We start with Sgt. Pepper's.
Two weeks ago the world was taking stock of the four decades since the Beatles changed the everything (like the fourth or fifth time) with the June, 1967 release of the greatest album in the history of rock music. And rightly so.
Maybe it's become vogue to diss the Beatles in general and this album in particular. But that won't change the fact that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was a watershed moment in music — that no one had heard anything like it before, or that it was the natural outcome of a trajectory of creative genius that began years earlier.
Forty years down the line, it's still a beautiful thing.
And that seems like a good way to start a blog on green marketing.
If you think tying Sgt. Pepper's to marketing is crass, I give you this.
Still, for anyone in either green business or communications, June, 2007 marks an uncanny convergence not unlike the kind that produced this album.
What's happening in the marketplace right now will change everything for both green business and marketers. Like the release of this Beatles's studio masterpiece, it's a seminal creative moment that germinated years ago. Green activists and entrepreneurs have been struggling hard for this, perhaps never realizing that it would look like this: major businesses and the unlikeliest corners of America taking up the banner. And yet, we're far from the promised land. But then, the top-selling album of 1967 was More of the Monkees.
The marketing of green that happens today promises works of genius that will spawn countless pretenders while marking a point of no return for both greenies and marketers.
Today it's giving those who have spent years preaching a gospel of sustainable development a contagious new sass as their agenda goes mainstream. It's giving advertisers a shot at redemption. It's also giving social/new media evangelists further raw material to reshape the communications profession.
It's a kick-ass feeling. The same jolt everyone felt, I think, when they heard the downbeat of the title track of Sgt. Pepper's.
"John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo
Starr were never more fearless and unified in their pursuit of
magic and transcendence," writes Rolling Stone Magazine in their essay naming Sgt. Pepper's the greatest of all time. "Sgt. Pepper defined the opulent revolutionary optimism of
psychedelia and instantly spread the gospel of love, acid, Eastern
spirituality and electric guitars around the globe."
That's really the same thing happening now with environmentally oriented business. And that's what this blog is about.
It Grows On Trees is all about the spread of the "revolutionary optimism" of the green movement in the marketplace. And we're dialing in on the communications side. There are several excellent blogs about green business out there already (including this, this and this). This blog isn't about green policy; nor is it about green business models, activism or even the scientific debates on whose green tech is better that the other. It's about taking green into the market — and how it gets talked about.
It Grows On Trees is about the role practitioners of advertising have to play to drive demand for sustainable technologies and services.
As such, we're going to focus in on all the culture, marketing shenanigans — the good, the bad and the ugly — that goes into advertising green. It's a narrow focus on the revolution of two worlds that have finally come together in something completely new but perfectly familiar: the act you've known for all these years.
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