social responsibility

Over the past 12 months, Pinterest has witnessed explosive growth. The site has topped 23 million unique visitors and average site visit time is nearly 100 minutes per month, making it one of the largest and most engaging social networks around. AdAge raves that  “…Pinterest has gone from relative obscurity to exalted status alongside Facebook and Twitter…”

The customer is always right – so goes the mantra of every sales rep from time immemorial. But, as we know, what customers want may not be best for the planet. For some brands, this presents a dilemma: how do you satisfy consumer needs while remaining eco-responsible?

A couple weeks ago, I sketched out an Oil Independence Plan for the United States that was based on a combined move to more efficient uses of petroleum as well as a much more aggressive move to oil- (and natural gas-) independent infrastructure, than is currently proposed in existing legislation in the US Congress. [Since posting that plan, Craig Severance has written an equally ambitious and more detailed plan which can seen here.

It's April. The flowers are bursting with color, trees are coming back to life, people are smiling, walking a bit more jauntily; hope abounds. It can mean only one thing: Baseball season has begun.

That, and the latest crop of pre-Earth Day surveys has invaded my in-box.

Last week I attended the Natural Products Expo West, the “world’s largest natural and organic products tradeshow.” Nearly 60,000 people attended the show to get a taste (figuratively and literally) of the latest and greatest in natural products, including snack foods, supplements, pet products, beverages, eco-friendly home products, and more from over 3,000 exhibits.

Despite there are a lot of efforts on recycling, very little of our stuff is recyclable and being recycled. I don’t think we are doing enough, designers and consumers have a dilemma, and we love nicely designed packaging but hate to see the kind of waste we’re producing. Food containers are one good example.

I've been a Bauhaus follower for 30 years. I am still fascinated by some of work produced during that period. A Bauhaus Summer School workshop was hosted last month by Michael Zinganel who is a freelance architecture theorist, cultural historian, curator, and artist from Austria.

Here we go again. In the run-up to yet another Earth Day, here is my third annual take on the bounty of polling data on consumer environmental attitudes that seems to hit my in-box this time each year. (See here for the 2007 and 2008 installments.) This year is no different. I've counted more than a dozen different surveys, market segmentations, and opinion polls since Barack Obama became president. By my estimation, that's a record.

by: Jennifer Rice

Ok, I’m a bit late to the game, but I just stumbled upon Liberty Mutual’s The Responsibility Project that was launched last year. The discovery led me to investigate whether its focus on responsibility was rhetoric or real.

by: Joel Makower