Marketing whizzes, grab your pencils, we said. SIJ wants you to respond to the following question: If you were approached by a billionaire and asked to produce a marketing and public relations campaign to “make sustainability cool,” what would you do?
SIJ also asked our marketing firms — two in Seattle, one in California and one in Portland — what their proposed budget is for said campaign.
All of the firms possessed varying degrees of expertise branding what we know as “sustainable” industries. In what might be expected from creative minds toiling toward a deadline, the responses were quite varied — and in some cases, a bit unorthodox.
Beyond the question at hand, we offered little guidance for our branding gurus. Not that it mattered — all four of the firms were ready to roll up their sleeves in thespirit of the dare. After all, if there’s one thing marketing firms are good at, it’s crafting pitches.
When all was said and done, some of the respondents conceded it was a challenging question. The prevailing wisdom is that sustainability already is cool, at least for a small but growing portion of the consumer world, not to mention a handful of stars rolling around Hollyweird in their shiny new Priuses and organic cotton undergarments. The larger challenge is expanding to a fickle mainstream audience inspired by ego, immediacy or artificially low prices.
But contained in this feature are some of the tools that marketing minds think can get us there: grassroots, word-ofmouth movements; campaign-branding crusades; attacks on an “unsustainable” status quo; community-organizing plans; celebrity TV spots; appeals to the “me, me, me”; and more. One of our favorite pitches: “Waste is a terrible thing to mind.”
Now that all of the campaign ideas have been tallied and edited, the only thing we aren’t coughing up is a billionaire waiting behind curtain No. 3 with a blank check. But perhaps a few high rollers will stumble across this feature and see what they might get for their money.
Maximizing the mindset The Maxwell PR strategy
It’s not easy being green. Just ask the Portland Oregon Visitors Association; it’s their tagline... Read more
Define it and they will come The Clean Agency plan
Sustainability “cool”?
Clean Agency believes that you can’t make something cool — either it is, or it isn’t.
But people have to know what you’re talking about before they can decide if it’s cool or not. When it comes to sustainability, that’s our biggest hurdle: people need to understand what sustainability means, because they won’t embrace what they don’t understand... Read more
Green is the new black The Bellwether curveball
First of all, let’s literally clear the air: sustainability is cool.
Demand is far outpacing supply of hybrid vehicles. Housing developers are scrambling to meet the burgeoning market for energy-efficient, healthy, environmentally sound homes in cities and suburbs alike... Read more
Seeking the 93% solution The egg pitch
At egg, we create brands and marketing tools for sustainable, responsible brands. We have 35 years combined experience in advertising, marketing brands like Coke, Southwest Airlines, and Porsche, so we have some experience in making things cool and desirable. But we would have to tell our blue state billionaire to save his money, because we can’t make sustainability cool... Read moreMission Un-Impossible The Frause Group focus WEB EXCLUSIVE!
At The Frause Group, our goal is to always get to the core of an issue in order to understand and address it as effectively as possible. With this in mind, the first step in making sustainability cool is to do the research. While research doesn’t sound cool, we communications freaks often think it’s better than making assumptions about the goods and services we’re publicizing and/or the audiences we are targeting... Read More
Maximizing the mindset
Define it and they will come
Green is the new black
Seeking the 93% solution
