Sustainability marketing for young, and old!

Now for something totally different and rather specific: where does an aging population (Hi Mom and Dad!) fit into the world of sustainability marketing?

They are without at doubt a valuable market, and "spend an estimated $2 trillion year on products and services" (Belch and Belch, 152). What market wouldn't want to capture that? Apparently the problem lies in those 30-something youngsters clogging up the creative department.

I have no trouble believing the statistic from the Association of Advertising Agencies International that 40 percent of agency workers are ages 30-39 (Belcher and Belcher, 152). Apparently, this means they can't connect to the older population with product and service messaging, let alone sustainability marketing messages.

Here's what I think:

Know your target audience! What do they believe in? What are their dreams and aspirations? Such reads the mental framework that unwinds as I march forward on my master's project around the somewhat intangible issue of water quality. Except that it's not intangible really, if it's polluted, you can't use it! Turning on a tap in this country though, is like living an idealized existence.

Sustainability in advertising, for my sense of creativity at least, is like a magic wand.

Depending on whether or not abstract thought has kicked in, some of the best ads - often by consumer brands - really know how to use sustainability as a way to stroke our emotional side. If you recall in my last post, the Lifebuoy hand soap ad can bring tears to your eyes. It isn't overtly about the soap, but a father rejoicing that his son has lived to age five by using it.

Ads like these make use of real statistics - that hand washing has literally saved thousands of children's lives from disease in India - and connect a distant group of people to the viewer with something nearly all people can connect with, the gift of life for your child.

From where I sit (and dab my eyes), that sort of reach into the soul of humanity is a sacred tactic, that I suspect doesn't come naturally at first to just any brand or marketing agency - there are whole conferences developing around this idea. It takes some abstract thought, some real brainstorming on how what you're selling, be it an idea, product or service, creates wellbeing for your audience. Making it good for the environment should be a given (but I'm an idealist, a hallmark of my age group).

So what if it's the creative-director young things that have a stronger grasp on all the technical ways to make ads, we shouldn't forget who the market dictates to us has great spending power (Hi Mom and Dad!) - and subsequently can vote with their dollars accordingly, if we share the right stories with them, the stories that really concern all of us as people on this Earth, learning from those who went before.

An article in The Guardian has a beautiful take on what older people can bring to the sustainability round table, and that marketers and advertisers alike can learn from, just as we always have from our elders. They have skills and life experiences to inform how we approach sustainability, especially from an advertising point of view.

One of the most telling pieces from the article that I feel can greatly influence sustainability marketing toward older people is as follows:

"The narrative in the media seems to stereotype this population as coffin dodgers, clogging up our health and welfare system. They are seen as a burden. They are marked down as a net cost to society, viewed as a drain on our limited resources...The truth of course is that few people want to be seen as old, and fewer still want to be a burden, or labelled as such. We urgently need to develop a more positive narrative, one that doesn't reduce the retired to clichés of people who are a danger to the future sustainability of the country."

Develop a positive story around the collective intelligence of this group! Research shows that many boomers don't adhere to their parent's idea of a retirement community. Show them how needed they are in helping us move toward a world of multi-tiered wellbeing. Sustainability is the issue that belongs to everyone, and it is not going to be solved by the latest group of movers and shakers out on the street. Instead of ads directed toward a life of pure comfort among other older individuals, let's approach this group with actionable messages of their value and need in our world. 

Disclaimer: (please forgive the excessive onslaught of older white men in the next three images - that's another post.)

Not this!

www.selwyncare.org

SHOW THIS! 

                                                                                                                            www.huffingtonpost.com


                                                                             AND THIS!

                                                                                                                           www.blogs.disney.com



Sources:
Adil, Abrar. 2013. A sustainable society means harnessing the skills of older people too
The Gauardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/sustainable-future-harnessing-skills-older-people 29 Jan 2014.

Belch, George and Michael Belch. Receiver decoding. Advertising and Promotion: An Integrated Marketing Communications Perspective. McGraw-Hill,  2012.

Burstein, David. 2013. Millineals will save us! Salon.com Retrieved from http://www.salon.com/2013/02/16/millennials_will_save_us/ 29 Jan 2014.

www.huffingtonpost.org
www.selwyncare.org
www.sustinablebrands.com

Sustainability and advertising, a true story.

With sustainability becoming somewhat of a household word these days in the wake of record-breakingly hot summers, higher impact winters, and super storms that threaten giant metropolis (s?), not to mention environmental concerns around the quality and quantity of natural resources - marketers are beginning to perceive the added value potential of advertising their product or service as having 'green' attributes.

What does this mean? Some ill-fated attempts are found to be untruthful in the inherent 'greenness' of a product - in truth a lazy attempt to influence a consumer's perception of what makes something environmentally friendly, when in fact -  there are no true facts! We call this 'greenwashing', and the practice has frustrated consumers when the dirty secrets are revealed by concerned citizens and advocacy groups. 

The website Greenwashing Index relates the unseemly act to political 'whitewashing', or "a coordinated attempt to hide unpleasant facts..." In ads, they suggest visiting the suspect product's website to uncover the following:

• Is it easy to find their sustainability business practices on the site?
• Is there information provided to back up their green claims?
• Do they attempt to share a story of their environmental journey?

Futerra, a sustainability communications consulting agency that specializes in sustainability in the UK, has it's own Greenwashing Guide with a more detailed and wonderfully illustrated booklet to assist you in your daily pursuit of products.

Futerra.co.uk

Luckily, there are a growing number of resources to help consumers make decisions on the truthfulness of an advertiser's green attempts to sell based on this attribute. For example, for health and beauty products, the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep Database has thousands of products on file with rankings of their tested toxicity, allowing you to uncover whatever might be lurking in your daily beauty routine. 

With these tools in hand, consumers may hope to go out into the market place a little more prepared to questions 'green' claims on products. 

There is another side to bringing real sustainability into advertising that speaks to human wellbeing. These ads cater to filling primary needs of various audience, often through the use of a story. In 2012, the Rainforest Alliance released an ad intended to drive customers to buy environmentally sensitive products (bananas, coffee, etc) with their 'frog-stamp' of rainforest approval. The ad they devised was brilliantly targeted toward the cognitive dissonance and insecurities that can plague some consumers who feel that they could do more to help environmental issues, in this case, the rainforest:

The video has over a million hits and was recently nominated for a People's Voice Webby Award. 

Other brands have fit themselves within the category of reaching out to address basic needs of people that desperately require their help and promotion of their situation for survival. The Indian Village of Thesgora has one of the highest rates of childhood death from diarrhea  a terrible problem that can be solved from washing one's hands. Have a look at soap manufacturer Lifebouy's amazingly touching ad:

These types of ads speak address a different type of sustainability than the usual, "look how 'green' we are" message, which personally, I find little value in other than it is a weak attempt at self-promotion when done poorly. These ads are works of art, and they highlight the brand's social mission and sensitivities of its stakeholders. By highlighting the true story sustainability of your brand, product or company, you can create lasting value for consumers. 


Sources:

Environmental Working Group .2014. Why This Matters - Cosmetics and Your Health. Retrieved from org/skindeep/2011/04/12/why-this-matters/.

Greenwashing Index. 2014. Greenwashing Index: Help Keep Advertising Honest. Retrieved from http://www.greenwashingindex.com.

Rainforest Alliance. 2012. Follow the Frog [video file]. Retrieved from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iIkOi3srLo.

Lifebuoy. 2013. Help A Child Reach 5 [video file]. Retrieved from: http://www.lifebuoy.com/socialmission/help-childreach5/.

Traditional techniques V. today's IMC

How do Integrated Marketing Communications differ from traditional advertising and promotion? What are the reasons for this shift?

Well, once upon a time, the various elements of the promotional mix were treated separately. PR, advertising and sales, to name a few, viewed their communications initiatives and problems from their individual 'silos' as we might say in sustainability, as the key to the problem.

I love Mad Men. Cut me some slack as I'm still on Season 1, but the complexities of their biggest issues in the office seem to revolve around what slogan to devise next, grooming the client they've had for years who's threatening to go elsewhere. Things were somewhat predictable in terms of reading research reports about one group, and creating ads that pretty much were either print or radio, and then eventually, TV. However you slice it, it was a one-way street to the customer.

Today, the customers are talking back, and marketing communications is treated as an interdisciplinary science in order to be effective on as many fronts as possible. Consumers have multiple touchpoint areas now, and individuals have adopted more and more unique tastes, lifestyles, groups they identify with. Technology, of course, has become widespread and fairly accessible (though from a sustainability stand point, the "democratization of media" is a contestable idea - not ALL people have access to the internet or smart devices - IMC has emerged as a more holistic approach to reaching people more effectively, wherever they are.

The primary post.

Hi Yinz! (It's a Pittsburgh thing)

This is a blog directed at thinking through advertising and marketing through a sustainability screen. I'm a masters student at Chatham University, in the brand new program entitled 'MSUS,' or Master of Sustainability. We reside in the newly named Falk School of Sustainability.

Within this interdisciplinary program, you have the freedom to design your track based on what you know and like. My undergraduate background was varied across the arts, but everything I did was a form of communication. I graduated in 2011 with a Major in Public Relations, and minors in Museum Studies and Exhibit Design, Studio Art, and Music - all at Baylor University in the heart of Texas. Here at Chatham, I've kept whittling down to communication of sustainability science (think systems-oriented communications around ecology), and business, specifically marketing with an advertising edge.

This spring, I'll be posting weekly here about advertising and promotional strategies and how the systems-thinking, broad spectrum, style of sustainability can be applied to overall communications objectives.  Think of it as a framework, a web in which advertising plays a key role in the promotion of not just products, but ideas.