Sometimes a brand blazes a trail, only to find itself outrun by the competition. 

Back in 2006, entrepreneur Blake Mycoskie, who made his name and a small fortune as a contestant on reality TV show, The Amazing Race, came up with a unique proposition for a new brand, TOMS Shoes. The business model: TOMS would donate a pair of shoes to a child who lived in poverty for every pair of shoes sold. The philanthropic concept quickly became a sensation that catapulted the company's brand awareness to superstar status.

Not surprisingly, other companies started to knock off the idea. The most egregious copycat has been a line of shoes called "BOBS" that Skechers introduced in 2010. BOBS not only look exactly like TOMS signature shoe, right down to the logo stitched on a visible exterior label, but Skechers also shamelessly followed TOMS' "one-for-one" model of giving away a pair of shoes for every pair sold.Continue reading...

Coca-Cola and its various beverage logos may seem ubiquitous to most urban dwellers but Chicagoans are about to get an imagery overdose of Coke-owned products on an odd location: recycling can lids. 

In a timely bit of news for Earth Day the week, the Coca-Cola Foundation has agreed to grant $2.59 million to the city of Chicago to provide 50,000 blue recycling carts so that the city’s houses and smaller apartment buildings have access to recycling, the Chicago Tribune reports.

In return, Coke gets to plaster its logo and the logo of all of its many brands onto the can lids. This means that 25,000 carts/Coke ads will be sitting in front of people’s homes by year’s end. The rest will come over the next five years as carts get replaced.

“We see this as an incredible way to be able to give back to Chicago, give back to the United States, and to be able to keep our pledge, which is to be sure that every bottle, plastic bottle, can in which our products are packaged and sold will find its way back into a recycling bin,” said Sonya Soutus, a Coca-Cola marketing exec, the newspaper reports.Continue reading...

As brands around the world celebrate Earth Day, it is becoming more apparent that creative, effective marketing will be a vital factor in the adoption of green consumer products and practices. Years have passed since terms like "green" and "sustainability" became part of the lexicon, but little has changed when it comes to consumer behavior that effects the environment. Joel Makower, author and chairman of GreenBiz Group blames "half-hearted, humorless and uninspired," marketing efforts that push "underwhelming, overpriced, inconvenient, ineffective or unavailable," green products. 

Initiated in 1970 by Denis Hayes, 20 million Americans gathered for peaceful demonstrations in favor of environmental reform. Today, more than one billion people in nearly 200 nations recognize Earth Day and its goals. This year's Earth Day theme revolves around climate change and all those affected by it, from "a man in the Maldives worried about relocating his family as sea levels rise," to "the orangutan in Indonesian forests segmented by more frequent brushfires and droughts."Continue reading...

AT&T has landed at top spot on CR Magazine's 14th annual 100 Best Corporate Citizens List, beating out other top Russell 1000 large-capitalization companies on merits including human rights and corporate governance.

Rounding out the top 10 on the new list: Mattel, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eaton Corp, Intel, Gap, Hasbro, Merck & Co., Campbell Soup Co. and Coca-Cola. 

The ranking crunches 298 data points of disclosure and performance measures across seven categories: environment, climate change, employee relations, human rights, governance, finance and philanthropy. 

Notably, 26 companies on the 2013 list were not on the 2012 list, while 11 companies have appeared on the list every year since 2007. For those that were bestowed the honor, many were quick to highlight the significance of employee participation to the success of the company's initiatives.Continue reading...

“Think Green!” has long been the rallying cry for anybody who has his or her mind on helping the global environment. VW, which has never been afraid to be a little bit different from everybody else, has been encouraging everybody to “Think Blue.” April is Earth Month around the world and VW is celebrating with a new blue-themed ad campaign.

Set to a modernized version of the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” the new campaign “Think Blue.Book,” features the automaker’s Eco Up!, “the most efficient natural gas car in Germany and also among the cheapest on sale in Europe,” according to AutoEvolution.com. The car uses just 6.4 pounds of compressed natural gas every 100 covered kilometers (62.1 miles).Continue reading...

Athletes expend a whole lot of energy all over the world. In a world that is desperate for ways to find new sources of sustainable energy, it seems like a no-brainer to try and capture some of that expenditure of energy and use it for good, such as the more than 350 UK gyms that are built to generate their own energy for lighting or the bike energy that helped power the laptops of Occupy Wall Street.

The Paris Marathon has now gotten into the act. More than 40,000 runners made their way through the City of Lights Sunday and every last one of them bounced across an 82-foot stretch of flexible tiles made of recycled truck tires on the Champs-Élysées that used high technology to store the energy generated by all that foot power into a few batteries. The tile maker, Pavegen Systems Ltd., says that “each footstep generates as much as 8 watts of kinetic energy, which is fed back to batteries that can charge display screens and electronic signs along the route,” according to RenewEconomy.com.Continue reading...

What North Americans know as moose and Europeans call elk apparently make a tasty meal. Since January, consumers in Europe and Asia could find the animal’s meat in lasagna sold at the Swedish furniture giant's stores. But recently there has apparently been a little something else in IKEA’s Elk Lasagna that consumers weren’t aware of: pork.

This isn't the first meat mix-up that IKEA has dealt with, as the company was one of several retailers implicated in the horse meat scandal that has swept across Europe. IKEA has been forced to remove its famed Swedish meatballs from its restaurants and frozen food aisles, and adding to its meat woes, the brand has just pulled nearly 18,000 units of its elk lasagne from its stores and websites after authorities in Belgium discovered the product contained a percentage of pork meat.Continue reading...

Procter & Gamble, the largest consumer packaged goods company in the world, set a goal in 2010 to achieve zero consumer and manufacturing waste to landfills. Now, in just three years, the company has announced it has reached the goal in 45 sites worldwide.

The mammoth company—which serves approximately 4.6 billion people in 75 countries—behind consumer brands including Bounty, Gillette, Ariel, Tide, Crest, Head & Shouders and Pampers has a longer-term vision that includes using 100 percent renewable or recycled materials for all products and packaging, less than .5 percent of manufacturing waste to landfills and powering plants with 100 percent renewable energy. The brand has created over $1 billion in value from waste since 2008.Continue reading...