• by April 15, 2008

In San Francisco in the 1960s, an iconic adman named Howard Luck Gossage declared that he would never recommend outdoor advertising to his clients because it was a blot on the landscape. It was typical of the errant genius of Gossage (who, if you're not familiar with the name, was the guy who introduced Marshall McLuhan to America). But I'm sure it was dismissed as just a crackpot move at the time.

And it wouldn't have much relevance today if his thinking hadn't been applied on a grand scale recently in São Paulo, where the populist mayor, Gilberto Kassab, banned all outdoor advertising for the same reason.

Interestingly, the São Paulo experiment doesn't appear to be viewed as skeptically as Gossage's original. According to Adbusters magazine, there is 70 percent approval for the move among residents of the city.

There's increasing evidence that consumers everywhere are demanding more socially conscious products and services. One out of every nine dollars under managed investment now is invested in socially conscious funds (a whopping $2.71 trillion). The natural products grocery category generates over $56 billion a year. And Toyota has sold over 1 million of its Prius hybrids.

The first thing to reject is the idea that the socially responsible consumer is a Birkenstock-wearing, granola-eating tree hugger. There are a number of those people, of course, but they comprise a market that's too small to be of interest to most mainstream marketers.

What about mainstream consumers who are using their social conscience to guide their purchasing decisions? There are somewhere north of 60 million of these people in America now, which is a population about the same size as that of the UK. These socially responsible consumers look like everyone else and they talk the same language but underneath, they're really quite different.

The characteristic that seems to best distinguish the tree-hugging granola-eaters from these new mainstream consumers is that the former were driven by a desire to improve the whole world, whereas the new mainstream are driven by a need to improve their own world - an enlightened self-interest, if you will.

Although the two groups are divided by their worldview, there are characteristics that they share. And one of the most palpable is the basic distrust of traditional organizations. For many, corporate America is considered bad to the core, willing to say anything to close a sale or make a buck.

So when someone starts to consume responsibly, they make a commitment to understanding not just what they are buying, but who they are buying from. It changes the way they shop and the way they research their purchases. They become active consumers of information, which they find online and in magazines. They trust friends' opinions and the posted opinions of like-minded people. And they always read labels (and any other information they can get in-store).

They are a label-centric bunch, in fact. They think companies can't lie to them on the label, because they're regulated. When a person picks up a product and doesn't like what he sees, he can put it down. Much of this is driven by the fact that eco-sumers don't trust what corporations have to say in ads (which makes it a little tricky to promote to this group).

These are highly considered shoppers across all categories and, ultimately, the same consideration that goes into their purchasing decisions needs to be given to the way that brands are created for them and communicated to them.

There must be clear consistency of purpose across communications platforms. The slightest deviation in point of view or approach will be keenly felt by people who will often actively expose themselves to multiple touch points for one brand.

Packaging and label design takes on a new role and should be approached as a primary medium for the brand. The brand's point of view, its credentials and attitude should all be apparent - as should clear, comprehensive information about the product.

But what underpins all of this is a demand for absolute integrity in marketing and communications: the kind of integrity that will make marketing and advertising a more honorable pursuit. And that's exactly the kind of integrity that Gossage would have applauded, I think.

Paul Parton is the brand-planning partner at The Brooklyn Brothers,
a creative collective. (paul@thebrooklynbrothers.com)