Steven Heydt from Elite Island Resorts came up with a creative promotion that not only aligns investors’ depressed moods to the plus of a vacation in his chain, but also landed them broad media coverage, like this story in the New York Times.
Only one food product was selected from among thousands at the Natural Products Expo East in Boston last weekend as the Best Product of the Year: PeaceWorks’ KIND PLUS Mango Macadamia nutritional bar.
Here is a report from Gourmet Retailer:
The Mango Macadamia flavor of KIND Plus – the first new line of products since the launch of PeaceWorks’ original KIND Fruit + Nut Bars – was singled out at the massive tradeshow’s New Product Showcase as the best new food item. Introducing six new distinctive flavors like Cranberry & Almond, Almond & Cashew, and Passion Fruit Macadamia, KIND Plus brings enhanced nutrition to the delicious taste consumers have come to expect from KIND by adding targeted supplements like calcium, antioxidants, protein, and Omega-3. Learn more about KIND by visiting www.kindsnacks.com.
The Gourmet Retailer
News gathering and the media world did not change much for decades – till the internet started transforming them.
One of the disadvantages of the old media model is that to get greater revenues through greater circulation, media has favored conflict – blood, controversy, negative news in short. Positive news, even if truly newsworthy are under-reported. Stories are less and less deep, and more and more biased – designed to affirm beliefs rather than to inform.
But new forms of journalism and data-gathering promise to re-arrange incentives and market dynamics, and some really cool and creative new models are popping up with a lot of promise to empower ordinary citizens.
Spot.Us is an experimental-phase platform for community-based journalism. People can suggest stories they want covered, and donate funds to enable an investigative journalist to research the story. Others in the community who like a proposed pitch can get behind it to fund it – which is referred to as crowd-funding.
Pro Publica, another innovative platform, aims to build an independent roster of investigative journalists who will sell their stories to media organs across the world.
Indeed, in an age where data can be easily aggregated, it is not efficient or natural to have hundreds of redundant journalists reporting on the same story for their respective local communities. It makes more sense to aggregate their efforts. That, of course, is part of the premise of agencies like the Associated Press and Reuters, which should at least theoretically gain in prominence as more local news teams get thinned out.
It also explains why it is likely that when the dust settles there will only be a few giant national or international media entities dominating the news (New York Times, USA Today, Wall St Journal, CNN/Time, Sky, Al Jazeerah) – each distinguished by their angle and intended partisan audience.
But with the internet you can create a citizen-driven platform where investigative journalists are accountable directly to the people and their interests – no political, national, ethnic or partisan angles.
Will their interests be enlightened?
Judging from the blogosphere, not always. But while the internet may also offer much more static and narrow biased coverage, it should also increase variety and provide opportunities for greater depth and nuance – for those who look for it.
Pom Wonderful just came out with a new product that seems sooo weird to me – coffee drinks with pomegranate juice – but you can’t say they are not extraordinarily innovative and that their marketing is not at the cutting edge and refreshing.
Copywriters will admire the site: http://healthybuzz.com/
The product reminds me of when we launched many years ago at PeaceWorks the Raging Raspberry Chipotle sauce from Azteca Trading Company – which flopped for many reasons including that the flavors were a bit too "ahead of their time" (a year or two later a ton more Chipotle-infused spreads came into the market, but they eventually also died out).
But POM has such an awesome marketing muscle, has been such a remarkable leader in the food industry, and consumers seem to be looking for "buzz (energy) plus health," that this could be a big hit. On the other side it could hurt POM’s parent brand – which I associate with all natural fruit, not with coffee.
I am curious how consumers will react
Mike Edwards questions whether the trendy concept of philantrocapitalism exemplified by Bill Gates is as effective as the uncritical buzz it is generating. And he raises questions worthy of consideration, including this one in his q&a:
…what are the actual effects of business involvement in activities that are intended to promote social change? Where is business involvement useful, where might it be damaging, and do we have the evidence to separate one from the other? Here’s a list of things that business could usefully do:
- pay your taxes
- don’t produce goods that harm people
- pay decent wages and benefits
- stop subverting politics
- obey regulations in the public interest
The problem is, philanthrocapitalism does none of these things.
Well, business actually has a pivotal role to play beyond the basic code of decency Mike Edwards lists above. As the primary force in the 21st century, the private sector can make enormous positive contributions into our lives.
I am a strong advocate of engineering market forces to achieve positive change, marrying the business model to the social mission, as we’ve endeavored to do for the last fifteen years at PeaceWorks.
And I am similarly an advocate of using entrepreneurial and creative practices commonly found in the private sector to maximize impact in civil society, as we try to do at OneVoice.
But beyond critical appraisal of "philantrocapitalism’s" effectiveness advocated in Mike’s article, what most resonates and troubles me about the unexamined noise with this and the broader concept of "corporate social responsibility" is that often it is used to mask dishonest or noxious behavior from corporations, to create bland appearances about business contributions to society while hiding under the carpet abhorrent behaviors that may be the primary driver of a business.
Certainly, a company cannot justify or sugarcoat ruthless practices, or an underlying business model that harms people just by affixing the "csr" motto to its ads. Unlike when people purchased indulgences from the medieval Church to swiftly absolve them for abominable sins, you cannot (or should not be able to) donate your way into brand heaven in the 21st century.
In sharp contrast to Mike’s provocative article, take a look at this piece in TIME Magazine where Bill Gates discovers the field of social entrepreneurship for humanity, dubbing it "creative capitalism." Gates first announced this discovery in Davos back in January, where he was given 45 minutes to share how he conceived a utilitarian servile version of social responsibility. It struck me he had just discovered and repackaged a field long in existence, just as he appropriated the netscape browser and apple’s operating system.
Social contributions should have a soul, a sentiment, and a sincerity of purpose. Corporations are driven by human beings, so hopefully they will be driven to make our world better because this too is their world. I have yet to meet a business person (or a human being) that does not care about the world. But the trouble is that sometimes some corporate business models or junctures present people with concentrated profit-maximizing opportunities that cause harm to society overall. And no amount of "CSR" should exculpate taking the wrong path – whether by lobbying the government to help a specific industry at the expense of the community or the environment, or by undermining competition, or any of the items in Mike’s list.
In the end, consumers will see through corporate efforts to manipulate causes just to make them look hip and responsible. Alas, along with the unscrupulous corporation so too will fall the credibility of this important space – the sincere intersection between doing well and doing good.
Thomas Friedman contrasts US energy policy and US behavior to the way Danes live and have structured their lives to be energy-efficient, and almost energy-independent.
A new site just launched that analyzes food product labels for ingredients that may or may not be good for you. Too many items pose as "healthy" while containing ingredients like high fructose corn syrup which labelwatch exposes here as not healthful.
The site is not perfect yet; it’s search engine is clunky; and it still is missing KIND Fruit & Nut bars, which are the #1 Healthy Snack bar line (in terms of market share growth of entire space over each of the last 3 years, and #3 in overall size already in natural industry, according to SPINS, IRI and Nielsen). But it is a good start.
From the OneVoice newsletter:
The results are in!
Ø 50 Palestinian winners and 50 Israeli winners have been selected
Ø Read some of the winning essays
Ø Israel & Palestine to Co-Host World Cup in 2018? Check out one vision for the future
· OneVoice Youth Leadership & outreach update
Ø OneVoice Israeli & Palestinian Youth to Tony Blair: “A Mideast Quintet”
Ø From our Gaza office: Town Hall Meeting in Beit Hanoun
Ø OneVoice is Referenced in House of Lords Debate 5 Times
Ø OneVoice Student Leader at Stanford Organizes Islam-West Unity Event
The Imagine 2018 campaign has only just begun – now that 100 winning essayists have been selected, 10 foremost directors will begin selecting 10 essays to turn into short films.
These films – the visions of Israeli and Palestinian youth brought to life – will be used to inspire people worldwide to envision some of the tangible benefits peace – to empower people to take action, and to ensure that the leadership acts with urgency and commitment to reach a two state agreement which ends the occupation and all forms of violence, and establishes a viable, independent Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the state of Israel.
How you can get involved:
Donate – Sign up to the Movement – Forward our videos – Visit our blog & tell us what you think
The OneVoice Teams in Ramallah, Gaza, Tel Aviv, London, and New York
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Some will criticize this as Shimon Peres’s much-discounted "New Middle East" vision, but I love it, and I am confident that if Israelis and Palestinians get their act together and accept the historical compromises necessary to a comprehensive permanent agreement, this will only be the beginning. Check out this vision for the future of the Arava, intersecting Israel, Jordan and Palestine. It fits nicely within OneVoice’s Imagine 2018 Project.
Before you could type the lyrics to a song and find what you were looking for through google. Now check out this very cool site: www.midomi.com.
Even for out of tune people who can’t sing, like me, you humm a song and the site helps you find what you were looking for.
When the site got a different song from what I tried to humm, I tapped to hear what it sounded like, and it actually sounded closer to what I ended up singing.