Monday 20 October 2008

Nau & Again


Nau have been bought by a nice-enough seeming outdoor clothing company called Horny Toad and are back in business. Staff numbers are down from 60 to 12 and the % of sales to causes is also a bit slimmer but it is good anyway to celebrate such a nice and brief-lived brand being brought back from oblivion. via core77

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

nothing to do with the post this is supposed to be a comment for. was just looking at 'the green marketing manifesto' on amazon and reading a few of the reviews. i don't get it; ok, i can see the book is anti green-wash, which is clearly a good thing. i think anyone is happy to spit on the green marketing bollocks which, say, BP, emits, or a thousand others. but as a marketer you either work for a genuinely green company or you don't. if you do, great, if you don't, well, ... not a lot to say. i mean it's the company/product/service itself that's green or isn't green. not the marketing. marketing, to me, is about connecting the public/consumer with your product/server. shortening the distance between the two. how is marketing green or not green? it's the product/service which is green or not green. and that just depends on who you work for. what am i missing?

Stefaan Vandist said...

Hello anonymous.
The Green marketing Manifesto is a book on how to make Sustainable products, services or lifestyles successful. It provides various angle points and strategies.
Is that different then other marketing? Yes and no.
It is marketing for sure, but it depends on different codes, just like marketing for coffee or beer depend on different strategic codes.

That's why it's a Green marketing Manifesto.

Kind Regards,
Stefaan Vandist
http://cause-encounters.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

hello Stefaan, thanks for the reply.

right, just seems that marketing is something which goes in the middle, like a pipe. it doesn't effect what's being carried at all. you're either piping environmentally friendly stuff or you're not. so i guess the book assumes you are carrying environmentally friendly stuff in the first place and starts off from there. i think that's what you're saying (the book is for people who have environementally stuff to market and makes suggestions on how to go about that), and i suppose that's pretty darn obvious. just seems to me that that gets a little bit forgotten maybe (not necessarily by you or the book), possibly... who knows. just feels that way a bit.

Sian said...

Marketing can also be a term used to encompass the entire process of selling a product, from it's 'birth' to it's 'death' - so, from what I've read of the book, even if you are marketing what is an 'ungreen' product you can make fundamental changes in the way it is created, distributed or consumed which will make it 'more green'. For example, if you are in the car selling industry, ok - you still have to make sales of cars but you can also promote that people use their cars more economically, walk more, get involved in car shares etc.

Obviously that's not the ideal 'green' marketing vision but it is a way that companies which aren't green can start to make a difference.

That could be completely wrong, but that's the sort of message I'm getting...

John Grant said...

hi I didnt really want to weigh into this, I hate it when someone raises a question on a blog & gets "the author" weighing down on them like they are a newspaper editor or something. Honestly we are all trying to work out if you can combine marketing and tackling climate change, social justice, even consumerism. One thing i really liked is that the original comment seemed to stem from just reading amazon & some reviews which seemed like a very resource light way to have been set thinking about this stuff!!! i broadly agree with the other comments anyway, thank you all.

the only thing I'd add is 'what is a genuinely green company?' I've worked with the likes of Body Shop, innocent, co-operative, The Ecologist and spoken to many others and they have been critically aware of how imperfect and in some places harmful their processes are. What we are looking for is rapid reform, creating a world and economics which supports life on earth and I'm not sure the greener companies are there yet either, certainly the ones I know and love dont remotely think they are

Just food for thought

:J