Green My Apple
Steve Bridger
Nfp2
One of the case studies in the book is Greenpeace’s ‘Green My Apple’ campaign, so I’m just going to put a little flesh on the bones that are in the case study for the next ten minutes or so. This was a very intelligent campaign for a number of reasons. What’s interesting to me is that you’ve got two powerhouse brands here, in their own definitive spaces. So you’ve got Apple, who we know, and Greenpeace with 2.8 million members globally. And the other characters in this story really are the brand communities - the passionate individuals who work with Apple computers, and also the members of Greenpeace, where that passion is leveraged into global campaigns. The challenge for Greenpeace though, was how they could campaign against someone like Apple without antagonising the very people that they wanted to influence.
Just to give you a bit of background to this, Greenpeace, at the very back end of 2006, released a report where they’d investigated the environmental impact of a number of computer manufacturers, and they got a very good response from a few of them like Dell, HP and Sony for example, but they didn’t get a response at all from Apple. I don’t know how many people in the audience will have customers willing to tattoo your logo on their bodies?! Probably not many! But it is the case with a lot – well, a few – people who use Apple computers. Now this is a number of photos uploaded by someone who’s quite clearly got an Apple fetish, up onto the photo-sharing community Flickr. Interestingly, in the description, they’ve said “Apple can easily ignore what Greenpeace are saying, but it can’t ignore me because I’m a loyal customer.”
Now what Greenpeace decided to do was to tap into the real strength of Apple, which is its extremely loyal and passionate customer base. And it did that in a number of ways – it set up a website called Green My Apple – www.greenmyapple.com – and it basically harnessed all that energy, all the support of the Apple brand community out there as well. So one of the mantras of the campaign was ‘Hug My Apple’ –“I love my Apple, I just wish it could be greener”. The whole sort of aim of the campaign was to get Apple to produce a greener computer, and to become a leader in that industry by creating a computer which was green.
So what Greenpeace asked people to do –you can see it sort of spoofed the actual Apple website itself , it looks quite similar to Apple’s own website – was to get Apple users to take photos of themselves hugging their Apple Macs. They uploaded these images onto Flickr and then these could be easily pooled into the Green My Apple website – as you yourselves could easily do. It got people to tag photos and all sorts of other media content – ‘Green My Apple’ – and then the website could very easily pull in a feed of all that media content from all those other websites, getting other people to do all of the work for them. One user actually created a mash-up of some of the best images that people created to get the point across, how they loved their Apples but wished they were a bit greener - he created an e-book of the best images. It wasn’t something that came from Greenpeace; it was serendipity, something that happened out there in the community on Flickr.
This was said at a conference last week actually – its not anything new, ten years ago people were saying that the internet’s not just a network of computers, it a network of people – and this is kind of along similar lines really. But I think its always nice to have that reinforced for us from time to time. So this is someone who heads up Google’s open social department last week at a conference in the USA – ‘People are the killer app of the web’ – you don’t have to go looking for other things, its people.
2nd May 2007, Steve Jobbs responded to the Greenpeace campaign, or the campaign amongst some of his own customers, and said “we’ll do better, we really should do better, you expect us to be a leader in many fields, and we’ll try and be a leader in this one too”. With some success, Greenpeace have kept up the pressure on Apple – Apple have said they’re going to produce the first green computer by the end of 2009 I believe. The next phase of Greenpeace’s campaign was saying ‘Green My Apple’ but ‘right to the core’ – let’s go the whole hog. Greenpeace challenged them to be a leader and create the first computer completely free of hazardous components.
A few interesting things about this campaign – Greenpeace were very careful not to antagonise the Apple community, and they were very careful with the language that they used, the tone of voice, and they made sure that the calls to action were very appropriate for the audience that they were communicating with – very reassuring language rather than antagonistic. They appealed to the passion that both Greenpeace supporters and users of Apple computers have. They trusted people to produce a lot of good user-generated content themselves, and they rewarded them by featuring the best contributions on the Green My Apple website and elsewhere.
One thing that encapsulates the campaign – something that someone from Greenpeace told me last week, from their office in Amsterdam, was that this was the old way of doing things: ‘Join us because we kick ass’ – the difference with this campaign was we said ‘Join us because we want you to kick ass’ in this particular campaign. Thanks very much.