Pete Cashmore of Mashable interviews David Jones, global CEO of Havas and Euro RSCG Worldwide and co-founder of One Young World, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Among the topics: David’s new book, Who Cares Wins, and the power of social media to effect change.

Documented@Davos: David Jones, Havas, One Young World from Michelle Laird on Vimeo.

Interesting post in The Guardian this week about steps businesses can–and should–be taking to promote sustainable behaviors:

Research shows that changing people’s habits through sheer force of persuasion is hard, especially if their surroundings stay the same.

Marketing campaigns can try to encourage people to live more sustainably, but “it’s entirely in the hands of the consumer whether they do or not,” says Lucy Shea, CEO of sustainable communications agency Futerra. “It rests entirely on the efficacy of that campaign, and often behavior change doesn’t result.”

An alternative is for brands to “build in behavior change so there is no choice but to use a product in a lower impact way,” says Shea. Innovations that push people towards sustainable living without preaching can range from large-scale infrastructure such as cycle hire schemes, to hair-cleaning products.

“Dry shampoo is one of my favorite examples. It was never made to be environmental, it was made basically for ease,” says Shea. “But the result of being able to spray your hair between washes, and therefore wash it less, is actually the same as all of these worthy environmental campaigns asking you to spend less time in the shower.”

Smart technology has great potential for designing sustainability into everyday life. Parcel carrier UPS, for example, has programmed its truck drivers’ navigation systems to minimize the amount of fuel they use for each journey. On American roads, turning left at a junction leads to higher fuel consumption because drivers have to wait to cross an extra lane of traffic before they can turn. By programming their drivers’ route maps to avoid left turns, UPS makes sure they drive more efficiently.

Smart thermostats in homes go further still, not just guiding consumers but acting sustainably on their behalf. The “learning thermostat” designed by the former head of iPods at Apple, for example, can sense whether anyone is at home, or what the weather is like, and adjust the house’s temperature accordingly. According to the BBC, its makers claim it can cut household heating bills by 20-30%.

Read the full article here.

Who said sustainability can’t be fun?

Find out more about the equestrian-inspired Fayton concept car at Yanko Design.

Not all global businesses are headed by forward-thinking leaders like Unilever’s Paul Polman or Marks & Spencer’s Sir Stuart Rose. But within large corporations there are often senior executives who understand that a move toward social responsibility and sustainability is the way forward. At the Global Social Business Summit in Germany in 2010, delegates were predominately from the nonprofit sector, but there were also a number of people from major corporations looking for ways to adopt social business initiatives and apply them to their own businesses.

A senior executive from one of the world’s top consumer goods companies said that he was looking for ideas about sustainable ways of creating social benefit. He shared that the global company he works for had shrunk its corporate social responsibility budget during the downturn and that it was now restricted to straightforward philanthropy in the form of charitable donations, disaster relief, and the like. He said his biggest issue, as an individual working in a huge organization, was how to move socially beneficial activities from being part of a siloed CSR operation to being part of the wider business, how to do that in a way that was sustainable, and—most difficult of all—how to convince the wider organization that it was not only possible but also desirable….

The executive at the summit said he was considering various options but that he didn’t really want to operate a distinct “pilot scheme” set to one side of the business. He wanted to understand how to make what he called the “jump” from sidelined CSR to incorporating social value into the mainstream business. “I need to know how to create social benefits in the markets that I am already in and with the products I am already selling,” he said.

While an understandable reaction, a pilot scheme is one way of experimenting to get proof of success: Adidas and Danone are both operating social business schemes, set up as discrete business units. The Danone scheme began after a meeting between Professor Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, and Franck Riboud, chairman and chief executive of Groupe Danone, which resulted in the former convincing the latter to invest in a social business. The business provides fortified yogurt to malnourished Bangladeshi children.

One of the benefits of entering the Bangladeshi market and South Asia, where Danone previously had no presence, is that the company can learn more about the market and then apply those learnings to the broader business. So while the social business itself is thought to still be making a loss and has attracted a number of critics, there are other benefits to Groupe Danone. In another example Adidas has also embarked on a joint venture with Grameen, which sells shoes to poor people in Bangladesh for less than one euro a pair. The mission of the Grameen–Adidas company is to make sure that no one, child or adult, goes without shoes.

French water company Veolia has launched a joint social business with Grameen to serve poor people with nutrition and safe drinking water. Germany’s BASF SE and Intel of the USA have entered joint venture social businesses to produce chemically treated mosquito nets and provide information and communication technology for poor people, respectively.

These schemes are not without their critics, and commentators often query the “purity” of motivation behind some initiatives that involve big business. Some dismiss them as “tactical” and are skeptical that big business is fundamentally committed. It is easy to criticize a big brand attempting to do good on the grounds that there is something “in it” for the brand. I would say, firstly, who cares what the motivation is, or whether there might be some benefit to the brand, if the end result is good and creates positive change in the world? Secondly, the whole point is actually that there must be some positive benefit to the business or brand. If we truly want business to change, then socially beneficial business must add value to the company, otherwise it will be impossible to convince the more reluctant companies, shareholders, and board members that it is a viable route.

One senior executive working on Adidas’s footwear project in Bangladesh described difficulties with NGOs, financial institutions, and consumers in developed markets who question how committed big business really is to being part of changing the world. This points to the potential danger that, as business genuinely tries to be more responsible, rather than embracing and encouraging that, NGOs and other parties will actually distance themselves and criticize the attempts, thereby acting as a major dampener to the movement. Obviously, business needs to be genuine about it. But if it is, then its efforts should be welcomed. I am not suggesting that there should be no scrutiny or accountability, far from it, but if real people who are in need are getting real help in a transparent way, then this has to be a good thing.

My view is that these early drivers of a change of focus within the corporate sector and change for social good should be encouraged at every step. Yes, there will be failures. No, not everyone’s intentions will be as good as they should be. But only the inclusion of the corporate sector in the development of social business will ensure that social business, as a concept, will become truly mainstream and really can help effect positive change in the world.

David Jones is global CEO of Havas and Euro RSCG Worldwide, and cofounder of One Young World.
Excerpted from Who Cares Wins: Why Good Business Is Better Business (Pearson/FT Publishing, December 2011), this post is running simultaneously on this site and our sister blog, prosumer-report.com. Buy the book on Amazon.

Image credit: Creative Commons/DoubleGrande@flickr.com

One of the biggest global TV hits of the past few years has been Mad Men—a program about the birth of consumerism in the traditional advertising world, which aired primarily on “traditional” media. Not only does the success of this show help to make the point that so-called traditional media is not yet dead, but it is also a great demonstration of the shift from a world of image to a world of reality.

The marketer’s job used to be about creating the best possible image for any product. No matter how divorced from the truth that image might have been.

Consider the signature “It’s toasted.” It sounds like the slogan for a delicious and nutritious food product. But the following exchange from the above-mentioned TV show reveals it is anything but:

Don Draper: This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal. We have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want. How do you make your cigarettes?

Lee Garner, Jr.: I don’t know.

Lee Garner, Sr.: Shame on you. We breed insect-repellent tobacco seeds, plant them in the North Carolina sunshine, grow it, cut it, cure it, toast it.

Don Draper: There you go. There you go. [Writes on chalkboard and underlines: “IT’S TOASTED.”]

Lee Garner, Jr.: But everybody else’s tobacco is toasted.

Don Draper: No. Everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike’s…is toasted.

Don Draper’s line, “We can say anything we want,” may have been a mantra for marketers and advertisers in the past century, but we now live in a world where reality, not image, is everything.

Naomi Klein’s best-selling book No Logo purported that people would no longer be interested in brands. Whether you buy into that theory or not—and I personally don’t, as I think in a world of more and more messages, shorter and shorter attention spans, and smaller and smaller screens, brands will become more not less important to navigate the clutter—the one thing that is certain today is that consumers are increasingly interested in the company behind the brand and what that company believes in and stands for.

In today’s open world, it’s incredibly difficult for a company to pretend it is something it is not. Someone, somewhere, will find out and share that with the world. People are now interested in who makes the products they buy. So far from “saying anything” and creating a great image for your product or company, the key to today’s successful social brand is to create or identify the best possible reality and share that with as many people as possible and to actually make that reality better in the first place.

Perhaps the best recent example of reality in marketing is the Domino’s Pizza campaign in North America. What Domino’s did went against every previous marketing convention. Rather than hide the research that said that people thought their products tasted really bad—with consumer comments ranging from “like cardboard” to “not much love in that”—they shared them with the entire world in their television advertising and used them as the platform for a very successful turnaround. And in the next development of their campaign, they actually started showing the food in their advertising the way it really looks, rather than spending hours prepping and heavily retouching it to look amazing. The approach seems to be working. At the time of writing, same-store sales have grown 14 percent year on year. Proof that honesty really is the best policy.

Another great example is the Dulux Let’s Color campaign. Let’s Color is the platform for Dulux’s bigger-picture mission to bring color to brighten up grey spaces around the world—the creative execution of it was to actually engage the local communities in poor areas of Rio in Brazil, Jodhpur in India, and London and Paris and to film them painting depressing and dreary places with bright vibrant color. This real footage of real people painting real places was then shared with the world.

Reality doesn’t just extend to marketing communications, however. It extends to every area of the mix. For those people worried that their reality isn’t quite as good as they would like, they needn’t be. Today’s social consumer is more interested in honesty than perfection. Walmart and Marks & Spencer are completely transparent in reporting how they are performing against numerous ethical targets they have set themselves. When they fail, they say by how much and what they are going to do about it. This gives much greater credibility to the things that they say they have accomplished.

Other companies, such as Starbucks, are now following this template of honesty in their reporting around social responsibility. Businesses that seek to gloss over or omit where they have fallen short will be regarded as dishonest. The digitally empowered Prosumer who decides he or she doesn’t like what a business is doing is to be feared—and actually, I would argue, much more so than regulatory bodies. Advertising and communications campaigns can be hijacked in a single click and turned into a liability rather than an asset.

David Jones is global CEO of Havas and Euro RSCG Worldwide, and cofounder of One Young World.

Excerpted from Who Cares Wins: Why Good Business Is Better Business (Pearson/FT Publishing, December 2011), this post is running simultaneously on this site and our sister blog, prosumer-report.com. Buy the book on Amazon.

Image credit: Creative Commons/clotho98@flickr.com (Lucky Strike)

How much dead, obsolete, or simply unwanted electronic discards are lurking in basements, garages, and on shelves? In the Unites States alone, the  Environmental Protection Agency reports, consumers in 2010 owned 2.4 million tons of electronic stuff they no longer wanted.

Find out where more of the detritus of the Digital Age is landing these days, in Adweek.

Image credit: Creative Commons/ÇP@flickr.com (Curtis Palmer)

Organic and eco makeup will continue to gain ground in the coming year as more of us demand chemically clean cosmetics. Look also for the market for Halal cosmetics to expand. With the world’s Muslim population set to grow from 23 percent to 26 percent over the next two decades, according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, this sector of the industry has nowhere to go but up. Abiding by many of the same values that govern eco cosmetics, Halal cosmetics boast high ratings in the cruelty-free and purity zones, so don’t be surprised to see health-conscious non-Muslims giving Halal a go as well.

This post was adapted from Euro RSCG Worldwide’s The Big Little Book of Nexts.

Someone seems to have hit the “mute” button on the media’s coverage of climate change. The level of coverage declined roughly 20 percent in 2011 from 2010′s levels and nearly 42 percent from 2009′s peak, according to analysis of DailyClimate.org’s archive of global media.

Read more about it here.

Unless you’ve been sleeping in a Styrofoam bed, you’ve no doubt noticed ecomania taking a global hold on everything from how we travel to how we dress, to how we wash our faces. With so much concern for our environment, as well as a desire to not be wasteful in these uncertain economic times, look for more brands to jump on the green bandwagon as consumers continue to challenge companies to not only provide goods and services, but also to do good while doing it.

Hotel brands from Hilton (a recent stay in a Hilton had us fumbling for the lights mid-shower as their bathroom lights are now on timers) to chains in China are finding all sorts of ways to be green. And ecotourism is growing as a vacation option for those looking for a more enlightened approach to travel. Cambodia recently hosted the World Ecotourism Conference with the goal of making Southeast Asia a huge ecotourism destination. We’ll see more organized efforts to lure travelers along the lines of organic farm visits in the Philippine city of Baguio, where visitors learn about the merits of organic farming and eating healthfully.

If you’re wondering what to wear on all your eco adventures, there is plenty of eco-chic fashion to suit every taste. Designer Stella McCartney, a longtime vegetarian, has launched an eco-friendly sunglass line, and Nike is offering its Environmental Apparel Design Tool, based on the company’s Considered Index, to helpdesigners make items with long-term sustainability in mind. Nike used the tool to create jerseys for the 2010 World Cup. Nike calls the shirts “the most environmentally friendly and technologically advanced kits in football history” and noted that the manufacturing process diverted nearly 13 million plastic bottles from landfills. Meanwhile, in fashion-forward Japan, Triumph International is turning old bras into power-generating fuel.

Conscientious packaging is also all the rage. Coca-Cola introduced its kinder PlantBottle—30 percent of which is plant-based. Not to be outdone, Pepsi came out with bottles made entirely from vegetable matter: orange peels, oat hulls, potato scraps, and other leftovers from its food business. Procter & Gamble released a new Gillette Fusion ProGlide Power Razor in environmentally sustainable packaging that uses plastic 79 percent less plastic than the traditional version. And for you coffee lovers, Planetary Design has created the Double Shot, a stainless-steel mug that doubles as a French press and also stores extra coffee or tea leaves inside to help get you over the 3 p.m. hump.

This post was adapted from Euro RSCG Worldwide’s The Big Little Book of Nexts.

Alabama is one of the least healthy states in the U.S. It’s ranked 46th out of 50 by the United Health Foundation and lags behind only Mississippi in terms of percentage of obese adults (32.3). Concerned by their state’s poor nutrition–and, in particular, by the lack of access to healthful, local foods–entrepreneurs Jen Barnett and Sam Brasseale have launched Freshfully, an online marketplace that gives Alabamians information about and access to better-for-you foods. The site offers an online grocery store, local food guides, and healthful recipes for preparing fresh foods. Check it out here.