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.

This past weekend, we attended the 2007 Net Impact Conference at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN to discuss and discover what the next generation of MBA students will do to make our world more sustainable.

This year’s conference, the world’s largest ever gathering of socially responsible graduate business students and young professionals, attested to the dramatically increased interest among leading corporations in corporate social responsibility with more than 30 major organizations, an unprecedented number for this fast-growing event, pledging their support and sponsorship for the conference. We saw flagship logos from the likes of Dow, Dupont, Starbucks, McDonalds and Microsoft purposefully displayed throughout the conference, and Dow even sent their Chairman & CEO, Chad Holliday, down to keynote the conference. There was no mistaking that the era of CSR has arrived in full force, and it’s no surprise considering the following stats:

• 79% of MBA’s indicated they would seek employment that is socially responsible in the course of their careers, and 59% said they would do so immediately following business school.
• 89% said business professionals should take social and environmental impacts into account when making business decisions.
• 81% agreed with a statement that businesses should work toward the betterment of society, although only 18% believed most corporations are currently working toward that goal.

We found the opening remarks by Patagonia’s founder Yvon Chouinard quite refreshing in a creatively pessimistic way. Interviewed by Andy Savitz, author of The Triple Bottom Line, Yvon pulled no punches in his brutally realistic outlook of the status quo, indicating with abrupt hand gestures the dissonance between projected population growth on the one hand, and non-renewable natural resources and ecosystem stability on the other.

Along with an overabundance of fantastic panels, covering everything from The International Business Challenge: Balancing your company’s identity with local culture to Making Waves: How social entrepreneurs bring about change, egg’s own Marty McDonald was a featured speaker on the subject of Green Branding: Engaging the Consumer, along with Nick Aster of TreeHugger.com, Perry Goldschein of SRB Marketing, Inc. and Brian LaValle of EcoMedia.

Happy takeaways: the conference’s use of the old-school Hatch Show Print shop for all of their design and printing, and a few memorable foodie visits including the very well-known Loveless Cafe, and the considerably less well-known Smokin’ Ed’s Barbecue.

Well, at least in The British Isles it appears to. And if past trend patterns are any indication, it will probably prove itself over here as well within a year or two. They are definitely ahead of us on the green issues across the pond, so we should predict the fallout of the green advertising and marketing push of late stateside–indicating the success in opinion polls of brands like Chevy, Dow, BP, GE, Wal-Mart–to show up in polls here soon enough indicating people’s perception that the greenest brands are those that advertise it the most. (Was that really a surprise to anyone?)

The sad truth is that lowest common denominators factor in when taking the broad pulse of the green movement and that in the end, whoever shouts the loudest, gets the prize. In spite of the fact that none of these companies above are doing as much as it seems like they are from their ad campaigns, the public will end up with a positive opinion of them. If I recall correctly, BP and Wal-Mart both have looked pretty good in recent surveys. And only if you make egregious mistakes will you come out harmed from this practice.

It all begs the question a bit of what exactly is greenwashing, and how does one identify it? But then, does it even really matter? We talk a lot about the need for transparency because we believe that the consumer now has a wealth of information at their fingertips to unravel the true corporate stories through the web, but is the diligence really there? One recent report indicates that companies just need to have a few things in place for consumers to give them the social or environmental thumbs up. (Anyone for a quick carbon offset bump?)

Let the green guns blaze, and caveat emptor.

Ronald McDonald continues to inch ever so slightly towards a more socially responsible brand.

Starting in 1990 and working with Environmental Defense, McDonald’s eliminated 150,000 tons of packaging, replaced foam-plastic sandwich containers with paper wraps and recycled boxes, and made other packaging improvements in its restaurants and throughout its supply chain.

Next, taking cues from the first litigation attacks against “Big Food” in 2002, when McDonald’s was alleged to have caused the obesity and related health problems of two young customers in Perlman v. McDonald’s Corp., they started to promote salads and apples a little more vigorously alongside the Big Mac and double cheeseburgers.

In 2003, they implemented a global policy to reduce antibiotic use in chickens, cattle, and pigs — although such measures could be considered a drop in the bucket when it comes to the issues revolving around standardized food. Many argue that large-scale food production inherently compromises agricultural and biological diversity.

Numerous other milestones for the company along the way culminated this year in an Energy Star honor for smart energy management practices and investments throughout its operations that have resulted in significant energy and financial savings.

And today, we read that McDonald’s in Europe has successfully redesigned both its retail spaces to be more European friendly, and its menu, to accommodate local and regional tastes. Paying attention to local tastes has also helped McDonald’s overcome some of the cultural hurdles it faced in Europe as a large American fast-food chain. “The problem in Europe,” said David Kolpak, an investment manager at Victory Capital Management in Cleveland, Ohio, who owns McDonald’s shares in his portfolio “was the perception that any large U.S. brand has, which is bringing the American way of eating and marketing and invading the local culture.”

McDonald’s faces inherent environmental and social concerns with a business model that relies so implicitly on mega-economies of scale. So while the aspect of healthier local food economies may be an uphill battle for advocates of decentralized food production when it comes to McDonalds, we should still look for the chain to incorporate more local suppliers and local foods into their offerings, and healthier recipes with healthier ingredients. And it goes without saying that the chain needs to continue to address its global energy footprint.

As what we might call a brand with a “little bit of CSR”, it is the challenge of the corporate brand alchemists to present these sustainable aspects of the brand in an honest and genuine way, while still balancing the brand’s consumer facing dimensions of value and taste.

The “trend” green is dissipating and will go away soon. The more significant green will remain and flourish.

Right now, green is the color of friends, money, and conspicuous conservation. For several interrelated and comprehensive reasons, people en masse out there are taking to the idea of green. But the green magazine covers are already subsiding. The green tips columns have already begun to lose their attractive sheen. Today, Barry Bonds is the news, but his controversial steroid-fueled run for the home run crown has at its roots the essence of green. Which is integrity.

The wild run on ethics over the last 10 years in the corporate world, working in convergence with the ill effects of globalization, over consumption and terrorism, have fueled the seeds of conscious consumerism. And while these seeds have spawned a movement with a green glow, the media is far ahead of actual consumer behavior out there. Actual green behavior in the marketplace has barely begun, but its potential is limitless. Only when economies of scale provide us with affordable, good looking, affordable, high performance, affordable, great tasting, affordable, stylish, and affordable, goods and services that are environmentally or socially aware, will this movement stick on any scale.

Nonetheless, Americans in every demographic and psychographic segment—conscious consumers–want more accountability and integrity in their lives. And they have shown that they will manifest this desire more in the market than at the polls. They are seeking to regain control of their out-of-balance lives in the market because that is the one place they feel like they have true control.

So while the swell of the green halo is eclipsing, the roots of green will remain deeply seeded. The green newspaper stories and ads will diminish, but the need and desire for significant change will remain: our landfills aren’t getting any larger; our carbon emissions aren’t getting any smaller; our soil, air and water aren’t getting any cleaner; our natural resources aren’t renewing; our communities aren’t getting any stronger; our families aren’t feeling any safer or healthier; and our global community isn’t getting any more secure.

The companies and leaders that understand this and take steps to address these issues in the context of their business models, or within new business models, will win in the marketplace because that is what we are all seeking, and those are the companies and brands that we will support.

The new green will be simply social and environmental responsibility with accountability, and it will manifest itself in many different actions, words, and phrases. These are the stories that need to be told. The progressive, visionary companies that see this need and opportunity, and step up to deliver on it, will lead us into a brighter future.

Today’s egglog post presents readers with a rare case of blatant self-promotion acting under the guise of worthy “news”. The news is concurrent interviews from two dichotomized but harmonious publications with egg’s founder and creative director Marty McDonald. The reason we decided to throw caution to the wind and bury our modesty this one time is the serendipity of the situation: two publications, representing the present and the future of our industry, give cause to observe “green” and the trend towards recognition of issues surrounding sustainability in marketing and advertising.

one. a magazine is the periodical of the One Show, the annual award show for creativity that creative professionals in the industry pay homage to as the gold standard for elevated conceptual thinking amidst the sea of communications mediocrity.

The magazine is “…the professional home for advertising’s creative community. Each issue features interviews with the industry’s creative leaders and thinkers, unearthing the latest trends in advertising culture. With its behind-the-scenes coverage of the making of ads - including graphic and web design, directing, special-effects, and editing - the magazine is an index of industry standards for advertising professionals worldwide.”

Then, Sixty, is the student created publication of the Virginia Commonwealth University’s AdCenter, which, in this writer’s opinion, is the preeminent professional advertising program in the country. Sixty is an engrossing rag in its raw creativity and one that any imaginatively minded person can disappear into for a good while, and come out refreshed and inspired by the talent coming out of VCU. It’s energizing to see how such talent will infiltrate the legions of future ad professionals and keep them from becoming too comfortable.

Marty was interviewed by the veteran Warren Burger of one. a magazine, and the talented recent VCU graduate Brian Feeney of Sixty, in regards to what egg is doing on the green front in brand development and advertising. Dichotomy-wise, it is quite reassuring to see that the industry as a whole is paying closer attention to sustainability and actively taking a role in some cases to support these issues, both from the top down and the bottom up. It is exciting to see that large agencies are now developing green strategy departments and green consumer experts, and that the ad schools are also paying close attention to developments on the sustainability front. We know too that Seattle’s Cornish College for the Arts and School of Visual Concepts are both very engaged with issues surrounding sustainability

Recognizing the self-destructive path we were forging for ourselves, the vision for egg was to use the astonishing systematic power and force of marketing to, in effect, heal thyself. But as a smaller player, we can only do so much good. The future of our industry, as well as that of our economy, environment and overall society, will have to rely on the concept of sustainable and integrity-based business models, supported by ethical marketers.

We were happy to see the latest Cone study — it presents the most compelling evidence to date for the importance of social responsibility as a major (and growing) brand differentiator. In short: the successful brands of the future will be those that do good and proudly tell the world about it.

Cone’s study found that Americans’ expectations of companies are at an unprecedented high — 83% say companies have a responsibility to help support causes. Furthermore, a full 87% of people (up from 65% in 1999) claim that they’d be “likely to switch from one brand to another brand that is about the same in price and quality, if the other brand is associated with a good cause.” And another dramatic recent shift: 72% of employees wish their companies would do more to support a cause or social issue — a 38% increase since Cone’s last survey in 2004.

The numbers are in: Americans are no longer satisfied with business as usual. This continues the story told in Environics’ Millennium poll: 89% of all Americans believe that companies need to go beyond their historical role of making a profit, paying taxes, employing people, and obeying all laws — companies must also set higher ethical standards and help to build a better society. (In fact, even back in 1999, when the Millennium poll was done, a full 35% of Americans advocated for companies prioritizing social goals above financial ones.) As the income gap in the US continues to soar to heights not seen since 1928, people are finally getting fed up with companies that put pure financial gain above all else — at the expense of the numerous environmental and social stakeholders. And as transparency is becoming an important cultural value, people are becoming empowered to vote with their dollars for the companies that actually want to do good in the world.

There’s a cultural paradigm shift afoot, and corporate irresponsibility — one of the many sad side effects of unprincipled capitalism — is no longer acceptable to an increasingly savvy public. Now that mainstream companies — from Whole Foods to Wal-Mart, from Nike to Timberland, are raising the bar by doing the right thing (or taking steps to do so), we can look forward to a new era of healthy competition — except this time, it’ll be about who can be the most socially responsible and get the word out most effectively.