Your Brand…in the Gutter (and what you can do about it)
branded garbage, virtue signaling & a call to action
I have become the neighborhood Roomba®. Actually, there is a small army of litter pickers, people who grab a bag or a bucket, don gardening gloves and set out on self-appointed patrol. Writer David Sedaris is probably the most famous , working a territory near his home in the English countryside. Grateful locals even named a garbage truck after him: “Pig Pen Sedaris.”
My Roomba conversion came about a few months ago when I began working on a project about the Materials Transition. The Materials Transition is essential for the Energy Transition, but its impacts on climate, the environment and the global economy extend far beyond the race to net zero emissions.
Business as usual is 100 billion tons of raw materials harvested, mined, dredged and drilled each year. These materials then criss-cross the globe to be refined and combined with other materials to make new materials for products that most of the time are either quickly consumed or tossed in the trash, often after only a single use.
Business as usual is what pumped the atmosphere full of greenhouse gasses, depleted natural resources and left legacies of petrochemical poisons everywhere. Business as usual also filled the world with garbage, piled high in landfills, choking rivers, and trapped in the eternal swirls of massive ocean gyres.
The very, very good news is that almost everything we make can be made better.
The bad news is the legacy of garbage that suddenly I saw everywhere.
It is a survival mechanism. We learn to banish trash from our consciousness, to edit out the plastic bottles, cardboard coffee cups, lids, straws, red Solo beer cups, beer bottles, soda cans, paper napkins, fast food bags, potato chip bags, plastic forks and spoons, candy wrappers, plastic shopping bags and pack of cigarettes (almost always Marlboros) that mar the view.
This is little “g” garbage, with an easy fix; regular, run-of-the-mill, everyday trash that gets tossed out car windows or escapes from overstuffed bins and dumpsters that aren’t emptied nearly as often as they ought to be. It is stuff people toss because, well, who knows why? But I can’t walk a block anymore without finding at least one plastic bottle in the gutter. And I bet it is the same wherever you live, too.
This isn’t the garbage that makes headlines. It is not The Great Pacific Garbage Patch where plastic swirls in a giant ocean gyre waiting the heroic Ocean Clean Up crew to lasso it. It isn’t rivers clogged with discarded bottles, or one of the many massive garbages dumps in the “global south”—Africa, Asia and South America—where unrecyclable “recyclables,” exported by the US and Europe, go to be forgotten. It isn’t the garbage of TED talks or Earth Day documentaries.
It is, however, branded. We may not know the particulars of who threw it out, but we know exactly who made it. It is written right on every piece of trash, in flashy colors with logos designed to catch our fleeting attention. In the parlance of marketing, “Your Brand in the Gutter” is a touchpoint, the last opportunity to connect with customers and make an impression.
After all the money, time and talent spent on brand strategy, positioning and graphics, the many seemingly endless Zoom calls sweating details of font and palette, the hard-won approvals up, down and across management chains, the data analytics, advertising campaigns, sponsorships, wooing and bribing of influencers and, of course, the conference presentation decks breathlessly expounding the award-winning details of “customer journeys,” psychographic truths and transformational insights, it turns out your customers think you’re garbage.
So they treat you like garbage.
Recently, I began photographing the trash on my garbage runs. Almost all of it is brand name: McDonald’s. Burger King. Dunkin Donuts. Panera. Starbucks. Pepsi. Dorito’s. Ruffles. Monster Energy. Snickers. Milky Way. Reese’s. Budweiser. Ice Mountain. Kirkland (Costco). Marlboro. 7-Up. Coca-Cola.
These companies have spent millions and in some cases billions of dollars to promote their brands.
And they all ended up in the gutter.
Brands are not oblivious to the problem. In May, Coca-Cola launched a splashy multinational billboard ad campaign to encourage recycling. Images of distorted Coca-Cola logos, sourced from videos of actual cans being crumpled, were paired with the tagline “Recycle Me.”
In the world of advertising, it was an instant classic characterized as “iconic,” snagging the top prize—the “Grand Prix”—at the prestigious Cannes Lyon Festival of Creativity. “We wanted to come back to the roots, to the simplicity and pureness of print,” noted the award jury president."I'm pretty sure that everyone will remember this Grand Prix some years ahead."
According to the case study by ad agency Ogilvy:
..This telegraphic and impactful visual, with the ‘Recycle Me’ call to action taken right from the side of the can, is designed to put recycling front of mind and encourage the consumer to take positive action after consuming a can of Coke. Using a variety of techniques like mechanical presses and vacuums, cans were crushed to make unique spins on the brand's iconic logo. Each execution features a unique logo, mimicking the different ways people crush their cans before recycling them..”
That’s great. Except customers tossing cans and plastic bottles on the side of the road aren’t thinking “recycling.” Some may want to recycle, but can’t find a convenient recycling bin.
Still, Ogilvy is right. The Coca-Cola logo is instantly recognizable, no matter how mangled.
Even in the gutter.
piling up
It isn’t brands’ fault their customers are litterbugs. But that doesn’t mean they can’t do more than a little virtue signaling about recycling. At best, recycling is a partial answer to an expanding problem.
In the US, recycling rates for aluminium cans range from an impressive 85% in Maine to a dismal 6% in West Virginia, with most states falling in the 20% to 30% range. For PET bottles, which far outnumber cans, Maine tops the list again as an outlier at 73%. The rate is 12% or less for half the states. In seven states, the recycle rate falls below 5%..
Many brands use recycled content in their packaging, but the supply chains for those materials represent only a small fraction of the problem. Much of what could be recycled ends up in landfills, while an unknown percentage piles up as litter.
It is estimated that a million PET bottles are manufactured globally every minute. I actually don’t know if that’s true. It is an often quoted, hard to source statistic. It could be a low-ball estimate. Yet even if the real number turns out to be a quarter of that, these bottles are designed to last for decades or longer. And when they break down, they generate tiny, long-lived plastic particles that have gotten into everything, including us. There is plastic in our hearts, in our brains, in our blood, in mothers’ milk.
No matter how many bottles I pick up on trash patrol, there are always more. Sorcerer’s Apprentice-level more.
call to action
So what can brands do? Quite a lot, it turns out, in ways both practical in the near term and systemic over the long haul.
Fund Municipal Clean Ups: For every piece of packaging, take a small percentage of a penny and put it into a fund administered by a respected, independent third-party organization for distribution to municipalities to pay for recycling programs, garbage bins, and litter patrol crews. Every fast food outlet can commit to keeping its community, or at least its block, litter-free.
Make Littering Uncool. Brands can create ad campaigns, big and little, collectively and individually, to change social norms. Other countries, from the Netherlands to Japan, have figured out how to litter less, which means it is possible. Dial down corporate virtue-signaling. Dial up showing what it means to care about a community by putting trash in garbage cans/recycle bins, cleaning up beaches and going on neighborhood trash patrols with friends. Enlist social media influencers, celebrities and hometown heroes to model how to create a better, cleaner future. A trash-free neighborhood means kids don’t have to see garbage everywhere they go. It resets the bar where it ought to be.
Embrace the Materials Transition. Switch to alternative materials that are more environmentally compatible. Be willing to pay extra to help start-ups scale up production.
In stakeholder interviews with customers, vendors, restaurants, employees and board members, ask how seeing trash in their neighborhoods makes them feel. Ask whether they have seen your brand in the gutter.
Support The Ocean Clean Up and other efforts to clean up the natural world.
Adopt business models that encourage recycling. For example, returnable, reusable glass bottles.
a warning for brands; a challenge for TikTokers & Instagrammers
If you don’t want your brand in the gutter, do everything possible make sure it doesn’t end up there.
Until then, for those adept at TikTok and Instagram, document the litter where you live and work. Then, after throwing the garbage in the trash, post photos and videos with the hashtag #yourbrandinthegutter.
Who knows? Perhaps some collective reputational shaming might do the trick.
for creatives: due diligence and the low bar to beat
Litter may not be a new problem, but it is a bigger problem and a growing problem. There are simply more people throwing out more garbage, and also more materials designed to last longer.
The following videos are a greatest hits sampling of anti-litter ad campaigns from the 1960s and 70s, which was decades before the single use plastic bag became popular. Coca-Cola’s first PET bottle—a two litre bottle—was introduced in 1978. Today, one out of every five PET bottles is used for a Coca-Cola company beverage.