Global Warming is lucrative and sexy screams the title of this post over at Fast Company's blog accompanied by this image of Diesel's latest advertising campaign.
One would be cautious of encouraging further posts or articles on the increasing relevance of sustainable ecologically sound design, also known as green product design if global warming ends up becoming 2007's faddish trend for the media.
One already knows that BusinessWeek is desperately seeking a new "next big thing" for "innovation" and "design" to continue to work their magic on the bottomlines of brands looking for new markets and new sources of revenue. The chief concern would be that once green product design became fashionable, would companies that turned to doing it be only doing so for the PR value of jumping on the next hot new trend in marketing or would they be those that were genuinely committed to saving the planet?
This question has been asked extensively at VentureBeat. One, talks about Vinod Khosla's apparent financial returns from his green investments in biofuels some two years ago and the other, from Sunil Paul, which worries that the firms now getting into 'green tech' VC funding are just doing so because it was the hot new trend to invest in or because they genuinely believed in saving the planet ?
These issues, the very same questions, are arising across disparate industries in totally different markets and audiences, some global some not, but what they do indicate however is an increase in understanding amongst companies everywhere that they simply cannot make profits from a one sided viewpoint of their shareholders anymore but needed to create value for their end user, their customers and their clients if they were themselves to survive the upheaval being created in markets and industries everywhere.
The fact that Davos chose to meet this year on the theme of global shifts of economic and political power, they do indeed go hand in hand, instead of the expected one on Creativity and Innovation as was prepared for last year with a few CeO workshops is in and of itself significant of the validity, the speed and the geographical spread of the shift.
An unexpected factor, imho, was the effect of the wealth flow that had been released from the bottom of the pyramid, an always unconsidered or overlooked segment for corporate global marketing strategy, and how this flow of wealth in emerging markets like India's or China's was able to add its not inconsiderable might in volumes to support the growth rates of these two economies. The question here is not whether they are overheating or not, as The Economist recently chose to do, but what will be the subsequent impact in the global markets and how they are managed by global companies in order to maximize their returns on investments for their shareholders.
Lets take a moment at this time to take a look at the tool behind this flow of wealth. You'll note that Gartner's crucial hypecycle of technology two and some years ago in 2004 from the new product design and development point of view. They leave out the biggest generator of wealth in the world right now - the mobile phone. In 2004, The Gartner Group had not seen the impact of the mobile phone in the arena for consumer technologies in just two years. They have the game consoles, home theatre, broadband all coded as "to plateau of productivity" in 0-2 years. It can be argued that these product lines have done so. However the mobile phone has not been taken into consideration nor was it's subsequent impact via its exponential sales volumes in emerging markets. This is a crucial missing link in the purchasing power calculations you make of your intended target audiences particularly in emerging markets is to seriously ignore the so called "poor".
If ever the words of CK Prahalad seemed prescient - in that he exhorts business to look at the 4 billion of the world's so called poor not as victims but as consumers, with aspirations and values of their own, that they hold - it is now. Why is the potential of the waiting market of 4 billion new customers such an insurmountable challenge?
Once we are able to frame the design problem correctly, in order to best solve the challenge of maximising our client's return on investments in an emerging market with the peculiarities of the bottom of the pyramid segment, we can simply say the following.
We must design for the maximum constraints.
And once we invest in product development and design, supply chains and assembly lines to create and distribute such products, it is but a simple task to increase their attractiveness to more sophisticated and more developed markets by repositioning their core values of sustainable, minimal footprint design using the scarcest of resources for the poor as "sound sustainable ecologically friendly green product design".
What we have here is an opportunity to create a platform of products, on a whole new platform of values, that of conserving mass and energy. There's a law somewhere that states the conservation of mass and energy is a zero sum game. The question that has been raised is whether this applies to economics, business, the market place or is it simply one of the fundamental laws of nature? I mean have we ever let gravity stop us from doing business online?
But in order for this to succeed, to truly make a difference to the genuine, its for real environmental crisis that our world faces right now, we cannot afford for global warming the concept to become the next big thing, or hot fad or trend for 2007. I genuinely believe that it would sap the movement towards healthier living in tune with our entire ecosystem of its value.
Let's hope the media think twice before going overboard on this too early.
