The Green Branding

I call it Green Branding - creating a consumer towards your brand by positioning it around social or environmental cause. With awareness of environment and sustainability gaining momentum, many brands will start embracing such strategies. About an year ago, I had also contributed an article to the Milagrow Newsletter talking about Sanyo's new brand Mantra - Think Gaia (Gaia means Earth in Greek).

Companies like Green Buy, that were popular among niche audience would now start attracting larger audience. The success of such ventures lie in building comprehensive range of products (Green Buy is quiet thin at the moment) and making pricing competitive to non-green counter parts.

Greenpeace also publishes its rankings rating Consumer Electronics companies according to their environmental policies on raw material and waste management.

Ironically, I recently bought a Lenovo (rated 3.7) over Toshiba (rated 5.9) at the slightest cost vs benefit skew in favor of Lenovo. The rankings were at the back of my mind but Lenovo offer was too hard to resist. Moreoever, there was also a question of credibility or accuracy of these findings. On the flip side, Toshiba never leveraged or marketed its Green Rating on its website and product catalog. Just goes on to prove that the Green mantra has still not taken deeper roots in the minds of consumers and sellers. The Green factor can only give an added value to the product, but cannot replace any functional or price value. At least for the next few years.

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The Sustainability Network - Inviting Students, Faculty and Alumni

LINKING INDIA'S INTELLECTUAL POWER FOR INDIA'S ENERGY SUSTAINABILITY

The Sustainability Network is an initiative to stimulate the intellectual power of the nation towards development and deployment of Energy Management and Renewable Energy solutions in the country.

The Sustainability Network engages country’s future professionals and business leaders into the field of Energy Management. The network comprising Students, Alumni and Faculty from Engineering and MBA institutes of the country sensitizes the future Engineers and Managers to this emerging need and opportunity. The idea is to give them the relevant experience while they are still in college through projects with the industry and thus encourage them to pursue Energy Management initiatives in the organizations they work with after graduation. In the first year, we are initiating the network in IITs and IIMs.

The Sustainability Network is first of its kind initiative in India aimed at bringing like minded individual together and working out solutions for country’s energy sustainability. The Network creates entrepreneurial organizations at each of the institutions at the ground level which can organize activities on campus to drive the sustainability initiatives.

Every participating institute is called the Sustainability Link (e.g. Sustainability@IITK, Sustainability@IIMA and so forth). Spearheaded by Students, every Link works closely with the Alumni, Professors and Professionals to undertake activities that

1. Create awareness about this emerging need and opportunity among students and soon to be professionals
2. Facilitate learning and development in the area of Energy Management and Renewable Energy through internships, course projects, campus activities etc and generate pipeline of Energy Managers and Entrepreneurs
3. Help companies improve energy efficiency and deploy new Technology and Management processes with the help of students
4. Encourage students to take up R&D in Energy Management
5. Foster new ventures in area of Energy Management and Renewable Energy
   

If you are a Student, Alumni and Faculty who believe in the need and opportunity of Energy Management in India, write to me. We are currently developing the Link Nucleus at all IITs and IIMs. We are looking for alumni from these institutes who can spearhead the formation of the Link in their respective institute. While there would be many motivated and capable individuals who would want to take forward this initiative in their respective alma mater, we would like to engage only those individuals in the core group who can invest time (we expect 10 hours per week) and occasionally money (say traveling expenses to the institute once a quarter). If not as Nucleus Members, alumni can always engage with the Link in various capacities described above.

We are working with authorities at apex level in the institutions to initiate projects in summer of 2009. The program will include training and live projects. In case you are a student who would like to engage with the Sustainability Network, please write to us.

I would also appreciate if you can propagate the message to your friends and colleagues who are interested in this area and would like to get involved.

We are also present on Facebook under the group - The Sustainability Network. Join Us.

Only For Beer Drinkers

I am a big fan of Advertisement that evokes laughter. People need to laugh and smile more than anything else, and that is biggest value your advertisement can add to their lives. Retention and ROI would obviously be higher when people discuss and talk (or blog) about your ad.

Non Beer drinker's would have some difficulty in comprehending it. I suggest they go and try out some beer.

Thanks Manya for sharing it.