It features a cultural icon, a movie star, and a corporate executive. Its backdrop is not a typical television or movie set, but a collection of boxes... brown, cardboard boxes.
While the setting may not be glamorous, Pratt Industries' "Harvesting the urban forest" ad campaign, now airing in the Southeast and Midwest on major networks during prime time, is a glitzy attempt to woo potential customers to its 100% post-consumer recycled products. Featuring champion boxer Muhammad Ali and Alicia Silverstone, an actress popular with younger audiences and a known environmental activist, the ad serves as a lesson to the entire industry that it has, well, a doggone good story to tell after all.
Shaping a sharper image
Pratt Industries' deputy CEO, Mike Harwood, is not shy about saying the ads are an attempt to set the company's products apart from virgin content boxes. Ads aired in the Atlanta area target potential customers near Pratt Industries' U.S. headquarters in Conyers, Ga., and its largest group of plants. Similarly, midwestern ads aim at customers close to another large cluster of plants. Also, 23,000 Delta flights will show ads starting this month.
But why spend millions on a prime time television ad?
"Companies don't usually spend millions on a television commercial if they are in a low margin business like corrugated paper and recycling," says Harwood. "But we felt, after talking with our big customers, that it's time to develop an image as an environmentally friendly producer of strong corrugated packaging, hence our campaign with Alicia Silverstone, an environmentalist, and Muhammad Ali, a strong guy and a champion boxer."
Pratt's customers are also becoming more concerned about how they are perceived from an environmental standpoint.
"Large consumer products manufacturers are our clients, and they have all told us that they are going to work hard to develop an environmentally friendly image with the modern shopper," Harwood explains.
Don't shy away from sustainability
Concerns about its corporate brand image and the desire to be a good corporate citizen prompted FedEx Kinko's to develop a 30% post-consumer recycled copier paper with International Paper. This is part of the company's goal to reach a 30% post-consumer recycled content across all paper and packaging grades.
Contrary to what some might think, FedEx Kinko's thinks paper has a good story to share, albeit with a caveat.
"One of the advantages of our business is that we are heavily dependent on a renewable resource — paper," says FedEx Kinko's director of environmental affairs, Larry Rogero. "But it must be provided in a way that reduces the amount of virgin material over time."
The paper industry is now increasingly involved in providing information regarding sustainability and environmental performance, but it is critical that customers and consumers know about these efforts.
According to David Ford, founder and CEO of Metafore, an environmentally focused, yet pro-business, NGO with goals of helping businesses receive accurate environmental information from paper suppliers, this lack of communication results from an inherent conservatism in the industry, as well as its isolation from the
end consumer.
"Historically, the industry has been reactionary rather than proactive with communications, and that's partly because many companies don't have the brand image since they don't sell to end consumers," says Ford. "Now, we're seeing big companies like Georgia-Pacific take a consumer products focus. The trend is that you're either going to be a land management company or a consumer products company. Over the next decade, it will be interesting to see how that transformation works as these companies begin managing their brands."
And brand is critical since it opens the possibility of leveling the playing field for North American mills.
"The North American forest products industry has a pretty doggone good story when it comes to lifecycle assessment approaches through reduced energy consumption, pollution control, managing forests, and other environmental issues associated with making paper," says Ford. "As long as that is communicated well, it can attract the more discriminating buyers who hold higher standards than you find elsewhere in the world."
