Random thought: couldn't Target effectivly turn all of its stores into supertargets just by hosting a farmers market in the parking lot?

earthsense

This past week I had the pleasure to hear a presentation from Mark Hardy at Earthsense, a market research company. The presentation broke down consumers beliefs of what makes a product sustainable. There are six key metrics, such as production, composition, distribution and disposal. The really cool thing about Earthsense's research is they can define sustainability attributes by product categories. For example, people care way more about the production and composition of their food than they do for their cars or electronics (for those items the green thing is to reduce energy usage). While some the findings are kind of obvious (like the example above), earthsense does do a great job of presenting the business case for sustainability in a way that can help management make more effective and profitable strategies.

Corn v Crude

Looks like the folks over at World Changing are taking up the Corn v Crude debate.

Please refer to my post "If mom cared" to get my take on this subject.

Whatever 2.0

If you need help explaining your Whatever 2.0 strategy try the "Web Economy Bullshit Generator"

T4America

Today the Star Tribune published an article that mentioned Transportation for America, T4America.org, a group that advocates for "a major multidisciplinary effort to reform transportation policy." They basically want to increased public transit and decreased energy usage. What I found cool, is they invite you to join the conversation. Keep track of them via RSS; read what you want, comment if feel like it, its a conversation!

User Generated Tahoe Ad

So a few years back GM thought it would be a good idea to let people create their own Tahoe SUV ads. They provided some canned footage and a program to create messages, (read this Wired story for more details). Here is one of my favorite ads.

If mom cared

So lets imagine Mom drives little Johnny 10 miles to McDonald's in her flex fuel Chevy Tahoe. As they finish their meal mom tells her child “finish your food, there are starving children in Africa”. So little Johnny pops another chicken nugget in his mouth, consuming 40 calories of food energy, which came from 120 calories of corn.

However, if mom cared about starving children in Africa she would tell her political officials to get the corn out of her fuel. Mom’s FlexFuel Chevy Tahoe consumed a whole gallon of E85 for the 10-mile trip to the restaurant.

One gallon of E85 contains more than a 53,000 calories of corn. In other words, it takes 443 times more corn to make one gallon of ethanol (E85) than one chicken nugget. Even if mom fills up with normal gas (which typically has a 10 percent ethanol blend) she is still consuming 6200 calories of corn or 52 times more corn than one chicken nugget.

53,000 corn calories for one gallon of E85, seriously?

A gallon of Ethanol requires 26.1 pounds of corn.
There are 2400 calories in a pound of corn

(26 .1 * (.85))* 2400 = 53,244 calories of corn

And the math for the chicken nugget
There is about a 3 to 1 calorie conversion from corm to chicken meat.

40 * 3 = 120 calories of corn