[ Thinking Green, Marketing Green ]

With An Inconvenient Truth’s Oscar win, we’ve reached a tipping point. The environment – and man’s effect on it – is on everyone’s mind.

For organizations this means new challenges. Energy providers are being pressured to find alternatives to fossil fuels. In the marketplace, green products have gone from fringe to ever-growing niche, and now they are poised to explode. In all industries, customers are beginning to demand that firms be responsible, sustainable, and carbon-neutral.

So now is a good time to consider how green your organization is. And if you have embraced environment friendly policies, it’s also the time to let your clients and customers know.

Take the burrito chain, Chipotle. While certainly not “fast food,” the restaurant does serve food fast...and in very large, meat-oriented helpings, which hardly make
one think “environmental.”

Yet Chipotle is thinking green, responsible, and sustainable on a number of levels. Its napkins have gone from white to pulp brown in order to reduce their use of harmful bleaches. It’s buying naturally raised pork and avoiding bovine growth hormones that could make their way into the groundwater. Even Chipotle gift cards are made from renewable and recyclable corn plastic.

It’s important to note that Chipotle didn’t make these changes all at once. The company has taken small, affordable steps, building momentum as it goes. But what’s crucial is that Chipotle has kept the customer informed at every step. Signs, cups, and menus at every store regularly update patrons on Chipotle’s progress, essentially saying, “Here’s what we’ve changed, and here’s why we’ve changed it.” It’s green thinking, good business, and great marketing.

To be certain, going green should be its own reward. But these days a sustainable philosophy is a marker to clients and customers of a premium product. And soon it will be price-of-entry in many categories, as it’s already becoming in industries like coffee production and homebuilding.

So if you’ve adopted green practices, it’s to your benefit to communicate that fact clearly to the customers, because they want to know. The green audience is discriminating, involved, and loyal...and if you win them by marrying a good product to a sound environmental philosophy, your organization will be rewarded.

If you haven’t thought about adopting environmentally friendly practices, now might be the time to start...even if your company doesn’t produce anything accompanied by a bleached napkin. A bank can look into new plastics for its ATM cards. A law firm might call a bike courier instead of a delivery van for local parcels. A new facility might be designed to be carbon-neutral. (And while some green solutions are still expensive, many others are not. Wal-Mart is enjoying improved media relations thanks to its move to energy-efficient lighting, but you can be sure they’re going to enjoy the estimated $3 billion they’ll save on their energy bills even more.) Most importantly, if you do decide to adopt green practices, be sure you communicate that fact to your clients, stakeholders, competitors, and local public officials.

Deciding how environmentally conscious to become might well be a challenge for your organization. But marketing your environmentalism is common sense. It will win you a loyal following, please external audiences, raise the bar for your peers, and increase public awareness of green initiatives as a whole. You’re saving the world...so make sure the world notices.

[ On Wiener Dogs, Rats & Search ]

Dachshunds are a smart, compact breed of dog designed to seek out and dispatch their even smaller and smarter adversaries: rats. This February Yum Brands had a rat problem worthy of a whole herd of wiener dogs, in the form of television footage showing rodents run amok in a New York KFC/Taco Bell. When the video found its way online, anyone could search for it. And they did.

We normally think of our favorite search engine as a faithful tool, a trusty hound sniffing out the answers we need from the Net. But like any excitable breed, search might just turn around and bite you.

Which is the real public relations lesson from the Yum Brands rat incident. As Kate Macarthur points out in Advertising Age, while the firm did make its share of typical PR mistakes – a slow response, treatment of the story as purely local, inadequate statements on the brands’ websites – the mechanics of search morphed the crisis into a fiasco. When people searched for “rats” they got Taco Bell; when they searched for “KFC” they found links to exterminators.



To avoid being in the doghouse, here’s what to remember:
• The more people visit a site, the higher it climbs in the rankings. To give your firm’s message equal billing, you need viewers to visit the sites you point them to...because they’ll already be checking out your site of disaster. A media crisis is a marketing crisis, so be sure your crisis communication plan addresses all forms of communication. It’s vital to get your message right and your click rate up.
• Be mindful of the need to advertise against negative search terms. Unhappy combinations of search terms – like a company’s name and “rodents” – can bring up damning sponsored links. You can fend off such results by buying up the relevant terms. Yum Brands seems to have taken this advice – now such a search yields zero sponsored links, instead of a who’s who of exterminators. (Over-reliance on computer-generated advertising is also unwise, even downright ghoulish. Adrants notes that when Anna Nicole’s son died, IntelliTXT ads offered new Smiths for sale at Target.)
• On the Net, mistakes are global...and they linger. At time of writing, one of the top 10 results for a Google search of “Taco Bell” involves union boycotts, and the sponsored links reference E. coli and law firms specializing in food and drug cases. Steady PR and search monitoring are always needed to offset such messages.

On the Net, the complications from poor crisis management can breed like rats...and it takes dogged persistence to sort them all out.

Unless of course,the dog dies from eating tainted pet food.

Which is why, as Ad Age and Yahoo! News report, organic pet food producers are experiencing a bonanza in the wake of pet deaths from tainted brand-name products. After all, the whole point of search is that it lets people find you. So paid-search ads drove concerned consumers to natural and organic pet food providers, whose sales have skyrocketed. Menu Foods’ debacle is a godsend to these companies, who recognize an opportunity to reach a vast, suddenly interested audience.

Thus, while organizations need to anticipate and protect themselves against potential crises, they also need to be nimble and alert to new opportunities. Disasters may linger on the Web, but golden opportunities don’t. When a competitor stumbles, ask what marketing communications tools might be used to capitalize on the moment...including, of course, search optimization strategies.

When well trained, search can be man’s best friend. Don’t let a crisis be your organization’s obedience school.

[ On Disasters, Human Nature & Your Media Insurance Policy ]

The difference between a potential PR disaster and an actual one is typically the PR itself – or the lack of it, in 99 percent of all cases. Johnson & Johnson’s aggressive response to Tylenol tampering in 1982 set the industry standard for good crisis PR. But most companies in a similar situation, like Firestone, fail to live up to that standard: reacting slowly, hiding their heads in the sand, obfuscating, taking half-measures, or even lying.

Typically they do so with the best of intentions – they just want to minimize the bad news. But news always gets out, and the resulting fallout is often more disastrous than the original calamity. (Just ask Patricia Dunn, HP’s overly inquisitive former chairwoman.)

When this happens, it’s easy for the marketing communications world to opine. “If only they had done crisis communications planning!” we say. “If only they’d had media training!” “We could have helped them avoid all this!” And we shake our heads ruefully as we switch our Firestones for Goodyears.

What we overlook is the fact that it’s our fault these companies have no crisis communication plans. We’re offering something that nobody wants.

People are cocky. They don’t believe disaster will happen to them. They always believe they are the exception, that their luck will hold.

Take fires, for example. Do you check your smoke detector faithfully every six months? Is there a fire extinguisher on every floor? And does your family practice its escape plan? Be honest– the answer to at least one of these questions is probably “No.”

Or what about driving? Do you always maintain a following distance of one car-length per 10 MPH of speed, or do you occasionally tailgate? Do you always stop at yellow lights, or do you squeak through before the red?

“But my house won’t catch on fire,” we say. “I’m a good driver.” Firms do likewise: “The company’s books are fine.” “Of course we’re environmentally responsible.”

But wait – look again at the above examples. We may not have nine-volts for the smoke detector...but we do have fire insurance. We take chances in cars that we shouldn’t...but by law, we have to have a policy before we get behind the wheel.

If the potential cost is high enough (the loss of all we own in a fire, for instance) we take certain measures... not to protect ourselves, but rather to get other people to protect us. Essentially, that’s all insurance is. And why should businesses behave any different than people?

So let’s call crisis communication planning what it is: media insurance. Media insurance is the guarantee that, when the inevitable bad day happens, you will know what to say and how to say it. Media insurance is the promise that someone will be there to guide you through the thicket of reporters’ microphones. Media insurance is how you make the news, rather than become it.

In short, PR firms need to stop lamenting organizations’ reluctance to do adequate crisis communication planning, because what they are lamenting is human nature itself. Instead they need to invoke common sense: getting media insurance is simply the smart thing to do. It’s folly to get behind the wheel of a car without insurance. It’s folly magnified exponentially to do the same when you’re driving a company.

www.cornerstonemtm.com

[ On Diamonds, Pencils & Corporate Chemistry ]

It’s easy to see why employees and managers get frustrated when the time comes to nail down an organization’s values. No matter how hard you work to capture your company’s unique essence, the values always seem to come out strikingly uniform and bland.

Honestly, who doesn’t value Excellence? Is any company going to say they don’t care about Character, Quality, Partnership, Communication, or Integrity? So what’s going to make your corporate values distinct?

Corporate culture. Personal connections and interactions. In short, chemistry.

The analogy is an apt one. Think back to high school. You learned that when a lot of carbon atoms bond a certain way they form a soft substance that slides apart easily: graphite (the “lead” in pencils). But under a different set of circumstances, these same carbon atoms bond another way, forming the world’s hardest mineral: a diamond.

The elements are the same. What changes is how the bonds are expressed. The resulting substances are radically different.

The same is true for organizations. Instead of chemical bonds, we mean the bonds between people – in other words,your organization’s culture. The values may be the same, but it’s your company’s culture that affects how these values get expressed...and how they get put into action.

For instance, two firms might both name one of their values to be “Communication.” A large computing firm might see Communication to mean having clear email protocols and using online discussion listservs. A small consulting firm might see Communication represented at the weekly round-table discussions attended by the whole staff.

One structure isn’t necessarily better than another, nor will it work equally as well for all companies. A diamond is useless if you’re taking the SATs. And you’d look silly exchanging engagement pencils with your future spouse. Likewise, round-table discussions might be unwieldy in our giant tech firm. And a rigid email chain won’t foster freewheeling brainstorming sessions among our consultants. The goal of clear Communication may be constant, but the path to achieving it is different for each company. The same goes for the rest of your values – Integrity, Quality, Partnership, Efficiency, and so forth.

So when the time comes to define your core values, take some extra time to look at how those values actually play out in day-to-day operations. By understanding your organization’s culture,you can track how its values are put into play,and by pointing to the values as models for behavior,you set goalposts for performance. By understanding your organization’s chemistry...how the bonds between people are forged, broken, and transformed...and how values get brought to life...you can stir up quite a reaction.

www.cornerstonemtm.com