Several months ago, I wrote about this baby carrots campaign that I noticed at HEB in Austin, TX.  As it turns out, that campaign (created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky) ended up winning a Jay Chiat Award for Strategic Excellence.

Here’s a link to the case study outlining the business challenge, the strategic solution and baby carrots’  spike in sales as a result of the campaign.

Key insights:

1. Baby carrots go to the veggie drawer only to be forgotten.  The trick was to get those deliciously snackable baby carrots into a more visible, easily accessible place.

2. Baby carrots have the same qualities as junk food.  Neon.  Crunchy.  Fun to eat by the handful.  Instead of trying to convince people that baby carrots are good for you (yaaaaaaaawn), reposition baby carrots as the original junk food – perfect for snacking.

In other words, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Sometimes, to get people’s attention, you have to look beyond traditional materials. For environmental campaigns, the materials you use to convey your message can be just as important as the graphic design.

Here’s a campaign from Focus DIY – a home improvement brand in the UK – that used seed paper to deliver their promotional messages for the spring planting season. To “Keep Britain Beautiful” the campaign suggested that consumers tear up the ads and bury them in their backyards.

The big idea: When you’re planning your next environmentally friendly campaign, think about the materials you could use to communicate your message. Do you have to use paper? Do you have to use ink? Take some time to re-think the medium on which your message is delivered. With innovative materials, your campaign could get a lot more attention and be much more sustainable in the process.

Recently, I’ve come across a couple photography websites that have made me realize the simple power of two photographs to tell a story.

Dear Photograph.  It’s a powerfully nostalgic concept that captures a picture within a picture, relying on crowdsourced submissions.

The concept is so powerful, in fact, that GM used the exact same concept in one of its ads.

Back To The Future.  This is a personal project by photographer Irina Werning.  Instead of a picture within a picture, Werning has gone to the trouble of recreating the exact same scenario as the one in the original photograph, juxtaposing the two images side by side.

Both of these projects point to incredible potential for environmental organizations looking to highlight the environmental changes that are happening, whether because of climate change, mining, fracking, oil drilling, etc.

To some extent, that’s what The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and Treehugger have done with the following photographs.

Sierra Club

Greenpeace

Treehugger

The bottom line:

Regardless of your nonprofit’s social cause, try to capture those before and after moments that can really highlight the meaningful change your organization is trying to create.  That means at the outset of a project you’ll need to plan ahead.  Bring your camera and snap as many pictures as you can from a variety of angles.  Then, when your project is complete, try to capture another dozen pictures from the same basic angles as the originals.  From there, you can stitch the photos together, side by side, and show the effectiveness of your nonprofit’s work in newsletters, Facebook posts, Pinterest boards and anything else you can insert a photo into.

My only question now is, “Does anyone know if there is a book or website out there dedicated to environmental before and after pictures?”  If not, why not?  This could be a great project for Yann Arthus Bertrand, the French photographer famous for his work on Earth from Above.

On my way to work the other day, while driving a Car2Go, I noticed this bumper sticker.

And it got me thinking: What if every Car2Go membership envelope had a bumper sticker that came with the membership card that read, My Other Ride is a Car2Go.  That way, Car2Go members could put the bumper sticker on their cars at home and help carry the Car2Go message as they drove around town.

But that could just be the beginning.  If Car2Go wanted to, they could go a few steps further, and create a fun, culturally infectious guerrilla campaign that showed these little bumper stickers on every form of transportation out there.

Here are a few ideas:

And of course, let’s not forget those boots, which got me thinking in the first place.

The bottom line: never underestimate the power of a simple sticker.  Why do you think Apple provides two Apple stickers with every MacBook, iPhone and iPod they sell?   If your fans love your product or the service you provide, they might very well carry your message for you.

What do you do if you see something happening in the world or in your community that you don’t think is right?

Like finding out from the New York Times that the reason the Grand Canyon decided not to go forward with its ban on the sale of disposable bottled water in Grand Canyon National Park was because of pushback from Coca-Cola, a major park funder.

Or finding out that Girl Scout Cookies are made with Palm Oil, an ingredient that causes clearcutting of irreplaceable rainforests and threatens the survival of humankind’s closest relative, orangutans.

Chances are, you probably post the article on Facebook and Twitter, and hope that the people you shared it with will do the same thing.  But what if you could do something more? What if you could get national attention for the issues that you care about and create positive change in a much bigger way?

That’s what Change.org is all about.  Leveraging standardized templates and grassroots campaigns to change the world one petition at a time.

Here’s how it works:

Of course, there are a lot of petitions that don’t get support and never get the kind of media attention they deserve.  So what are the secrets to creating a more effective petition?

1. Highlight a specific problem with a specific solution.  Ending animal cruelty is too broad. However, you could start a petition like this person did, asking a specific fast food chain to stop using pork from abused pigs.

2. Describe the problem clearly and succinctly.  If you can’t describe the problem in a paragraph or less (some would even say 140 characters or less), then chances are you’ve already lost your audience’s attention.

3. Tell a compelling story that people can relate to.  If people don’t see how the problem relates to them or could potentially affect them, they won’t care, which means they won’t act.

4. Support your claim with quotes and stats from mainstream media outlets.  This will help your cause in a couple of ways.  First, your cause will be more credible.  Second, you may be able to inflame a news story that already exists, but may have been overlooked by the population at large.

5. Keep up with the trends related to your cause using Twitter and Google Alerts.  Any news story or tweet that mentions the issue you’re petitioning is an opportunity for your cause to gain more traction and catch fire.  So make sure you reply to tweets, leave comments on news stories, and direct people to your petition.

Do you have additional tips for creating successful petitions at Change.org?  If so, please share them here, in the comments section below.

Here’s an interesting low-budget campaign from Greenpeace for World Water Day 2012.

Dirty little secret

Key takeaways:

1. Ask a provocative question.  People like solving puzzles, so to increase audience engagement use a question or set of questions to get people to lean in.  (Of course, you’ll want to make sure the answer is just as intriguing)

2. Split your campaign into multiple parts.  Remember, advertising is storytelling and campaigns are just stories told in multiple mediums/chapters.  In this case, Greenpeace asked a provocative question, and then, after a little while, revealed the answer in an intriguing way.

3. Capture the big reveal in pictures and video.  This campaign is very low budget – a few signs, some sponges and some water.  However, it feels much bigger and is able to reach a much larger audience because of the well-edited video now posted on YouTube. Remember to capture your campaign from start to finish so you can use the creative assets in slideshows, videos and newsletters later on.

Let’s face it. Bikes are a little more sensitive than cars when it comes to potholes, nails, and a whole host of other city driving conditions.  If you’re a daily bicycle commuter, you probably need to do all sorts of little maintenance and repair projects on a regular basis.

That’s why I’m intrigued by the latest addition to the Whole Foods market in downtown Austin.

The Whole Foods bike repair station is a brilliant idea because it simultaneously provides something of value to its two-wheeled customers while driving traffic into the Whole Foods store. It’s a place to rest, repair, rehydrate and refuel.

What puzzles me though is why more businesses and bike shops around town don’t create a network of similar bike repair stations.

Recently, in Good Magazine, there was an article about gas stations in Copenhagen turning some of their unused space into bicycle repair stations.

The note on the stations reads: “You can care for your bicycle here. You can pump and wash your bicycle and, inside the shop, you’re welcome to borrow a free bicycle care kit with oil, tire levers, allen keys, etc.”

And then there’s the Fixtation in Minneapolis, written about in Wired Magazine. It’s a bike repair station attached to a vending machine with all sorts of essential spares like patch kits, tubes, lights, multi-tools along with energy bars and drinks.

Why couldn’t Mellow Johnny’s or Bicycle Sport Shop or a national bike manufacturing brand like Trek put these kinds of stations at key locations around Austin?  It wouldn’t just be a random act of kindness.  It would be smart business.  It would be an advertisement for their brand.  It would be a potential revenue stream.  It could be set up in partnership with a local business or a national chain.  Imagine if every Starbucks or Walgreens had a bike repair station in front of it!

If bike stores and bike brands really want to see more people on bikes more often, they should start by putting bike repair stations on every corner.

One of the culprits to our throw-away culture is that most people have no idea where their local landfill is.  When we throw things “away” we don’t actually see where they go.  As soon as they’re out of sight, they’re out of mind.

A few months ago, I took a tour of Austin City Hall and just as I was about to throw something away, I saw something that made me think about where the trash actually goes.

Believe it or not, seeing that one word written on the trash can made me visualize the landfill where my trash would end up. I paused for an extra second to think about whether I might be able to recycle any of the items I was about to throw away.

Recently, at Whole Foods, I saw a similar labeling system.

And just the other day, I came across this article in Fast Company Co.Exist.

By adding the distance to the landfill, the University of Pittsburg has created what I’m calling a “location based awareness” of where you are in relation to the trash you’re throwing away.  As a result, “away” is no longer an abstract concept.  “Away,” in this case, is just 17.3 miles away.

According to the article, even though the sample size wasn’t huge, the addition of the yellow sign increased recycling rates by 29 percent.

I wonder if recycling rates would increase even more if other pieces of information were added to the yellow sign.  For example, what if you highlighted the number of pounds of trash thrown away each day at that particular trash can? Or what if you highlighted the year in which the local landfill is expected to close based on current rates of trash intake?  Or what if you simply added an image of the landfill itself?

Or what if you went all out and put a monitor above the bins and highlighted the life of two bottles – one that gets thrown away and ends up in a landfill and one that gets thrown into the recycle bin.  It could be a split screen, time lapse video of epic proportion!

Ultimately, what’s happening here is quite simple (and very powerful). The labels are creating a feedback loop.  And when people see the effects of their actions, more often than not, they end up changing their behavior.

There was a lot of fanfare on Black Friday about Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” advertisement.

Among my Facebook friends, I saw a fair amount of skepticism about the reverse psychology that seemed to be at play.  After all, how can a company that wants to stay in business promote that you NOT buy its products?

It’s a good question, and I think a lot of the answers can be found here, in this Q&A with Rick Ridgeway, Vice President of Environmental Initiatives at Patagonia.  Ultimately, I think the ad was meant to raise awareness more so than sales and to that end, I think they were extremely successful.  Also, it’s important to note that Patagonia is a private company, which means they can pretty much do whatever they want.  They don’t have to compromise their values because of shareholders who might move their money elsewhere if they feel they’re not getting a big enough return.

What has really caught my attention though with Patagonia’s Common Threads Initiative is the idea of “repair.”  I think it gets overlooked because of the emphasis on re-imagine, but I think there’s huge potential in the “repair economy.”

As it states on their website, and as Ridgeway says in his interview, “On our end, we’re offering a robust repair program that will turn around products in 10 days.”

It’s interesting because a lot of times in our throw-away society it’s less expensive to buy something new than to repair the old. This could very well be a huge service opportunity and could potentially turn into a leasing business model, similar to what Interface Carpet developed years ago with its Evergreen Lease System.

On the other hand, travel and adventure gear has a tendency to take on all sorts of sentimental value and it’s not something people are likely to lease back or throw away easily. I’ll be curious to see how many people end up sending their products in for repair and if Patagonia does anything via YouTube and Facebook to capture the stories of people whose products have been repaired. If Patagonia can keep the price of its repairs to a minimum and maintain their ten day turnaround, perhaps their gear can become like old pocket watches from the 19^th century – family heirlooms full of stories that get passed down from generation to generation.

The problem with the environmental movement is that, more often than not, calls to action don’t focus on specifics. Save the planet. Stop global warming. Eliminate waste. These are all macro issues that leave people feeling overwhelmed because they don’t know where to begin. If we’re going to have any real chance at solving these macro environmental problems, we’re going to have to break them up into thousands of micro issues that people can actually do something about.

That’s what I love about SipECup.  It’s not focused on “eliminating waste.”  It’s focused on a very specific micro problem: eliminating the paper cup trail left behind by runners.

According to the image above, over 7,500 paper cups are used and thrown away every day at Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Texas. That’s the simple, straightforward problem that Adrienne Oujezdsky set out to solve. Instead of just letting the paper cups get recycled, Oujezdsky saw an opportunity to replace the paper cup altogether.

Of course, there are other ways to eliminate the paper cup problem. You could always carry a water bottle during your run, but depending on the length of the run and the amount of water you’d need to carry, the weight of the water could be cumbersome. The simplicity of the SipECup design is that it lets you do the exact same thing the paper cup does but without the waste.

So the next time you’re faced with a big, macro environmental problem – like eliminating waste or stopping global warming – remember this: macro problems are really just a thousand micro problems in disguise. Instead of thinking about how to stop global warming, pick a specific area that’s connected to global warming, (e.g. car emissions) and start digging for a more specific subset of problems. For example, car emissions can be solved any number of ways. Electric cars, car share programs, bicycles, buses, telecommuting, etc.  But each one of those solutions has its own set of problems. So keep digging. Get as specific as you can until you find the root problem for the subset you’re focused on. When you get there, chances are the problem will be so refined, streamlined and straightforward that the solution will present itself.