Surely one billion minds are better than one?

Corporations and non–profits are increasingly looking outside organisational boundaries to identify people with good ideas to solve their ethical and environmental challenges and are increasingly turning to crowd sourcing, using online platforms with prize- led competitions rewarding those with the best solutions.

We all remember the Virgin Earth challenge with a prize of $25m for “preserving history for many generations to come” by significantly helping reduce climate change- no small order! It felt rather over most people's heads, however, this use of dragon’s den tactics is taking a more mainstream grip with increasing numbers of companies beginning to harness the collective brain power of consumers, accademics and entrepreneaurs.

A couple of recent additions include One Billion Minds, the innovation platform that connects scholars with solution-seeking companies & non-profits and Betacup, a Starbucks led online competition and community hub to solve the problem of the 58 billion paper coffee cups thrown away every year.

Are businesses really onto something? can a pot of prize money and some recognition be all you need to get to quicker and better solutions to complex sustainability problems- can 'we', that's any one of us, help solve some of the biggest issues? or is this just another marketing fad? .....time will tell, which should give me just enough time to get my self-growing bio based material coffee cup idea entered.

From shareholder to stakeholder

Unilever has had a reputation for quite some time as a company that takes sustainability seriously. But recent comments from its new chief executive, Paul Polman, suggest that it may be more visionary than previously suspected. Mr Polman, talking to the Financial Times, suggested that he was focused less on delivering shareholder value, and more interested in meeting the needs of the customer. Specifically, “I do not work for the shareholder, to be honest; I work for the consumer, the customer . . . I’m not driven and I don’t drive this business model by driving shareholder value.”

His point is well made - if your customer is happy, it's more than likely your shareholders will end up happy too. Sounds obvious when you put it like that. But an approach that recognises that a business's health, viability and sustainability is predicated upon balancing the needs of all its different stakeholders is more likely to deliver value to shareholders in the long run than a model that focuses on driving quarterly earnings performance may sound like common sense but is in truth a radical and substantial shift for most companies. If Chief Executives could embed this thinking into the way they approach all their decision making, and encourage their employees to do the same, we'd see a massive step forward in terms of the way business interacts with society. Not to mention the fact I'd probably be out of a job...

Not enough Hugh's in the world

I recently attended the '1 Billion Reasons' to end poverty presentation run by the Global Poverty Project. I spent most of the evening with my mouth wide open at the sheer horror of an issue that appears hopeless. Rather than throwing money at a charity, this organisation explains how everyday actions - in what you learn, say, buy, give and do - can be connected to the ending of extreme poverty.

We all try and do our bit but sometimes you need a presentation like this to really open our eyes. Their partnering with Fairtrade, DEA and DFID is long standing and long may it continue . Hugh Evans is a man on a mission and definitely someone to keep an eye on...

I'm all for rewards...

...but rewards to make us fly more? I recently received a piece of email marketing from Virgin which told me that they were going to start to reward customers for using the train. Brilliant I thought - finally a well loved consumer brand trying to encourage more train travel by rewarding more environmentally friendly modes of transport?

Wrong. Well partly wrong. It turns out the reward being offered is air miles for your next flight. What a shame that the reward for encouraging more of us to travel by train couldn't be something a little less CO2 heavy!

If you have an audience of 100 million people, don’t you think that should set the bar quite high in terms of what you show them, particularly if you’re paying in the region of $2.5 million for the privilege? Apparently Audi didn’t think so, when they approved the ad for the A3 TDI that aired during the Super Bowl a couple of weeks ago.



As cars go, the TDI has comparatively good green credentials, and particularly so in comparison to the cars driven by most Americans . So it’s not unreasonable that Audi would want to shout about it. But as a way of selling cars, the Green Police ad seems perverse and somewhat ambiguous. Is it gently making fun of the way in which we’ve become obsessed with environmental minutiae (our obsession with avoiding plastic carrier bags whilst thinking nothing of jetting off to Europe for a weekend break)? Or is trying to suggest that the green movement has become the thought police of the 21st century? Do I want to be with the Green Police, or against them? The eco-friendly universe portrayed by Audi is a pretty terrifying place – a libertarian’s worst nightmare, with every move monitored by a bunch of overweight cops. On the other hand, Audi’s website describes the green police as “a humorous group of individuals that have joined forces in an effort to collectively help guide consumers to make the right decision when it comes to the environment”.

There’s the germ of a really important idea there – that it’s possible to make environmentally conscious decisions without sacrificing style, beauty or fun. But the ad does a good job of making sustainability seem uncool, boring, irritating and an all round pain in the backside. Which surely can’t have been the intention…

PepsiCo's refreshing use of social media

This is my first ever blog entry which I’m pretty sure makes me social media Luddite! But although I don’t actively participate in social media I am very much interested in how it is used – increasingly so - by companies to engage with their consumers.

PepsiCo is arguably a leader in this area having integrated the medium holistically into their global marketing strategy - from the decision to launch the Pepsi Refresh Project in the US at the beginning of this year to the Dewmocracy initiative that crowdsourced the Mountain Dew line’s new flavors.

For the past year, the Pepsi brand has been using its "refresh everything" mantra to ask people about ways to change their world. But at the beginning of this year the brand decided to go further with the launch of the Pepsi Refresh Project - a grants scheme providing millions of dollars ($1.3 million every month) to fund good ideas that ‘make the world a better place’. But it isn’t a traditional grant scheme - consumers list their project ideas online and get to vote for the winners. And it uses social media to do this – relying heavily on Twitter, Facebook and a website to encourage submission of ideas and voting.

This initiative is being presented as Pepsi’s alternative to spending on television advertising at the US SuperBowl, which emphasises the increasing importance of social media to brands. The emphasis is shifting onto how a brand can figure out what its consumers’ value and how the brand can address that. It appears PepsiCo has moved the conversation it started with its consumers onto the next stage by actively helping them turn their ideas into action.

New generation of CR reports

Gone are the days of producing 300 page long CR Reports... Well no not quite but it is clear that companies are starting to look at different mediums for communicating their CR activities. Solar Century published its 2007-8 report in video format. It is not the most exciting video in the world and it is perhaps a little too long but it is an innovative way of delivering key messages to its stakeholders.