The Seattle Direct Marketing Association has ears to the ground on all the hot topics in the direct marketing industry. Our PR guy has done a bit of research and a bit of pondering on the topic of green marketing and has expounded on the topic for the benefit of all direct marketers interested in how their work is affecting the environment.
Thanks to Jeff Wenker for the following contribution to our blog...
On Earth Day someone wrote that not printing an email isn't going to save the planet. Fair enough. However, what if everyone in your office stopped printing emails, everyone in a Fortune 100 company, everyone in a city? What if it became the norm to never print emails? That might not save the planet either, but it might help.
People have been talking about the paperless office for a long time, I think it was Tom Seibel or Larry Ellison, some database guy back in the day (what day, you say) who was all gung-ho about it. It's impossible, of course. The joke being, offices will be paperless when they remove the bathrooms.
As an interesting experiment, try this: don't throw away any paper. Let it pile up. Put it in a stack in the corner of your office or cube. See how much you produce in a month. Then multiply that by, I don't know 100 million, to pick a nice round number. Leave that stack there and start a new stack for the next month. Check and see if the second stack's shorter (hint: try to make it shorter). Then do the math again.
There's a great Paul Kelly song - "From Little Things, Big Things Grow" - it has absolutely nothing to do with paper, but I think about the concept frequently. From the acorn comes the mighty oak, the tiny mustard seed grows into one of the largest trees, we all come from that microscopic gleam in our fathers' eyes (or that's what they told me). A pretty obvious point, little things grow into big things, but where are those little things?
There are things we accept now as second-nature that ten or 20 years ago were unthinkable. Some are small. It's a reflex now to buckle our car seat belts, kids have never done otherwise, a generation will have been strapped into carseats snug as astronauts, yet their parents were frequently tossed into the back of stationwagons to roll around like empty Coke bottles. Some are large. We can now call or email anyone anywhere in the world from wherever we happen to be. If someone told me in 1985, the year I graduated from high school, that I could do that in 20 years time, I would have been
blown away (stoked at something so totally bitchin' but still blown away). High schoolers today wouldn't accept less, in fact they probably complain about the speed or coverage of their service.
So, what is the next big thing that we can't imagine now, but will be accepted as the norm to preschoolers tomorrow?
Paperless Direct Marketing?
How about Train-Planes?
Instead of viewing the transportation of humans in heavier than air machines across the skies and seas as a competitive endeavor to be done as cheaply as possible in order to lure the largest number of passengers, what if air travel was viewed as part of our global infrastructure. Governments manage and regulate highways, railroads, sewage and the electrical grid, why not air travel? After all, we don't have competing sets of train tracks. Let's make wildly speculative imaginative leapings. Say we had just one kind of plane for long flights and it looked like a troop transport plane with big empty space on the inside rather than one level of seats and one level of cargo. Then imagine a train loaded with passengers rolling right onto the plane all ready for take-off. You could build induction terminals closer to population centers where all security measures could take place away from a secure airfield designed only for safe landings and departures of uniformly designed planes. If one plane broke down or needed repair (not that that ever happens) another one would be in line ready to go. It's not drastically different from a modern airport like Hong Kong where you can check your bag in town and then take a train to the terminal. You just take it a step further so it would be like the train ferry from Hamburg to Copenhagen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_ferry. If a train can roll right onto a boat, why can't a lighter train roll onto an airplane? Bags travel with you in your own private car or economy could share a car with other passengers, like the European train system. You could even bring back smoking on planes by adding cars with their own air circulation systems.
Yes, it would be an engineering task of immense proportions - new planes, new specially designed trains, new induction terminals - but think of the economies of scale. We wouldn't have airlines competing in a race to the bottom (not ideal from 30,000 feet) trying to cut costs and stay afloat in an era of rising fuel costs, necessary yet expensive security measures, and reluctant ridership (flying commercial ain't fun anymore).
Compared to a crazy scheme like this, Direct Marketing without paper sounds
downright logical.
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