All Business Is Local

It's an election year and you'll probably hear "All Politics is Local" a few times. It's also a good time to remember that much (inarguably not all, but a lot!) of business is local, too. (In fact, if anyone has the numbers out there on how much of the economy flows through locally-owned companies I'd love to see it!)

Here's a quick article out of the Harrisonburg, VA Daily News Record on the benefits of businesses belonging to their local chamber of commerce. It's not just about free marketing, sponsoring the local arts and crafts fest or making a float for the Founder's Day Parade. According to a recent study, it's about trust; potential customers appear to find a company's products or services more credible if they are members of the local chamber.

The question, even for local companies with a national or global scope, is: why WOULDN'T you belong to the local chamber? It's not only part of being a good corporate citizen- to be active in your neighborhood- but it's also where your employees (and you!) live. Here's hoping the biggest of the big remember to participate locally, too.

More on the Green Backlash

For another perspective on the potential "green backlash," check out this post from Celso Oliveira, who dishes on Dell, GE and the potential consumer backlash of blatantly PR-driven green programs.

I thought about this not once but two other times today, aside from a quick chat with Celso:

1) Talking to a colleague and Civic Hybrid driver, who cynically acknowledged the electricity requirements of hybrids like hers. We then started talking about hydrogen vehicles, high end electric cars like the Tesla roadster...and I even found myself again quoting Michael Crooke at LOHAS 2006: It's not enough to be eco-groovy.

2) Watching The Office and Scrubs tonight on NBC. During commercials they promoted next week's Green-themed episodes of Chuck, Heroes and 30 Rock, with a guest spot by Al Gore.

Cementing my moderate outlook on all things Green, I'm not nearly as cynical of NBC's attention grabbing programming stunt as I am of its name ("Green is Universal," a silly pun nodding toward NBC's parent.) Like Celso I'll conclude that it's up to the consumer to distinguish between PR and a genuine green effort.

Radiohead and Pay-What You Want

Radiohead self-released In Rainbows online in a pay-what-you-want forum ("It's up to you" and "No really, it's up to you," says the shopping cart) for several reasons, and I'm not professing to know their order of importance:

-The band could afford the experiment (in terms of wealth already accumulated from adoring fans)
-The band could afford the experiment (in terms of knowing that adoring fans would still pay for the album)
-The band probably genuinely didn't care whether it could afford the experiment, anyway
-The band probably enjoyed being among trendsetters in releasing an album without the backing of a major label
-The band, or some trustworthy marketing resource employed by them, probably knew that the pricing mechanism would be a great promotional vehicle (and it has been)
-And, let's not underestimate, the band probably thought it was a nice thing to do for its fans.

At any rate, the experiment is going splendidly, with over 1.2M copies already legitimately downloaded, per Pollstar, at an average of $8 per Mashable (which points out that this is a bigger response, and far more profitable, than the band's last three albums combined) and by the way, it's a great album, although no The Bends.

Funny ignorant American currency sidenote: I used the currency calculator linked from their site to back into how many Euros I should pay to give them just about $10, and I settled on 7-something. But of course the shopping cart was in pounds, so I actually paid about $15.

Ethos JWT, and a side rant on subscriber content

Nice little Wall Street Journal clip (and it is a clip, since most of their illustrious content is still free in preview only) on Ethos JWT- the arm of massive ad conglomerate WPP that initially handled non-profit work before finding a lucrative market in helping companies tout social responsibility efforts.

Note on WSJ's "subscriber content:" about 8 years ago I had an internship with a magazine, and a great boss who shared me his WSJ log-in. I got all ethical a few years later and stopped using it to access WSJ long after my internship was over. And now it appears that the movement is firmly afoot to tear down the "subscriber walls" at the web's best news sources, as Web@Work notes the NYTimes did with columns and other archived content in September. Note: I'm not saying what I think the media companies should do; in fact, I'm completely conflicted, because even as a blogger and an advocate of "citizen journalism" I'll always yield to the higher authority of bona fide reporters, who need to get paid somehow (and I ironically don't believe that serving ads is always the answer), and yet I'm a cheapskate and almost completely unwilling to subscribe to an online newspaper.

Al Gore and Live Earth

Trying to keep things apolitical around The Optimist Company will not be easy given highly charged public opinions on topics like the environment and business' role in the community. At one point only a few years ago mentioning Al Gore may have been as politically charged as we could get.

But now that Gore has distanced himself from politics (a stance that, obviously, could change at any given moment in the next 6-9 months) and turned to building private ventures like Current TV and employing his own soaring Q Rating to making the topic of Global Warming both celebrity-cool and about as politically agnostic as it can get, it seems safe to plug MSN's archive of July 7's Live Earth "Concerts for a Climate in Crisis," staged around the world by master promoter Kevin Walls and emceed by Gore himself. Check out Optimist favorites Jack Johnson in Australia, Lenny Kravitz in Brazil and the star-studded London lineup.

Also, checkout this month's fantastic Fast Company profile by Ellen McGirt on the "brand makeover" of the formerly droll pol. Al Gore.

Love An Inconvenient Truth or dismiss it as propaganda, but you must at least grant Gore some serious marketing credibility for his ability to make the global climate a talkable topic.

Where will you see Green next? and Silk..and Timberland

"Green," which we are already drastically over-featuring on only the 11th post (this blog is not about Green but about companies that do good...it just so happens that many are Green- focused...), may pop up in front of you at any time.

In magazine articles, on the news, and in the press releases of many companies touting their eco-friendly efforts, for sure.

On the side of a bus, a clothing label or Timberland shoebox, even.

What about on a carton of soy milk? Silk Soymilk says so with its Green Caps for Green Energy sweepstakes, a simple enough program where the company will buy 30 kWt hours ("enough to power an average home for a day") for every UPC code you, the enlightened consumer, enter at their website.

It's a sweet Activist/Philanthropist maneuver from a company that is arguably Business Model Good in that it provides a delicious and healthy product to consumers who potentially need a milk substitute. As an ice cream addict, I can't imagine needing such an alternative, so you be the judge of whether that's Optimist enough. Delicious, however, is my word choice, not theirs, as I've recently fallen into the habit of using the Vanilla Silk in my coffee.

Kudos to Silk, by the way, for not sending you through the ridiculous paces of mailing in the UPCs and milk caps to some obscure PO Box that you're likely to miswrite, like most rebate programs.

PS I love the clever tagline atop the carton: "Shake Well & Buy Often." Simple, unexpected, and not surprising from an effective CPG brander. So ubiquitous is the Silk packaging, in my ad-cluttered mind, that I actually had to look it up to make sure it was the brand name, and not the category of milk. Look out Kleenex and Xerox.

Completely unrelated side note: In case you haven't heard of another great packaging innovation, Timberland's eco-footprint disclosing "nutrition" label on the side of each shoe box, see Joel Makower article from last year on WorldChanging.com.

Godin on Bad

With his typical marketing-wise view of the world (or worldview, as he would say), Seth Godin starts with the assertion that marketing works (people can be sold) and concludes that businesses have a responsibility to the right thing. Don't take my paraphrasing for it; it's always worth reading his dramatic interpretation of the business world's approach to marketing.

In between, Godin focuses more on the bad that a business can do before closing on an Optimistic high note (a link to Patagonia.) The part that struck me most, and a topic I'll definitely revisit frequently since I'm from the region and agree entirely with his readers' quote, is his example of "Detroit's" fatal approach to cramming SUVs into the marketplace.

Disclaimer: I drive a big piece of Detroit myself, and yet the environmental impact of our beloved gas guzzlers is only part of his message. It's really about one of Godin's favorite themes, and it's not just an indictment of the Big Three but also the powers that be in the automotive world: if as much time and energy and resources were spent aggressively innovating safer and more efficient vehicles as were instead spent on defending life span of the current production, the hole in the ozone would be a little smaller and a lot more people in the "Rust Belt" might still be employed.

More specifically, I've recently adopted the mindset (not my own unique thinking) that Motor City business and government leadership missed a GIANT opportunity, not only to keep pace with the foreign brands but to more aggressively and more publicly and more enthusiastically pursue BETTER vehicles (better for consumers, for safety advocates, for fuel consumption, etc.) instead of trotting out tiny incremental improvements every year in addition to a slew of useless tradeshow novelties. Simple example: They could have thrown a tiny share of their lobbying budgets toward luring alternative fuel start-ups to the region.

But they didn't, so on the Optimistic side, there is still a GIANT opportunity out there for a company- and now it could be any sized or stage company, really, given the endless avenues for prototyping and production- to become the leader in better vehicles. And that means there's still opportunity for an entire region to become the home to one of the biggest industries in America (transportation), the way Henry Ford did with Detroit a century ago.