It's A Case of L.L. Beanwash

The L.L. Bean brand used to connote squeaky-clean business practices with a heavy dose of earth friendliness. No more.

The venerable outdoorsy Bean brand is now connected to a rather egregious greenwashing effort – a crude attempt to squeeze extra profits by making unfounded environmental claims.

“Go Paperless and help keep the world green,” advises a recent promotion to holders of L.L. Bean Visa cards. “Paperless statements are . . . better for the environment. Eliminating paper statements conserves trees and energy,” advises an email, without providing a shred of evidence or even a link to anything backing up the claim.

The real culprit may be Barclaycard, the banking organization that actually issues the cards in a partnership with Bean. Barclaycard is apparently behind the promotion – and the business whose coffers would presumably become “greener” if more customers opted out of printed, mailed statements.

The Barclay bank conglomerate’s somewhat sketchy sustainability reporting provides no evidence that its digital processing is inherently more earth friendly than ink on paper. Its main response to climate change is the purchase of carbon credits to offset its 1-million-tons plus annual emissions of greenhouse gases. A fair portion of those emissions apparently were the result of its data centers, which consumed 332 gigawatt hours of energy in 2011, a 4% increase over 2010.

And what about Barclay’s progress in 2012? Who knows – it hasn’t published its environmental data for last year yet. (Note to Barclay: We’re now in the second half of 2013. It’s time to reveal what you did to the earth last year.)

Bean’s environmental efforts – including the use of paper with recycled and sustainably forested fiber, green buildings, and participation in the EPA’s voluntary Climate Leaders program – seem exemplary. But, like Barclay, Bean's sustainability reporting is far less detailed or revealing than what’s typically published by much smaller and less profitable printing and paper companies that are being indirectly slandered by the "Beanwash” campaign.

By allowing its name to be used in such a tawdry fashion, Bean is damaging its credibility and reputation. Could it be another Toshiba, which made unfounded anti-print green claims that ultimately failed to distract attention from its shady environmental record? (See 9 Lessons From Toshiba's No-Print-Day Debacle.)

The good news is that print-oriented industries are fighting back. The latest effort is the Ecographic Challenge issued by the U.S. branch of Two Sides. The non-profit advocacy group will award a $2,500 cash prize to the designer of the infographic that best demonstrates “the sustainability of print and paper in a way that’s fun and easy to understand.” Details are here.

To prime the pump, Deborah Corn of Print Media Centr has created three ecographics that challenge vague claims about switching from print to the coal-fired internet. My favorite is this fun “Save the Batteries! Harvest a Tree” message.

For further reading:

• Going Paperless Doesn't Mean Going Green, The New York Times Proves
• Google Using Blatant Greenwash To Promote New Catalog App
• Killah in Manilla: Hearst's Green Reputation Tarnished by Subsidiary

USPS To Give Publishers a Break on Ride-Alongs

The Postal Service has decided to liberalize the “ride-along” rules that have  prevented product samples and certain other advertising gimmicks from running in U.S. magazines, sources said today.

The new regulations would reduce the postal cost of many of those advertising pieces by 90% or more.

To understand the significance of the change, note the recent cover of an L.L. Bean catalog, which includes a small fabric sample on the first page that pokes through a die-cut hole in the cover, with an invitation to "feel the softness." Bean has used such fabric samples several times in its catalogs, but never in its magazine advertising.

The reason is simple: In a Periodicals-class mailing, the fabric sample would be considered a ride-along, for which the Postal Service charges 16.5 cents apiece. But the only postal charge for putting the fabric sample into the Bean catalog (Standard class mail) was a bit of additional weight, resulting in a postage cost of only a tiny fraction of a cent per catalog.

One source said the decision by postal officials, which will supposedly be spelled out soon in the Federal Register, was announced at an Idealliance postal seminar in New York today. Many items now subject to ride-along charges will instead be treated like regular advertising pages in magazines or newspapers, though CD’s will still be charged ride-along rates.

The idea behind ride-along rates was to prevent Periodicals from being used to cannibalize other, more profitable classes of mail. But the high price and the limit of one ride-along per publication have blocked many high-impact advertising ideas that included seed-impregnated paper, band-aids, refrigerator magnets, and small product samples that would have virtually no impact on the Postal Service’s costs.

See Postal Service May Boost Ride-Alongs for more information about the thinking behind ride-along liberalization and what it might entail. And Catalog Prospecting: Thar's gold in them thar pages notes L.L Bean's use of magazine advertising to prospect for new customers.

L.L. Bean Says Ye$ to Summer Sale

L.L. Bean expects to mail "at least ten million additional catalogs" this summer if the U.S. Postal Service's proposed "Summer Sale" is approved, a company official says.

"With more advance notice, this number would have certainly been higher," Steve Fuller, Chief Marketing Officer for Bean, wrote Tuesday in a letter to Dan Blair, chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission. The letter was one of several that catalog and direct-mail companies have submitted to the PRC in support of the Summer Sale, with some agreeing that their participation would be limited by the short time frame to plan and execute the additional mailings.

"I want to assure you that L.L. Bean will do everything possible to maximize our mail volume during this period," Fuller wrote in praise of what he called a novel program. "Final volumes will depend on program details and L.L. Bean's inventory position."

The sale would provide postage rebates of 30% for Standard mail (such as direct mail, catalogs, and retail flyers) sent this summer by large mailers after their mail volume reaches a certain threshold. Each mailer's threshold is based on the amount of mail it sent in previous quarters and is calculated in a way to encourage companies to mail more pieces than usual during the Postal Service's slow summer period. The PRC has indicated it would rule on the proposal by June 4.

USPS officials hope to issue the rebates to mailers' postal accounts by Dec. 1. They have also indicated that the program is an experiment from which they hope to gain valuable information about how to implement other profitable incentive-pricing programs.

The Postal Service's incremental costs for the additional Standard mail would be even lower than the discounted postage, USPS told the PRC in a document filed last week. The Postal Service's delivery network, buildings, vehicles, and equipment will have significant excess capacity this summer, meaning the cost of handling additional mail pieces during that period will be unusually low, it said.

For example, the cost of an additional catalog would be 32% to 67% lower than normal, depending upon the sortation level, calculations presented by the Postal Service show. A discounted catalog with high-density sortation would cost USPS only 2 cents but bring in 11.5 cents in revenue, according to the USPS data.

Catalog Prospecting: Thar's gold in them thar pages

Our contacts note that some catalogs are cozying up to magazines more than ever.

For example, a toy seller is binding a mini-catalog into a children's magazine, and L.L. Bean seems to be buying more print ads than ever. Magazines struggling to get ad pages (and which ones aren't these days) and catalogs wrestling with high prospecting costs: take note.

Consider the Bean example. It typically buys full-page ads for a single product, often with an invitation to request a free catalog. The traditional cataloguer's view is that magazine ad pages lack precise targeting and have a low response rate. So why does Bean, reportedly one of the most marketing-savvy multichannel merchants, keep running ads in national magazines?

The Bean folks know the metric that matters is cost per response, not response rate. A typical lightweight catalog (the kind that got slammed with postal rate increases of 20% or even more last year) probably costs about 40 cents per piece. An ad in a national magazine probably costs roughly 4 cents per copy ($40 cpm) these days. That means that a response rate on the magazine ad of only 0.5% is equivalent to a 5% response on a lightweight catalog.

Advertisers want to know which media have "engaged," responsive audiences but often have trouble tracking that. Bean has done it for them: You can bet that Bean tracks responses closely by medium, so any magazine that gets its repeat business must have a responsive audience.

My employer's advertising and marketing people would tell you that I don't understand advertising. But I've got one up on them and the rest of the magazine industry: The last time I checked, two mohels were running ads next to one of my Oct. 23 posts. Don't recall seeing that in People, Cosmo, or the other biggies.

Maybe I should contact one of those mohels to help me with budget reductions. They're probably much better than our bean counters at making cuts without damaging essential items.