Mayari’s Blog

The latest post on Business Week Innovations is about authenticity as a strategy for your brand or business to grow.

I feel sad that the principle of authenticity doesn’t seem to be a standard in doing business. (Are all marketers liars? Seth Godin) Can lies be covered forever? I don’t think so, especially not now, as our world is becoming more and more transparent thanks to the Internet. Another question: Do you know anyone who likes the feeling of being cheated? I don’t. Neither by a friend nor by a company.

If you want to be trusted (which is a positive feeling worldwide) act according to your set of truth (which is relative all over the world but always valuable) and therefore be authentic. No matter if you are a friend or a brand.

There is an online shoe company (zappos) that bribes their new employees to quit. The newly hired get “the offer” (before it was 100$, now they rose the quit-now-bonus up to 1000$) about one week after they started working. By then, the new employees should have been able to get an idea about the character of their company and the business.

If the employee takes the money, so zappos claims, their commitment for the company wouldn’t have been to high in the long run anyway, so in the end there is no loss for the company.

Love it or leave it. Makes sense.

via steve clayton

read more at futerra.

Green Marketing is good but I think information sharing communities fit more our zeitgeist. Within a community one can have the feeling of being part of something bigger than themselves. A feeling of being involved due to an intrinsic motivation and not being convinced by someone else. Within modern communities there are usually less hierarchies. I believe Individualists don’t like hierarchies but search for like-minded people in order to share and make a statement.

I’m part of One.org, We and Anti-Apathy, Lovepeace.ch by greenpeace, TED ideas woth spreading and Design21 social design network, ebay, etsy, the german version dawanda and instructables (At school I even made a businessplan for a similar community more than one year ago: planbdesigns). I’m also with LinkedIn, studi vz, a small world and of course facebook. Further I’m with Improveverywhere, Ning and Xing, Couchsurfing, Conceptart and the McKinsey Quarterly. Not to mention Google, Netvibes, Flickr, Twitter, Wordpress and Youtube. And probably I forgot some communities where I’m member too. Too many!

I like all these communities or offers but the question is: Where am I active? In some of them I have never been active. I just wanted to be a symbolic member, in others I was active for a while. A few I use very often or even daily. People have to select their favourites because time is limited to 24h a day. What sites, which brands make it to favourites and why? Big question and interesting challenge to find out.

Like Organic Works Marketing does since 2001 launched by two woman in New York.

Or Robin Browne contributes his thoughts on social marketing at consciousimages.org.

Once more the USA is progressive and ahead our time. But the East is getting there too. Kind of sad I’m interested in Asian and European markets/cultures. Probably it still takes a while till this trend finally gets there. I know from experience that most Chinese are not too concerned abut their environment. I understand that. But I’m sad about it.

I foud this picture in a presentation about sustainable design:

THE REAL CHALLENGE OF SUSTAINABLE DESIGN

An interesting Presentation. In a nutshell: We have to become more sustainable on two levels.
1. in the material domain (new products and their production)
2. in the human domain (new business models and different consumption e.g. behaviour).
As a designer people think I should act in the first domain. I’m not a traditional designer but a concept designer. My interest lies much more in the second domain. It’s what I would call a change and not a chance. And we need a change. I strongly believe that new media and new brands or rebrands can help doing so.

A way to meet like minded but yet unknown people in your area using your mobile phone patented in 2005 by MIT.

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