I am sorry,

A scientific fact: in risk-communication (like campaigning to stop smoking, or avoid drug-use) you will reduce your beneficial effects greatly when your campaign intends to scare your audience. Fear is not productive. So, showing black lungs in your public service announcement will not have an effect on people quitting smoking. But, this is only true for mass-media campaigns. If you were to show a picture of the same black lungs in a face to face educational setting, it’s a different story. But in those settings you would also give people tips on alternative behaviour, on the odds of actually getting sick, on the social norm concerning smoking, et cetera. The picture does not have to convey the entire message. (another thing that does not work, by the way: advocating abstinence as an hiv (or other sti) prevention program. Also scientifically proven. And did you know that the prevalence of sti among religious groups is higher than among non-religious groups, in the same country?)

Anyway; our world faces a lot of dangers in the coming few decades. Besides global warming we also face the threat of nuclear technology ending up the wrong hands, there are less and less fish in the ocean, there are more and more deserts… It all looks quite negative. At the same time, we’re not doing anything. I mean; some people are, but on the whole… We’re all still getting in our cars, we keep buying cheap meat, we make hard copies of every file we get and throw the paper out right after. It’s like we’re dancing on the volcano. Nobody seems to care about the future of our planet. We say we do, but we don’t ‘walk the walk‘.

I’m going to pitch an unusual suspect for this lack of action; the internet. And I will have a hard time explaining why. I’ll do so in two parts, starting with – appropriately – part one: The internet gave us -first- a lot of extra media-competition, and now it has given us a form of media-anarchy. The traditional news media have to fight to get and keep their audience. And how do we do that? With a lot of thrill seeking, scandals and negativity (to explain why that is the case, would be whole different posting). The media-anarchy (referred to as web 2.0) means that everyone is now a media-exec. We are all bloggers. And what bloggers generally get most attention? The ones that give us the dirt and the scandals. The ones that teach us that everyone we know is probably an unreliable, lying piece of… So everyone is focussing on negative news. Everyone that’s trying to bring any form of positive news is probably a weed-smoking, tree-hugging hippy that’s to be (verbally) attacked and ridiculed.

Part two of the explanation: up until about fifteen years ago we all had to rely on a select number of editors in chief for our news. Our world view depended entirely on the opinion of a handful of well-educated professionals of what was ‘news’ and what wasn’t. The normal response would be: the internet-model is superior to that. Now you no longer have to depend on the traditional media to give you an insight of the condition of the world… you can see for yourself on millions of websites or on obscure digital channels we can now receive with our satellite dish. This is entirely true. But what if most of the news you get to see is bad news? What if all you see is that all over the world there is violence, crime, and everyone all over the world is abusing our planet? Wouldn’t that just mean that you would feel that it does not make one bit of difference what you do as an individual to help out? There wouldn’t be any point.

In all honesty… I don’t have much faith in this hypothesis myself. But that’s no reason to not post it. That’s just web 2.0

I’m guessing a lot of you, dear readers, are not very familiar with the ‘cradle to cradle’ concept. The reason for that could be, other than just a mild distaste for anything ‘eco-friendly’, that marketing and C2C (hey, it’s sounds a lot more interesting now, doesn’t it?) seem a bit contradictory. Let me explain: C2C is eco-friendly but does not approach that from a moral high ground, but from simple economical sense: producing waste will cost you money. If everything you produce has an economical value, because it ads to the biosphere you will therefor, make more money. All pollution is stuff a producer made, for which he does not get paid… so that doesn’t make sense. It’s all just a matter of design, good design will not reduce waste, it will get rid of it.

How would this work in practice? Some examples; icecream packaging that melts when it gets defrosted. A company has added tiny seed to the packaging so that every time you throw the wrapper away you are spreading plants, therefor adding to the biosphere (I guess there are a couple of foreseeable problems to this, watch the documentary ‘Darwins nightmare’ about the East-African Lake Victoria for an obvious example, but still). Another example, a car that runs on compressed oxygen; the more you drive around, the cleaner the air gets. Anyone who has ever seen a photo of the smog over LA of any major Chinese city understands how this would help. It’s possible to compress the air making use of ‘clean’ energy so there would beno waste. And Ford Company is, in the meantime, designing a car that is completely C2C as well. Traditionally, to produce a 3000 pound car, you would use 50.00

Sounds pretty amazing huh? If you want to learn more, there’s loads of stuff about it on the net and I strongly recommend the book by the C2C founding fathers, William McDonough and Micheal Braungarten.

So, now to marketing. Marketing should be defined as: tricking people into buying crap they neither want nor need, with the forever unfulfilled promise of finally satisfying the consumers’ unhappiness. I know we’re all taught at university that marketing is about listening to our customers and that the customer is in the driving seat and that this is the story we tell each other and other out in the open, but this is, actually, BS. 95% of all marketing activity is about pushing unwanted crap, so that should actually be the definition. The ones of you that are reading this are obviously responsible for the remaining 5% so I’m sure we have no need for discussing this matter any further. So, it would seem, that the outcome of any marketing activity is: waste. And that’s not very C2C. Unless…

McDonough and Braungarten already knew that it’s not possible to use 100% of everything you put in, in the end product, some stuff will get discarded. So they said: waste is food. (remember the icecream wrappers?) You may need water to cool your production, but there is no reason why this water should get polluted. It is actually quite possible to have cleaner water go out of your factory then went in. I think we can consider ‘market segmentation’ and ‘targeting’ the equivalent of ‘reducing polution’. Marketeers try to, or have to, limit their polluting activities, not because they care, but because it makes economical sense. But try to ‘think outside of the box’ for a minute (it is something that’s supposedly in your job description isn’t it?). Your job is to sell crap, why not try to add value to (make food of) that crap as well as as the selling activities as well. I am quite sure that McDonalds could think of something better to put in their Happy Meals than Disney puppets made out of plastic. I am quite sure they have research on how long it takes for their gifts to be thrown away. If you make the give-away not just biodegradable but also add something that actually adds to the biosphere, that would help enormously. Or how about; you can return it to McDonalds so they can reuse the arts for new toys to give away? While we’re at it; why don’t they sell their burgers in stuff that adds to the biosphere? And how about those coupons that are handed out on the streets? How much of that is thrown away? Imagine all the seeds, leaves and branches that birds tear of trees and drop… that’s not pollution, that’s dding to the biosphere. Everyone that buys from Mcdonalds or receives leaflets or coupons from McDonalds could be like those birds. Without having to think about it, just throw all that stuff away (just like they do now). The architect Mcdonough likes to view buildings as trees; adding to their ecosphere with all its activities. All marketing activities could do that too. Just think outside of the hamburgerbox.