Creating a Demand Economy For a Better World
Two thirds of the earth is water. Nearly all the rest is market-driven.
For the world to get better, people need to buy things that make it better.
The success of fair trade, organic and other positive-impact qualifiers is establishing a new set of considerations beyond price and quality — namely, how something makes the world better.
The agenda of The Change is to make “positive-impact criteria” more desirable, compelling, self-fulfilling, and common.
Basic Tactics
Before blowing any money on advertising, brochures or videos, we believe you should maximize the impact of everything you already spend money on. Things like hang tags, packaging, usage instructions, retail displays and the product itself. These things are like the human brain. Most marketers use only a tiny percentage of their potential. Huge gains can be made by putting time and strategic thought into the stuff you already pay for.
The truth is your best tool.
Use it everywhere.
Authenticity. Everyone Wants It.
Nobody wants to hang around with someone who’s faking it.
We (human beings) are drawn to people who are engaged in the moment; people who have a genuine passion and sense of purpose.
Brands that care about more than just making money have an inherent edge when it comes to authenticity.
What Makes a Brand Authentic?
A. It has a sense of purpose beyond just making money. If it feels like a marketing ploy, then it won’t work (because then it's not beyond making money).
B. Authentic brands have a personality. A personality is how you act because that's who you are, not how you act just to please someone. It's being genuine with someone (note how genuine and generous have the same root?)
C. Brands that enjoy who they are. It's much more fun to relate to someone who is happily engaged with being themselves. Brands that obviously love their purpose in life, Ben and Jerry’s, Google, Ferrari, stand out.
D. Consistency. People think politicians are inauthentic because they keep shifting their positions. If your packaging and marketing keep changing its tone, then how real could you be?
E. All of the above.
Leverage Your Story
Every product has a story. Yet, if people knew what went on behind most products, they would be more outraged than enticed. The obscene quantity of pesticides required to grow conventional cotton; the bleak conditions in the typical third-world textile plant; the inhumane state of life at a factory farm — if these stories were revealed, they would decimate the sales of their products, rather than increase them.
A positive story can be a tremendous advantage.
It should be articulated in a way that is as powerful, charismatic and proprietary as possible.
It should be communicated at every point of contact between brand and consume.
The Free Market
"Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss—the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery—that you must offer them values, not wounds—that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods."
- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
"Free market capitalist economics is arguably the most powerful tool ever used by civilization."
- Al Gore
If goods are created at the expense of the air, the water and the dignity of their human makers, then they're a failure of reason, not a triumph.
Things that are made in ways that are environmentally responsible and socially respectful to their labor force offer more value because they improve the world instead of messing it up. They give people more for their money.
We infuse this truth into the marketplace.
We help the best companies win.
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