Shine and fade

It's not a very complex idea, but probably needs explanation. We want to shine and twinkle, we want our projects to shine and twinkle, but forget that what gives the twinkle its twinkle is not just the shining: it is the fading and the shining, then bursting through the obscuration of light.

Shine that persists is glitz.
Shine that persists is glitz.

Glitz is on the TV, in the magazine, in the everlasting smile on Tony the Tiger's face. In reality, persistence isn't possible, of course; our life is cyclic, and uninterrupted shine that endures usually involves some toxic residue.

Suggesting that the persistent branding approach doesn't work for green products and services; it may be that it's well into the cusp of failing globally for conventional products as well.

Green and mass transformation

Marketing green products & services is often referred to as "green marketing."

You could compare it to convenience food marketing or education services marketing: green marketing is a kind of category and is something we can characterize. We see in convenience food marketing certain patterns and rules on such things as pricing, advertising and reach. In green products marketing we see familiar patterns and rules as well: premium pricing, ethical stance, the recycled packaging, the appeal to the future, the "let's all pull together" attitude.

These are ways that green marketing can be typified, and the marketing of green can easily be typified - bordering on pure caricature.

We do know that under green there is a strong sense of necessary transformation. Good. The drive to change is natural, and is built into our DNA. This is something marketing can sink its teeth into. But how?

We seek transformation, in Herds we call churches, or fads, or clubs. Mark Earls, whose book I'm reading right now:

"The biggest problem is that ours is a social brain not an individual self-determining brain: it's the brain of a creature whose life consists largely of other people and interaction with them. Looking at it as if it were otherwise and the creature that owns it as an isolated agent is a pointless abstraction."


People aren't isolated, they change together. Compare the spurious improvements brought by well meaning "fads" to the lasting change brought by quiet contemplation by a group of semi autonomous individuals...

There is a case to be made here - that there is a qualitatively different form of marketing that is suitable for marketing green products and services.

Clay Shirky, environmentalism and freedom

Environmentalism is usually associated with a restriction on freedom. We need to re-frame the conversation. Because anti- environmentalism can take away basic freedoms ( freedom to breathe, etc).

Freedom has been characterized as a pseudo-religious justification in North Americ; the widespread adoption of Internet as a communication tool is one contemporary result. On a side note - Clay Shirky writes about the Internet and freedom:

"The best way to design a network is to allow the sender and receiver to decide what the data means, without asking the intervening network to interpret the data.” ...

What the internet is for, in other words, what made it worth adopting in a world already well provisioned with other networks, was that the sender and receiver didn’t have to ask for either help or permission before inventing a new kind of message. The core virtue of the internet was a huge increase in the technical freedom of all of its participating nodes, a freedom that has been translated into productive and intellectual freedoms for its users. As Scott Bradner put it, the Internet means you don’t have to convince anyone else that something is a good idea before trying it. The upshot is that the internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom."

The desire to protect the environment is not "just data" - the motive it not value-free. Which makes it uncomfortable for some people. So how do we get over the dip of discomfort.