It's one thing when a company establishes and controls their message to their audience. It's entirely another when a third-party takes over the company's store/product for another purpose.
An organization known as These Come From Trees is providing stickers to people who are willing to place them on items that dispense paper products. As an example, it is suggested that people put these stickers on towel and napkin dispensers in restaurants.
It is truly an admirable goal to attempt to get people to conscientiously
consume disposable paper products (admit it, we've all grabbed 10 napkins when
we only ended up using two). But to encourage vandalism is simply wrong. The
organization seems very misguided on this point. For example (quoting from their website):
"...the bathroom owner is just a part of this project as the label sticker. She's the one who decides whether it stays or goes. And if the ink is smeared, it ceases to provide value to that bathroom owner, and simply becomes another bit of graffiti for that poor business owner to deal with. And that is the opposite of the win-win proposition we're trying to achieve here."
In other words, it isn't graffiti until the vandal says it is.
In other words, if a vandal places a sticker where the business owner never intended to have a sticker, it is somehow virtuous and OK, as long as the sticker is pristine.
In other words, by placing a sticker in someone's business, the vandal is "providing value".
WRONG! WRONG! and WRONG! How misguided.
To me this actually seems to go a bit beyond vandalism and approaches terrorism. I can envision some form of implicit extortion occurring. "If you don't appear to be complying with our program, we'll paper your business with our stickers."
The cause is noble, the execution is atrocious - and smacks of people dealing from a position of perceived powerlessness.
I suggest that this organization consider the fact that they do possess a great deal of power. Most of us (consumers) do care about our impact on our environment, on our "pollution footprint", etc. This program would be better-served if it were to tap into our willingness to go along with the bigger picture (not just with their feeble graffiti project) and:
- get some energy behind the idea (including donations and other funds behind a promo program that encourages consumers to prefer establishments that are tree-friendly)
- then get businesses to willingly implement their program while being supported by the tree-friendly promo program
I prefer TreeHugger.com's take on this topic :
"So combine this germ of knowledge with the fact that there are currently about 50,000 fast food restaurants, 200,000 gas stations, and 10,000 Starbucks in the US and it's easy to see how we could be saving a whole lot of trees by implementing just one type of sticker in bathrooms across America. And I can say one thing for sure; if I were the CEO of one of the companies footing the bill for all of these paper goods each year I'd go out and buy these stickers by the caseload, mandate they be put in every bathroom in the company, and then add the savings to the bottom line. Let's face reality, wasting paper towels is wasting green in more ways than one..."
Exactly! Partner with the companies that dispense the paper. Don't attack them.
This isn't B2B, but it is Marcom, and it is a very interesting topic to kick around in your departments. Questions I will ask my team:
*Why does the organization feel they need to skulk about and vandalize?
*Is there a better way to take a good cause and give it a negative connotation? (posed sarcastically)
*What effect does an unsavory campaign have on the originating organization?
*What can we do to ensure that we NEVER come anywhere near doing something like this?
*What good can we take from this situation?
I'd appreciate your comments as well.
Peter Kazanjy:
Hi Rick,
Thanks for adding the conversation. I appreciate your concern for this being perceived as potential vandalism.
Let me respond to your criticism. Firstly, I am of the strong opinion, and have done my research in speaking with many business owners whom this project would touch, that if these business ownes knew of the value that could be provided for them: saving 150 pounds of paper a year or so--a nontrivial sum, and a non-trivial amount of money, they would do something about it themselves. As TreeHugger points out: the ROI is there.
However, there are real barriers to that happening. The sad truth of the matter is that Kimberly Clark and Georgia Pacific make the paper towel dispensers that all these businesses use. And the businesses face a challenge in modifying those paper towel dispensers--that is, they don't have the time or the resources to potentially come up with something. Furthermore, this project was spurred by non-intuitive research. How to communicate those results to such a broad swatch of people, though, is another question entirely.
Now, your point of "partnering" with these organizations is a valid one. In fact, I'm working with my employer, VMware, to do a pilot rollout of the stickers to paper towel dispensers all across our corporate campus, which services 3k employees. The These Come From Trees blog has a post on it from this past Saturday. So yes, there is definitely value in partnering. However, there is also much to be said for virality, and the fact that I am one person, and this is a side project. Thus, by building a spreading mechanism into the product, the word can spread more quickly than one man working on this alone, or involving his immediate network. Yes, building up donations and using a traditional marketing communications approach is great, if you have budget and a staff. We, sadly, do not have that, and thus must be more resourceful.
Lastly, the stickers are "laminated paper labels". They're not vinyls stickers, and when torn off, with a bit of elbow grease and some Simple Green, they go right away. This was actually a requirement that we set ourselves when conceiving of this solultion to the perceived problem.
Compare that to the marker and graffiti, and knife cuts that many of these towel dispensers often sport, and I think that ultimately, when you add up all the arguments I advance, and weigh them against the costs, which you, and others have done a good job of enumerating, the project still nets out a big positive.
Again, a sticker is a tree's worth of paper a year. Time is ticking by. We've distributed 10k stickers so far through viral word of mouth alone. How many would we have deployed talking to the management team at Starbucks? Yes, eventually that's a conversation we'd like to have, but having some market traction to begin with makes that conversation more tenable.
Thanks for your commentary and constructive criticism. It makes this process better for all of us.
Amy Nowacoski:
I have conflicting ideas/thoughts/feelings on this.
My teenage self would have been all over this. I can picture myself getting all nervous, looking around shifty-eyed as I was about to plant the sticker, knowing I was being slightly subversive and just a little bit naughty while being a warrior in the fight for greater good. Woo hoo! Down with the Man! Er, sorry.
And it's just a silly sticker. A good portion of people will filter it out as whitenoise anyway.
My older cynical self would feel a little different. When I feel that other people's political agendas are being forced on me, especially in a "neutral" setting, I am bound go the other direction and rebel against the message. I'm gonna take three towels instead of two! So THERE! Ha HA!
But again, it's just a silly sticker and I might not even notice it in the first place.
My media savvy self sees this as just more noise and yes, vandalism and not the most effective way to accomplish the overall goal. Sticker campaigns are nothing new and actually they are quite annoying and that factor outweighs any potential benefits of the campaign.
In NYC any unattended flat surface will eventually get some sort of sticker on it. And sure, you could argue that it is less troublesome than marker or paint graffiti, but it is still graffiti. The notion that it's the intent behind that message that makes it ok doesn't really hold with me. I remember years ago these little stickers that popped up on pay phones around that city that read "Blacks have AIDS. Don't have sex with Black Men." It is a piece of graffiti that is pushing an agenda, just like "These come from trees" sticker. And just because the "Tree" sticker is less offensive to me (and is even an issue I could support), doesn't change the fact that its still graffiti. The creator of the aforementioned racist sticker could truly believe in his heart that he is not racist and he's doing his part to make the world better. The exact same intent and belief as the "tree" sticker people.
But really, it's a silly sticker and my bandwidith needs to be allocated to other things.
That all being said, there is one point that is really sticking with me:
"However, the reason why this is important, is because the bathroom owner is just a part of this project as the label sticker. She's the one who decides whether it stays or goes."
The Bathroom Owner is NOT part of the project. The sticker-applier forced her into the project. The Bathroom Owner is a non-consensual participant in the project. Just like if you're stuck on a subway car and a mariachi band gets on and plays in hopes of you tipping them a few bucks. You are now a non-consensual consumer of their music. Hey no big deal right? It's just music and music makes the world a better place. That, however, may not be what I choose to fill my environment (perhaps I was scarred as a child by a wayward, malevolent mariachi band). My right to choose and my consent have been stripped from me. Yes, I can get off the subway car at the next stop (Bathroom Owner can try and remove the sticker), but why should my right to exist without music (or the sticker) be held second to your right to play (or make your statement)?
Questin Maelstrom:
I always use and waste as much paper as I possibly can. If not burned, waste paper is a marvelous "carbon sink" - a naturally-sourced carbon-sequestering material. The trees used for paper are harvested, then replaced with more CO2-absorbing trees in a natural cycle. I can not see a problem with this, and refuse to recycle paper.