There’s a mystery I’m trying to solve. It started with a swarm of people in a room, all abuzz about sustainability and its many guises. I overheard somebody talking about a particularly profound example of conspicuous conservation that seemed almost unbelievable to me, and I made a mental note to research it when I was next united with my laptop. My google skills are usually creepily good, but I was unable to track down anything definitive about this particular claim, so I remain in a state of skeptical curiosity, and am therefore reaching out into the no-doubt-vast network of sustainability-savvy folks who read this blog, in hopes that somebody somewhere will be able to provide an answer.

The mystery at hand: Are there people in Japan who put fake solar panels on their houses, just for the ecochicness of it all? Or is this just an urban legend, perhaps created by a clever Chindogu and a telephone gamey misunderstanding?

On the face of it, it just seems wrong that such a thing would exist. Yes, solar panels are so expensive that they’ve come to be seen as a luxury item in Japan, and yes, we know that people want to appear so green these days that 9 out of 10 people in the UK admit to telling little green lies to appear greener than they really are, but I simply cannot fathom the depravity of somebody who would actually go to the trouble of purchasing and installing fake solar panels. It would be like driving around in a fake Prius.

So you can see why I’m determined to find out whether these panels are real or not. If so, it would mean that conspicuous conservation has veered into new and disturbing territory. Our own research at egg has delved into the gap between green beliefs and green actions, but this data point, if true, would introduce a new category: the eco-fraud. It’s one thing for companies to greenwash, but quite another for individuals to go so far out of their way to blatantly misrepresent their energy sources. (Yes, I suppose one could make the tortured argument that fake panels will ultimately promote sales of real ones, but I’m not going there right now.)

So here’s what I found so far: a googlesearch for “fake solar panels” japan yields a paltry 28 hits. But no definitive answers. A handful of blog posts reference a now-defunct link to a TV show that apparently mentioned the fake panels. One guy thinks they’d make a great biz idea, but seems to think he came up with it. I uncovered no primary sources, no news articles, no images. So I expanded my search a bit, and learned that Japan makes 50% of the real solar panels in the world, that they’ve got big plans for solar (30% of homes by 2030), and that 80% of solar panel sales in Japan are made door-to-door. This last article was most revealing — it discussed how the panels are indeed considered a luxury item, but it had a captioned photograph of a standard-looking roof, saying Japanese prefer unobtrusive solar panals like these roof tiles. So at this point, I’m thoroughly confused.

I know that there are plenty of deeper mysteries out there, but I’m still rather curious about this one. So have at it: ask around, trawl the wayback machine, hop a carbon-offset flight to Tokyo. If you’re the first person who solves this little mystery, I’ll send you a special gift.

This will be perhaps the longest post yet of the egglog. But don’t worry, we aren’t going to start getting verbose here. It’s just that this particular post requires some storytelling.

In order to better understand consumers and their orientation towards sustainbiltiy, we frequently use the notion of a metaphorical pathway to describe the journey that people take in moving toward a more sustainable view on life, and the actions that go along with that way of thinking. Each step usually leads the traveler further down the path to the next milestone. Note: this is a conceptual framework with a hypothetical set of circumstances and milestones. Every person will have their very own unique version of the path to sustainability, with some lingering for quite a while at a certain point, and others leaping ahead in bounds.

The Path to Sustainability

Healthy
Local
Social responsibility
Environmental responsibility
Simple living
Control

First, keep these things in mind. They’re all part of sustainability.

Then, imagine a path that starts with a glimmer, a flicker, a desire for some sort of change, some sort of control over a chaotic situation. Maybe you’re trying to eat healthier, or starting to recycle, or starting to drive less, or maybe you’re just sick of the work buy consume die cycle and feeling the need for something higher, something more connected.

It often starts out with concern about me me me — my health, my kids’ health, my pocketbook, and then once you’re on the path for a bit, the systems thinking begins to kick in, and you start thinking about the deeper impact of the things you do, the impact not only on yourself and your family, but on other people in distant communities (like sweatshop workers), and the impact on nature, on animals, on the environment.

At the beginning of the path, maybe you start eating healthier, feeding your kid organic babyfood because you heard about the toxic effects of all the pesticides on human development. And maybe you read about the toxics in plastic babybottles, so you move to glass, and maybe you get rid of your old waterbottles and get some ones made of stainless steel. Maybe you start recycling because you have to, but then you start thinking about composting too, as you become aware of what you’re doing with your food waste, and the great effect of compost on your garden. Maybe you also read about the toxic effects of chemicals on your lawn and decide to let it go natural so it’s safe for your kids and pets to play on.

And continuing down the path, you realize that gas prices are insane, so you start to drive less, carpool, take the bus. You start thinking of the impact of fossil fuel consumption on the planet because you’re hearing more and more about global warming these days, and they say that by 2100 the coasts will be completely flooded and certain areas will be completely uninhabitable, so you try to minimize your fuel consumption more than ever, and you really want to buy a Prius when you get your next car.

You eat organic food all the time now, as low on the food chain as possible because you read about how badly animals are treated in factory farms, and how meat production is bad for the environment. You’d love to get solar panels for your house, maybe even a wind turbine. You use a water filter because you read about chlorine and fluoride being bad for you. You buy clothing from thrift shops sometimes, and you’re starting to shop less….

And maybe you start to collect rainwater from your roof and use if for your garden (which is by now completely chemical-free.) You won’t shop at Wal-Mart anymore, and all the coffee and chocolate you buy is fair trade. You read the labels on everything, and have stopped using toxic cleaning products in your home and toxic personal care products on your body. You shop at Whole Foods all the time, and try to get to farmers markets whenever possible. You’ve turned down the thermostat in your house, and everybody in your family has to wear more layers inside during the winter. You’ve eliminated most plastics now, and you’ve started making your own babyfood, and you’d love to get one of those cool urban chicken coops that you read about in Treehugger — fresh organic free-range eggs every morning!

In fact, you’re becoming more and more connected to things that feel more “authentic.” You’re getting into home remedies — using vinegar to clean, and taking echinacea for the flu. You’d love to learn how to can all that extra fruit you find at the farmers market. You’ve started volunteering with a local environmental group — you take the whole family out to do trash pickups every few weeks, and you’ve signed a few petitions about endangered species too. You’re really upset about the polar bears dying out because of global warming. You’d love to move out of the city and into a place that’s more connected with nature.

You start doing yoga more and more often, and you still haven’t gotten that Prius yet, but you take the bus and walk a lot, so it doesn’t really matter. You’ve done a home renovation to capture some passive solar rays, and you used all recycled materials and low VOC paint. You’ve turned most of your yard into a garden, and you use one of those old-fashioned push mowers. In fact, you seem to be doing a lot that might be considered “old-fashioned” these days. You’re unplugging as much as possible, spending more time with friends and family, simplifying your life in all sorts of ways. You consider the origins and impact of everything you put in your body now, and you also think carefully about how you spend your time and what you produce and consume. Every time you read about global warming getting worse and worse, you feel emotional and frustrated about the dire state of things and about all the progress that’s yet to be made.

You’ve finally done it. You’ve moved off the grid. You’re totally solar-powered now, you have a goat and chickens and you finally feel like you have control over your environment. You had an air purifier and a water filter when you lived in the city, but it just couldn’t compare to the feeling of purity you have now. Each of the steps you’ve been taking has given you such a sense of satisfaction, of greater connectedness to the whole, and you become more and more aware with each passing day at how far you’ve come from the mainstream. You cannot even enter a mainstream drugstore or grocery store without being acutely aware of how unsustainable most of the world still is — so many toxic products being sold, so much treating the symptoms and not the source of an illness, so much gratuitous commercialism and marketing that plays on people’s insecurities, such a glut of irrelevant parity products flooding the market. Yeah, once you’ve come this far down the path, it’s impossible to go backwards. But you really wouldn’t want to, anyhow, despite the challenges of living a considered life…..

This handy chart from Futerra, a nifty communications shop in England. It identifies how to spot, prevent and avoid greenwash for consumers, companies and agencies. Futerra’s new Greenwash Guide analyses the current state of greenwash and what’s being done about it. You can also find guidelines for companies and agencies on how to prevent greenwash, and a ‘spotters guide’ for consumers to help avoid it.

So the question we ask ourselves is how much of what we are seeing out there is bad marketing, how much is lazy marketing, and how much is deceptive marketing? Most likely, there is a fair share of marketers who have jumped on the green bandwagon and who are spinning green pitches unduly and even unjustifiably, but what about those who have something to say and rely on an agency that just doesn’t get it? They rely on the hackneyed images, colors, and ideas that are the low hanging fruit of green communications strategies and executions. For example, I recall a Toyota ad where they used #3 here with the daisy flourishing from the tailpipe for Prius. And yet, Prius has a great story to tell–technologically speaking with direct benefits to the consumer. Sometimes, it isn’t even laziness, but simply a lack of understanding of the challenges in how to reach the consumer regarding these issues. I recall seeing GE’s first Ecomagination print ads that used Audubon prints in a very clever way, but in the end, the execution served the agency’s portfolio better than it did the initiative, and so they changed to a smarter, more informationally driven look and feel that explained the environmentally friendly technologies GE has been working on.

The challenge facing communications professionals will be to tell the stories that carry information and help educate the consumer on what makes something green and why it matters to them. But it most likely will not be colored green. And it will not involve a tree.

The quintessential, perfectly shaped, ribbed leaf. Almost any tree. Polar bears, glaciers, treefrogs, and bamboo. Illustrations of leafy vines, branches, stalks and roots. The classic dandelion image with seedlings a-blowin’. Of course, the omnipresent windmill as icon, regardless of the fact that the sponsoring brand has nothing to do with wind. And we cannot leave out the classic that started the category and continues to live strong to this day: a pair of tender hands cupping a baby earth globe.

And these days, globes of all shapes and sizes are selling like hotcakes at Getty Images and other stock photo sites. When I got my Green Festival brochure in the mail recently, I wondered what the meaning might be behind the woman on the cover who is playfully batting the globe around as if it were a volleyball—perhaps that the powerful human race is not taking this stuff seriously enough, and that our future might be in the balance? Hmmm. But then why is she smiling?

These are the images of green. We have all seen them now, and they are multiplying like the green tendrils of the invasive English ivy that have taken over my backyard. The big question for those of us in the business of communications around brands that are talking about sustainbility, is what works and what doesn’t? And what is best for the cause? It’s big business obviously, or Getty wouldn’t be selling their secret sauce for 400 quid.

Of course, for colors, just about every shade of Pantone green has been used to sell green. When egg started in 2003, we even created a Conscious Consumer swatchbook with seven shades of green—from darkest Off The Power Grid Green, to lightest Red State Green—to playfully denote the various segments of the green consumer landscape based on a US Green Consumer survey that we conducted. Somehow, at the time, it seemed warranted in this manner and for our specific purpose.

Obviously, the more we see the same images and colors used over and over again to communicate issues around sustainability, the less meaning and differentiation there is across the board. And who really wants a brand that looks like all the others? Within the Green Festival program itself, there are fewer than 5% of all ads that chose NOT to use the color green in their layout. Good for them. Bad for the movement, and bad for the communicators out there. We can do better than this.

As the green “movement” moves ahead, for it to become a success, we need to move away from these clichéd communications solutions. Such expected images and colors have become suspect in the selling of green. Consumers are having a hard enough time on their own without us marketing types muddying the waters. While they are desiring green solutions, they have a hard time understanding it, finding it, and embracing it. Because of the rampant nature of this cavalier and listless approach used to communicate green, consumers have come to question all things green, and we are now in the cynical, distrustful phase of the game. Greenwashing has become the standard.

But people are actually smarter than we think. They want to know what this all means and they are willing to listen, so long as we try a little harder. And brands that understand this stand to gain green ground.

The story of green is so much richer, and more colorful than “green”. Green is about innovation, technology, intelligence, and exciting solutions which conjure up all kinds of great images. As has always been the case in our business, the unexpected is far more interesting than the expected. And as John Grant thankfully proclaims in his good new book, the Green Marketing Manifesto, “Green marketing is about making breakthrough green stuff seem normal—and not making normal stuff seem green.”

We can do better. We need to do better.

Cultural trends tend to follow a certain pattern. A meme or a look or a movement will percolate through the culture, at first gradually, then infectiously fast, and then it will saturate the public consciousness so thoroughly that it will no longer satisfy those on the bleeding edge, who will initiate a radical shift and begin the cycle anew. And the interesting thing about trends, as opposed to fads, is that they reflect larger underlying cultural forces and tend to affect multiple domains. Thus, we witness transition times like the 1980s, when the US began to emerge from recession, and earth tones, bellbottoms, and back-to-the-landers gave way to neon, massive shoulderpads, McMansions, and big hair.

Right now, we’re going through another cultural shift, heralded in by the faltering climate, the faltering economy, and the profound reassessment of values that began in 2001 after the towers fell and the dotcom bubble burst. And as 2001-2007 saw the revival of green, from a fringe concern to a mainstream trend, 2008 appears to be witnessing the beginnings of an interesting shift around the color wheel — to blue. Which makes all of us at egg very happy, because ‘green’ was never a broad enough term to describe what we’re about, but we found ourselves using it anyhow, often when talking to people who have no idea what sustainability means (which is most people).

Whence blue? Two words: climate change. If green was about hugging trees and not paving paradise, blue is about the fact that the entire planetary balance is shifting, fast. When climate change finally begins to scare mainstream people in a Y2K problem or duck and cover kind of way, we can expect to see a lot more blue everywhere we look. We’re only witnessing the first glimmerings of the blue shift right now, but I predict that it will eventually come to subsume green in describing the cultural shift that’s been happening since the early naughties. Green was a step in the right direction, but it always had too much baggage. Blue is neutral, it’s soothing, it’s the color of clean water and air (ever-scarcer resources), and it also happens to be the color that people worldwide choose most frequently when asked to name a color. I think it’s got good staying power, as far as these things go. And don’t worry — the sensibilities underlying green won’t go away. They’ll just expand

Ready to jump on the blue bandwagon? Pantone has beaten you to it — they’ve declared Blue Iris the color of 2008, because it “satisfies the need for reassurance in a complex world, while adding a hint of mystery and excitement.” A complex world indeed. A google search reveals 9680 hits for “blue is the new green,” and I expect that this number will be growing exponentially. Gradually but gradually, all the common leitmotifs of “green” ads — leaves, seedlings, and of course, the ubiquitous color itself, will give way to a newer bluer look. And this blue period isn’t just about imagery; we’re already seeing it percolate into names and concepts: Mercedes has dubbed its newest eco-technology Bluetec, France has been using the Pavillon Blue as an eco-label to indicate eco-towns and ports, our client Gerdling/Edlen has named their latest eco-building Cyan, there’s a UK sustainability consulting firm named Level Blue, and the list goes on and on. Yeah, blue may have corporate associations, but a fresh new shade, especially complemented by some vibrant gold or orange hues, will be in no danger of looking workaday.

The thing that makes me happiest about this shift is that I won’t have to keep reading articles about what green is not. It seems that every article I read nowadays assures me that green is not about Birkenstocks or granola or Ralph Nader or frumpy hemp clothing or tree-huggers or patchouli or dubious hygeine practices. In short, people are still terrified of hippies and hardcore environmentalists, especially those people who are still stuck in the 80s conspicuous-consumption mentality. And yeah, the back-to-the-land movement is on its way back, and the hardcore hippie look will eventually undergo a full-on revival, as the current porn-plastic-botox-airbrushed-metrosexual aesthetic reaches a zenith and the utterly natural begins to look dramatically different and fresh. But at this moment, green still has plenty of limitations. And I welcome the influx of blue. It won’t happen overnight (hell, there are still plenty of people who covet McMansions), but it’ll happen.

As for me, I’ve already moved on.

The Duke Blue Devils Basketball team extended their record to 19-1 this Saturday, beating the Miami Hurricanes by a 15 point margin. And in the process, they burnished their brand just a bit more.

What might you ask, does this news event have to do with egg, our blog, the egglog, or anything at all related to sustainability? Well, besides the fact that Duke is the alma mater of each of egg’s 2 co-founders, Marty McDonald (a somewhat avid Blue Devil basketball fan himself) and Mindee Nodvin, the Devils put on quite the green show at Cameron this past Saturday, while handedly thrashing their ACC opponent. In the name of Focus The Nation Day, a national teach in on global warming solutions, and to symbolize Duke’s ongoing commitment to sustainable environmental practices, recycling and water conservation, the Cameron Crazies -– Duke’s enthusiastic student fans — donned green shirts, emblazoned with the slogan: BLEED BLUE, LIVE GREEN. The more enthusiastic fans skipped the shirts and just went for green paint. (VOC free, non-toxic, hopefully.)

Duke will purchase carbon offsets equivalent to the electricity, steam and transportation consumed by the game, working in partnership with the renewable-energy company NativeEnergy.

“Grassroots movements have a way of starting with the students,” said Jennie Dean, 24, a first-year graduate student in environmental management and one of the coordinators of Focus the Nation at Duke. “Global change is something we’re very concerned about, and it’s our future, so we’re doing something about it. We hope Focus the Nation starts a national dialogue.” We do, too. And if it means getting national exposure for the cause by suiting up for TV camera exposure during the popular Duke basketball games, more green power to them.

In many college communities, including Durham, the university represents the largest consumer of power and water. With thousands of residential units, fleets of vehicles and dozens, if not hundreds, of buildings, an American campus is like a city unto itself. But unlike most cities, a university can take sweeping steps to improve its environmental behavior.

And the issue has hit home recently as North Carolina is in the midst of a very serious water crisis. Duke’s sustainability coordinator, Tavey Capps, says, “We’ve been working quietly for several years now to improve the campus’ sustainability in water and energy use and to build more sustainable new buildings because it’s the right thing to do.”

You can find out more about what Duke is doing around sustianability by visiting their site. And of course, to find out more about how the Devils are doing on the hardwood, you can go here.

Go Duke. And Go Green.

For this January 1st post, I’ll skip the conventional list of 2008 predictions and resolutions, except to say that I resolve to work less, eat better still, consume less, and exchange as much screen time for face time as possible. Oh, and be outdoors even more.

And my one big, hairy prediction for green and how it will be successfully marketed in the coming year is in the use of “citizen marketers”. Citizen marketers are customer evangelists—regular people–who extol the virtues of brands, products, services, and companies to their friends and peers online and offline. This form of peer-to-peer marketing is the perfect vehicle for green brands for a few reasons.

Citizen marketers are recruited and incentivized by companies to sell their products, and while one of the shortcomings for companies looking for citizen marketers of non-green products is that it is somewhat hard and costly to find reliable citizens to become shills, the green arena will prove to provide legions. One study in green-forward England showed that because of green peer pressure, people tell “little green lies” to overcome guilt and inaction. Green brands will find a surfeit of willing green evangelists to pitch their wares and in so doing pitch their own individual holier-than-thou brands in a show of conspicuous conservation.

Conversely, the recipient of the assurances given by the citizen marketer in pitching their favorite green brand, unlike the possibility of a skeptical or turned off friend for a non-green brand, is similarly positively inclined and more likely to listen and buy in. Green begets green as a powerful marketing tool.

Green brands benefit most from lack of spin (read: advertising as usual) and communicating an authentic and truthful message, and what better way to do that than through the bottom-up mechanism of word of mouth promotion? The new greenwear company Nau knew this coming out of the gate when it launched its company this year on the backs of its non-profit partners’ constituents and their green posses.

The highest level of code cracking by today’s marketing mavens involves some important themes, not the least of which is getting consumers involved with your brand, and even letting them shape it. In the realm of green branding, by using the green brandgelist, companies avoid accusations of greenwashing by effectively skipping any green claims that they would otherwise make in advertising and allowing their green brandgelists to do the heavy lifting.

Unilever’s ahead of the curve on this. Its “Go Green and Small With All,” uses in-classroom magazine and Web ads to recruit participants, targeting elementary school kids via a contest that looked for the greenest grade school in the country. Its ambassadors were encouraged to get their families to make small, green changes at home (like using concentrated All detergent) and to spread branded, eco-friendly messages. The ambassadors and their parents submitted report cards on their progress, and the school with the highest percentage of report cards (not yet announced) will receive a $50,000 grant for eco-friendly school improvements, a solar-powered iPod Shuffle MP3 player for every student, a one-year supply of All and an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in January. More than 3,000 elementary schools entered.

Using young students as ambassadors “reaches our target audience of mothers of school-age children,” says Helayna Minsk, marketing director for All. Incorporating it into a contest “encourages … word of mouth and got kids involved collectively,” she adds.

All of this doesn’t mean that there will necessarily be much of a reduction in the attempts to hit the green message home in traditional advertising. In fact, we’ll see a lot more of this. But traditional advertising will only be marginally effective in connecting with consumers, mainly because few agencies know how to create advertising for green or socially responsible brands that actually works. Case in point this year is the Chevy campaign “Gas Friendly to Gas Free” that began to position Chevy and GM as a green car maker. Desperate times require desperate measures, and Chevy is in line for one of the more grandiose greenwashing awards of 2007 with the public’s reaction of utter confusion over ads for cars not for sale, giant hybrids and vegetarian cars. To think that all of those years of building a brand around patriotism and durability could somehow be sidestepped to capture the new green consumer is an embarrassment to the advertising industry. (Maybe the next TV spot in line should show nature imagery in the vein of Infinity’s seminal ad campaign from 1989 of “rocks and trees” to redefine the tagline, Like a Rock. And instead of Bob Seger, they use Bob Dylan.)

The fun will come in effectively integrating the messages and the vehicles across media, which increasingly means letting go and allowing the consumer to influence the brand.

With the wild and woolly weather over the past few years, there are bound to be ramifications throughout the business world. For example, two consecutive years of volatile weather have proved disastrous for companies that rely on predicable temperatures to sell cold-weather clothing like coats and sweaters.

So, while the $200 billion apparel industry has adding the job title “weather forecaster” to its staff, we predict the implications will be so great as to ultimately drive for the creation of a new C-level player dubbed The Chief Climate Officer. Joining the ranks of the Chief Green Officer and the Chief Sustainability Officer, it is inevitable that industries and companies that rely heavily on the weather, and reducing risk associated with it, will find the need for leaders who can assess the comprehensive strategic issues associated with weather and make smart decisions hinged on it.

One interesting new company, Storm Exchange Inc., helps corporations maximize shareholder value by reducing the financial impact of unplanned weather on earnings. In other words, they hedge against the weather and write insurance policies based upon it. The company states that while most businesses routinely hedge risks such as currency and interest-rate fluctuations, many simply hope to get lucky when it comes to the variability of the weather—a practice that has given prominence to what Wall Street calls “the weather excuse.”

Department stores that sell apparel are among the retailers most exposed to weather fluctuations. Much of their survival depends on favorable weather: if it’s raining or snowing or very cold, consumers are less likely to go shopping; if the weather is too warm in the fall, consumers will hold off on purchasing winter wear; and if the weather is too mild in the summer, consumers will avoid purchasing summer wear. Operating results can be further weakened by inventory build that follows lower-than-expected sales volumes.

In an interesting first, a large manufacturer and supplier of overcoats to department stores, has taken out a $10 million insurance policy with Storm Exchange against unusually warm weather. Weatherproof signed a contract that guarantees it would be paid as much as $10 million if daily temperatures in New york City are lower than the historic average for December, 37 degrees. The higher the temperature this month above 37, the more Weatherproof makes.

With climate creating such serious monetary implications over the past few years, including the possible move towards a cap and trade system, its anyone’s guess what the next innovative business model will be that harnesses the opportunities in climate change. Let’s just hope they impact all three of our bottom lines and spur some solutions-oriented innovative thinking.