Here’s a novel way to get consumers to test out your product. In March, Nokia announced a competition to shoot a short film entirely with a Nokia N8 mobile phone. It invited entrants to send in a story pitch and offered a $5,000 filming budget and two Nokia N8s to eight finalists.
“Splitscreen: A Love Story,” directed by UK-based JW Griffiths, won the first place award of $10,000.
Coca-Cola has gotten very good at reclaiming the containers that hold its beverages. In 2010, it recovered 400 million pounds of cans and bottles in the U.S. alone. Much of this has been converted into everything from chairs and clothes to jewelry. But building a sustainable planet demands more than reclaiming product packaging, so Coke has come out with the industry’s first 100% recyclable merchandise display racks for use in grocery and convenience stores. Made from corrugated cardboard and soon from recycled PET plastic too, the merchandise racks are the first step toward a comprehensive closed-loop retail equipment program. Coke’s “Give It Back” rack is meant to be returned or recycled to keep it from being tossed into a landfill. The recyclable rack is being tested in select U.S. markets now and should be widely available before yearend.
The World Database of Happiness (WDH) at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, has been conducting scientific research on happiness levels worldwide, in some cases taking measurements over a 30-year period. The WDH arrived at their happiness quotient by surveying their subjects’ overall satisfaction with life as well as their mood day-to-day. In addition to having the subjects self-rate their contentment level, the interviewers even conducted sight inspections, rating their subjects’ “cheerful appearance” based on eight aspects, including whether their mouth was turned up or down in a smile or frown and whether their movements looked relaxed or withdrawn. The data was basically broken down into not at all happy, not very happy, quite happy, and very happy. (WDH had lots of other happiness measures too complicated to understand, much less try to explain without becoming very unhappy.) Fortunately, Good and Open took WDH’s data and worked with Dorian Orange to create an infographic of happiness by country, using the familiar yellow “happy face” to illustrate the point.