Continuing on from Jason's post, the green movement truly is the wave of the future. But I'd like to talk more specifically about Organic Cotton. In 2006, sales in the organic cotton market nearly doubled to ~$1.1 Billion with international retailers like Walmart and Nike starting to really push their organic clothing lines and offers. As the market grows explodes, it will be interesting to see how retailers react.
Organic Cotton Market
2001
2005
100+ SMB Retailers
30+ Major Retailers
Global Sales $245 Mil.
Global Sales $583 Mil.
Demand 5,720 Metric Tons
Demand 32, 326 Metric Tons
Supply 6,480
Supply 31,017 Metric Tons
Let me also mention that the market is growing 110% annually and is projected to be $2.6 Billion by 2008 which is an increase of 116%. In addition, by 2008 consumers are expected to be consuming 99,662 Metric Tons which is an annual growth of 75%. Therefore, it is sufficient to say that the players in the organic market are set to reap a large ROI.
Interestingly enough, the top consumer of organic cotton is Nike followed closely by Coop Switzerland (Grocery Store), Patagonia, Otto (Major German Retailer) and Walmart.
Other big players in the market include H&M with their new H&M organics line, Roots and their 100% environmentally friendly yoga studio, American Apparel and their Sustainable Edition line to name a few. These companies are starting to embrace the needs of their consumers and have the opportunity to corner the market on organic cotton. H&M specifically has a very cool organic baby line that will appeal to all mothers who want the best for the baby. (On that note, congratulations to Neil & Laurie and their new baby boy!!)
As Jason mentioned, pressure from the market is quickly mounting on all companies to employ more environmentally friendly standards and sell products that are better for the earth. The real selling points for me on this discussion are the numbers above. $2.6 Billion by 2008, 110% market growth year-over-year, almost 100,000 metric tons... the numbers are staggering. The opportunities in this arena are huge. Only a handful of companies have made a real commitment to the environment (Patagonia and Cotton Ginny are 100% Organic). With so much demand for organics already and an ever increasing profit margin for the companies that decide to play ball, how much longer can the Walmarts of the world really wait? Contributed by: Angus Gastle
For anyone watching the green branding space (is anyone not?), the past few months have been breathtaking. Even for us jaded ad folk who can work phrases like "tipping point" and "unprecedented rate of change" into any sentence (just try me), the sheer velocity at which things have started moving is pretty freaking crazy.
For years, the green movement crawled along, slowly gaining steam but always finding mainstream credibility slightly elusive. And then all of a sudden in the past year, and especially the past six months, things are moving exponentially. Food miles, air travel, carbon calories, getting rid of plastic bags, and now bottled water: it seems every month a new target comes into focus. Just how far have we come? Look at shopping bags. By now you've no doubt heard of the canvas shopping bag fracas started by designer Anya Hindmarch. Her canvas bag, designed in partnership with We Are What We Do and bearing the phrase "I'm not a plastic bag", was sold as a $15/£5limited edition last spring in places like Whole Foods and Sainsbury's. It quickly became a craze. Celebrities were seen with them. Lines formed around the block. Bags are sold on eBay at huge mark-ups.
But here's what's cool about all of this: you know that a trend has landed when the conversation gets all meta. After all, no one's seriously debating whether plastic bags suck anymore. We've moved onto spoofs and commentary. We have arrived.
All of this is by means of saying: can any brand, in any category, afford to not have a green strategy now? Given how many brands and categories have wasteful practices, and given quickly the pressure has been applied to plastic bags and bottled water, who's to say your category won't be next?
One of the interesting things about social networks and other web 2.0-y stuff has always been the opportunity for marketers to see how people actually talk about brands. There's no research effect, no worrying that people are trying to please the interviewer, no long questionnaires or sterile focus group facilities. Now you can see how your brand or product or campaign is being discussed/used/spoofed/etc in real time on blogs, on YouTube, on Flickr, and so on. (Or what's often worse, if it's not being discussed.)
Facebook looks set to trump all of that. With Facebook's meteoric rise (they're now at 25+ million users) over the last few months, I've been checking all the brands and categories we work on, and so far every single one has at least one group (and often dozens) set up around it - whether out of love or hate or ironic appreciation or bewilderment. As barriers to participation go, the bar is a lot lower to join a Facebook group (you need to click one button) than to film and post a YouTube video, or even to write a blog post, so there seems to be a lot more brand-centric discussion happening there than elsewhere. Although it's not always deeply insightful ("Tropicana kicks Minute Maid's orange juice ass!" is fairly typical), it's still amazing to watch.
Facebook has also just launched Facebook Polls, which lets you pose a question to Facebook users - either all of them, or targeted by age/geography/gender/group. It's really easy to use, super fast, and costs only $5 for set up and a variable cost (as low as $0.10) per response. I wouldn't exactly call it projectable or statistically valid, and I won't be basing any huge decisions on it, but as quick and dirty research options go (and especially for reaching young adults), it looks compelling.
And with the recent opening of Facebook's doors to external apps, people are starting to wonder if Facebook is on its way to becoming the next web giant - not just a site or a network, but a platform that all social networking can be built from.
In the meantime, I'm just glad this now has its own Facebook group:
The NY Times has a good article looking at research into the roots of superstition, ranging from lucky totems to sports fandom to magic (it makes clear it's talking about something distinct from faith).
I'm fascinated with this stuff - I have a degree in psychology and really should know better, but I still have my lucky rituals. According to the article, the idea that people can affect the outcome of events with their thoughts, wishes and rituals is "far more common than people acknowledge" and has evolutionary roots in the wiring of the brain. It's related to pattern recognition, and also to how our emotional brain can trump rationality. And it has some survival benefits: "the sense of having special powers buoys people in threatening
situations, and helps soothe everyday fears and ward off mental
distress."
But maybe it's not just superstition. The article doesn't get into this, but some psychologists and quantum physicists are starting to wonder if indeed our thoughts can, in a fashion, create reality. A subject of a lot of recent discussion in the personal coaching and self-help world is the idea of the "Law of attraction" - positive thinking can beget positive outcomes, and negative thinking negative outcomes. A documentary film and book on the subject, called "The Secret," is becoming a huge underground hit (I watched it a few weeks ago and despite some cheesy production values, it's quite interesting). And anecdotally, I've noticed recently an increase in people talking seriously about this stuff, without skepticism or irony.
My brain's too tired to figure out what it all means. But fortunately the always interesting John Grant has some related ruminations on the little rituals we all have, and the brands that sometimes are a part of them.
Thank goodness for John. But on this subject I'll leave the final word to Stevie:
Google's year-end roundup of the searches that defined 2006 came out last week as part of Google Zeitgeist. Anything that combines Borat, Banksy, and Hezbollah always makes for compelling reading.
I'm reading Steven Johnson's new book The Ghost Map for Gareth's book club, and remembered that I've been meaning to write something on a great article Johnson wrote in the New York Times Magazine a couple of months ago called "The Long Zoom." I've been thinking about it a lot, and referencing it ever since.
The bulk of the article is a profile and interview with the famous video game designer Will Wright (creator of SimCity and The Sims) about his new game Spore, but what interested me most was how Johnson frames the piece with a fascinating observation.
"Most eras have distinct “ways of seeing” that end up defining the period in retrospect: the fixed perspective of Renaissance art, the scattered collages of Cubism, the rapid-fire cuts introduced by MTV and the channel-surfing of the 80’s. Our own defining view is what you might call the long zoom: the satellites tracking in on license-plate numbers in the spy movies; the Google maps in which a few clicks take you from a view of an entire region to the roof of your house; the opening shot in “Fight Club” that pulls out from Edward Norton’s synapses all the way to his quivering face as he stares into the muzzle of a revolver."
So it looks, for example, like this:
Once I started looking for the long zoom, I began seeing it everywhere - the special effects shots on TV shows like CSI or House where you travel from inside someone's blood vessels through their organs and out to the autopsy table; the long pullback shots in Spielberg films from tight in on a character's face out to a reveal of them standing in a bustling crowd; the camera panning out at a sports event from a player to the whole stadium from the Goodyear blimp. At Leo Burnett we've recently even used this effect in some ads for the juice drink Five Alive - zooming into a character's brain to see what happened when they drank the product.
In the article, Johnson talks at length about how Wright's new game Spore may be the best example of the long zoom, because it compresses the entirety of evolution into one game, making you navigate from being a microbe swimming in primordial ooze to forming a creature, then a tribe, then a city, a civilization, a planet, and finally a galaxy. In typical Will Wright fashion, it sounds immersive and addictive.
But other than being a popular device right now, why is this act of zooming out from the granular close up to the wide context shot, or vice versa, defining of our era? Johnson explains further:
"...this is not just a way of seeing but also a way of thinking: moving conceptually from the scale of DNA
to the scale of personality all the way up to social movements and
politics — and back again. It is, by any measure, a difficult way of thinking, in part because our brains did not evolve tools to perceive
or intuitively understand the scales of microbes or galaxies."
Now this is a really big thought: the long zoom helps us see how things at different scales, from the littlest things to the biggest, are interconnected. This is actually a theme in a lot of Johnson's writing, including the Ghost Map. He talks at length in that book about the idea of consilience, being able to join things from different classes of knowledge together. This idea of seeing relationships across different scales is an immensely useful and important idea.
A lot of postmodernist thinking is about the idea that the meaning of things is inherent in their context. Now, as digital technology interconnects everyone and everything and floods us with data, that idea has become very real. Seeing the context of what something is connected to has become an important way to judge things. Many of the different internet media spaces reflect this in various ways. Which other blogs link to your blog, how many friends you have on MySpace, your eBay history, what groups you belong to on flickr, how many Diggs a website has: these are all examples of how connections have come to signify importance.
But more specifically, what the long zoom visually demonstrates is what you could call the verticality of interconnectedness - not just connections between peers or similar things, but the connections between things at different scales, between the small and the huge. Scale can seem to impose its own limits - it's easy to assume that small things should have small effects, big things should have big effects. But the long zoom helps us see that small things can have big effects. This idea is can be seen almost everywhere today. It is central to chaos theory and the butterfly effect. It also informs fractal geometry. It is part of our understanding of ecosystems and global warming, of bacteria and DNA and genomes. It appears in advice about managing diet and health. It explains how a brief video clip can affect an election, or a rumour can damage a company's reputation. It explains how some initial miscalculations in invading Iraq can have led to disaster, or how small terrorist cells can take on huge nations and armies. When everything is connected, little things can have big effects.
This way of thinking is all fairly new: until very recently a person's world-view was constrained by what they could perceive with their senses, and to their immediate surroundings. People had no conception of microbes or galaxies, nor of what was happening across the country or around the world, let alone how anything was connected. In the article, Johnson quotes Brian Eno (who seems, all of a sudden, to be everywhere again) talking about how this has changed:
“One of the things that’s obviously been happening for the past 100 or 200 years,” Eno told me, “is that the range of our experience has greatly expanded: we can see much smaller things and much bigger things than we ever could before. But we can also start thinking about much longer futures and much deeper pasts as well. That really makes a big difference to us as humans, because on the one hand it makes us realize that we’re very powerful in that we’re able to comprehend and see all of this universe. But it also makes us seem so much less significant. We’re a tiny blip on a tiny radar screen. I think this is a feeling that people are trying to come to terms with, the feeling of where do we fit in all of this.”
Eno hints at some big underlying currents of social attitudes and feelings that I think we need to examine and understand. But beyond that, what I like most about the long zoom is I see some useful applications in it for framing the changing world of brands and communication.
I think the long zoom can be an important metaphor for how we think about brands. Russell and others have talked about thetyranny of the big idea - the tendency in business to assume that all problems require "big solutions" and "big ideas." And Seth Godin's new book, titled "Small is the new big," is also about the power of being small. The long zoom and the interconnectedness of everything gives us another way of talking about this issue: that seeing subtle chains of causal connections can help us understand how small, seemingly unrelated things can build up to big effects.
Because of that, the long zoom is also an interesting metaphor for the skills needed for successful brand stewards today. In a world where everything communicates, and everything creates data, we need to understand how it all fits together, and how different choices might play out. We need to be able to see connections between things at different scales. We need to be able to see how small choices in things like packaging design, in targetting, or in the production details of an ad might relate to each other and what effects they might have on a brand. We need to be able to zoom from a discussion on casting specifications or ingredients out to the level of brand architecture or a long-term plan. The ability to see across different scales is a necessary skill to manage today's brands.
And the long zoom can also guide us in the kinds of experiences we create around our brands. For many brands, we need to create things that work at both the overall broad level for the casual observer, and at a level of deep granular complexity for the loyal user and die-hard fan who will spend a lot of time looking and playing with it.
I see a natural fit here with the idea of transmedia planning. When we use different media vehicles to deliver different parts of a brand's story, one way to look at it is they could deliver on different scales to satisfy different levels of engagement with the brand, from the very broad and wide scale - suiting the cursory glance - to the very detailed and personal scale - providing fodder for brand fans to talk about with others, encouraging conversations.
Taking a page from Adidas' Adicolor and the recent Beck album do-it-yourself cover art, Penguin Books (in the UK) has released a series of six classics with blank covers made of art-quality paper, so you can create your own cover. And of course you can submit your work back to Penguin and have it featured on their website.
I wonder when this trend will reach a saturation point and stop being interesting. Because I'm beginning to envision a world in the not-too-distant
future when all products will be sold with blank packaging so we can
all customize our products and be individual all the time. And how boring would that be? via PSFK
There's been a big trend around for a while towards all things arts & crafty: knitting, scrapbooking, deconstructed textiles, and sites like etsy.com where you can buy and sell anything handmade. But over the last little while it also seems to have crossed over into world of professional design, film, video, and advertising.
After years of reliance on Photoshop and CGI animation, all of a sudden there seems to be a counter-trend going on recently towards the rough instead of the slick.
The nice folks over at Influx posted on a similar thought a few days ago. For example the cover of Esquire magazine this month features this hand-written cover.
Michel Gondry started playing with cool handmade stop-motion techniques a while ago (including my favourite video ever), but it's gone more mainstream of late. Like this video by the Pocket Dwellers from earlier this year with lots of interesting design using ink and paper.
And for the promotional campaign to his upcoming film Bee Movie, Jerry Seinfeld deconstructs the whole animation process with live actors in bad costumes (what's funny is apparently the movie itself actually will be full CGI animation, this film was only made as a trailer).
As they note at Influx (where they have some other great examples), the idea seems to stem from a desire "to demonstrate that human beings were involved in the creative process.
It is interesting that this happening at the same time as creativity is
becoming more democratic."
So it seems like all the "unprofessional" creativity expressed by people on MySpace and flickr and YouTube - all the webcam films and picture-a-day videos - has seeped into the collective design consciousness, and is starting to change our expectation of what professional creativity can look like. Which seems to me to be a good thing.
Maclean's is a national news magazine in Canada. They're not the most cutting edge or insightful publication, but they have a fairly broad mainstream readership. And this week, they've become the latest instance of old media hugely, colossally, missing the point. Here's their cover article:
Now I realize they're probably trying to be contrarian and raise some hackles to sell some magazines, but come on. The internet sucks? Really?
You know, I was originally just going to post the shot of the cover and let it speak for itself, but now I think it deserves a response. Yes, the internet is filled with porn, and spam, and scammers, and misinformation, and bad people doing bad things, and mean people, and selfish people, and boring people, and crazy people, and the whole enterprise is messy and convoluted and confusing. But you know what? That's also what LIFE is like. And that's why Maclean's is missing the point.
The internet is one of the most powerful forces ever created not because it elevates dialogue to a better place or represents us at our best, but because it allows us to see each other exactly as we are. It reflects humanity in all its forms, from every
corner of the world. By connecting everyone to everything it allows us to see
unfiltered windows onto other people's lives in ways we never have been able
to before. And that teaches us important things about the human condition.
Ever since the printing press, media has been centralized and controlled and edited, so the world you're seeing is someone's version of the world. With the internet you really can get an unfiltered view of the world (of course, you can still choose to rely on others to control and edit for you), and have to navigate your way through it, find communities, share ideas, and build your own view of the world. That ability changes the power structures. It changes how information is disseminated. It changes how we see things. And yes, that's messy and nasty sometimes, but that is what life is. Saying the internet sucks is saying life sucks.
Watch this 9-minute video of a random selection of YouTube postings edited together.
Yes some of the people are boring, or silly, or use bad language. But I find it really beautiful and inspiring. And what gives you a better sense of humanity and what regular people are up to... this, or the op/ed page in a news magazine?
Let me also mention that the market is growing 110% annually and is projected to be $2.6 Billion by 2008 which is an increase of 116%. In addition, by 2008 consumers are expected to be consuming 99,662 Metric Tons which is an annual growth of 75%. Therefore, it is sufficient to say that the players in the organic market are set to reap a large ROI.
Other big players in the market include H&M with their new H&M organics line, Roots and their 100% environmentally friendly yoga studio, American Apparel and their Sustainable Edition line to name a few. These companies are starting to embrace the needs of their consumers and have the opportunity to corner the market on organic cotton. H&M specifically has a very cool organic baby line that will appeal to all mothers who want the best for the baby. (On that note, congratulations to Neil & Laurie and their new baby boy!!)
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