We attended this years second annual Kitchen Conference in Portland which is a gathering place for the visionaries out there who come bearing the latest ideas, trends, and insights of marketing for values-based businesses. It is inspiring and thoughtful and renews our commitment to doing this work for those agents of change who see a better pathway.

There were some good highlights, including presentations from Theresa Marquez, a champion of the small farmer and chief marketing officer of CROPP Cooperative and Organic Valley, Jay Friedman, who is the ex-vice chair of the original National Organic Standards Board and the preeminent organic regulations expert, and Ben McConnell, well-known for his book, Citizen Marketers, which points to the influence on brands by the average joe and jane consumer through consumer generated content and peer to peer networking.

This last trend is especially important for brand managers to understand. When they fully understand what is going on in the realms of the citizen voice, they realize that they are in fact not brand managers at all, but brand stewards, doing their best to guide the brand through the consciousness of the consumer by leaving well enough alone and allowing for channeling by and through the masses. Good brand stewards recognize the limitations of their influence on the brand, and that indeed, brands are defined by consumers not brand managers or marketing officers.

We saw this manifested recently in living color with Comcast’s sleepy serviceman and Barack Obama (yes, Barack Obama is a brand). The best defense any brand leader has is to develop a clear understanding of who your consumer is and from that craft a solid brand platform from which to design a communications blueprint. Course correction is to be expected because brands are living entities, and, like people, tend to change.

Personally, the highest highlight was the latest insight from our friend and fellow green consumer junkie Laurie Demerrit of the Hartman Group, a research firm, which indicated that as green moves into the mainstream through the expected drivers associated with self-interest (health, taste, cost, convenience, etc.), the next level of interest showing up for consumers with this audience (as opposed to the Advocates, for example) in driving purchase behavior are the social issues, rather than the environmental ones. This caught us off guard because of all the conversations we have been having around the environmental matters (think global warming, climate change, pesticides, etc.) After a little thought, though, it makes sense. For mainstream consumers—what egg refers to as the Moderates–the “people issues” (e.g. fair trade, labor, human resources) would seem to resonate more deeply than the environmental ones. It is our model of enlightened self-interest taken to the extreme, so that when we go beyond even the self-interest drivers, the things that people can connect to are those that are closer to them, and people are more real and emotive than the environment.