Look at Coke’s publicity stunt for the World Wildlife Fund with your conscious mind – and the backlash it ignited among its loyal customers – and it seems the world’s most recognizable brand blew it. Now, consider the disruption this white can created in the collective subconscious – and the attention that resulted – and you’ll see the brilliance that drives this campaign.

For more than 125 years, Coca-Cola has burned its logo and red can into our collective mental circuitry. In his book, Incognito, the secret lives of our brains, David Eagleman describes how the enormous subconscious architecture of our brain is markedly faster and more efficient – and more powerful – than our conscious mind. We think we’re in control, but we’re really not.

We’re hardwired to learn, imprint and do things without thinking, so that our clodhopping conscious self isn’t hobbled with automatic tasks. Do something often enough, and it becomes rote. If you’re even a moderate Coke drinker and you get thirsty for a soda, or you’re in the soft drink aisle at your grocer, you reach for that red can without thinking.

Now, the makers of your favorite soft drink disrupts that process by surprising your subconscious with the exact opposite of what it expects – a white can – and they’ve just triggered significant cognitive dissonance.

Your inner self is saying, “What the hell?” while your conscious brain tries to create a rational narrative around the surprise. You might not even know why you’re agitated, but one thing is for sure, it gets you actively thinking about the product and acting upon your impulses.

It’s the oldest storytelling trick in the book. Everyone from the likes of Greek mythologists, Bach, Shakespeare, Spielberg, and global marketers worth their spit have used cognitive dissonance to elicit a reaction by tweaking their audience’s implicit memory to cause an explicit reaction.

Even Coke said they were trying to be disruptive with its marketing. And it worked. Everyone carried the story, including Time, Wallstreet Journal, ABC News, Huffington Post, and multitudes of bloggers and the so-called social media elite, with alarming headlines that included words like, “consumer backlash,” “resentment,” “fiasco,” “trickery,” and even “blasphemy.”

To be fair, there’s even a Save the White Polar Bear Coca Cola Cans Facebook page.

Are you kidding me? Is any of this rational? Of course not.

Coca-Cola and the World Wildlife Fund pulled off a miraculous marketing campaign that brought greater attention to an issue that is melting in public sentiment as steadily as the disappearing ice caps, while whipping up a whirling dervish of visceral attention for a ubiquitous brand during the most competitive time of the year for consumer mindshare.

Kudos to Coke. Like the street corner magician, they pulled off a marketing slight-of-hand that everyone talked about, but nobody got.

It’s all about creative destruction, the fuel that propels free markets.

Author Tim Wu is a former tech writer from Silicon Valley who is a professor at Columbia Law School. This is an enlightening journey through the typical arch of American communications industries: From tinkering in the garage to a life-changing industry; from half-backed contraption to must-have production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single entity; from open to closed system.

Eventually, entrepreneurs and innovation smash apart the closed system, and the cycle starts anew.  Is SOPA the start of the natural constriction of the open web – the most verdant field for social innovators and communicators that we have know in our lifetime – and a natural continuation of the cycle? Will a resurgent AT&T eventually capture T-Mobile to expand their empire and once again monopolize telecommunications, another revolution in its cycle?

One of the interesting themes that threads throughout The Master Switch is the Marxist concept of ”Creative Destruction,” popularized and applied by Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter during the early to mid 1900′s. The free markets are based on creative destruction, the invention/birth, maturity and destruction of a product, service or industry, its demise caused by similar innovation that created it. Often, according to Wu, the inadvertent self-destruction of the successful endeavor that has reached the masses is at the hands of its creators whom go from risk-taking inventor to risk-adverse monolithic corporation or cartel that becomes vulnerable to individuals innovating. David falls Goliath.

“All knowledge and habit once acquired becomes as firmly rooted in ourselves as a railway embankment in the earth. The very nature of fixed habits of thinking, their energy-saving function, is founded upon the fact that they have become subconscious, that they yield their results automatically and are proof against criticism and even against contradiction by individual facts.”  - Schumpeter

As a green marketer, you are a storyteller for sustainability. You have the master switch; the megaphone to reach your customers and stakeholders. You are also the innovator and risk-taker fighting the good fight against the mindset of, “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” I believe we are all still pioneering and learning how to make sustainability work. We must be the fearless inventors tinkering in our sustainability garages and continuing to challenge the status quo. We are at the very beginning of the cycle. It’s an exciting time, and one we are privileged to be part of.

Read The Master Switch and see how the rise and fall of these communication innovators and empires directly parallel the rise of green marketing and sustainability within our firms and the public conscious.

Can you share an example of creative destruction in your experience with green marketing and sustainability?

Green marketers, on the other hand, are typically about changing consumer behavior. Consume less. Recycle more. Go green. But is that the correct approach?

Changing behavior is tough. Especially if the behavior has been engrained in us since childhood. I just read Dan and Chip Heath’s relatively new book, Switch, How to change things when change is hard. We are currently working on two education movements in Arizona: Expect More Arizona, and Mesa Counts on College, and Nicole Magnuson of EMA gave us the book as a primer to our work with their campaign. After all, what can use more positive change than our educational system?

The Heath brothers drew on a wealth of behavioral material to write Switch, which comes down to these five simple steps:

1. Shrink the challenge so it’s not daunting, but doable
2. Point to a meaningful outcome
3. Give your consumer clear, easy steps to take to get there
4. Focus and build on the bright spots of their actions throughout their journey
5. Rally the community around them

Switch describes behavior change as motivating a rider (The intellectual left brain prone to analysis paralysis) and his elephant (The stronger, more unwieldy emotional right brain) to take the correct path to the proper destination. This metaphor is borrowed from Jonathan Haidt, and his book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.

So after reading several behavior change books like Switch, and listening to the big companies at the Sustainable Brands Conference earlier this year, one thing has become clear to me: Promoting sustainability is about amplifying the positive behaviors consumers are already taking in their consumption habits as opposed to trying to change them. Change will come from how susceptible your consumer is to community influence (They call this, “Rallying the herd”), which is a hard individual behavioral aspect to anticipate and manipulate. Let the herd do that.

Accentuate the Positive

Rather than fanning “the world is on fire” hysteria hoping to scare change out of consumers, green marketers should point to the positive sustainable behaviors that are working. For example:

• When you donate to Goodwill, you and your community keep millions of tons of useful items out of landfills, in addition to helping put people back to work
• Turning off the water while you brush your teeth and other basic water conservation habits can save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars per year (Use to your monthly water bill to prove it)
• And studying with your child just 20 minutes every day will have a measurable impact and improve their success in school (Just watch that report card).

If you’re a chief sustainability officer, green marketer, educator, parent or someone charged with amplifying lasting behavior change in your organization or movement, I highly recommend Switch, as well as the dozens of other books they used as resources for this fun and educating text.

What book, TED presentation, or speaker have you been exposed to recently that will amplify my research in behavior change?

“We just got another $5 donation for prostate cancer.”

“Oh no,” I thought. I’m going to be guilted into giving to another cause as I check out with my Lloyd’s barbeque ribs, Kraft mac-and-glue, and Coors Light.

“Just got a $5 contribution for prostate care,” another checker chimed in for the entire store to hear. All told, while I shopped for about 15 minutes, Safeway raised around $60 in shopper donations. My initial annoyance of the pending “Ask” began to thaw into more of a sense of community. As I heard the one, three and five dollar amounts shouted out, I felt the growing need to participate.

Socialization is one of the primary drivers in game theory

Safeway’s donation drive was nothing more than a game it was playing with its shoppers, while doing something great for the community. But could it have been more effective?

I just finished the book, “Game-based Marketing: Inspire customer loyalty through rewards, challenges, and contests” by Gabe Zichermann and Joseline Linder. Having attended Gabe’s gamification workshop at the recent Sustainable Brands Conference, in Monterey, CA, I’ve been fascinated by game dynamics in creating real and lasting behavior change.

As the book reveals, we are constantly playing games. Sometimes we even participate without knowing (See the “Naive Player” description in the book), with everything from frequent flyer miles, to currying favor with a Starbucks barista, to customer loyalty programs like Safeway’s Club Card.

Safeway deployed a small set of social game dynamics in its prostate fundraiser, but I think they could’ve created an immensely more compelling game with a few added twists.

First, Safeway’s primary strategy focused on the “Socializers,” one of the four primary archetypes of gamers, which comprises approximately 80% of all game players, according to Zichermann. People play to be social, and winning is secondary. In the case of the prostate drive, the sense of winning comes in making a donation that is cajoled out of you by announcing the donations being made real time by your fellow shoppers (The social side of their game).

Five ways they could’ve made the game more fun

However, it seems they could’ve amplified their success by also using the four primary motivational constructs of gaming: leaderboards, points, badges and challenges.

1. Leaderboards: Since I’m a Club Card member, why didn’t they ask for permission to announce not just my contribution but my name to the store? Sure, some folks will want to give anonymously. But if game theory tells us anything, it’s that people crave recognition for their achievements and good deeds. Plus, it would personalize the exchange and make the overall “Ask” even stronger to the next shopper.
2. An electronic leaderboard promoting the names of the contributors could have also been positioned at the exits to acknowledge their gifts and alert sweaty incoming shoppers that they are entering an important game currently in play.
3. Points: Safeway built three levels into this particular game – $1, $3 and $5 contributions. So the shopper personally levels up depending on which contribution they choose to make, and presumably gets an increasing level of self gratification depending on which denomination they choose. I felt better about my $5 contribution than if had I given less. Safeway missed a great opportunity to give coupons of varying degrees, depending on the level, to thank the shopper for playing.
4. Badges: Along with the coupon, Safeway could have also attached a brightly colored yellow, green or blue thank you sticker to the shopper’s bag signifying which level you belong to. It’s an atta-boy-or-girl that provides a demonstrable thank you and ignites the curiosity of the shopper behind you leading to the conversation about their contribution.
5. Challenges: Finally, I’m wondering if Safeway could’ve added an internal challenge by marking random products with the prostate game sticker and providing a $10 contribution in the name of the shoppers that happen to have it in their basket at checkout. This is the kind of designed serendipity that adds an element of surprise and reward to make the game more intriguing. As shoppers look for the stickers, they are culling through other merchandise that will illicit the spontaneous purchase they might not otherwise had considered.

The game inside the game seemed to be blowing up

In addition to the shoppers, it appeared that the checkers were competing with each other for the amount of contributions they secured from shoppers. But it was awkward. The poor guy that rang up my groceries was being badgered by what appeared to be an assistant manager, another checker and a bag boy, to make sure he was playing their internal game. They kept asking him in front of me and those in our line about how many donations he had tallied, and how was his dollar amount? You could tell he was NOT into the game, and I felt badly for him.

I’m curious how management structured this secondary game of checker competition, because it clearly wasn’t resonating with this player. It underscored another important element in Zichermann’s book about how critical is competition compared to other social dynamics? It turns out, competition is NOT the most important motivator in creating a compelling game.

I do believe that gamification is gaining a growing influence on marketing and behavior change, and that we’re entering a whole new realm of ways to reach and engage customers. So pay attention to the games that you’re participating in over the next few days. I bet you’ll find that you’re a pawn in a game or two that you didn’t even realize is underway.

Let me know how you fare.

Jacquie Ottman, 20+ Year Green Marketing Veteran

She corrected me immediately. I said that the word “Green” was losing its voracity in green marketing. Jacquelyn Ottman, author of the new book, “The New Rules of Green Marketing,” sat squarely across from me in a small booth in a deli on the upper east side of Manhattan. She looked up and said, “What do you mean? Green marketing is finally coming into its own.”

I suppose she ought to know. Jacquie, principal in J. Ottman Consulting, wrote her first of four books on green marketing in 1991. Like a witness now being cross examined by a polished pro, I forged on in the defense of my position. I pointed to how trite and trivial so many marketers have become as they half-heartedly promote their “Green” brands, and how their incompetence, and misdirected and ill-advised use of green marketing terms dilutes the entire movement. I had a lot of coffee in me that sunny St. Patty’s Day morning.

“That is precisely why I wrote the book,” she, with the calming affect of a tenured professor, said.

“The New Rules of Green Marketing” is a hybrid of text book and professional journal. I did not read it cover-to-cover on my flight out to NYC. It is the kind of book that you pick through, dog-ear, highlight and scribble in. It overflows with insightful marketing, smart case studies, and lists of references, resources and “do’s and don’ts” for successful green marketers. It now adds another pound or two to my briefcase, even when I try to shoo it away. When it appears again on my office desk or in my home den, I find myself indiscriminately opening it and learning in 5-minute chunks.

When my third cup of coffee arrived, she volunteered to sign my copy. I had to apologize for already having written all through it. I think she was glad to see the industriousness of this reader mirroring her utilitarian approach to sustainability.

Jacquie is a very wise, friendly and thoughtful marketer. Admittedly, I can get bogged down and ornery about the inane use of the advertising industry in general, and especially the short-sightedness often found in green marketers. But not Jacquie. She has one optimistic goal: “To skew the market to greener goods.” Her book is built on three themes:

1. Product lifecycle orientation
2. Responsible consumerism
3. Consumer empowerment through education

If you’re a brand manager, chief sustainability officer, or ad agency consulting with a self-proclaimed “green” person, product, company or cause, then you need to read, no, wait, “own,” “The New Rules of Green Marketing.” It will give you an immediate jump on your competition through its encapsulation of decades of proven green marketing experience combined with current and relevant resources.

I can’t tell you what a treat it was to have breakfast with Jacquie in her neighborhood deli. Her new book is simply a reflection of her generosity, and although I picked up the tab for our eggs and bagels, she happily gave me some unsolicited branding advice to make me a better blogger and green marketer. And you know what else? I think she’s right about that, too.

God bless her.

It happened yesterday when I was reading The Now Revolution, a new book on social media by Jay Baer and Amber Naslund. The Now Revolution is an amalgam of the bottom-up management found in The Rudolph Factor, Zappo’s uber-company-culture tome, Delivering Happiness, and Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents. This social media primer provides actionable steps you can take to make real-time business work for you, rather than against you.

With social media and the connected consumer, you can’t feign passion, fake authenticity, and be complacent.

Here’s how I inadvertently put Jay to that very test.

A unique feature in the book are QR codes that you can scan with your PDA, which then immediately transport you to greater online content. I downloaded the Microsoft Tag app. on my iPhone and scanned the tag on page 16 for “The Culture Barometer;” a quiz that helps you determine the “social” culture within your organization.

But the tag kept taking me to The Now Revolution Facebook page. After three attempts, and being new to the technology, I reached out to Jay on Facebook about the errant link suggesting that it might be user error. Within five minutes, he responded  thanking me for the alert. He made a quick adjustment to the URL, and asked me to try it again. Voila!

This is The Now Revolution at work. When else could you immediately reach an author, point out a business challenge, and have it fixed within minutes? And it didn’t cost the publisher thousands of dollars in reprints and weeks of wasted time. Plus, this customer (me) became an even more active participant in the product and brand: an amazing example of the new velocity of commerce.

I jokingly suggested to Jay that he embedded this snafu to demonstrate the premise of the book: “7 shifts to make your company smarter, faster and more social.”

I’m going to miss Jay and Amber

But you don’t have to. This Friday, you can meet the authors at the Social Media Arizona event at Madcap Theaters in Tempe, AZ. I’ll be in Omaha. But if I was in the crowd, and after reading The Now Revolution, I’d ask:

1. I can appreciate the pragmatic use of QR codes for companies and causes that can deliver meaningful content. But how can marketers avoid making them annoying promotional gimmicks, and therefore diluting the technology’s credibility?
2. What level of manager or executive typically drives the cultural shift needed for large organizations to adopt social media?
3. Besides Yammer, what are the top three internal social media platforms, and have you heard what SharePoint is doing in this space?
4. Who is moving faster to learn, adopt, and activate B2B social media: Ad agencies, PR firms, or internal corporate communicators?
5. What is the single greatest fear an organization must overcome to be successful with social media?

If you haven’t ignited your own social revolution inside your company, then the time is NOW to start by attending SMAZ.

Steven Pressfield’s book about breaking through the blocks and winning your inner creative battles explores our self-doubt, procrastination and laziness that is the holy trinity of resistance.

No matter what profession you’re in, it’s the artist within each and everyone of us that unlocks our success. “The War of Art” examines resistance in bite-sized one- and two-page chunks exploring all of the ways we thwart ourselves, primarly out of fear of success and failure.

Despite the topic, this is a fun read, written by a fabulous screenwriter and author, that should be stuffed in everyone’s brief case and revisited often for quick refreshers on how to cross the finish line with every endeavor we set  into motion.

Pete Walsh, Master Certified Coach

My friend, Pete Walsh, is plagued with an occasionally wicked slice from his left-handed golf swing. Yet, it never gets him down. He has the mental tools and insight to work on his weaknesses in the fairway, while accentuating his strengths around the green.

He’s a competitor.

The best thing about Pete? No matter how far he cranks it out-of-bounds, he’s always having fun and looking forward to the opportunity that comes with his next shot.

This is not only how he takes on coaching in the business world, it’s how he approaches life.

Buy your copy at Amazon by clicking here

Pete is a master certified coach, and he brings the same discipline demonstrated in every winning sports team to his clients’ offices. He’s worked with Park&Co for several years, coaching everyone from our front office person, to me. He makes me a better person, player AND coach to my people.

When I blow it, he’ll come in and say, “I’ve got to punch you in the nose on that one, pal. What were you thinking?” Then he helps me find positive ways to fix my swing and holds my feet to the fire to be accountable to myself and to my team.

The foundation of his corproate coaching is his proprietary P.A.C.E program, which stands for:

• Percieved need: Unearthing the gap in behavior that needs to be closed or corrected
• Analysis: Understanding how the behavior impacts both the person and the organization and how it might be remedied
• Commitment: Making a commitment and being accountable for your change
• Execution: Taking action and being there as a coach to cheer on your employee at the finish line

I’m proud of Pete, because in celebrating his 10th anniversary in business, he is sharing his program in his new book, “Coach to Win the Leadership Game,” Accelerate team development and inspire accountability to win in the marketplace.

I loved the “20 Traits of a Coaching Leader” he outlines in his book, and the practical ways he applies proven coaching techniques to win in business.

You can buy Pete’s book on Amazon.com, or contact Pete at PeakCoach.com. You might not want any of his golfing tips, but he’ll definitely improve your game in business, and in life.

Congratulations, Pete.

Image by Tony Wellington

This economy certainly has companies looking inward. Just to survive, let alone be sustainable, means questioning every practice and how you do business. We have built our agency primarily on outward bound advertising campaigns that we call marketing movements.

Now Park&Co is being tapped to help organizations with their intenal communications programs. They’re not looking for your typical H.R. storyline. Clients are asking for as much creativity and disruption with their internal campaigns as you will find with award-winning ad campaigns.

These employee-centric campaigns have me digging into a whole new realm of business and motivational books to help us find ways to create messages that are relevant and compelling to the individual worker.

Derrick Mains of Green Nurture recommended, The Rudolph Factor, Finding the Bright Lights that Drive Inoovation in Your Business. The book is a case study about the remarkable turn-around Boeing mastered by applying the leadership principles of the Rudolph Factor to their C-17 plant in Long Beach, California.

What we have found is that human nature tends to promote the vision of the machine without demonstrating why it matters to the goals and dreams of the individual employee. The overiding premise of the Rudolph Factor is.

“Leadership, in its most rudimentary form, is all about, and only about, connecting people to their future.”

One of the surest ways to drive innovation and promote employee buy-in is to marshall the forces of your internal “Rudolphs.” Rudolphs make-up about 10 percent of every organization. They’re just as likely to be on your shipping dock, in engineering, or found in a bright secretary, as they are in the C-suite. Tapping their innate inovative ways is essential to building a sustainable organization.

So what do the look like? According to the Rudolph Factor:

1. Rudolphs are naturally creative, and often appear eccentric to the their co-workers
2. They solve problems in unconventional ways and love to get their hands dirty
3. Rudolphs spend an average of four to six hours per day outside of work thinking about ways to better the organization
4. They are extraordinarily passionate about their work
5. They often ask, “Why?” even when it makes others around them uncomfortable
6. They question the status quo and challenge their colleagues to think outside the box
7. Rudolphs see possibility, opportunity and potential, usually creating nontraditional or unconventional opportunities
8. Although they enjoy it, Rudolphs are not motivated by self promotion
9. They are adept at connecting the dots that others do not see to solve problems and make improvements
10. They are systems thinkers seeing the whole forest rather than a single tree
11. Although they think like an entrepreneur, they do not want to run their own businesses
12. Rudolphs prefer collaboration
13. They have the ability and confidence to turn their ideas into action
14. They often act on an idea before they know how it can be done (My father always told us, “Do something, even if it’s wrong.”)
15. Rudolphs do not rely on convention to get things done, and they often appear as trailblazers, troublemakers, or loose cannons to non-Rudolphs

If you find yourself redefining how your company or organization can fly through the fog of the recession and become more sustainable, I highly recommend “The Rudolph Factor.” What book would you recommend to add to my library on internal communications and motivation?

Look at this painting. It tells a powerful story. Where is your attention focused? Now look away and see if you can describe the landscape that surrounds the frightened horse and hungry lion.

Nine out of ten of you will not be able to recall the rock outcropping, evergreen shrub, or dramatic sky that frames this scene of pure terror. Like the startled horse focused on the crouching lion, you were probably focused on this pair of animals compressed into the painting’s lower right corner, which barely makes up 1/5th of the the painting.

This is but one example of the human mind’s typical bottom-up reaction to attention found in the book, “Rapt – Attention and the Focused Life” by Winifred Gallagher. She explores the basic premise: What we think about we bring about.

Do we approach life from a restrictive, negative viewpoint, or a more worldly and open positive mindset? Rapt offers many interesting insights on how green marketers tell their sustainability stories, and how those stories are received by the public.

Rapt, by Winifred Gallagher

“When you feel frightened, angry, or sad reality contracts until whatever is upsetting you takes up the whole world – at least the one between your ears. Life seems like a vale of tears, the future looks bleak, and the only memories that come to mind are unpleasant. The best explanation for why bad feelings shrink your focus is that in a potentially ominous situation, homing in on and reacting to any trouble quickly is more important than taking your time to get the big picture.”

When you think about it, the bottom-up grip the reptilian, fight-or-flight, brain has on your attention is confounding. It’s surprising but true that…

• You’ll work harder to avoid losing money than you will to gain the same amount.
• You’re likelier to notice threats than opportunities.
• You’ll spot an angry face in a crowd of cheery people much faster than a cheery one in an angry crowd.
• You’ll process and remember negative material better than the positive sort.
• You’ll spend more time looking at photographs depicting nasty rather than nice behaviors.
• You’ll react to critical words more slowly and with more cogitation than to flattering ones.
• You’ll listen longer to complaints about yourself than to compliments.
• Even when you sleep, most of your dreams are the bad kind.
• On your birthday, you’re up to 20 percent likelier to have a heart attack, perhaps prompted by stress caused by fears of aging or disappointed hopes.

Rapt explores the phenomena  that the main reason why we’re wired to pay attention to unhappy and frightful emotions is that they attune us to potential threat or lose, which makes us solve the problem to survive.

Rapt is also about the positive, top-down approach to attention. The book points out that if fear and sadness warn us of danger and loss, joy, curiosity, and contentment invite us to reach out and explore the world.

For green marketers, which do you think is the best approach to creating a sustainable movement?

“Horse Frightened by Lion” is a famous painting by 18th century artist, George Stubbs. According to Winifred in her book, Rapt, “Stubbs knew that a ‘high-value’ idea or emotion is as compelling as a flash of lightening or volley of thunder, and it biases the competition for your attention so thoroughly that everything else fades into the background.”