I want to tell you a little bit about myself and my family. We do not own a car. I haven’t owned a car in twelve years now. We also do not have air conditioning. Again, it’s been twelve years since I’ve had this. I take almost all my local trips by bike, and I recycle nearly everything. Why? because it’s so damn convenient to do all of this where I live. I live in San Francisco, of course, where public transportation and parking sucks, thus the bike, recycling here does not need to be separated, thus recycle nearly everything, and air conditioning is climatically built in, thus no A.C. If I didn’t have all of these things being incredibly convenient then I would be a gas guzzling landfill kind of guy.What am I getting at? What’s the point? It’s convenience, stupid. It’s not action, or even seeing Pat Robertson having to associate with Al Sharpton for 30 seconds that is going to make me change into someone who cares about climate change. So, what I’m saying is it breaks my heart a bit to see the “We” campaign spending so much money to be the marking arm of the Greening of America when in the end it’s going to begin to feel disingenuous to people after being bombarded so much with the ads.

Here is a much more powerful model for climate change that requires a much smaller advertising budget: ZipCar. Zipcar is a for profit company that provides cars that are shared by multiple people and can be rented by the hour at reasonable prices. For instance, I use a car 3 hours per week, so instead of owning a car I pay 18 dollars a week to run all of my errands. If I want to take a trip, then I may pay 80 dollars for the weekend. I never pay for gas, insurance, nor do I have to fix the car if it breaks down. I can drive stylish cars that I would normally not have access to, and I can rent the car within seconds. The point is that this service works conveniently and cheaply while keeping hundreds of cars off the road.

What is ZipCar’s most sucessful marketing strategy? Word of Mouth. Make an innovative, cheap, and convenient service that eliminates major headaches in people’s lives and you have an easy way to spread the word quickly on almost no budget.

So back to the question: Can we solve it (the climate crisis, that is)? Yes we can, but probably no with more television commercials.

I read this in the Wall Street Journal

Because the green Starbucks logo is so pervasive, the switch to the retro version is an immediate attention-grabber. It’s just one part of a much broader effort underway at Starbucks, in which the company is stressing a return to its roots and working to reemphasize its brewed-coffee chops. (Click here to read more from today’s Journal.) To much fanfare, Starbucks today unveiled a new blend, Pike Place Roast, meant to have a smoother taste. The change isn’t permanent–the retro logo is being used temporarily. But in the annals of brand identity, switching away from a high-recognition logo–even for a promotion–is an unusual move.

Starbucks has jumped the shark twice recently. That is, they’ve created PR stunts to gain popularity, but in fact, lead to their demise. It seems to be a trend for Starbucks to use PR ploys more and more rather than sticking to their simple brand promise. I think changing the logo is less annoying, however, than closing all Starbucks in the U.S. for three hours recently making people ask the question: " Is life still good without Starbucks?". The answer for me is yes.

I’m not suggesting Starbucks simply should sit still in their business until something better comes along, but I think they should look for real paradigm shifting changes to their business that require much more difficult risks than changing their logo for a couple of weeks.

My advice to Starbucks would be to study cases of businesses where they seemed to have jumped the shark with their brand and succeeded. One that comes to mind is the show Twin Peaks. They jumped the shark in the very first episode  and got more and more boring afterwards, and yet they stretched the series for many season? How? By trying to reveal pieces of the mystery in each episode, they came up with a long puzzle to solve that requires the audience to watch every second. Kind of like Steve Jobs makes PR mysteries at Apple by giving hints at what they’re going to unveil.

Buzzwatch : Grande Logo Switch: Is Starbucks’ New Cup Grabby–or a Grind?