Over on the excellent WorldChanging I have a short piece up on Carrotmob, a concept recently launched out in San Francisco where a group of green-minded buyers coordinate their shopping to incentivize a certain business into making concrete earth-friendly changes. The mob shopping concept is about you and your friends playing along with capitalism to move the market in a direction of your liking.
What ran on WorldChanging was a shortened version of my take on the topic, so I'm taking the liberty of running some of the omitted sections -- on the "carrots" that might make businesses participate in such a scheme -- below. It probably makes sense to read the post over there first and then hop on back here if you're still interested.
The natural question becomes whether the success of the Carrotmob targeted-consumption approach at K&D can be replicated and grown. The answer might lay in the answer to a different question: what's in it for business? What carrots might really make them to go green(er)?
Looking at the Carrotmob experiment from the spring, the most obvious answer is cash. When Brent says with a smirk in a video on carrotmob.org that "corporations will do anything for money," he means that in a good way. With their interests on the table, what remains is aligning them with those of the green-minded buyer. What's so important about Carrotmob is the coordination, because it reduces an inefficiency in other, uncoordinated socially-conscious shopping: "mobbing" lets a business know exactly why the gods of good fortune have smiled upon it.
A second, less obvious carrot came up in the Carrotmob planning process -- reputation, and in particular the growing power we all have to use the social Internet to shape the reputations of businesses we like. One of the downsides to the "stick" approach to collectively addressing (like, say, me prodding my social circle into boycotting Shell over its poor environmental record in Nigeria) is that going negative (a) takes sustained effort and (b) isn't that much fun. But buying a six pack of Brooklyn Lager on a Carrotmob-appointed day, and then blogging about how much I looove my energy-efficient corner bodega on a social site like Outside.in? That's easy. And fun. It's casual, occasional, proactive activism.
Using online social cred as a carrot took something of a backseat to cold hard cash as Carrotmob rushed to launch. That's something of a shame, because those combined carrots can be powerful. K&D Market's participation in Carrotmob was rewarded with a sharp jump in business, at least for a day, but visit K&D's page on the hyperlocal review hub Yelp and you quickly see the opportunity for more. (The page is easy to find -- Google "K&D Market" and it's the first result.) Among the nicest reviews about K&D is one calling the market "the museum of expired cereal. (Many reviews complain about poor service.) For some businesses, a boost in their online rep that going green might provide might be even more valuable than a few hours of targeted sales.
(Photo thx meganpru)
