Marketing Sustainable Products: From Label Compliance to

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Marketing Sustainable Products: From Label Compliance to Customer Communication

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Speakers:

Bon Appétit Management Company, Maisie Greenawalt, Vice President, Strategy

Numi Organic Tea, Greg Nielsen, Director of Marketing

Three Twins Ice Cream, Neal Gottlieb, Founding Twin

Whole Health Marketing, Nils-Michael Langenborg, Founder and CEO Moderator:

Presidio Graduate School, Rodrigo Espinosa, Adjunct Professor; Lonesome George & Co, Partner

According to an Aberdeen Group study of environmentally sustainable companies, 35% of those surveyed said green

products offer competitive product differentiation and 28% see a demand for more eco-friendly products. Sustainable

products undoubtedly stand at the forefront of many corporate initiatives, but are corporations effectively marketing

these products?

In the current competitive landscape, consumer communication and label compliance is of paramount importance in

establishing an eco-friendly business identity. The results of successful green marketing campaigns not only lead to

greater and more positive brand recognition, but also to an increase in the consumption of these goods as consumers

are increasingly informed by an environmental social consciousness.

http://www.aberdeen.com/



Contents

TRENDS IN MARKETING 3

Marketing Basics 3

Social Media Marketing and its Impact 5

Integrating CSR into the Fabric of a Company 6

Selecting a Price Point 8

Experiential Commodity Products 9

Q&A SESSION 11

The Value of Certification 11

Employees and Social Media 13

The Gimmick Factor 15

Sharing Social Benefit Programs 16



“The original vision was for a consumer label and that consumers would care. We found out that medium and large scale purchasers care more because their consumers care. Thus, Food Alliance has become more of a B2B label. That does not mean that you still not see it labeled on some products of store shelves.”

– Maise Greenawalt, Vice President of Strategy, Bon Appétit Management Company

TRENDS IN MARKETING

Marketing Basics

Moderator Rodrigo Espinosa with Lonesome George & Co began the panel by asking the panelists why their

product is in existence, why is it better than the other, and who is it that cares about the product.

Neal Gottlieb from Three Twins Ice Cream responded that they wanted to created a great tasting, organic ice

cream that has a sustainability component included.

“The ‘why’ behind Three Twins is really to make a great product that appeals not just to the hippie-dippie,

organic consumer, but to make a great product that adds value regardless of whether you drive a Prius or not.

It adds value because of taste and quality, and then it has the attribute of organic other sustainability measures

tied in. Therefore, that can appeal to far more than just this niche organic consumer. Hopefully, down the road, it will be on board

to be a prominent national brand on par with Ben and Jerry's or Haagen-Dazs. But, we are doing this in a way that is absolutely

about organic to the core and not taking any short cuts. We are also being forthright about shortcomings in sustainability, which we

all have since we are not growing lettuce in our back yards.

Maisie Greenawalt from Bon Appétit Management Company responded by talking about both Bon Appétit

and the Food Alliance.

“The Food Alliance started about 12 years ago and the reason why was to define sustainable agricultural

practices so that there could be a market benefit for producers who are producing in a sustainable method.

The first part was defining sustainable agricultural practices and Food Alliance takes a multi-disciplinary

approach to that definition. It is not just about inputs or pesticides, which are very important, but it is also about how animals are

treated, how water is used, and how people are treated. For the 'who cares’, it turns out that purchasers do care.



“The original vision was for a consumer label and that consumers would care. We found out that medium and large scale purchasers

care more because their consumers care. Thus, Food Alliance has become more of a B2B label. That does not mean that you sti ll

not see it labeled on some products of store shelves. But, I can tell you as a purchaser from Bon Appétit Management Company, we

are continually evaluating the purchasing practices by our customers and by third parties. We also have a certification by third

parties that we can be transparent about and show real data behind our claims. This is really critical and Food Alliance has gives us

the ability to have data.

“Having a common set of standards provides market access to a different size producer. This is where a really small producer maybe

could not go to a large purchaser with three acres of green beans to sell, even though the purchaser needs 3,000 acres. If there are

a common set of standards, then producers can go to market together and say they all stand for this common set of practices and do

that consolidation for the purchaser. The purchaser is who we talk about a lot in the food alliance.”

For Greg Nielsen of Numi Organic Tea at the end of the day it is about values and making a valuable product.

“In the US market, where everyone loves ice cream, the American tea consumer was victimized by a very low

quality and awful tasting product for a long time. The founders of Numi Organic Tea really wanted to first give

Americans higher quality, broad leaf tea that is delicious, can be steeped longer, does not get bitter instantly,

and really provides a taste proposition. Being the visionaries they are, they then started sourcing organic and

fair trade, looking at the packaging, and really going down into the sustainability path.

“It really started with the value of the product and then we also decided that instead of using perfumes and flavorings to scent the

teas, we would use the real ingredients along with it. This was about believing the food that comes from the earth provides a better

product at the end of the day. That is what is what is going to set us into the mainstream space and why we are so successful with

accounts like Costco, Target, Safeway as well as Whole Foods nationally.

“The consumers should care for a lot of reasons. Tea is delicious, healthy, and when it comes down to the basics, it is not a washed

product. When you are using conventional teas and that plant is being put into the water for the first time, it means a difference in

quality for the consumer at the end of the day. The people on the ground also care. We annually send our operations team and

different people from our company to the sources of origin all over Southeast Asia to ask how we can help. We definitely work with

partners to foster and grow our relations with people on the ground.”

Nils-Michael Langenborg from Whole Health Marketing spoke about how marketing I tied into brain science.

“It is a seemingly easy question, but it is a fairly complicated answer. There is a really good TED talk by a guy

names Simon Sinek, which is ‘First Why and then Trust'. It is very compelling, but ‘why’ is really the function of

brain activity. As humans, we are part animal and part human. We have three brains. We have a reptile brain,

which is about survival and reproduction. We have a limbic system, which is all of the programming of

emotions of the body that come from the secretions of the body. We have a third level called the rational mind, which is the least

developed and the newest of the brain functions.

“One of my favorite books is called 'The Denial of Death' by Ernest Becker, who wrote it in 1974 and won a Pulitzer Prize. In it he

talks about two things. The first is that at some point in time as human brains developed, we started to realize that we were



different from animals. We have opposable thumbs, the ability to build, and the ability to think. We also realized that we were

mortal like animals and that at the end of the day a carcass is a carcass whether it was human or an animal.

“As that third brain, the rational mind, started to develop our thinking became about why we are here and what our function is.

What we created was symbology, and branding is all about symbology. We create symbols, such as religion, such as nationality, or

sports teams. What is interesting is that the symbology of our products, whether they are organic, a Ford, a Toyota, or whatever, is

what that represents to us. If you really start studying marketing and advertising and break it down into the three brain functions of

survival and reproduction, fight or flight (the limbic system, which means everything that we have been programmed with up to the

age of about 12), and Beta, Delta, Theta, and the Gamma, which are functional parts of the brain.

“If you look at really successful products, a lot of them have to do with these base line survival/reproduction issues. Organic might

be part of that. Sustainability might be part of that. People who might be more environmentally conscious, which is 35% of those

surveyed, said that green products offer competitive product differentiation. That is because they have greater awareness. They

are looking more into their survival and reproduction than others are. They are saying that they have to do something not only for

themselves, but for their kinds and so on. When you ask about the 'why' it is about where you are in that brain function --

survival/reproduction, flight or fight, or the higher, rational mind, which is kind of hard to survive within the normal world.”

Social Media Marketing and its Impact

Moderator Rodrigo Espinosa with Lonesome George & Co. next asked the panel if they use social media to

engage their audiences and how they measure that impact.

Neal Gottlieb at Three Twins Ice Cream commented that the sales are really hard to measure from social

media.

“This is because there are so many different social media platforms that we are involved in. Whether it is

YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, or something that I do not know of, my employees are using them. Overall, it

tends to be feel good fluff, like we have a new flavor, we are sold at this market, we are going to be at this

street festival, or something like that. It is challenging with all of the noise out there to really use it to tell a deep story.

“I just went to Brazil to see where our sugar is grown and we have made almost no mention of it through our social media. But we

are trying to figure out how to tell this bigger story despite all of the noise out there. We are asking if it is really worth taking a trip

that took a week to do, and from which and there are hundreds of pictures, just to boil it down to 140 characters or less. We are still

trying to figure out how to set the main message apart and get it to stick out from that feel good fluff, which is important and helps

build community. After all, we are selling fluff, or fat, which has been frozen and filled with sugar. It is delicious, but it is not saving

lives. That fluff and feel good is definitely an important part of the social media, but there is the more serious and meaningful side

that I think we are still trying to convey that in a better way.



Maisie Greenawalt with Bon Appétit Management Company responded that they use social media to present

a fuller picture of who they are and what they think about to the world.

“While sustainability sits, in many corporations, in a corporate affairs department or in somebody's marketing

function, we do not have a person who is in charge of sustainability. It is throughout our company, so we are

having conversations and we are reading things about what sustainable food means every day. By sharing what

we are reading and tweeting/retweeting things that we find interesting and thought provoking, versus really punching a message

out that is strictly a marketing message, I think that we paint a fuller picture of who we are.

“We are going through an evolution in social media right now within marketing. My theme this year with the entire company is ‘we are all marketers now’… Social media is not really a discipline, it is a tool, and there is no reason that someone in customer service or operations cannot be engaged in social media.”

– Greg Nielsen, Director of Marketing at Numi Organic Tea

Integrating CSR into the Fabric of a Company

Moderator Rodrigo Espinosa of Lonesome George & Co. next asked Nils-Michael Langenborg about the

concept of shared value and an organization having CSR interwoven in the organization. Specifically he

wanted to know how that is impacting the way corporations create their products.

Nils-Michael Langenborg from Whole Health Marketing sees social media flattening the media distribution

model a great deal.

“I started my career at the second largest advertising agency in the world. I was hawking motor oil for awhile

and then it was car wax, telecommunications, or whatever they put in front of me. We controlled the media



because we could out spend people with tremendous amounts of money. I had advertising campaign budgets larger than any

company that I have worked with or for in the last 15 years. Whatever Numi's sales are, triple them and that is like what one of our

budgets was, and that was back when that was meaningful.

“Social media really does flatten the ability for companies to control their message. It has two sides to it. One of them is the

entertainment side. For example, Old Spice had this advertising campaign that was a single shot. The guy would do this or that, pick

something up, and it was all just a single shot. From a production standpoint it was quite remarkable. They put some stuff out on

social media and they got this incredible surge of hits. That surge went away in three days. Now, what does that really mean?

Someone won an award. Someone sat at a conference and they were relevant for 72 hours. That is great, but what is the long term

effect of that? No one knows.

“What social media is really good for is revolution. What is revolutionary is turning over a government, or what have you. When

you look at the organic sales in the food category, it is about 4% of the total, but only 1% of the agricultural land in the US is organic.

This means that we import 3%, which is three times what we are producing here. We have to ask ourselves when the price comes

into play, when is the revolution in farming?

“I do not know if the audience is aware of what a Hoot Suite is. It is a nice little thing where you can put all of your social media on

one page. I have something like nine accounts because I have a variety of personalities and I cannot keep up with it, even on a daily

basis. It is really hard for something to pop out of the mix. I like the twitter people who do not just retweet stuff that they have

read, but send out stuff that comes from their own thinking.”

Greg Nielsen from Numi Organic Tea responded that his company is already engaging in much of what had

been discussed.

“We are going through an evolution in social media right now within marketing. My theme this year with the

entire company is ‘we are all marketers now’. A company like Numi is small and we are so engaged in

everything that the brand believes in, that we attract people to the company who are great ambassadors.

Social media is not really a discipline, it is a tool, and there is no reason that someone in customer service or operations cannot be

engaged in social media. We hear from our retail customers through social media. We hear from consumers who have problems

with their products through social media. That is one of the first steps to it.

“One of the things that we have above the big companies is we have a great story and a reason to exist, which our consumers love.

We know that based on the passion we see from interacting with them. We are building up loyalty programs to empower the

consumers to tell about Numi and reward them for that.

“Particularly with new products, we launched a different type of tea in the US market called Puerh. It is delicious, super healthy, and

something that is starting to gain traction. We have a campaign coming out this fall season called Puerh People. The whole design

around it is to empower consumers to talk about what it tastes like and how it makes you feel. There is all of this folklore, but

consumers are smarter than that, especially our consumers. We want to empower them because at the end of the day people

believe their family and friends more than the advertisers.”



“The price is a very important part of our value statement – great product for a fair price, presented in attractive packaging, and it has all sorts of other great stuff to love about it. Positioning is huge. We could offer $8.00 pints at grocery stores but we would not have the same sell throughs that we have at the $4.50 price points.”

– Neal Gottlieb, Founding Twin, Three Twins Ice Cream

Selecting a Price Point

Moderator Rodrigo Espinosa from Lonesome George & Co next asked the panel how their respective

companies settled on the price point they have for their products, and whether it was a competitive choice

based on the market or if being sustainable was something important to reflect in the price.

Neal Gottlieb with Three Twins Ice Cream replied that the price point is very important.

“The price is a very important part of our value statement – great product for a fair price, presented in

attractive packaging, and it has all sorts of other great stuff to love about it. Positioning is huge. We could offer

$8.00 pints at grocery stores but we would not have the same sell throughs that we have at the $4.50 price

points. Where we are at, which is based on the costs and the scale that we have gone into, we are able to

compete price wise with Ben and Jerry's and Haagen-Dazs. We likely have a slightly lower margin, but we also have much lower

infrastructure and marketing costs.

“At Whole Foods our pints are $4.49. Benn and Jerry's is $5.49, so you can spend a dollar more to get corn syrup if you would like. I

think that Haagen-Dazs is $4.39, but it is for a 14 oz. container. They have pretty much tricked their consumers into thinking that

they are getting a pint. It is probably working somewhat, but if the consumer does the math they will realize that Three Twins, just

purely on price, is the best value. If you factor in that it is organic, it tastes goods, and that with every purchase you are helping to

fund our land conservation effort, it is a great value. With that we are seeing a lot of success.”



Moderator Rodrigo Espinosa with Lonesome George & Co followed up his previous question and asked how

Three Twins Ice Cream communicates the sustainability efforts they are making, like the land conservation

initiative, to their customers and still competes with Haagen-Dazs on the shelf.

Neal Gottlieb from Three Twins Ice Cream replied that it is a challenge because of the space limitations on

their packaging.

“Last week I saw somebody picked up our fair trade package of vanilla bean spec, which is the first fair trade ice

cream in the United States. They looked at it and commented that the packaging is very busy. I laughed

because there is a fair trade insignia, the ice cream for acres insignia, the USDA organic label, and the 1% for

the planet logo on the package. It is busy, but we have to make the most with that real estate. That has to go from your packaging

to our website to our social media. It also needs to be in the communications that we have wherever we are. You always have to

share that information and be a marketer.”

Maisie Greenawalt from Bon Appétit Management Company spoke about how certifications have affected

the marketplace.

Some Food Alliance producers have used certifications to change prices, in some cases, in order to get a

premium price. As a certified product, it has an attribute that is worth paying something for. Other producers

have taken a different tact and used the certification to get market access. Their price may be the same as

their competitor, but they are going to get preferential purchasing because the product has different attributes. Those are two ways

that certification can impact sales.

“Bon Appétit has a different kind of relationship with its clients than a packaged product. We are going for 5 – 20 year contracts

with our clients. We always say that we are definitely not the cheapest, but we are also not the most expensive. If a client comes to

us and their first questions are about price, we know they are not going to be a good long term partner for us.”

Experiential Commodity Products

Moderator Rodrigo Espinosa from Lonesome George & Co brought up the case study of how Starbucks took a

commodity product, built an experience around it, charged a significant price point for that experience, and

then scaled it enormously. He asked Maisie Greenawalt what the key communication is that she uses to be

able to make that case.



“Pricing is where the rubber hits the road. It is where the final question is answered, which is if the product is valuable. There are a number of different levels to it. On one level there is the company managing the pricing, which is really managing the spreads between revenue, the cost of goods, and sales and administrative expenses. It is also about how to manage those spreads over a long time.

– Nils-Michael Langenborg, Founder and CEO of Whole Health Marketing

Maisie Greenawalt of Bon Appétit Management Company responded that her CEO, Fedele Bauccio, talks

about differentiating a commodity business all the time.

“He took a commodity business, which was cafeterias in corporate America and colleges, and improving the

experience in them. The first differentiator in 1987 was around food quality. He asked what would happen if

we took restaurant chefs and put them into the institutional marketplace. He realized he could differentiate his

product and no longer be a commodity by doing this. We have continued to iterate that through many of our sustainability efforts in

the company.

“Now, when someone is coming into a Bon Appétit cafe, they are having a great meal and they are also supporting over 1,000 farm

to fork vendors. These are small, owner operated farms within 150 miles of that kitchen. Now, we are having an experience that is

much different than just getting a turkey sandwich, and certification plays a role in that.”

Greg Nielsen with Numi Organic Tea talked about pricing in relation to product positioning.

“When it comes down to pricing, it is about product and positioning. We are more premium than other brands,

but we also believe that we provide a better tasting product. We also offer more sustainablity and social

impact on the shelf. We believe that all of this delivers a better tasting product at the end of the day. Also, in

the theme of what our legacy is, our operations team has done a wonderful job of lowering our impact by

consolidating where our commodities are being sourced and bringing it to a centralized facility, which lowers our carbon emissions,

fuel costs, shipping costs, etc.

“It is always evolving and never landing on the status quo. That has also been able to get us some cost savings. In addition, we do

not spend a ton of money on marketing through traditional media because we put those expenses into the value proposition. We

land in the premium section, but we are priced at $6.99 where the competitors are priced at $8.99 – $11.99 a box, and they do not

have the sustainable story.”



Nils-Michael Langenborg with Whole Health Marketing spoke about the primacy of the price point for

product success.

“Pricing is where the rubber hits the road. It is where the final question is answered, which is if the product is

valuable. There are a number of different levels to it. On one level there is the company managing the pricing,

which is really managing the spreads between revenue, the cost of goods, and sales and administrative

expenses. It is also about how to manage those spreads over a long time. If it is a large company, they price within a portfolio.

When I was working at Specter we had 70 different products, so it was about portfolio management when we set prices.

“One example I can use is the predatory pricing model that Fosters is using currently for their beer. If you buy the big cans of

Foster's Lager or Bitter, they are two for $4.00 or $1.89. It used to be $3.29 -- $3.50. Fosters is one of the largest liquor companies in

the world. They are basically buying their market share so that over time they get the loyal consumer. Beer tends to be a switch

category where people buy a lot of different types, but they might have set staples. Foster's is trying to get to be one of those

staples, but they are taking their time. They can do this because they have this large portfolio of products, which they can use to pay

for the predatory pricing.”

“I also thought about this type of pricing from the three levels of the brain. There are very few things that exist in the rational mind.

There is value, premium, and super premium. Value is survival, premium is emotional and limbic, and super premium is rational.

But, a lot of times price is at the survival level. Wal-Mart is a half a trillion dollar retailer because they appeal to people's need to

survive and reproduce. They have families, so they need to buy inexpensive products. But, it also works with cosmetics.

“Revlon was started by Charles Revson. He always said that they do not sell cosmetics, they sell hope. What he did was hire the

most beautiful women in the world, air brushed them and made them look lovely so that women would see them and think that

they have to look like that to compete for a man. When studying pricing from a consumer's perspective in terms of the value

proposition, by breaking it down into survival concepts, one can see a lot of patterns take shape.”

Q&A SESSION

The Value of Certification

Question from Matt Trocker (Agrion): One thing that Neal touched on was the busy label with a lot of icons

going around it. There is limited real estate for that on product packaging. How valuable are those

certifications on the label? How much is it worth to spend on getting certain certifications and how valuable

is that for you as someone who is in charge of a brand?

Neal Gottlieb (Three Twins Ice Cream): “I like to think that the ones that we have on all of our packaging are

very valuable. They are the USDA Organic, 1% for the planet, and our own land conservation initiative. There is

not really any altruism in business; I am making the bet that those certifications help to build the brand far

more than they cost. It seems to be working because people love them. The USDA Organic is absolutely

essential as a differentiator and a statement of quality. The other two, probably matter less to most

consumers, but there is a certain set of consumers that just love it and it helps them fall in love with the brand.



“At the same time, you have to know when to stop. We are not certified Kosher because we already have so many others already. If

you keep on adding feathers it makes for a really expensive hat. You do have to know when to stop because you can certainly kill

your margin with every single certification that is out there. You also do not want the symbols crowding out the brand message

either.”

Maisie Greenawalt (Bon Appétit Management Company): “One thing that we are playing around with at Bon

Appétit is a digital way for customers to filter out the labels that they are interested in or are not interested in.

For a menu item, instead of having five different symbols next to it the customer can choose organic and local

because they care about those things. Then we can show them their menu with those attributes. They may

not care about Kosher, so it is not shown. There are some ways that we can do these things better digitally

than we have been in the physical world.”

Greg Nielsen (Numi Organic Tea): Labeling and certification is important because it helps consumers to

understand that there is a third party supporting the claims being made. We use several and it is always a

challenge because we are a company that was founded by two artists, so balancing the message and the

aesthetics is an issue. We are a founding member of B Corp, and it is important because it covers a lot of the

things that we believe in and provides a substantiated report that covers a lot of these areas. But, there are

some that do completely overlap, and are still important.

“There is a big movement in the natural box industry for a non-GMO label. Whole Foods is a major player behind it and a lot of

others companies are as well. Technically, it is a label that is only focusing on the product right now, and not the packaging. A lot of

times the corn plastic, as it is called, is actually sourced from GMO corn. The other edge is that there is no way that organically

certified tea is GMO at all. There is a little bit of an overshadowing there, but at the end of the day we are working with the non-

GMO project to certify packaging and to take that leadership role. We also understand that it is part of the dialogue with the

consumer and that we need to help them become further aware of these issues.”

Nils-Michael Langenborg (Whole Health Marketing): For me it all boils down to the concept of symbology.

What does a symbol represent? Like you said, the USDA organic means something to people because there is a

lot of veracity behind that. When we were working on the Numi project, we had this conundrum where we had

7 different symbols that we had to figure out where to put them on the box. We can cluster them all in one

panel on the side. We can make them all small, but they have to be there. This is all good because it is like

your badges. It reminds me of the pirate ships. You would fly your friendly flag and then when you got close

they would send up the pirate flag and they would start blasting away. I am just saying that symbology is all about whether it is true.

I saw a presentation once by a guy where he has a slide where he starts showing 'green' symbols and it just gets so thick that it

almost turns to black. There are about 500 different green symbols. At some point it becomes too much. It is interesting that you

have to make a business decision as to whether it is valuable or invaluable and what your priorities are. Hopefully that follows the

customer's priorities as well.



Maisie Greenawalt (Bon Appétit Management Company): Craig brought up the point about people asking

about GMO products and not being able to have GMOs in your product in order to be organic. We recently had

to complete a survey about whether the pork we buy has hormones in it. Anybody who knows about pork

production knows that added hormones are not allowed in pork production. Thus, we could very easily say no,

but it is sort of a silly question.

“One of the reasons that we have been drawn to the food alliance is that there are a huge number of experts that have gone into

developing those standards and asking the right questions. Therefore, we at Bon Appétit do not have to become an expert in every

single area. We ask the producer the blanket question of whether they are food alliance certified. That is an intelligent question

coming from us and the producers can then respond to that without having to get into the technical details.”

Employees and Social Media

Question from Kirsten Born (Buy Right Family of Businesses): I am interested in the idea of everyone being a marketer now, that

every employee of a business is a marketer, and that everyone owns the message. It is something that I struggle with in an

organization where a lot of the value we have is in our people, their voices, and their expertise. It is a fine line for letting those

things show, but also somehow filter them and present them in some way. I am curious how each of you do that in your

businesses. I struggle with whether more employees than just myself can tweet, be posting on Facebook, and how to incorporate

them on our website. I am curious to see how you maximize that.

Greg Nielsen (Numi Organic Tea): “It is something that we are evolving with at Numi, so those are the same

exact challenges that we have. It is about shifting ones mindset as a marketer to be more a leader of business

culture and in some ways we are getting closer to the function that HR does. In any family, brand, or

community there are those people who are the outliers and there is always this overall feeling that the strange

cousin is going to say something that will be embarrassing. I think that as long as they are not saying something

terrible, which you have to trust that they do not, it creates the halo of an authentic organization that people

are genuinely attracted to.

“People are attracted to authenticity at the end of the day and some of it is just getting around the table with people from different

departments. We are too small of a company for me to spend a lot of time writing down talking points for every possible scenario or

question that could come up on social media. It is about fostering culture and in some ways letting go and not being so focused on

being in control of the message.

“When we were talking about this earlier, it made me think of a friend who works for a larger bay area coffee company and they

were not permitted to respond to any questions on their Facebook pages. This included simple things like whether they offered free

shipping or things like that. That is, in some ways, branding suicide. A lot of this is about letting go and putting yourself in an

uncomfortable spot.”



Rodrigo Espinosa (Lonesome George & Co): “I am fairly certain that at this coffee company the legal

department got involved. What happens is that legal gets involved and they say that the company is liable for

anything that any employee says, and that it is crazy to allow them to talk. Then marketing comes to the table

and responds by saying that legal is killing the brand. Then HR jumps in and says that the company will not be

able to recruit any Gen Y people if they are not allowed to be on Facebook. It is a major cultural shift and a

different way of running and driving an organization.

“Google's Cisco intern is a good example. At Cisco a couple of years ago they were interviewing an intern and she tweeted

something. One of the people following her was one of the people who just interviewed her. Then a twitter war erupted and within

24 hours it was on CNBC. That is just what the CEO of a fortune 50 company wants to be dealing with.

“This was a couple of years ago, but it is about guard rails establishing what is acceptable for your culture. Harnessing the culture of

your company to be the brand ambassadors is the best way to market a company. There will always be the crazy cousin, who is the

outlier, but you should already know who they are and you just spend a little bit more time working with them. The community will

monitor itself within time.”

Neal Gottlieb (Three Twins Ice Cream): “Within Three Twins there are a group of people who know a lot more

about social media than I do and they spend a lot less time sitting at a desk than I do. It is important to

empower the people and let them get out and spread the message. They are as important to the brand as the

person who started it, after a certain point.

“At the same time, they need to be imbibed in the company culture and know that if something is in a grey area that they shou ld

check. Again, we are dealing with ice cream, which is not a very controversial subject. The biggest thing that we have dealt with is

the consistency of what you call the brand. Overall empowering the people gets so much more of the story out there and it makes it

so much more interesting than tweets from my desk.”

Maisie Greenawalt (Bon Appétit Management Company): “We have a little bit of a different perspective. We

have 11,000 employees in 32 different states. I do not know all of the crazy cousins. I do find them, however,

for what they send out in the world at some point. People do things, like we have a chef who is now on a

reality show that I had no idea he filmed. Now, it is on FOX and I am there with everyone else on the edge of

my seat to see what he is going to say next. So far he has not said anything horrible, but it is only in the second

episode.

“What we have to do is create systems so that the voice can get out there and we are not overly filtering it, but there has to be a

system. For example, we have an internal social network called yammer. My staff combs through yammer to find stories to send

out, but we do not let anyone out in the field tweet directly under the corporate name or to post directly onto the Facebook page or

blog. But, we try to find those stories and then make sure the voice stays intact at some level when it comes through corporate.”

Rodrigo Espinosa (Lonesome George & Co): “There is a very big difference between Three Twins ice Cream

and Bon Appétit, so you have to know what you have and how you are going to manage 11,000 people. Just on

sheer numbers, your crazy cousin factor has now increased tenfold, when before there was only one. The

other part of this is to know what you are good at and what you are not good at.



“For me and others, tweeting and social media is a learned behavior. It is not so much for a 23 year old intern. It is amaz ing to

watch them. This is what they do and it is like second nature. We, to a certain degree, outsource that to people internally who do it

much better.

“The key there is to use and teach them to be part of the brand authentically instead of just outsourcing it to someone who does not

understand the brand. Then you get the best of both worlds. From a management standpoint or an entrepreneurial standpoint that

becomes a different way of running an organization. It goes from control to coaching, motivating, inspiring and driving.”

Nils-Michael Langenborg (Whole Health Marketing): “What is interesting is that every consumer is a marketer

now because of the reviews and opinions that they can put out. One of my clients was Good Earth Natural

Foods. When I first started working with them there was this person who had gotten fired and on any forum he

could he was writing all of these nasty things. It was one disgruntled person, and the attitude of the owners

was that they could not do anything about it because it was their opinion. They have a relationship with their

customers and if a customer comes in and asks about it, they will tell them the whole story within the confines

of HR requirements.

“If you do not consider your consumers to be marketers, with reviews and all that sort of stuff, then you are missing out. I was

looking for a place to eat in Occidental, CA and I went to Yelp. I found a place and someone had written a really bad review. The

owner got an opportunity to rebut it and explain the situation from his side. I do the same thing with hotels when I travel. I decide

to not stay at a place based on different reviews. Now Cornel or Columbia has done a linguistic analysis to see if the reviews have

been manufactured. There is a small cottage industry of people who write opinions as if they had a product or were actually at the

place. You can pay them to get you 4 stars and offset the 1 star.

“The most interesting thing to me is what is happening in the country of Sweden right now. Sweden has a national twitter account

and they randomly choose a citizen and allow then to tweet whatever they want. Recently, the person they were allowing to tweet

was tweeting some rather unsavory things. The Swedish government decided to do nothing about it because it was their opinion

and they were not going to censor it because they are a country of 10 million people with as many opinions.”

The Gimmick Factor

Question from Matt Trocker (Agrion): Neal, in the press there has been some stuff about the world's most

expensive sundae. This is a sundae in the glacial fields of Kilimanjaro and I was wondering if you could share

a little bit about that idea? Also, if the rest of the panel could share some big marketing ideas that you have

done, have yet to do, or that you have admired, that would be great.

Neal Gottlieb (Three Twins Ice Cream): “We have four stores and our second one opened in 2007. We had a

little extra wall space, so I put up an absurdity menu. We have a ‘Twinasaurus Sundae’, which is a 20 scoop

sundae served in a big pot. Then we have ‘The World's Most Expensive Ice Cream Sundae’, which is $3,333.33.

Since we are up in Napa, it is a banana split that is sacrilegiously made with three rare desert wines – a Chateau

D'Yquem, a vintage port, and a Trockenbeerenauslese. These are boiled down to syrup and poured across the

banana split.



“Then there is ‘The World's More Expensive, Most Expensive Ice Cream Sundae’, which is $65,000 for one. It includes first class

airfare to Africa in order to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with me. We will chip away some glacial ice, harvest it, and bring it down to

base camp in order to churn out ice cream that night. I did a test run of this last year and it worked fabulously, although it did not

make the best ice cream ever.

“The whole idea behind this was that we needed to fill this empty wall space because there were going to be lines and we wanted to

give people something to look at when they were in line. It was up there as a joke and over the years there has been a media hit

here and there, but two weeks ago the San Francisco Chronicle put it on the front page of their business section. It had sat there for

4 years and from that it was picked up twice by the Huffington Post and then by the local CBS station. From there it was on a bunch

of international blogs that we cannot even read.

“It has been great because something that cost up maybe $30.00 to print up has suddenly garnered us thousands of dollars in media

attention. Today I am going to take pictures of a mock up of the sundae because Yahoo wants it for their home page. If that works

out, then we are talking about tens of millions of media impressions all for maybe a few hundred dollars of photography.”

Sharing Social Benefit Programs

Question from Matt Trocker (Agrion): One thing about it is that it is a really fun, absurd idea, but each of

those includes a really big donation to the land trusts. Is that also another way to share the message that

you really do care a lot about giving money to have land conserved?

Neal Gottlieb (Three Twins Ice Cream): “That is a core thing. The Kilimanjaro sundae is an all you can eat item

and it also comes with an organic t-shirt that says 'my (fill in the blank) bought the world's most expensive

sundae and all I got was this organic t-shirt' and then a $10,000 donation to an African environmental non-

profit. The same thing is true for all of our absurd stuff. You can also buy 100 pints of Three Twins that is

personally delivered by me for $3,333.33. I think that we have a $333.00 donation included to a non-profit so

that we are staying true to our core of being organic, delicious, and giving back.”

Greg Nielsen (Numi Organic Tea): “One thing that we are working on this year, it being election season, is that

since everyone has their platforms and movements to organize around we believe that everyone should be

eating and drinking organic, especially organic tea. Numi is forming a political party called the Organic Tea

Party. We are going to be asking all politicians and candidates to adopt the Organic Tea Party platform, which

will be essentially for a healthier planet using organic food all together.



“There will be some fun and interactive pieces built in where you can tweet President Obama, Mitt Romney, Steven Colbert, and

whoever else is running to ask them to adopt the Organic Tea Party Platform. With that there will be a ballot for consumers to vote

on the next organic flavor that we will be releasing next year. It is really about putting our values in the middle of the discussion and

wrapping around the political season as well.”

Maisie Greenawalt (Bon Appétit Management Company): “I have a story about a marketing idea that had

unintended consequences. It was maybe not the marketing that we thought it was going to be. We read an

article in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005 when the term 'Localvor' was coined here and there was this idea

of the 150 mile diet for a month. We did not think that we can do it for a month, but we figured we could do it

for a day. Thus, we instituted an ‘eat local’ challenge in all of our cafes. For one day every cafe would serve a

meal that was 100% local, with the only exception being salt. From a culinary perspective, we could not take

away salt. Remember that we are in 32 states and salt is not available everywhere to be harvested. It was a fun idea and we

thought that it would have this big marketing component, that customers would care and that there would be all of this publicity

around it.

“Right before our first eat local challenge Hurricane Katrina hit and the PR team sat back and knew that they would not get any

coverage on the eat local challenge. The country was, and should have been, focused on something else at that moment. We

wondered if we should cancel the challenge, but the uproar from the chefs who were so engaged in this and from the hourly

employees was immense. We have a local producer program all the time, but we combine them with conventionally bought

ingredients.

“If you say it has to be 100% local, then any employee that touches the product in the kitchen has to think about where that product

came from. We decided that even if we got no marketing benefit from it, just the esprit de corps and the deepening of the culture

into the hands in the kitchen is worth whatever the company was going to spend on marketing. We ended up getting some

coverage and now we do it every year, but that has become secondary to the cultural build that we get.”

Nils-Michael Langenborg (Whole Health Marketing): “Marketing is really about telling partial truths,

ultimately, because if we tell the whole story it is pretty overwhelmingly bad. For example, I work with a client

called Lisa's Organics. They make frozen vegetables that have sauces included with them. When you go to the

store and buy a bag, you go home, cook it, and eat it. It is pretty cool.

“Mark and Lisa, who are the owners, have three young kids, so we talked at one point about the absurd notion of having green

beans that are grown in British Columbia, picked and put in a freezer. They are stored in the freezer at the DC and then are trucked

down to southern Texas, where they are put in a freezer warehouse. Then an order comes in and the beans are put on a truck and

driven to California, put in a warehouse, then onto another truck that goes to the store and they are put into yet another freezer.

The customer buys it, put is in their freezer, and it is ultimately eaten. If you follow that track, it is kind of nutty.

“We talked about a campaign for people to help us go out of business. The means that we do not think that it is such a good idea to

create bags of frozen veggies, shipping them all over the country, and storing them in very expensive things called freezers. I do not

know how much the audience knows about frozen stuff, but to harden ice cream it has to get to a very cold temperature. When I



worked a Straus, freezers are generally at - 20 Fahrenheit because when the door to the truck opens to pull a pallet out it has to

have time before melting.

“What we really want is for you to grow your own vegetables. Buy fresh, buy organic, buy local, and take the local challenge. When

you cannot, and you still want to buy something good, then go ahead and buy our stuff. But, if you could help us go out of business

by growing your own at home or getting it locally, we would welcome that. We are actually going to start that campaign, even

though we just started the company a year ago. Interestingly enough, because we are already planning our demise, we think we are

going to grow. This comes back to the partial truth aspect of marketing. We want to tell the whole truth. As marketers, I was

taught by some very capable people never to tell them that and just to tell them certain things.”

End.

Documents

Marketing Sustainable Products: From Label Compliance to