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 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.

This post goes out purposefully one day after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to honor the necessity for this man’s message to remain vital and ever present. We cannot contain the vast scope and importance of his work and its higher calling in a one day tribute, but rather should consider it a part of who we are each and every day.

The social aspects of sustainability are often overlooked, misunderstand, or misinterpreted. Recently at Compostmodern in San Francisco, some of the best and brightest designer minds were gathered to address the issues of sustainability as it relates to the design of our systems and society, but mostly the focus, feature, and understanding revolved around the environmental impact and considerations. And while respect for a clean and healthy living environment is critical in the big picture, even more important is our respect for others in the grand scheme of things. If in our pursuit of all things pro environment, we discover that we have lost our humanism, the trees have obscured our view of the forest, and we are in deep trouble. Understanding the quintessential nature of how our social systems interact with and complement our environmental ones is the key to understanding the true meaning of sustainability.

For today’s post we show a viral campaign we created about ten years ago in honor of the day and the mission of the man. Also included is the photograph that inspired the vision for the idea, which was to post these signs around Seattle above pairs of urinals, water fountains at airports, telephone booths and seats on buses.

The message below the words simply reads, “Thanks to Martin Luther King, Jr., signs like this don’t exist anymore. Remember him on January 18th.”

Perhaps it would have been better to say, January 18th, and beyond.

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.

The web is abuzz with talk of Amazon’s new e-book reader, the Kindle, which will launch tomorrow at a swanky gala at the W Hotel in NYC, timed to coincide with the finest media coverage that money can buy. Some say it’s a dreadful bit of industrial design destined for the dustbins of failed electronic devices, others say it will define the future of reading. Personally, I’m obsessed with its ecological impact.

Here’s what I’m trying to figure out: is the Kindle a vast improvement over the current dead-trees approach to publishing? At first glance, it seems like it definitely is. There are around 3 billion books sold worldwide each year, which adds up to an awful lot of trees being cut down, shipped off for processing, ground into pulp, made into paper, shipped off to printing houses, printed with toxic inks, glued with toxic glues, shipped to distributors, shipped to vendors, and finally shipped to recipients.

With the Kindle, you can summon a book directly through the aether. Just click a button, and the magic of the internet and cellular telephony will deliver it to you in seconds. Carbon footprint: zero. But it’s not really zero, of course. First, all the materials for the device have to be individually fabricated and/or sourced. This includes metals (likely toxic), plastics (ditto), and perhaps glass and ceramic (perhaps less toxic). Then the devices need to be assembled, shipped to distributors, and then shipped to recipients, who will then discover that, unlike dead-tree books, these Kindles take power to operate. Carbon footprint? Unknown. And then there’s the matter of planned obsolescence and the dirty little problem of consumer electronic waste. Starting to long for dead trees?

Of course, this all begs some deeper questions: can we fabricate a book out of entirely recycled and non-toxic materials? Sure. And could we do the same thing with the Kindle? Certainly. And we could even power it with renewable energy — one could do worse than trekking into the wilderness with a solar backpack and a slim little Kindle filled with hundreds of books. Assuming all recycled non-toxic materials for both, I’m thinking that the Kindle might just come out way ahead in the ecological race. And with humankind’s current technophilia, I’m suspecting that even a non-eco Kindle (or its inevitable sexier kin) will eventually displace the analog book.

But deeper still, what happens when climate change reaches a tipping point (looking closer and closer these days), and Amazon becomes just another jungle? E-ink may be as easy on the eyes as paper, but in the end, it may be far more ephemeral.