomline: If your product meets all environmental standards as its competitor products, emphasizing these claims only causes marketplace confusion. You don’t want to build a consumer relationship based on misleading a consumer.
5. Sin of Fibbing
   Outright false claims. Can the manufacturer back up certified organic or green claims?
   Bottomline:This one may sound obvious, but if you’re going to claim you’re certified organic or meet standards, make sure you actually are, and can backup the claim with a listing on the certification body’s website.
6. Sin of Lesser of Two Evils
   A claim that tries to make a product seem “green” that is basically “ungreen”. One example Scott mentioned was “organic tobacco” – is it really a green product?
   Bottomline: Not all products can be green. If you’re selling something that is intrinsically not green, like tobacco, you’re sending mixed messages by claiming that it’s green. “It’s 100% organic tobacco…. and its still going to give you lung cancer”.

On a somewhat related tangent, I also couldn’t agree more on Seth’s thoughts that green claims need to include numbers, even if they are imperfect numbers. I’d go further into 4 separate numbers that could be totalled to give an overall “EcoScore” for each product’s lifecycle:

1. Source Score: A number representing the materials/ingredients/harvesting methods used, e.g. sourced from sustainable bamboo forests;
2. Creation Score: A number that scores the environmental impact of the manufacturing process, e.g. impact of chemicals, energy used in production;
3. Use Score: A number that scores the impact of the regular use of the product, e.g. chemicals, or C02 released over regular use;
4. Disposal Score: A number with scores the impact of the disposal of the product – products with manufacturer-run recycling and disposal programs would score higher.

Product packag would include individual numbers for each stage of the product’s lifecycle along with a total score. I’ll touch more on this EcoScore idea in a future post. In the meantime, what are your thoughts? I think consumers are asking for this sort of information, and its high time we give it to them in an accessible form.

You can also read more on TerraChoice’s Six Sins of Greenwashing at www.terrachoice.com.

• Jim Cramer’s Stay Mad Life
• Total Money Makeover – Financial Fitness
• Many of Seth Godin’s books (Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Idea Virus, All Marketers are Liars)

Then I also came across an article in USA Today which indicated that a recent survey of CEOs found that being bald is a business advantage.

“The CEOs felt that baldness conveyed leadership presence. Steve Carley, the bald CEO of restaurant chain El Pollo Loco, told the newspaper that his baldness is “a point of pride and a personal branding advantage. … It encourages approachability.”

Apparently bald men are also a bigger slice of the general population, with The International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery estimating that 50% of Caucasian men older than 45 and 60% older than 60 have clinical balding.

Regardless of this plausible link between baldness and conveyed leadership/approachability, not to mention some very real brand benefits, I don’t think I’ll be shaving my head any time soon. For those of you who are already balding and considering ways of covering it up, just shave the rest of it off. There’s never been a better time to go bald!

Fundamentally, great marketing is about great storytelling. We’ve all had the experience of being enthralled by the power of a good storyteller, their ability to bring their subject to life and create an experience.

Conversely, we’ve all also had the unfortunate experience of having to endure some really bad storytelling. The kind that a lot of the times begins with “So have you heard the one about…..”. More often than not, we are the victims of boredom inducing, daydream inspiring stories during which we retreat to our mental play-garden.

That’s why we pay good money to hear and see good storytellers. We pay to hear them in the form of speakers and we pay to see them in the form actors. Companies pay for them in the form of good marketeers.

In a way, marketing is something that we all do because we all tell stories. So yes, in a sense everyone is a storyteller, the problem is, most people are only good at telling stories about themselves an not telling stories in general.

Not ever, not even once.

Talk around it, talk over it, talk under it but never about it.

Why not talk about your product? Simple. You’re too close to it. No one will believe you. So talk about what other people are saying, experiencing and sharing about your product instead.

I’m not talking testimonials here either, I’m talking about real stories about real people with real experiences. Stories in their own voices.

It’s what people say about a product that speaks, not the the product.

1. Loss Limited to Initial Investment - You can and probably will, lose all the money you invested, but hey, at least you didn’t lose more than you invested.

2. Including but not Limited to… - Basically, if anything goes wrong you can’t blame us for anything, especially the stuff we haven’t even thought of.

3. 15% Restocking Fee Applies – There really is no return policy, but we know that customers like that sort of thing so we advertise it. If you really want your money back you may be able to resell the junk we just sold you on Craigslist for more than 85% of what you paid for it. (If you’re lucky.)

4. Automatically Renewed for Your Convenience – We love taking money from you! Especially when you don’t even know we’re doing it!

5. 24/7 Customer Service – As long as you call any time between 9 & 5, eastern standard time of course.

6. We have Customer Service People Waiting to Serve You! – Only if you know enough to push 0 or # and have speaker phone so you can do something productive while we keep you on hold for about an hour, hoping that you will get frustrated, hang up, and stop bothering us.

7. Lowest Prices in Town – Until you go to Walmart and see the exact same thing for half the price.

8. Guaranteed Credit on Approval – I hope your kids really like whatever you’re buying because because they’ll be making payments on it too!

9. 30 Minutes or it’s Free – Only if you’re prepared to argue with the delivery guy for an additional 30 minutes.

10. Rebate – We don’t really like low prices, we just pretend we do because customers seem to like it. Really, we’re just hoping you buy and forget about the whole rebate thing because we’ve made it so difficult and complicated in an effort to put you off.

So after reading this list you may tempted to think that all marketers are liars and that marketing is all about telling lies. However, this isn’t the case at all. As I argued in an earlier post, fundamentally, marketing is about storytelling. The difficulty in telling stories is that they set expectations and create visions in the consumer psyche. I call this phenomena a Benefit Scenario. This is what every ad and marketing campaign is designed to do. It tells us a story about a version of ourselves that is better in some way, that has benefited by partaking in a particular product. The challenge is then live up to that the promise of that story. Unfortunately, it is too often the case that companies say one thing and do another, creating what I refer to as an Experience Gap. I’ve boiled it down to simple formula:

Benefit Scenario – Execution = Experience Gap

In the same way that a brilliant play enacted by amateur performers is no longer brilliant, great marketing without great execution only creates disillusionment which leads to disappointment and finally disengagement. The right formula is simple: Say what you mean and do what you say.

Photo credit: *Silihari*

There is nothing a company wants more than to cultivate a love affair with customers. Now what’s wrong with that sentence? Well nothing really, besides the fact that its usually a LIE, and a pretty brazen one at that.

Sadly, most corporations only preach this without actually practicing it. They prefer to behave like detached creatures that loathe closeness and recoil at the slightest twinge of customer affection. They prefer “customer adoption” and “customer retention” to customer affection. They shrink back from the warm embrace of their most ardent fans.

Case in point, whenever customers become so enamored with some product or service that they are willing to contribute to its well being and development by devoting copious amounts of their own free time to improving upon it, they get sued. Think Scrabulous here. Two brothers who are fans of the classic Scrabble board game create a Facebook application based on it. It becomes popular, really popular. So popular in fact that Hasbro & Mattel, the owners of the rights to the game decided to take legal action against brothers who are now pulling in about $25 000 a month on something they did on a whim based on their enjoyment of the game. What they intuitively recognized as fans of the game of Scrabble is that playing the game is a social act. It is best enjoyed when playing against family and friends and even better when you have a wide variety of opponents to challenge. What better place to connect to friends and family and huge number of possible opponents than a social network? Furthermore, they realized that it is not necessarily possible to finish a game of Scrabble in one sitting so they designed it in such a way that games could be played over long periods of time at the leisure of the players.

This really illustrates the heightened insight of the most devout customers. I mean who is really in better position to understand the customer psyche? Is it the guys sitting in the “Ivory Tower Boardroom” trying to figure out what makes people buy or the customers themselves, the people actually acting out the consumption behaviors; the individuals who feel the itch created by an unfulfilled need and spend countless hours seeking out a solution.

Connecting with customers is hard, I get that; but companies should not fool themselves either by thinking that going the easy way of dealing with “market segments”, “psycho-graphic profiles”, targeting customers, and “cardboard cutouts” is equivalent to engaging and connecting with customers . The consequence of this is that consumption becomes abstracted from real human experience, then categorized and finally objectified. The customer becomes a mere data-point in a maze of interconnected databases.

All this misses the fundamental idea that the best customers are also the best innovators because they are the most acutely attuned to the needs that are fulfilled by the various products and services they buy. So why don’t companies make it easy on themselves and simply let the customers tell them what they want? When I say this I don’t mean focus groups either.

I mean co-creation, genuine partnerships between those who consume and those work to produce such that when consumers come up with innovations they are embraced instead of slapped down with cease-and desist letters. They are given the tools, access to resources and the ability to be a part of the process that creates the things that make our lives easier, better and more enjoyable. Think of what might have happened for instance, if RIAA had worked with Napster to create a digital distribution platform for the music industry. Would there still have been an Itunes?

Once you objectify your customers, you’ve completely lost touch and it’s only a matter of time before they find someone who makes them feel like they matter. It’s high time companies learned to embrace their customers and profit from Customer Affection.

Then almost like magic, as if I were playing a real life version of Where’s Waldo, I started to see the parkas everywhere! In the streets, on the bus in the subway. The logo had become distinct and unmistakable and I could spot it from a mile away. Which brought me to my next thought, that if this wasn’t a private company then I would buy the stock because with so many people wearing these parkas, the company must be doing really well!

At that point I stopped to reexamine my thought process and realized something was wrong with my my logic (gasp!). In reality there aren’t any more or less people wearing Canada Goose parkas, the only difference is that I went from not noticing people wearing them to noticing just about anyone wearing one. Therefore, it would appear to me as if there’s been a huge increase in the number of people wearing the parkas but in reality there is a certain number of people wearing parkas that have been wearing them and continue to wear them regardless of my ability to spot them or not.

So what’s the moral of the story? Well the whole experience got me thinking about trend spotting and how difficult it is to actually find real trends. The first evidence of a trend is always anecdotal and based on a single observation or piece of information. As a result of this, one goes from being completely ignorant to suddenly aware of some phenomenon and begins to look for it systematically. The only problem is that the human eye is so fond of finding patterns that it becomes difficult to discern real trends from what one merely thinks are trends. In other words, am I seeing a lot parkas because people are buying a lot of parkas or am I seeing a lot of parkas because I’m looking for them? Once a pattern seems to manifest itself the temptation is always overestimate the significance of one’s subsequent observations. One begins to subconsciously look for information to support what they already believe to be true and in doing so, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

Just like in the Waldo books, if you look carefully you can find Waldo and the same is true with trends too. Just be careful when trend hunting not to confuse what is happening for what you think is happening. Always be hesitant to draw conclusions based on examining a potential trend from just one perspective. Observation tells us about where a trend might be, it offers an avenue of investigation and a potential opportunity but it should not be taken as a firm conclusion. The reality is that most so called trends end up in fact being just blips on the radar. A good trend hunter must realize this and consistently re-frame their perspective in order to discern the difference between what they think is happening and what is actually happening.

It was the proposed firmware upgrade for the iPhone and iPod Touch which adds the Mail, Maps, Stocks, Notes and Weather applications. While the upgrade is free for iPhone users, “lucky” iPod Touch users get to pay $20 for the same privilege. You would think that Apple would have learned its lesson with the backlash they experienced when they debuted the iPhone and then lowered the price just 67 days later, that it’s generally a bad idea to leave early adopters of your product feeling like they’ve been suckered.

Companies need early adopters to get their products off the ground. There has to be a group of people who are willing to go out there, buy your product at full price and take the risk that it won’t function exactly as advertised. These are your product ambassadors, the people actively promoting and showcasing your product to the rest of the consumer world. Without these people your product doesn’t move into the consumer consciousness because it can’t be seen in use and there are no experiences being shared which involve it. I would liken it to hosting a party. You always need a few people to show up early to start the party otherwise everyone who arrives will soon leave because they assume the party isn’t going to be very well attended and therefore not any good.

Given how important these people are, you would think that a company might want to take good care of them. This logic seems lost on Apple because it consistently sends the message that if you’re an early adopter of Mac products then you’re likely to get suckered. Either the price for that shiny new gadget you just bought will plummet, making you look stupid instead of cool or you’ll have to pay extra for new features on what you “thought” was the latest and greatest. Is this really any way to treat your most loyal fans? Apple should be wary because it might soon find that the so called early adopters won’t be so eager to adopt and won’t show up early either.

If you’re actually interested in the other announcements from the Macworld keynote but don’t feel like watching the whole thing try the condensed version. Its 90 minutes of keynote condensed into 60 seconds. Now how’s that for convenience?