It Grows On Trees

A Touch Up for Sherwin-Williams Identity

Um, isn't it time we retired this logo?

Everytime I see a Sherwin-Williams truck or ad, I wonder how long before this becomes a problem. It's incredibly out of touch with the times, wouldn't you say?

Is Green is the New Atkins?

Monday's New York Times article on the me-too rush to claim eco-cred at retail brings up some important questions: when does a product earn the green badge -- and who decides?

The highly entertaining piece details the silliness in some of the 60,000 products bidding for the Home Depot's new "Eco Options" program: plastic-handled paint brushes hawked as eco-friendly because the weren't made from trees; wood-handled painted brushes shilled because they weren't made of plastic.

Is it possible that green is in the eye of the beholder? Or is it just that sometimes green is gray?

The best brand managers and advertisers know that any brand experience they create must come from a truth in a company's practices and people. If a company can reasonably show its commitment to environmentally forward practices in the way it makes, packages or distributes its products or services, can't it claim green cred, even if those practices are eco-imperfect?

Take Toyota, for instance, maker of the eco-darling Prius. As the largest car manufacturer in the world, they help pump far more more CO2 into the atmosphere than its Prius can claim to withold. Should we be cynical about the Prius? Or should we praise it as a good start for a very complex problem? Can GE's ecomagination make up for all its environmental sins of the past? Or does it merit a closer look by virtue of its leadership from the top of the Fortune 500?

The answer isn't "yes and no." The answer is to quit expecting a silver bullets. To the extent companies and products (not to mention you and me) make incrementally smaller impacts on the environment in the course of doing business, that's a good thing. And that's something marketers can and should take to market. The trick is to back up claims with reasonable, credible evidence.

Of the 60,000 proudcts they revied, for instance, the leaders of Home Depot's Eco Options program only accepted 2,500.

What worries me is less that green can be gray and more that green could be the new Atkins. As a rule, me-too marketing is shackled by the law of diminishing returns. And when the returns start to tank, the prentenders have a way of taking others down with them.

The Act You've Known For All These Years

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.