Recently in Corporate Social Responsibility for Green Marketing Category

Conversations with Green Gurus puts green marketing into a new perspective. Looking differently...creates new ideas for the new reality facing us.


Green marketing is a matter of prioritization for both companies and consumers. It's time to think of green marketing differently. It's not about whether people with "pay more" for green.

It's about a tipping point in our civilization. Green motivations include such strategies as...

• Avoid risk
• Save money
• Improve health
• Disclosure of key metrics
  
• Survive!

Do something!  Try something better! 

"Green marketing is about solutions and making progress!" says Grant.

I read the following note about industry award programs from a member of a trade association recently:

"...awards programs function as a way for groups to recognize and value
contributions by the membership for some perceived greater good. 
    While it has been argued that they are all just an elaborate attempt at
self-aggrandizement, I am convinced that those people who make the effort to
enter take the first step toward personal and business evaluation. 
    For me it's never been about winning and losing as much as it's about establishing
comparable or improving bench marks of relative quality.  'Where do I stack
up against the competition?' is determined by the way I craft a submission." K. Brown

A number of orporations are now publicly committed to sustainability. But, beneath the public relations happy face, executives and managers are perplexed.

Many executives have families, and it would appear they have a human interest in a sustainable world for their families -- and that human heart is increasing seen among executives who have a genuine desire to work in an ethical and sustainable manner.  However, when the most conscientious of these executives engage with their stakeholders for that purpose, they sometimes are surprised by a generalized encounter of hardball politics,  hostile activists, self-interested elites, and unpredictable attacks. 

What executives must understand is that their own experience of their company's policies might not be the public's encounter.  However, if corporate executives need a guide for coping with the array of ideas, feelings, and experiences that can be thrown at them, this book can offer some clues.

Stakeholder Politics: Social Capital, Sustainable Development and The Corporation gives companies a "how to" guide for addressing the twin problems of maintaining political legitimacy, and promoting sustainable development.

"The text presents a typology of stakeholder networks that helps managers and community leaders identify and improve the social capital patterns in their own networks."  That's good, because green marketing -- or socially responsible behavior -- must start with internal purging and restoration of a system that deserves respect. 

Once executives know these patterns, they can move their networks towards those that foster sustainable community development.

Stakeholder Politics: Social Capital, Sustainable Development and The Corporation  describes vivid cases in which managers and community stakeholders have used the authors' approach successfully, and in addition provides managers with handy tools for predicting and avoiding community-level socio-political risk around stakeholder issues. With its proven and practical approach, Stakeholder Politics promises to be a valuable guide for managers and academics who are invested in sustainable development worldwide and stakeholder issues alike.

Greenleaf Publishing

	Stakeholder Politics Social Capital, Sustainable Development, and the Corporation Robert Boutilier 2009, Available Now Buy this book

Think Green Alliance offers the following services to help businesses outline a sustainability strategy with the goals of establishing a step-by-step plan with carbon reduction targets, using tools for sustainability and carbon measurement/management, as well as ensuring the sustainability plan meets business and ROI goals.

• Strategic Sustainability Blueprint Development
• Carbon Measurement, Reporting and Benchmarking
• Sustainability Audits and Reviews
• Sustainability Best Practices
• Sustainability Whitepapers and Research
• Custom Sustainability Consulting
• Sustainability Project Consulting
• Project Management

The Think Green Alliance is a community of businesses and organizations that are committed to providing environmentally and economically sustainable services, products and goods. As of February 2009, the Alliance membership represents a total of 159.7 billion dollars of annual global revenues and over 250,000 full-time employees.

The Alliance was founded in March 2008 by Jean Jerome Baudry of Baudry Cybernomics Corporation.

For more information, please contact Kim:
projects@thinkgreenalliance.com
416-915-4048 ext. 304

How serious are people getting about the environment? How serious are suppliers getting?

As more companies find ways to work recycled materials into their products, and reduce supply chain GHGs, and end of life toxic dumps in our neighbors around the world... the more we'll see in the growing field of mobile devices.

Phones might look as disposable, self-destruct materials like compostables that just melt when subjected to heat. They are about that disposable anyway!

With more than ONE cellphone for EVERY PERSON ON EARTH... we can't look at cell phones and mobile devices the way we could just a few short years ago. This electronic waste is piling up...and we need to let manufacturers know that we are concerned about toxic landfills and unrecyclable cases and short term usage of billions of pounds of consumer products.

Samsung's Reclaim from Sprint has probably been the most aggressively marketed green phone to date in the U.S., starting with its name and green color. Made from 80% recyclable material and released in August, Current Analysis called it the first eco-phone people may actually want to buy.

Even if the Reclaim is meeting or beating sales expectations, it would be hard to separate its success from qualities that would make it a good phone even if it were made out of regular plastic. Apart from any regulatory or legal requirements, it's not likely manufacturers will focus more on environmental considerations until they see them as an important differentiating factor for consumers.

New research suggests demand for environmentally-friendly devices will power sales of "green" phones in the coming years. A recent study by ABI Research found that nearly half of U.S. consumers would choose a green handset over a conventional phone if price, features and performance were the same.

ABI estimates the proportion of properly recycled handsets will grow from 8% in 2009 to 17% in 2014. A separate Juniper report predicts that even with an incremental shift in consumer attitudes, shipments of green phones will grow from 250,000 in 2009 to 105 million by 2014.

Deborah Fleischer, founder and president of Green Impact, works with mid-sized companies to launch green initiatives . In a recent entrepreneur's coaching event, she observed three key challenges common to many of the companies she spoke with.

1. Lifecycle assessment (LCA): LCA is an approach that considers the cradle-to-grave lifecycle chain involved in producing, using and disposing of a product or service. It forces you to consider materials use, energy consumption and related greenhouse-gas emissions of your product, packaging and transportation decisions.

While larger corporations might have the resources to tackle LCA head on, across the board, the start-ups were struggling with easily accessing good data to help them estimate the key impacts associated with their entire value chain.

A few LCA resources for start-ups to consider include Sustainable Minds, Earthster and EIO-LCA.

2. Packaging: Many of these clean tech products require packaging and pushing for recycled content and avoiding plastic is a challenge for a CEO with twenty other competing priorities.

The Sustainable Packaging Coalition is a great resource on this issue.

3. End of life: Thinking about what happens to these new "clean" products at end of life is challenging. How do you create incentives to get consumers to recycle or return a product? One of the start-ups was considering a rebate program and another planning on using a mailer to make it easy to return the product at the end of its life.

Read more at Matter Networks

Deborah Fleischer, founder and president of Green Impact, works with mid-sized companies to launch green initiatives that encourage innovation and grow market share.

Marc Cooper's cover story for The Nation:

Let's make it easy to understand. California might be suffering its worst drought in decades, but the entire Golden State is underwater. Goodbye to those timeworn, bubble-gum-colored fantasies of the Endless Summer, California Girls and gleaming, pool-pocked suburbs. Hello to a new set of descriptors: "Bankrupt." "Ungovernable." "California Nightmare." "Failed State."

Read the full story here.

Do you have (or know of someone who has) a company producing green, sustainable, or high performance solutions?

We are launching a "green directory with a difference" -- you get a real opportunity to tell your green solutions story in the listing!  Up to 600 WORDS...and your listing can be included in FIVE categories. 

We also include BOTH Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer categories.  IF we don't have the right category for your solution -- let us know and we'll seriously consider adding it.

The SolutionsforGreen.com site is highly "search engine optimized" and the listings will probably appear higher on Google searches than your own company's listings for key word phrases.  We work hard at building a robust platform of sites to help drive traffic to the directory.  We're serious about greening our world...and want to help others who are also serious about the challenge facing us.  And who have solutions!

We would  love to have your company, nonprofit organization...or even public agency list your green products, green services...and green programs.  You don't have to be in the commercial market.  You just need SOLUTIONS!  Employee programs.  Festivals. Innovator groups. The broader the variety of solutions, the better! 

"Necessity is the mother of invention"...my mother taught me.  And we have necessity.  Now it's time to implement some great, innovative solutions.

And then get the word out for replicating good results.  So add your listing, already :-)

SolutionsforGreen.com

These are not politically correct suggestions for greening your status quo. 

They are the result of a hell-of-a-lot-of asking why little things like not using water bottles have taken over our imagination. 

We need some big solutions for some really big problems. 

We're using FOUR times the natural resources as other folks in the world.  We would need TWO to FOUR planets to keep pace with our western "lifestyle" choices.  Policymakers are looking at THIRTY YEAR PLANS to reduce our gluttony and waste.

So...we need at least FOUR-X the solutions!  How about these as a starting point for discussion:

Top Ten Things YOU can do to reduce climate change, gluttony, lawlessness, violence, over population...etc. etc. etc.

1. Green your job - be an inside champion to find solutions to green your decisions, purchases, facilities, and company policies.  Business decisions have SO much more leverage than your decisions at home (but don't neglect home, either)

2. Cut the number of children you have to one or none. And encourage young family members to think before they cut the condom.
 
3. Cut down the amount you eat...and eat healthy foods only. Skinny people are healthier.

4. Get exercise by walking where you need to go. If it's too far to walk, use the phone or internet.  At least most of the time.  Reduce your mileage by 80%.

5. Reduce water consumption for bathing, irrigation and stupid drinks.  Bird baths work fine on odd days and desk jockey, lazy days. 

6. Use shared transportation as much as absolutely friggin' possible.  You'll  learn a lot about people!  And we need some new and improved people skills! 

7. Buy green, energy efficient products made as locally as possible.  Transportation of all the parts and assembled sub parts and supplies and retail distribution and landfill graveyards add up to a huge number of miles.  Just cut the krap.

8. Build mutually sustainable, positive or at least respectful relationships with everyone in your family, tribe and community.  What we want and need and desire most is human friendship and companionship. So just go for it without all the faldaral.  Shake. Cuddle. Smile. Be nice!

9. Abide by our cultural structure of laws. (Think "New Jersey" and you'll get my drift)  Be a good citizen and allow others to live up to their potential as well. A nation of laws cannot survive is it's so corrupt that honest men and women can't make a living.  Enuf said?

10.  Enjoy laughter, joy, natural wonders, people, the arts, and simple pleasures - they pollute less, use less and produce more happiness than any manufactured gadgets!

When we get to this point, we'll all be so happy we won't need gadgets and renewable energy and electric cars and recyclable bottle caps.  We won't even need irresponsible sex. 

We'll be responsible about living and breathing and making a real home and a real community and a real world that can survive our onslaught.  We'll actually be happy.  Simply happy.

--- By Carolyn
(Just so you know, I don't live here anymore ;-) - )