There’s an old saying that there are two ways to make a donkey walk forward: Either offer a delicious carrot out in front of it, or hit its behind with a stick. Think of businesses as the donkeys. Traditional consumer activism uses a lot of sticks, such as protests, lawsuits, boycotts, and so on. We want to use the carrot instead. We believe that we can get businesses to make big positive changes by offering them profits in return. It’s a positive model where there are no enemies and everyone wins. So that’s what the Carrot means. The mob refers to the large group of consumers who come together to achieve this common goal.

If you want to dig deeper you could say that carrots are good for your vision, they’re healthy, and they are grassroots.

No. Never. And yes, the Oxford American Dictionary and New York Times have both spelled it with a big M, but you wouldn’t jump off a bridge just because the NYT jumped off a bridge, now would you?

When we are taught about economics and capitalism, we learn that the market determines what businesses do. If there is ever any question about why a company behaves in a certain way, the explanation is that “market forces determined this result.” At some level this is true, but it also rings hollow, because WE are the market forces, yet we don’t feel like we have the power to determine much of anything. When we talk about “the consumer market,” we’re talking about billions of individuals, not a coordinated unit. We want Carrotmob to change that, so that “the consumer market” can cooperate and organize itself into a networked force.

We are taught that consumers “vote with their dollars”. But when individuals go to the store, they have no sense of anyone else “voting with their dollars,” so they don’t see why the brand they choose even matters. What’s the point of voting if there’s never going to be an election? An election is when you count up all the votes, and when the people make their voices heard. In 5 years, Carrotmob should be holding periodic elections, where all consumers vote on which business best represents our interests.

Who should be more powerful? The people of the world, or the companies of the world? It has to be the people. Now, when the people elect a government and the government tells a company what to do, some companies often complain that any regulations amount to socialism, and the free market should be the only sheriff in town. Some people agree with that, and some don’t. But everyone should agree that the free market has been a pretty lax sheriff. The world economy needs a new sheriff that directly applies the will of the people to companies. If enough people use Carrotmob to help make or break the reputations of all the world’s businesses, then we can make the business world into something that advances the interests of all people. We could succeed where government has repeatedly failed. Carrotmob can expand the reach of democracy to directly affect businesses, with no middlemen. Don’t look now, but the free market system just evolved.

We believe that in an ideal Carrotmob campaign, several businesses will compete, but only one will win. This isn’t a rigid rule, but we think it’s ideal for several reasons. First, competition is good because it results in stronger commitments from the businesses, and results in a bigger overall impact for the campaign. It also helps us understand what sorts of changes are practical for different types of businesses. Competition also makes the process more democratic by providing an opportunity to let the mob vote on which of the businesses should win.

Now, some people ask us why all of the businesses can’t win. If 5 businesses all offer to do good, why don’t we just mob all 5 businesses? Well first of all, that undermines the whole idea of the competition. Secondly, it IS a meaningful thing for a consumer to decide to support ONE particular business. It is NOT a meaningful thing for a consumer to decide to support ANY of several competing businesses. Thirdly, and most importantly, we need to understand what the “carrot” really is. There are two parts to the carrot: cash, and reputation. Some businesses will be more interested in winning because they will make a lot of cash on one specific day. But many businesses will be more interested in winning because they will get a good reputation that will give them a big boost in profits over the long-term. Nearly every business will benefit from this reputation boost because it gives them a competitive advantage over their competition. The reason they will decide to participate is to win this very valuable carrot. But if we allow all of their competitors a chance to win as well, then the value of the reputation boost goes to zero. We have not given this business much of a carrot if we gave the same thing to their competition. We must not dilute the carrot.

Some people worry that if everyone in a town starts shopping at the one responsible grocery store then the other 3 stores might go out of business and hurt the local economy. That would be an extreme situation, and maybe Carrotmob could be rather destructive in a situation like that. But the way things work is that some businesses succeed and other businesses fail. This has always been true. Historically, the businesses who succeed have been those who are most talented at the art of business, whether or not they care about saving the world. We want to change the market so that a business’ success or failure is connected to how socially responsible they choose to be.

We have only rewarded small businesses so far, but we plan to start doing big companies in the future.

There’s something beautiful about the community events focused on local businesses. We want to keep doing that, and cultivate little Carrotmob chapters all around the world. Planning a Carrotmob campaign should always be an option in the toolkit of every activist and community organizer. However, in order to have a much greater social impact, we’d like to eventually start planning campaigns focused on bit, well-known brands. Once the Carrotmob network is big enough, we should be able to go to competing consumer products companies (who make things that your average consumer would want to buy) and have them compete to see how much good they are willing to do, relative to their competitors. It will be challenging to develop a system for comparing the proposed actions of companies that may be doing business in very different circumstances, but we’ll figure out how to do it, and then companies will do what they do best: compete for profits. I think we can use that competition to get them to commit to making significant improvements. And the nice thing about dealing with the heavy hitters is that even if they are only willing to do something relatively small, the impact would still be enormous compared to what a little grocer can do.

Some campaigns are simple and easy. But if there’s anything too complicated, no, we won’t have sufficient expertise. The solution to this problem is to partner up with other advocacy groups or non-profits who do have the expertise. We would love to help non-profits plan their own Carrotmob campaigns as an additional, more effective way for them to fulfill their missions. So far, various experts and non-profits have been very excited about partnering with Carrotmob organizers to make these campaigns successful.

This is an excellent question, and to be honest, we’re not sure how airtight our answer is yet. Once we start negotiating with big global businesses it might make sense to make compliance some sort of contractual obligation. But until then we just need a simple solution for dealing with small businesses. Luckily, the more we ponder this issue, the less worried we are about it.

We presume that businesses would only get involved with Carrotmob if they knew they would profit from it. For some campaigns, the profit will come because winning a Carrotmob will give them a great reputation that will bring them profits for years to come. For other campaigns, the businesses may not care much about their reputations, and they may just want a one-time infusion of cash from Carrotmob purchases.

If the business cares at all about their reputation, we probably don’t need to worry. They are participating because they believe that Carrotmob has the power to give it a good reputation, so it should be obvious that Carrotmob has the power to hurt their reputation as well. If Carrotmob members were to discover that they had been decieved, that business’ reputation would instantly go from an A+ to an F. That sort of reputational damage would cut deep. That fact should be enough of a deterrent to make sure promises get kept.

Now it might be a bit more tricky if we were dealing with a business that didn’t care about its reputation. There are very few businesses who don’t care about their reputations. There are very few businesses who Carrotmob couldn’t theoretically punish if they broke a promise. But if we were to come across such a business, we wouldn’t have a great way to enforce promises. The safest thing would probably be to avoid dealing with such a company.

We should learn more about this topic (including the practicality of written contracts) as we experiment with more and more campaigns.

Businesses should look at the track record of the organizer who is planning the campaign. Organizers are going to need to be able to convince businesses that people will show up. If you are not confident in your ability to get people to participate, you shouldn’t be organizing a Carrotmob event. Businesses should also look at the ability of Carrotmob to spread the word about them, attract local press, and so on. Some businesses might be willing to take a leap of faith, but it would be more sensible and fair for organizers to structure campaigns in a way that minimizes risk for the business.

Here’s a risky deal:

Carrotmob Montreal agrees to bring a huge crowd to the “Buy n Large” on Main St and spend $20,000 on April 1st. In exchange, “Buy n Large” agrees to replace 4 massive refrigerators with new, super-efficient models.

That puts a lot of pressure on the organizer to come up with $20k of spending. It also means that “Buy n Large” is making a hugely expensive commitment without knowing whether or not anyone is going to show up.

Here’s a much more sensible deal:

Carrotmob Montreal agrees to bring a huge crowd to the “Buy n Large” on Main St and spend as much money as possible on April 1st. In exchange, “Buy n Large” agrees to replace one massive refrigerator for every $5,000 that the Carrotmob spends.

This sort of structure is much safer for businesses. If no one shows up to the Carrotmob, the business gains nothing, but also loses nothing, since they don’t have to replace any fridges. That’s the sort of deal that businesses will want to accept.

That will happen with every single campaign. Look, we believe that every business is part good and part bad. There is no perfect business. The point of a Carrotmob is not to define one business as good, and another business as bad. The point is to get a business to take some specific action that we agree upon.

Let’s imagine there’s a company called Festivus Inc. They manufacture Festivus poles for the celebration of Festivus. As part of this process they dump toxic chemicals into a river. The company also has a terrible maternity leave policy, and they test their poles by smacking chipmunks with them.

It is understandable that an activist might look at a company like this and say “forget it, there’s no way I can support this company.” And sometimes that might be the right choice. But that means that nothing will change. So let’s imagine that Festivus Inc isn’t all bad: they offer generous college scholarships to the children of all employees, they are wind-powered, and they donate millions of dollars to cancer research. Now this sounds like most companies: part good, part bad.

If a Carrotmob organizer is feeling really ambitious, they could organize a mob of people to buy Festivus poles and demand that the company fix ALL of its problems in return. But it seems more likely that a company would agree to stop dumping in the river and maybe also stop smacking chipmunks, but that’s it. In our opinion, it would make sense to buy a Festivus pole as part of this Carrotmob event, even though the company would still have a horrible maternity leave policy. One step at a time. There’s no reason that another organizer couldn’t follow up by planning another Carrotmob of the same company in order to change another policy. In this way, Carrotmob shall facilitate the airing of grievances in the spirit of Festivus.

We believe that every business is part good and part bad. So there are no “bad businesses,” just businesses that may have some bad practices. As far as Carrotmob is concerned, everyone starts out with a blank slate. You can probably think of a dozen companies that you think are horrible. But even if you’re right, Carrotmob won’t pre-judge anybody. Everyone gets a chance to improve if they are willing to come to the table and meet the demands of Carrotmob.

Furthermore, we have no problem with businesses that choose not to participate in our campaigns. We are here to help businesses do good by making it economically advantageous to do so. If businesses don’t participate in our campaigns, we recognize that we have not yet offered enough value to them in return. We respect that. The only way that a company could possibly become an enemy of Carrotmob is by failing to keep their word. If a company ever promises to do something and breaks their promise, that’s when we’re going to have a problem.

Your followup question is probably going to be, “how do you handle a company that breaks their promise?” And frankly, we don’t like your line of questioning. Carrotmob and Virgance are all about positive activism concepts. We are interested in carrots, not sticks. We don’t expect any companies to break their word. Why would they? They will only gain by participating. So we hope it never becomes an issue.

It depends.

When a business wins a Carrotmob, they win a specific reward. They don’t win our eternal support forever, no matter what else they do. It’s tit for tat. We offer a specific, finite reward in exchange for whatever they offer to do for us. So our reaction depends on what our agreement with them had been.

Let’s say a shipping business agreed to only use hybrid vehicles for all its deliveries, and we gave them our reward. If they later proceeded to start dumping toxic sludge into a local lake, we might be disappointed, and we might immediately do something about it, but it would not be directly relevant to the agreement we had made with them.

If, on the other hand, the company purchased a fleet of Hummers for making deliveries, we would have an enormous problem with that. Refer to question above.

This will be an unsatisfying answer.

We hope to represent all of the world’s consumers, so we want to keep our values broad and inclusive in order to be a resource for a wide range of activists. In theory, we would love to have the community define our values through all of the campaigns they come up with. But if we don’t stand for anything specific at all then how will we foster a unified mob? Not having values could really hurt the Carrotmob brand. So we’re basically planning to let the community play around for the time being with no rules and see what happens. But at some point we intend to define some general values that we want to support. Now, what will those look like?

When we’re sitting on couches at our office, talking about this, we use generalities like, “It has to be good…it has to cause positive change….” We also rather like using a broad definition of the word “sustainability.” We don’t just want to sustain our natural environment…we also want sustainability for our economy, for our educational system…look, this is going to be a difficult project to figure out. Rather than spending our time and resources pontificating about our theoretical values, it makes more sense for us to let the Carrotmob organizers start doing their thing, and we’ll impose limits later if it becomes necessary. Suggestions welcome.

We are non-political and non-partisan. Basically, it would be foolish for Carrotmob to get involved with the controversy and mud-slinging that comes along with politics. Why? Because everybody loves Carrotmob. With Carrotmob, everyone wins. Carrotmob has no enemies. A stereotypical liberal loves us because we are a great means for advancing progressive causes. A stereotypical conservative loves us because we are pro-business and we embrace the free market system. Libertarians have told us that we were the best libertarian idea they had ever heard of. Carrotmob truly is embraced across the American political spectrum*, and if we started taking sides in the world of legislation and elections, we would lose that magical unity.

* Exception: if you reject capitalism and/or democracy then I guess you won’t like us.

So far our campaigns have been focused on environmental issues with specific attention to energy and climate change, but we can’t wait to see campaigns that go beyond environmental issues. Surely you have 1000 ideas on this topic….

If you disagree with a campaign, you shouldn’t participate in that campaign. It ought to work democratically: The campaigns with the widest base of support will be the most successful, and less popular campaigns will be less successful. Here are two likely scenarios for campaigns that some activists might not participate in:

• Someone organizes a campaign to reduce the incidence of uncomfortable kidney stones in Siberian mice. Sure, maybe this campaign is in line with your values, but you just don’t care. You don’t think it’s the best use of your time to participate, so you don’t.
• Someone organizes a campaign to reward your all-time least favorite company in return for them making some positive change. Maybe you know the campaign is a good step in the right direction, but your heart just won’t let you support the company yet.

Either of those scenarios is fine. No big deal. We’re not going to ask people to always participate in every Carrotmob no matter what.

No. Carrotmob is a great fit for people who buy stuff…you can buy the same stuff you would buy anyway, and have a huge positive impact while you do it. If you’re really hardcore, and you grow all of your own organic food and weave your own clothes out of hemp, you’re probably not going to start buying Carrotmob’s preferred brand of pork rinds just because we got the pork rind factory to start using solar panels. Let’s be honest: you are just a way better person than the rest of us. Keep doing what you’re doing. We know that Carrotmob is doing nothing to reduce our global consumption habit. We know that “people buying stuff they don’t need” is a huge problem. But we’re not fighting that fight right now.

Here’s the master plan:

1. Carrotmob becomes wildly popular in mainstream society by being an extremely easy, accessible, and effective method of activism.
2. As a result of their experimentation with Carrotmob, mainstream society begins to self-identify as activists, and becomes more educated about the problems we need to solve.
3. Everyone begins to understand and agree on some broader changes we need to make as a society.
4. Cultural shifts change the way we think about “consumption,” and humanity evolves.
5. Carrotmob becomes obsolete. Mission accomplished.

We embrace mistakes and failure. This is all very experimental. Carrotmob is a very versatile idea. We are going to be trying it out with a wide variety of cultures, types of businesses, types of goods and services, that we can guarantee that some of them won’t work. Some people will be great organizers, and others will be pathetic failures. Some campaigns will have a massive impact, and others will have a negligible impact. There will come a time when no one shows up. There will come a time when some confused store owner actually does things to become LESS sustainable. An organizer will plan a party at a bar after a Carrotmob event and someone will get belligerent and an old lady will get knocked over in the parking lot, and the local news will say that Carrotmob is out of control.

We hope that failures will be rare, and we intend to vet campaigns in order to make sure they are well-planned, safe, and so on. But the important thing is that we learn from our mistakes. As assorted fiascos unfold around the world, we will be taking notes and learning constantly, and refining our methods. As Soichiro Honda once said, “Success is ninety-nine percent failure.”

Yes! At some point we hope to set up a forum where people who know a lot about one particular topic can answer questions and offer guidance to our organizers. This way, if an organizer wants to plan a campaign focused on refrigeration technology, they could pop over to the “refrigeration” topic in our expert forum, and the topic would be “hosted” by our 5 refrigeration experts, each with a little picture/bio/website. Then whichever expert is available can jump in to answer questions, and keep our organizers up-to-date on the latest news in the magical world of refrigeration.

We would want experts on hand to answer questions about all sorts of topics. Here are some made up sample topics: wind power, lighting in grocery stores, low-flow toilets, how to write effective copy on your Carrotmob event flyers, fair trade, lumber industry, how restaurants can reduce waste, Chinese supply chains, the changing tax effects of LEED Certification around the world, anti-discrimination law, permits for outdoor events in New York, efficient factory ventilation systems, and so on and so forth…

If you would like to give us your name as a possible expert, drop us a quick email about yourself and your topic, and we’ll get back to you whenever we begin creating the expert’s section. Keep in mind that being one of our experts is a volunteer position.

Yes! Here are 2 creative ways that companies could participate…first an example for retailers, and then an example for other companies.

1. Let’s say you are a sporting goods store and we’re doing a Carrotmob campaign focused on different brands of hiking boot. You could put up a special display in the hiking boot section that promotes the brand that won the Carrotmob event. Doing this could increase the impact of the Carrotmob campaign, as well as boosting your sales and letting your customers know that you are a friend of Carrotmob.
2. Let’s say that you work at a huge company that develops boring enterprise software solutions. We do a Carrotmob campaign related to brands of liquid hand soap. You drop an email to the person in charge of buying hand soap for your whole company. That person switches brands and then challenges all the other enterprise software companies to do the same. Meanwhile all your fellow employees are excited that your company is a friend of Carrotmob.

If you are interested in something like this, drop us an email to let us know what you’re interested in…

We certainly hope to. We shall see.