That’s my obvious answer to Korey Baker’s question on LinkedIn today: “What attracts business owners to the idea of “going green”?

To give my position credence, just look at McDonald’s 2011 Sustainability Scorecard. Of their 13 stated goals in five areas, they only met one:

“Increase energy awareness and education across the System to continue to realize savings to the bottom line and benefits to the environment.”

While they’re making progress in other CSR areas, including sustainable supply chain, employee experience, nutrition & well being, and community, it’s no surprise that the big savings are in environmental responsibility.

As I mentioned in the American marketing Association article about the sustainability scorecard, McDonald’s wins by reducing operating costs, increasing net profits, and creating a story about their sustainability that they can share with the world.

That’s how you sell “green” to a company. What’s your answer?

Our son Parker, with his friends Will Walsh and Teddy Saunders, just posted their documentary of Burning Man as seen through Dr. Seuss goggles. I’m proud of their accomplishment in producing such an ambitious project and obviously connecting with so many viewers. On Facebook, Burning Man is already calling it one of the top festival films for 2011.

I’m also amazed by the comments this short film is receiving on YouTube and Redit video. The reactions are an interesting study at how people embrace or fear creativity.

Where does this film take you?

Our first spot follows a boy as he finds a new home for his Teddy Bear. The second spot features empty-nesting parents as they collect the items from their grown daughter’s room and relive the memories. Michele and I can especially relate to the second spot, having two of our three kids now on their own.

The theme throughout is that you have choices when giving away your clothing and household items, and we’re hoping you will choose to donate them to a nonprofit that will put them to good use helping others. Obviously, we would like your story to conclude at Goodwill.

Did you know that 90 cents of every dollar worth of items you donate to Goodwill funds workforce development programs that help put people to work in your community?

We’re also pleased that the print portion of this campaign is featured on Ads of the World.

What is your Goodwill journey? What treasure have you found and what have you donated to help put people back to work?

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?

We were incredibly blessed to have the sun set on our day as a Monet painting, and I wanted to share it with you during these hectic holidays. Now, you can re-gift it to someone you know who might need to slow their pace and receive some grace in their day

Feel free to return often.

Happy Holidays!

It’s not. It’s making fun of companies and brands that are eager to jump on the green bandwagon without doing their homework. Their green marketing shortcuts are laughable, diminishing the credibility of the entire green marketing industry.

At least Lorna Li of Green Marketing TV appreciates my humor. She recently invited me on her web TV show to discuss the art of green marketing.

The Art of Green Marketing for Sustainable Brands – Park Howell, Park & Co from Green Marketing TV on Vimeo.

In this interview we cover:

• Which companies tell their sustainability story well, without the hackneyed green marketing cliches
• Big brands that are failing the “got green?” test
• Successful examples of green marketing
• Egregious examples of green wash, in products that have no business calling themselves green
• Whether green marketing is really dead and if we should just give up

This revealing discussion with several real world green marketing examples, ought to help you better define your green marketing strategies and bring you closer to becoming a remarkable sustainable brand.

But not to YouChange.com. They find value in that pile of ewaste.

You Change is a Phoenix-based service that keeps ewaste out of landfills. You can either mail in your your old electronics, or they will pick them up. They will cull through the items, refurbish and resell what they can giving you a portion of the profits, and recycle the rest. None of what you give them will ever hit a landfill.

Derrick Mains, Enviro-entreprenuer, hummus aficionado, and executive vice president of YouChange.com, said,

“Every year more than 140 million cell phones pollute landfills. Add that to computers, mp3 players, game consoles and other electronic items, and the problem is immense. YouChange is remarketing those items that could have a second life and recycling those that don’t. On www.youchange.com you have the ability to see what the secondary market value of your item is and best of all YouChange will buy those items from you! Reducing your impact on the environment and making a buck. What more can you ask for?”

So if you’re like most consumers, you have drawers, and boxes, and closets, and even offices full of dust-collecting electronics. YouChange offers one way to unclutter your life of ewaste and make a dollar or two while you’re at it.

Do you know of other services where readers can easily recycle their electronics? Please share in the comments section below.

GoGreen Conference at the Phoenix Convention Center

Do you think you have your green brand and marketing figured out? Do you want to put it to the test? Join me as I moderate the workshop, Green Marketing & Branding: Creating Behavior Change during the inaugural GoGreen Conference at the Phoenix Convention Center this Tuesday, November 15.

GoGreen Conference Phoenix has a terrific lineup of speakers, including:

• Al Halvorsen, Senior Director of Environmental Sustainability, Frito-Lay North America
• Derrick Hall, CEO of the Arizona Diamondbacks
• Phoenix Mayor, Phil Gordon
• Kevin Tuerff, President, Enviromedia

There is no real donation involved – presenting something as a gift, grant or contribution – although the for-profit entity that hoodwinks you out of your items would like you to think so.

Inside Edition just aired this story on Bruce Binler, a Long Island, NY businessman who owns hundreds of clothing bins that masquerade as non-profit collection points. It is despicable that they can intercept your donated items for their own gain that would otherwise help put people back to work, as in the case of Goodwill of Central Arizona.

Since the for-profit collection bins have appeared in Arizona, Goodwill of Central Arizona has seen its volume of donated items drop by 40 percent, from 130 pounds-per-donor to approximately 72 pounds. With foresight, Goodwill has increased its number of donors; they’re just dropping off substantially fewer items per trip.

If Goodwill had not experienced the drop in per-donor volume, they could be serving 70,000 Arizonans, instead of the admirable 35,000 they currently serve, to help find jobs. Goodwill attributes much of this loss to for-profit bins.

More than 5,000 profit-seeking bins dot the vacant corners and parking lots of the Valley of the Sun, often illegally because they appear in the dead of night without the permission of the property owner. They are here to compete with legitimate non-profit organizations for your valuable castoffs. But unless these bins have a reputable nonprofit prominently displayed on them, like Goodwill, Valley Big Brothers and Big Sisters, St. Vincent De Paul, or the Salvation Army, you can bet your donated items are headed to a bulk buyer and sold out-of-state or overseas. Very little of the money from your once beloved items will remain in the local community to help put people back to work. It goes to men like Mr. Binler.

Donation bins, like this one from Campus California, have come under fire.

But he’s not alone. Other organizations, like Campus California, which has come under intense scrutiny in the Bay Area, are doling out 200 “cause-oriented” collection bins throughout Arizona.

It’s no wonder that competition for your resale items has gotten nasty. According to the Association of Resale Professionals, resale is a multi-billion dollar a year industry that has grown by seven percent each of the last two years.

Profits are driving unscrupulous marketeers to invade the historical retail domain of non-profits and pirate your items with the false promise that they will have a significant impact on an important social cause.

So the next time that collection bin slams shut on your donated items, think again where it actually might be headed and who is truly benefitting.