After several months behind the scenes, we’re excited to share our work with Nordic Naturals on the What’s Essential campaign, aimed at creating user-generated stories inspired by the brand’s natural essential oils. Our team helped to create and develop the identity for the interactive contest, which encourages consumers to think and talk about what’s most essential in their own lives. This approach re-imagines old tactics of health-related marketing by unleashing larger conversations about health, happiness, balance and a meaningful life. The campaign—which empowers co-creativity and celebrates individuality—has already reached 24,000 Facebook likes.

PS. Throw your hat in the ring! Share what’s essential to you on the What’s Essential Facebook page or microsite for a chance to win prizes like a trip to California to visit the Monterrey Bay Aquarium and Nordic Naturals’ award-winning, LEED-certified, Norwegian-fishing-village-inspired headquarters.

A few takeaways in no particular order…

Go native. Digital native. It’s about our capacity to adapt, to use information technology to engage, inspire and improve the world. Keep up or risk irrelevance! The landscape is littered with companies that can’t or refuse to pivot. Hand me a #Gatorade (Are you tracking me, Mission Control?) Courtesy B. Bonin Bough, Pepsico, @boughb.

Take the smartcut. Kids today. They want to game this game called life, but it’s less about shortcuts and more about smarts and resourcefulness. “So, how do I get to the next level?” “Wait, you just got here.” “So?” “So, this is a job, not a game.” “Oh. (blinks) How…boring.” Courtesy Allison Hillhouse, MTV, @mtv.

TV has always been “social.” What’s all the hype? In the age of Yoots and DVRs, appointment viewing is now a thing of the past, as precious as granny’s dusty cameo. Getting viewers to share and connect, independent of place, is bound to increase, and the efforts will be expensive. Courtesy of Sabrina Caluori, HBO, @sabrinacaluori.

Can we gamify everything? Should we? What if we gamified service design, education, the retail experience? Imagine the possibilities but anticipate gaming fatigue, natch. (Read the rest of this post and earn the blue badger badge to badgeville, which will unlock a hidden link to an exclusive, never-before-seen blog post, ha.) Courtesy of Max Clark, Vitrue, @vitrue.

Lunchboxes fail to motivate. Don’t try feeding the beast with sub-par boxed lunches. Step it up next year, please. Folks were, um, restrained in their Tweets, to say the least. Courtesy Green Buzz Agency, @greenbuzzagency.

The fix is in. Understand how the “screening of our lives” and this “culture of interruption” feeds our need for speedy affirmation. If getting a text is like a hit, how can we keep the real-world, in-person conversation one that’s worth having? (Overheard at the water cooler following the “Let’s Play” panel.)

Kan we kalculate your Klout? As we engage more consumers beyond insights generation toward innovation and influence, knowing their impact–and whether we can trust them– will get easier to track and gain import. That a job candidate will put his/her Klout score on said resume still has me scratching ye olde noggin. Brave new job interview, indeed. Courtesy Tim Mahlman, Klout, @tmahlman

Optimize thy video. The metrics are off, way off, as most campaigns fail to drive key brand metrics, favoring impressions and/or click-thru rates instead. Do not pass go. Go back and re-examine your campaign objectives first. Courtesy Mark Rotblat, TubeMogul, @tubemogul.

Brands of the future will be ‘sustainable brands.’ Twenty-first century brands will go to market with practical or functional benefits, but they will also embed into their DNA how they’re making the world a better place, and how they connect us to ‘tribes’ of like-minded and like-hearted consumers. Courtesy of me, BBMG, @whichmitch.

Visuals rawk! You know the cliché: a picture is worth a thousand words. So why aren’t more presenters following TED’s model: tell me a story, say it with dynamic visuals and video. Don’t torture me with 10-point type and undecipherable charts and graphs. Courtesy of Death by Powerpoint, no Twitter handle at press time.

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So what were your takeaways? Lemmeno. And don’t be a stranger. See you at SXSW Interactive.

My sustainability journey began at a young age. I studied the causes of acid rain and frog deformities in agricultural areas. Industrial pollution and agrochemical runoff became dinner-table talking points. I pursued a degree in environmental policy, hoping I could address sustainability issues through regulation and policymaking, spending time in the U.S. Senate, at the EPA and a number of environmental NGOs. The work was important and rewarding, but something in my worldview was shifting.  I was starting to look at the very industries and companies that we were working to regulate or campaign against as the key to driving positive impact on a large scale.

My first foray into the sustainable business space was at Seventh Generation. I was blown away by the passion and vision of Jeffrey Hollender and the company as a whole. After witnessing the positive impact consumer brands can have on the world, I had decided on a new career path.

I joined Walmart in 2008 and fully immersed myself in the world of corporate sustainability thanks to the retailer’s 200 million U.S. customers, mission to save people money so they can live better and bold sustainability goals. I created campaigns that educated consumers about the business benefits of renewable energy, helped introduce more sustainable products into stores and worked across the supply chain to better understand and quantify products’ total life cycle impacts. My tenure at Walmart solidified my belief that business embracing sustainability represents the greatest economic and environmental opportunity of our time.

Today, I find myself at home at BBMG, working at the dynamic intersection of branding, sustainability, technology and social purpose. Every day brings a new challenge and a new opportunity to engage consumers in a vision for making the world a better place. I still get to partner with the Fortune 500 set as well as with the bold visionaries at companies like Seventh Generation and Earthbound Farm. It’s a perfect fit.

Through this journey I’ve realized that there are many ways to do good work and bring sustainability and social equity to the world–and that it doesn’t matter if that mission is carried out inside the world’s largest company, at a small Vermont NGO or in the halls of government. What is important is finding the environment that excites me the most and feels the most authentic, and where I can leverage my strengths to make the greatest impact.

And, I’ve learned a few lessons along the way:

Passion is Paramount – A business case or new policy alone won’t cut it.  If you’re passionate about the issue or the outcome you’re driving towards, you’ll be much more successful. You will use the power of storytelling to bring others on board and draw attention to your initiative.

Create a Coalition – Don’t try to go it alone; build a robust team of supporters along the way and keep them updated, engaged and excited.  Share the work and share the success with your network at key milestones.

Stick with It – Having a great idea and a handful of supporters is just the start and, in some ways, the easy part. Follow-through and determination is what wil get results in the long run.

To help guide organizations on their journey, we started with a basic question: “Do you have a green team?” From there, we charted dozens of Yes/No follow-ups consistent with our experience and the interviews we conducted with leading companies, then we revised the fishbone and revised it some more.

The end result, featured in our latest Fast Company blog, helps bring our framework to life in a more visual way (at least we think so).

That was our challenge. Here’s yours: go through the flowchart and see where you end up!

We’ve learned a lot from our daily conversations with these practical and purposeful shoppers—including a few surprises. (Think organic is the hottest trend in food and beverage among these most-influential consumers? Think again.) So what issues and brands were at the top of New Consumers’ minds in 2011? Here are just a few of the many highlights from the year’s past activities.

Collectivites praised Origins for its excellent products, USDA-certified organic ingredients and 100% natural essential oils.

1. Natural Beauty: Keep It Pretty Simple

• Efficacy: Even the most values-minded consumers want products that work. Efficacy and safety are price of entry.
• Ingredients: Almost equally important, consumers want—and are willing to pay a premium for—natural and non-toxic products with recognizable and straightforward ingredients.
• Certification: Trustmarks with mainstream appeal, like USDA Organic or Leaping Bunny, can influence purchase choices, but they’re more likely to be a value-add or differentiator rather than a core purchase driver.

Marissa in New York put it this way: “Bottom line: products have to work well. Finding quality products that work well and limit their impact on the environment—that’s a bonus and a great win-win.”

2. Food and Beverage: Health Trumps Organic

Lotus Foods offers high-quality heritage rice breeds that are sustainably and organically grown by small to mid-sized farms in developing countries; Collective members helped refined messaging and packaging concepts.

• Taste, Quality and Price: While organic can sway purchase decisions, New Consumers consider taste, quality and price above all else.
• Highlight Health: Though sustainable practices are certainly appealing, health remains a bigger purchase driver for many, highlighting opportunities for targeted communications to health-centered shoppers.
• Think Local: Even above certified organic, consumers are increasingly likely to buy local goods that directly support their communities. And, local produce has the added appeal of an actual connection with a real person.

Collective member mbal put it this way: “I prefer to support producers with organic, biodynamic and sustainable growing practices. But those alone aren’t enough—quality and taste are critical.”

3. Social Causes: Beyond Stick-on Cause Marketing

• Lasting Impact: New Consumers are more interested in cause platforms that support and build infrastructure than one-off charity projects or donations.
• Authenticity: Consumers favor brands that support or partner with causes that are true to their mission or identity. Pink buckets of fried chicken for breast cancer, while they may generate large donations, can create more skepticism than support.
• Transparency: When they get behind a cause, consumers want to know how they are making an impact – and track how their money is being used.

Collective members respond to making a lasting impact; for example, Heifer International helps families improve their nutrition and generate income in sustainable ways by offering them livestock and training as “living loans.”

Says WoodGrain: “I think supporting infrastructure is a fantastic alternative to just throwing money at a problem.”

4. Packaging: Thinking Outside the Box

• Less Is More: Extra, unnecessary packaging is a peeve: it’s annoying to dispose of, bad for the environment and gets in the way.
• Beyond Recycling: Making packages reusable and not just recyclable showcases creativity and drives consumer loyalty—they’ll get more out of buying your product.
• More Than a Box: Use packaging as a platform to tell a compelling brand or product story and to inspire education, engagement and social action.

Ecocradle’s styrofoam-looking packaging is actually made from biodegradable, compostable mushroom and seed fibers.

Sri put it like this: “One of my big pet peeves is boxes for electronics. First of all the box is way too big for the product and comes in an even bigger box with tons of things I don’t need. I like places that give me reusable containers and let me bring them back for discounted refills.”

For consumers, The Collective offers voice, creativity, influence and impact. A chance to connect with the brands and causes they care about. As user Damizelle says, “I love The Collective because I feel that I am contributing to improving my community’s experience of shopping and consumption.” For brands, it’s all about innovation, engagement and authenticity.

So, here’s to co-creativity: to hundreds of thousands of ideas still to come; and to better brands, products and experiences that benefit us all.

Additional reporting by Margaret Tung. 

Last week, fellow designer Jess Oswald and I took a trip to Parsons to see legendary designer Milton Glaser talk about his upcoming book “In Search of the Miraculous or One Thing Leads to Another.” We fully expected inspiration, which we got—plus, a hilarious and articulate account of the 82 year-old man’s life as an ethical designer, and a lesson on color that was arguably more enlightening than anything we learned while stationed behind our computers in design school.

“The computer is an instrument of the devil. You have to be very suspicious,” he warned us. “It makes you do what it wants you do to. I don’t know enough to be victimized by it.” Glaser believes that imagination and creativity come from the brain through your hands, and that too many designers today turn to the computer (a machine, he says, that is smarter than us and yet more limited) to begin a project.

Perhaps the most moving part of his presentation was his take on the transformative power of color. The “miraculous” in his book title refers to moments in design when there is a relationship between art and energy, sometimes achieved only by virtue of color. He revealed images of beautifully illustrative textiles he designed—first in dark tones and then in light ones—to demonstrate that the consequence of color can be simple but extraordinary.

Milton’s impact on the world of graphic design is immense and powerful, and so too was his talk. Even if you aren’t a design person you’ve no doubt seen his work. The ‘I “heart” NY’ logo? Yup, that’s his.

SPOILER ALERT: I describe the general plot outline of the movie below, but don’t ruin any of Fozzie Bear’s jokes…Then again, they’re so bad to begin with, how could I?

Don’t get me wrong. I was laughing out loud for most of The Muppets and absolutely recommend it to any and all Gen X and early Gen Y’ers, who are clearly the movie’s target market. Muppet Man and a certain flock of feathered Muppets singing Cee Lo Green were alone worth the price of admission. However, at times, it felt more like I was watching a business presentation than a movie. And it was a hard sell.

A key character in the movie is Walter, a very human-looking Muppet, who it’s clear represents me and other fans who stuck with this tarnished brand over the years (see: Muppets From Space). The movie opens with precocious young Walter waxing poetic about how he grew up watching the Muppets and how they gave him hope. Then, Walter learns of a nefarious plot to destroy the Muppets and he makes it his mission to return them to their former glory.

Kermit–representing the Muppets, of course–is a sad sack for most of the film. At first he turns down Walter’s entreaties, but eventually relents and says sheepishly, “Well, we could try.” (A strange comment from a green puppet. I prefer Yoda’s “Do or do not. There is no try.“)

As the movie progresses, more and more responsibility for the Muppets’ success is heaped at Walter’s–our–feet. Kermit is just not his usual resourceful self; instead, Walter must inject optimism into scene after scene with a forlorn frog who keeps shrinking–his cute-sock puppet face literally crunching into a ball–as obstacles get in the way. Kermit reaches his nadir near the end of the film when he thinks the Muppets’ big comeback show was a failure, but then, he opens the theater door to discover that thousands of people have spontaneously taken to the streets to celebrate the Muppets’ rebirth. At that point, I felt less like I was getting a relaxing Saturday night and more like I had been given a job: “Kermit needs you! Go forth from this theater and spread the news…The Muppets are back!”

The Lesson: Just Say It!

There’s an old rule that when giving a presentation, you should:

1. Say what you’re going to say.
2. Say it.
3. Say what you just said.

The Muppets followed this template to a T. Only they didn’t have to–and, for that matter, neither do many actual business presenters. Sometimes all you need is step two: just say it!

So, to my dearest Kermit, Fozzie, Swedish Chef, Piggy and friends: Please don’t be insecure. Show me that you’re great. No need to tell me or sell me. Just keep cracking corny jokes, singing sappy songs and getting into zany misadventures. In return, I promise to tell the world!

The BBMG design team’s most recent field trip? The Design With the Other 90% Cities exhibit at the U.N. Besides feeling really cool and important walking through the building’s fabled doors, we were excited to see projects designed with a higher purpose in mind: improving the daily lives of those who fall outside the world’s richest 10%.

The exhibit’s many brilliant projects from across the globe share a common mission—to design and develop products and services that better living situations by focusing on basic needs such as shelter, health, water, education, energy and transport.

Walking around the exhibit you quickly understand the reasoning behind the key choice of words: design with the other 90%, not for the other 90%. All these projects were born out of pure collaboration. The people provided the materials and the insights and the designers brought their expertise and production know-how.

Many Tanzanians live without a daily source of electricity. This bicycle phone charger provides a reliable way to charge cell phones. It’s made from scrap bike and radio parts and generates power when its roller hits a bike’s spinning wheel.

Garden-in-a-Sack allows communities with little or poor farmland to create their own gardening systems for reliable food supply. The product is broken down into a three-step DIY process involving an empty sugar or flour sack, soil and manure. Not only does this system help feed households, it empowers villagers to sell excess produce and supplement their income.

The Plastic Formwork system allows people with little construction skills to create and cast their own homes. The system is made from simple squares of plastic that join together to create hollow walls in which mortar is poured and left to harden overnight. Each kit can be used up to 50 times before it’s broken down and recycled.

To echo one of the show’s designers: Poor people are among the most revolutionary designers in the world. The extreme constraints of poverty force them to focus on what we already know: simple is best, use materials that are in abundance and concentrate on increasing quality of life over the acquisition of more things. Pretty inspiring and grounding stuff!

The BBMG design team visited our friends at Hyperakt last Friday for an inspiring #lunchtalk from Pentagram’s Eddie Opara. Opara merged his studio, Map Office, with Pentagram in the fall of 2010—becoming the first partner to join the firm since 2006; and, at 38, he’s also the youngest (and the first African American) partner at the firm.

Eddie shared some of his process and work from recent projects, including an innovative information system for the New York City Department of Design and Construction (DDC), an interactive table for the Savannah College of Art and Design and a data visualization system called View 2 developed for J. Walter Thompson. Opara commented on each project’s focus on data visualization, stating that the best data visualization shows not what is there but what isn’t. The visualization of the information, in other words, reveals something that can’t easily be seen with a page of statistics.

I’ll leave you with a few words of wisdom from Eddie: Nothing is ever finished. That’s ok… that’s the way our world works—ever evolving. As a consequence, our focus should be on designing open-ended systems as opposed to close-ended (static, one-time-use, only one way to use) systems.

A few weeks ago I read about Stockbox Grocers, a Seattle-based startup that’s bringing fresh produce to under-served and disadvantaged metropolitan areas using an entirely new idea: turning old shipping containers into affordable mini-grocery stores. These shipping-container stores—currently prototyping in a few Seattle locations—sit in empty or shared lots, allowing Stockbox to keep overhead costs low and sell a variety of foods at affordable prices.

I’m excited about Stockbox’s idea—so excited, in fact, that I called up co-founder Carrie Ferrence to learn more. As you’ll see by the below interview: They’ve come against some marketing challenges, but have great partners on the ground helping them generate buzz!

Hi Carrie! What inspired the Stockbox Grocers model?
Carrie: We were originally inspired by the mobile markets that have recently launched in Los Angeles and Chicago. These markets put fresh produce in old buses or old postal vehicles and drive them around to communities that are low-income food deserts. However, these markets have had limited success because they aren’t able to fit very much food in the back of the trucks and also have an impermanent presence in communities. Stockbox’s model makes fresh produce permanent and reliable.

How are you telling your communities about Stockbox?
Carrie: We are relying mostly on flyers, offering coupons and working with a local organization called Healthy Foods. People are confused by our concept because it’s new and unfamiliar. Many think we are more expensive, but once they walk in our stores they are surprised by how fair our prices are. When building our business model, we factored in competitive pricing to companies like Safeway and Target, because our price point is one of our key sells.

How does the shopping experience at Stockbox compare to that of a larger grocery store?
Carrie: Our prototype is smaller than that of the permanent stores we are hoping to create. We can currently fit five or six customers at a time. Our permanent stores will probably be able to fit about one to two more. We’ll also be able to stock 300-500 items in the permanent store. The average time a customer needs to spend in our stores isn’t as much as in a larger store, so we don’t anticipate issues with crowding.

Reliable stock is important, especially in neighborhoods where regular availability of fresh produce is scarce. How have vendors reacted to working with you?
Carrie: We are working with UNFI. They’re really supportive of providing inventory. They want to help us take Stockbox Grocers to scale. We’re trying to expand to 15-20 Stockbox stores in a city.

Do you have plans for specific programs to connect with customer and community needs?
Carrie: We’re currently getting feedback from our customers about how relevant our inventory is to them. We’re training store managers to introduce customers to new foods and the raw materials used to make canned goods. We’re also printing recipe cards, coupon booklets, and we are partnering with community organizations to identify and address needs.

What are your short-term and long-term goals for Stockbox?
Carrie: We’d like to open a couple permanent Stockbox stores next year in south Seattle. But this would all happen after we get a sense of what the city needs and how many stores we can handle before we consider another location or urban area.

Head over to the Stockbox website to learn more about their stores, products and updates. Personally, I can’t wait to see how their business model unfolds.