The Compass and the Nail

How the Patagonia Model of Loyalty Can Save Your Business, and Might Just Save the Planet

Craig Wilson

• Publisher: Rare Bird Books, A Vireo Book
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781942600060
• eBook ISBN: 9781942600152
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

Brand development and direct marketing expert, Craig Wilson, argues for the responsibility of consumers and the companies they spend money with. It is only through the power of the consumer, and the dedication of businesses to creating responsible and sustainable products, that we will be able to combat the draining of resources and the chemicals behind global warming and air and water pollution.Craig Wilson's The Compass and the Nail lays out a plan for how businesses can use consumer concern for the planet in order to create more successful businesses, while at the same time pushing forward in more sustainable business practices.

Chapter Ten

Standing on the Edge of Some Crazy Cliff

It’s no easy or obvious task to embark on a grand mission of change. I didn’t set out to write a book about the environment, nor did I intend to become an authority on how great companies engender great customers. I certainly didn’t think those two ideas would be so intimately connected. I started out by simply helping companies grow and secure a profit.

The more I worked, thought, and applied the model in various businesses and varying settings, the more the evidence began to mount that the model was valid, and that it worked in applications big and small, simple and complex, and in all sorts of categories and types. With that understanding, the grander possibilities began to emerge, stretching beyond the relationships between brands and their customers. With time, I realized I had a responsibility to do more than just help companies perform better. I was in a position to help companies be and do better in the world. The starkness of that responsibility is similar to Holden Caulfield’s self-imposed policing of a field of rye. I, too, desperately want to keep a bunch of kids, the global citizenry, from running off a cliff. It’s clear that our choices as global citizens contribute either to our own demise or our own commencement with every single decision we make. Unfortunately, we are marketing, buying, and producing our way into extinction, and there is no referee, parent, or overarching authority, not even the Pope, that can step in and stop us. There is no Holden Caulfield.

It was Tim Draper’s commentary—“We need renovation in healthcare, government, and venture capital. That essentially these institutions are no longer viable and need rethought and redone.”—that really got me thinking. This idea, that how we are functioning as a global society needs to be refashioned, is increasingly discussed in the mainstream media and among disparate circles of influence throughout the world. Jeremy Rifkin (The Empathic Civilization), Sir Richard Branson (The B Team), Arianna Huffington (the Third Metric), Thich Nhat Hanh (the Community of Nations), Ellen MacArthur (the Circular Economy) and Yvon Chouinard (the Responsible Economy) are all concerned with the same issue: there is a disconnect between a vision for the world as a peaceful, sustainable biosphere and our ability to realize that vision as a global society, and as global citizens.

There is, however, this model, this idea, that if we understand truly what makes users and providers tick in every circumstance, then we can design a functioning economy that won’t kill us. It’s up to us as global citizens to drive the right kind of demand. It’s up to the global corporate leadership to use their economic powers for good to design a new, Responsible Economy. It’s up to economic policy writers and nation states to design the global economy as it could be. By applying the fundamental tenets of the Brand Ecosystem and the Customer Activation Cycle to any situation where there exists a provider of a service and a user, these three (citizens, corporations, governments) intertwine, ...

Table of contents

• Right Livelihood
• Choosing to See
• The Basis for
• Inspired Relationships
• The Brand Ecosystem
• The Science of Building Advocacy
• Exploring Purposeful
• Connection
• Throwing the Baby Out
• with the Bath Water
• Errors in Judgment
• The Macro View
• Grow Your Own Apple
• Standing on the Edge of Some Crazy Cliff