I have written about Adam Werbach before. Now, Adam is making waves again with a new seminal speech on ‘The Birth of Blue‘. One can take issue with Adam’s grandiose objective of starting a one billion people movement, but there is no denying the inspirational value of his thinking. Highlights form his recent talk on NPR:
- His goal is to construct a consumer movement for sustainability
- Adam talked about the surprising success of his Personal Sustainability Promise initiative at WalMart. 500,000 out of 1.3 million employees voluntarily pledged to make small changes and were able to keep them for a year. The changes covered a wide range and were very personal in nature, e.g, parking car furthest away from the store so they would start walking more, or losing weight, or eating an organic family meal once a week.
- His feeling is the grassroots of consumer movement of sustainability is just starting.
- People consume for fulfillment. Adam bases his belief on research showing that happiness does not raise after $10,000 yearly income.
- He quoted one interesting statistic. There are twice as many people overweight in the world as people who do not have enough to eat.
- He wants to promote a new culture of consumerism, based on consumers’ actions, and the choices they make during their hour of daily shopping.
- Companies need to move beyond the traditional three P’s of marketing, into the three P’s of sustainability: Price, Purpose, and Process.
- ‘Blue is the New Green‘. I got this from an earlier JWT 2008 Trends Study. Adam claims it as his own. Meaning the need to move broader than green and climate change, to include other human problems such as obesity, health care, education, women’s rights, and energy availability.
- WalMart is not big enough. It needs to be bigger to accommodate more people in more sustainable ways. “God Bless WalMart” – Adam’s words, not mine.
What I like most about Adam Werbach‘s discourse? His insistence that there is hope, and his vision of some possible solutions. This is one man’s contribution. Can you think of other behavioral thinkers whose works also address the crucial issue of sustainability?
La Marguerite 