The folks at MBDC are marketing a baby blanket that’s fully compliant with their cradle-to-cradle environmental design guidelines. Designed for the cradle, this blanket’s value proposition also has everything to do with cradle-to-cradle design thinking:
… using only the highest quality and healthiest available materials and chemicals… It’s safe enough to eat (if you need the roughage) and can be safely composted after use, to build healthy soil.
And though MBDC is not doing a good job of marketing it (no reach, zero awareness!), the blanket itself is rather compelling from a marketing point of view. Yes, the graphic design they chose is hard ugly, but there’s some beauty underneath, to wit:
First, the value proposition is awesome. Think about it: a blanket that’s safe enough to eat, safe enough to plant as fertilizer in case…. er, em… in case it ever becomes so impregnated with fertilizer of the baby kind as to become unwashable. Which makes it something you’d feel very comfortable putting next to your new baby’s skin. No weird, endocrine-disrupting chemicals. No worries at all.
Second, this blanket demonstrates the value of storytelling as a way to market environmentally sound products, be they "sustainable" or "cradle-to-cradle" or whatever. Why? It isn’t making the mistake of trying to change the worldview of a parent who drives a Suburban. Instead, it tells a story of total ecological integrity perfectly tailored to an audience of Prius-driving parents worried about a world where you can’t eat the fish, can’t play in the grass, and can’t wear chemically-grown cotton. With that ugly MBDC logo woven into the blanket, it’s a rolling advertisement for cradle-to-cradle thinking, and it will trigger storytelling wherever it goes. It’s a story these parents are ready to hear and transmit, and that’s all that matters.
That’s great marketing.
