The Real Chocolate Caper

Nestle is taking a quite beating over what is nothing short of a complete PR disaster for them.  So much for the good old comfy notion of a Kit Kat or Nestle Crunch.  The company recently attempted to censor some information about its use of palm oil in its products and got caught red-handed.  To make matters worse, they got caught by the one organization you don't ever want to get caught by: Greenpeace.  They are the defenders of the whales and watchdogs of the endangered Orangutan. They are extraordinary in their passion about their work and their beliefs, and don't take lightly to those who beat up on our planet.  While they can be extreme at times, I have tremendous respect for their dedication and their perseverance to the cause of saving our precious planet.

Nestle's poor handling of this social media debacle, however, is a lesson that every organization should be extremely mindful to as their blunder highlights the biggest faux pas that companies make in social media: lack of transparency and disingenuity.  These are the two most important ingredients in any social media recipe.  Forget about chocolate and crispy wafers, let alone the evil palm oil.  The bigger mistake was thinking that you could censor or even worse, fool your community.  People know when they are being duped and quite frankly, they really don't like it.   They can read signals and know when you are being dishonest.  Alex ("Sandy") Petland wrote a wonderful book about this; Honest Signals.  It's a bit of a scientific read but at its core, the essential premise is that humans are extraordinarily adept at picking up subtle signals and more importantly, they know when they are being lied to.

 Nestle would have done far better to face the criticism head on, admit their mistake to their 90,000+ Facebook fans, and try to make amends to their community.  They should also start to talk about alternatives to their use of palm oil in their products and identify projects where they can start giving back to the rapidly disappearing rain forests in Indonesia.  They could have completely turned this around and used it to their advantage but instead, tried to brush it under the rug.

No one wants to be associated with destroying rain forests or dramatically reducing the Orangutan population, let alone be associated with a company that blatantly lies to its community about its dopey chocolate wafers.  People care more than you think, and never under estimate the power of the people in their willingness to express their discontent.  Nowadays, they have an even more instantaneous and more powerful way to do it.

Companies be ware!  The chocolate caper could happen to any company.  Respect and understand your audience and more importantly, be honest and sincere with them.  I guarantee the rewards will be endless and more meaningful than any management-book ROI equation.

Value, generosity, and giving without expectation are concepts we need to embrace with greater enthusiasm because the rewards and benefits are limitless.

American Consumers and Their Need for Control

The psychology of American consumer behavior is fascinating.  A recent article in the Wall Street Journal about Americans' use of laundry soap was one of the most titillatting trips down the bunny hole of American consumerism that I've come across in a while.  It was interesting on so many levels. 

From a sociological perspective, we've become so ingrained in our laundry habits that we disregard the directions on the product and more often than not, improperly dose our washing machines.  After some rather intensive market research, Method Products Inc., a San Francisco-based company which makes eco-friendly household products found that 53% of consumers don't use the recommend amound per washload.  In fact, Method just launched a product to help train its consumers in proper laundry etiquette.

Using too much detergent has several deleterious effects, not the least of which is that it is ruinous to your poor machine that is desperately trying to keep up with the suds.  Even worse, if the product is not eco-friendly, it is ruinous to the environment.  Over sudsing wrecks havoc on clothes and often leaves them as dirty (if not dirtier) as they were before they found their way into the washing machine.  Some people may not particularly care because they either love the "Spring Fresh" scent of  their preferred product, or they don't intend to keep that shirt more than a year anyway.  We won't even talk about that logic mousetrap for now.

It is fascinating, however, to think about how habituated we have become in certain aspects of our daily chores.  We are all convinced that we have perfected the right recipe for doing things, despite clear label directions which tell us otherwise.  How odd is that?

Europeans have developed very different living habits.  Have you ever seen the size of a refrigerator in England?  They are basically the size of the ones college students use in their dorm rooms.  Europeans also don't really have much of a "soap" dilemma.  The reasons are fairly obvious; they tend to be more "space" conscious and less wasteful primarily because a) they have less space and b) they can't afford to be wasteful because they have less space.

It seems to be that our habits are symptomatic of an eclectic intellectual fabric which is partly our heritage Manifest Destiny and partly our profound sense of entitlement.  We want what we want, and we will do what it takes to get it.  We are an odd lot in many ways.  Many people around the world admire us for our unique achievements and determination. Many condemn us as well for those very traits and accuse us of being greedy and overly consumptive.  The laundry item, however, just struck me as just plain funny.  We ignore directions at our own peril because we are convinced that our approach is best. 

I wonder if this also applies to dishwashers?  I also put a little extra in the secondary holding area but I alwasys assumee that was ok.  Why else would it be there?  It's always worked for me in the past and I like my dishes to be really clean.

Oops, there goes that need for control.  I should probably go read the label and find out if I am in fact making my dishwasher work harder or ruining the environment.

Plastic Soup

While somewhat reminiscent of Bridget Jones' infamous "blue soup", to quote Billy Crystal, this is neither fun, nor funny.  This is major, and should be a monumentally disturbing reminder to every single soul on this planet: we are destroying the most precious thing we have--our world. Without it, nothing else exists. 

A story released today by the Associated Press chronicles the findings of several researchers who  uncovered yet another giant island of plastic floating about in the ocean.  This time it's in the Atlantic, and this time is inherently more troubling.  The floating garbage, which apparently is hard to spot from the surface and is spun together by a vortex of currents, was documented by two groups of scientists who trawled the sea between scenic Bermuda and Portugal's mid-Atlantic Azores islands.

The studies describe a "soup of micro-particles" similar to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  This garbage patch was discovered in the late 1990's and exists between Hawaii and California.  Researchers say that it is very likely these types of garbage patches exist in other places around the globe.


This is the type of stuff that keeps me awake at night.  What are we doing to our precious little planet?  We are ruining our environment with death-defying speed, and are so wrapped up in our Iphones and Facebook pages, and twittering endless drivel to the world that we seem to be oblivious to the fact that at some point, nature will self-correct.  We cannot survive in a world with oceans of plastic soup.   We cannot survive in a world where we can't breathe the air or safely harvest food.

I agree that it takes a village and the village is indeed forming.  I only fear that it is not happening fast enough. I drive a hybrid, I've reduced my carbon footprint to the best of my ability, and I reuse any material--plastic or otherwise--in as creative a manner as possibly can.  I reused 90 year old nails on a renovation project in my home because they were still good, they still worked just fine, and they were better than the ones I could buy at Home Depot.

I don't mean to sound like a doomsayer and I realize there are many, many problems in the world that warrant equal attention; starvation, poverty, genocide, and human rights violations to name a few, but this stuff is just scary.

If we are fortunate enough to keep our space program alive, let's hope that the next set of pictures we receive from space are not snapshots of our beautiful planet with a giant plastic footprint in the ocean.