egg's Conscious Consumer Color Swatch Book.

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. Or, more accurately, we can’t:

1. Make sustainability cool enough; and
2. Do so to a large, mass audience; and
3. Accomplish it over a sustained period of time.

If you disagree, just remember that 30-plus years of advocacy for the environment has already proved the point. Our consumer research shows that there is a small, philanthropic, good-for-the-commonwealth cluster of people — about 7 or 8 percent of the population — that embraces ideas like environmentalism and sustainability simply because they are the right things to do. Moreover, they are willing to pay significantly more for nearly identical products that help them achieve their altruistic goals. That’s cool.

But it’s a different story for nearly everyone else. To varying degrees, the other 90-plus percent of the population balances these questions: “What’s good for everyone?” versus “What’s in it for me, me, me?”

And that’s cool, too. It’s like a personal triple bottom line: “I’ll get my coffee at Starbucks because: They treat employees well, they use (some) recycled paper, and they make a mean frappacino.” Call it doing good while drinking well.

Sustainability doesn’t provide an immediate, short-term, emotionbased, selfish answer to “What’s in it for me, me, me?” It is too conceptual and abstract, too global, too community oriented, and its benefits are too far into the future.

The good news

Luckily, there is a way for our billionaire to meet the end goal. That’s by answering the question “What’s in it for me?” Find out how sustainability fits into different people or groups of people’s lives, translate it into language that is meaningful for them and help them accomplish their goals — like “Organic is great because it’s good for my family’s health, not because it will help us overcome specific environmental problems.”

Or educate people about how buying local brands might help their local economy and support jobs. Or explain better the concept of true cost accounting and how actual costs affect their pocketbooks. Or make the connection between brands that do good and also provide personal advantages, whether in price, design, or quality (all things that are about “me, me, me”).

So what is meaningful to the other 93 percent? Plenty.

Here’s one example. Most people want their kids to have healthy lunches at school; they just don’t know how to get this done. So our billionaire could invest in an effort to provide healthy organic food (SlowfoodUSA and Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyards program could use all the funding help they can get) at schools.

Focus on grassroots efforts that target local schools, not just mass media. Find ways for people to get involved, not just passively absorbing a public relations campaign. Publish stories in the local community newspaper, not just the metro daily.

Before you know it, plenty of people will be fanatics for sustainable agriculture because it is in their best interest, their immediate, shortterm, selfish interests — their kids’ health, their families’ health, the health of their neighborhoods and communities. That’s just one way for our billionaire to make sustainability cool: redefine it in meaningful terms: my health, my family, my community.

Another example comes from an egg client, the Seattle Monorail Project. Nearly all Seattleites agree that traffic congestion is an enormous, growing problem. The trick for the last 30 years has been creating a solution that everyone can agree to.

SMP, charged with initiating and building Seattle’s monorail network, did this by educating voters on the societal benefits and the personal benefits of the proposed monorail. It will help clean the air by reducing emissions and cut travel time from West Seattle to the Sonics game by 15 minutes.

In November 2004, a Monorail recall group managed to get an initiative back on the ballot to kill the project, but this time after a six-month educational outreach campaign, 63 percent of voters favored the Monorail — a landslide in politics. That’s pretty cool too.

‘Enlightened self-interest’

At egg — with apologies to AdamSmith and Alexis de Tocqueville — we call this “enlightened selfinterest.” We define it as a balancing act between three factors:

1. Cost of entry benefits. Is the brand widely available? Reasonably priced? Does it perform well (tastes good, does what it is supposed to do)?

2. Societal benefits. Does the brand have a positive environmental story? Does the company/brand speak to social equity, like treating employees fairly and sourcing labor responsibly?

3. Selfish benefits. You guessed it: What’s in it for me? (good for my health, helps me look good — the brand reflects back on me in some positive way, like the Prius’ badge of conspicuous conservation, it satisfies my internal affirmation that I am a socially responsible person).

Can sustainability be cool?

So perhaps we need to rethink our answer to our billionaire. It might not be possible to make sustainability cool, but maybe the goals of sustainability can. You just need to think local, think specific, and think “What’s in it for me?” If you know someone who has an extra million dollars burning a hole in his or her pocket, let us know. We could start with food, move onto energy, then transportation, and then investment. Or better yet, bring it on all at once.

In their own words: egg is a brand development and advertising agency in Seattle that specializes in creating and growing responsible brands. We utilize powerful strategic and creative thinking, guided by an understanding of the consumer, to generate success in the marketplace for sustainable brands and organizations.