Branding a city

Brian Lehrer had a fascinating piece today on how the public sector took on a private sector strategy to save New York during the 1970’s. The city invested in Branding. Faced with a failing economy, rising crimes rates and a bad reputation New York officials created the iconic campaign “I Love NY”.

My main takeaway from the piece was the comment Miriam Greenberg made about branding. She said that branding is a combination of both marketing and material, that you need more than just a great message. I completely agree.

There’s a lot of discussion about what companies and governments should invest in during these times. There’s healthcare, or education, or infrastructure. If anyone said branding, I bet the suggestion was widely dismissed.  But if you take Ms. Greenberg’s use of the term, its really not such a bad idea.  Branding helps people identify with products and if anything needs support of the people right now, its the economy. Its our cities and local businesses.  Its going to be the new products.

So for every project that we are launching, stimulus or not, lets make sure we put a solid branding effort into it too.

A lesson for the public and private sector alike.

There is a new tool for alleviating global poverty - capitalism.  Individuals such as Kickstart’s founder Martin Fisher focus on affordable technologies that address the economic conditions of the recipients.  Mosquito nets, oral re-hydration therapy and vaccines are excellent interventions for stemming specific ailments but they are less affective at addressing the underlying causes of poverty.

The idea is to move away from large charitable efforts and towards small scale products designed to meet local needs and provide people with the resources they need to make money.

Kickstart’s website says it clearly enough, “Poverty is caused by a lack of money.”

Laureen Wilcox, of WorldArk, lays out three rules for this emerging movement of design for development. A product should:

1. Increase income - most poor people are entrepreneurs by necessity and a tool that increase their income is a path to local investment in everything from education to sanitation.
2. Be affordable - the tools must be within the reach of the end user, yet should not be free.  The programme avoids having to decide who receives one and the pride of ownership provides the user with added incentive to achieve.
3. Be scalable - Individuals should be able to acquire the technology cheaply yet its capabilities should grow with their success. The goal is to not just improve people’s condition but to provide a path for a new and sustainable life.

Helping people build their own success on their own terms may prove to one of the most life changing methodologies.  Efforts like Kickstart and MIT’s DLab should be supported but they need to work in tandem with traditional advocacy efforts.  Read the rest of this entry »

About a month ago Juneau Alaska was cut off from its main source of power. An avalanche knocked out the transmission lines that connect city to a hydroelectric damn that has been providing cheap energy to the town. Energy prices have been on the rise since. You thought oil was bad? Energy costs for these folks to light the homes, run the stoves, power computers skyrocketed in price by 400%.

Yes, 400%. Electric bills that once cost 100$ are now 500$. In some cases, home owners are paying more for their electric bills than their mortgage payments.

So what did the town do? In under a week, the townsfolk were able to reduce their energy consumption by 30%. Frivolous neon signs were shut off. Vending machines, unused for the vast majority of their existence, where unplugged. Citizens are researching their past electric bills to discover which appliances are eating up the most energy and found ways to conserve their usage. They are even monitoring their own electric meters.

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I am not sure what is more amazing: The savings-killing spike in energy prices, or the immediate reaction by the citizens of Juneau. While we can begin to empathize with the emptiness of our wallets as we head to the pump this holiday weekend, I think we should all be inspired by how readily the town responded to the crisis. Clearly financial motivation is effective when trying to get the population at large to change its behavior.

As NPR noted in Morning Edition “Energy expert Allen Meier of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is visiting Juneau this week to offer advice on the crisis. He said the closest comparison may be Brazil in 2001, when severe drought gripped the hydropower-dependent country. Brazilians were told to reduce their electricity usage by 20 percent or be disconnected.” As follow up research has shown, energy consumption levels never really went up again even when water levels rose again. Yet Brazil has managed to maintain a strong growing economy despite its reduction in energy consumption.

I know many will argue that it’s the crisis at hand that motivated Juneau to cut their consumption, and we all shouldn’t be subjected to similar conditions. But I think it’s the magnitude of financial incentive that’s the real motivator. A cash incentive is a cash incentive, whether it comes from reductions in an astronomical utility bill, or a government tax rebate program.

Clearly, America’s supposed inability to make sudden changes in behavior is merely a figment of the imagination. Perhaps our government leaders at the state and federal level will take note. If you want to motivate to start changing your citizen’s behavior now, you have to provide adequate meaningful rewards. The long term pay-off in smarter communities with a better quality (and lower cost) of living will be well worth the expense of providing temporary rebates for reducing energy consumption.

I’m an avid listener of NPR’s Marketplace. In a world of constant spin, I consider them a voice of accountability in business journalism. As if they were trying to prove my point, they collected a network of environmental professionals in a blog called “The Greenwash Brigade”.

Collectively, the brigade is on the prowl for corporations who they’ve caught red-handed in the act of “greenwashing.” Greenwashing – for those not in the know – is when a company uses environmental responsibility as a marketing campaign, and in-fact is not at all about how their business operates.

It’s a misleading practice that tries to hoodwink all of us as consumers by convincing us that we are appeasing our consumer conscience by purchasing something that is better for the planet. In fact, when you look deeper into many companies, these products are “green” only on the surface, and the company as a whole has made no commitment to the environment. Lablling themselves as “green”, remains only a label and conveys little genuine value to the consumer or the envirnoment.

So how are we, the general consumer, supposed to make sense of all noise around green? The Brigade recommends that we should research the company as whole, review annuals reports and go through pages and pages of background data. As the Greenwash Brigade points out, even Seventh Generation makes it hard for consumers to discover if they are green washing, or not. This seems like a burdensome process, and one that is unlikely to be undertaken by the population at large, or even shareholders of a particular company. Why don’t the responsible members of corporate America push their very operations to the front? Show your bones, and help all of us understand and admire the inner workings of a good company.

You would think that corporations would see this as an opportunity to communicate with the public at large - connect to a subject that is emotionally tied to our buying decisions. Instead they all to often resort to marketing veneer.