Allow me to begin by announcing that I believe in truth in advertising.
I think the more you tell a potential customer, in your business name and description, your logo, your URL, your commercial, etc., the better off you are, and the better off society is. You tell your potential customers what to expect from you, and as long as you’re honest about it, it’s the opening to a mutually beneficial relationship.
I should also mention that – to an extent – I do this for a living. Part of my career is in giving corporate training on the intricacies of the Country of Origin Marking regulations, to keep manufacturers, distributors and retailers on the right side of the rules enforced by Customs agents and the Federal Trade Commission. (In case you’re wondering, yes, my lectures are interesting, detailed, helpful, and affordable!)
So when I see something in a name that tells me something about a company, my eyes light up.
Imagine my surprise today when I saw a solicitation come across my desk – a “cold call” email – with a brand new (well, new to me, anyway) URL extension at the end, one that I’d never seen before.
We are all familiar with the most common one – the .com extension. And we know that .net is available, mostly for companies whose desired name was already taken as a .com extension. We’re all familiar with schools ending in .edu and entrepreneurs who think .biz will help them (though I’ve never thought it appealing). US government sites end with .gov, and cities and states have extensions including the two-character abbreviation of their states. Foreign countries use a similar approach, utilizing the two-character ISO abbreviation for each country.
And here at the American Free News Network, being good patriots, we proudly use the .US extension.
It’s a very neat system.
Today, the cold call email I received ended in a .eco extension. I’ve never seen that one before.
I had a sneaking suspicion, of course, but I looked it up to be certain, and sure enough, a .eco extension is for any organization, or business, or university, or government agency, or individual, that wants to boast about its commitment to the environment.
Gee. That could be just about anybody, couldn’t it?
It’s apparently been around for about seven years, and it’s managed by Big Room, a Vancouver BC based web registry. They make it easy to qualify; you just have to state your commitment to their ecological goals, and publish a statement of the sorts of things you do to further such goals, as a “publicly accessible ECO profile.” Cool, huh?
They say it’s for companies and organizations doing “sustainability related work” and people who are “committed to positive change for the planet.”
They don’t make it easy to tell exactly what specific policies qualify for the domain. Big Room cites such vague goals as sustainability and ecology, environmental concerns and commitment to the planet, but we are left to figure it out on our own, and then apply, and then presumably they’ll grant the domain as soon as your check clears.
And maybe they’ll eventually boot you if they decide your approach wasn’t sufficient for them?
So we don’t know for certain, but we can figure it out, can’t we?
So, the .eco extension may mean that the company is committed to using solar panels and windmills instead of cost-efficient power sources that actually work, like natural gas, petroleum, nuclear and coal.
Or the extension may mean that the company requires that all its employees carefully separate their trash so that paper goes in one bin and plastic bottles go in another, and aluminum cans go in a third, until eventually trash cans line an entire wall where a single can was once sufficient. As long as you separate them at the workplace, nobody has to think about the fact that 90% of the stuff will be recombined by the trash collector and dumped in the landfill anyway because the dirty little secret is that most recyclables simply aren’t worth the cost of recycling.
But the extension could also mean some serious commitments that make a big difference to the company’s product, and therefore, to their value to a potential customer.
It may mean that their drivers use so-called electric vehicles, which means they have an unnecessarily higher overhead that has to be built into their price.
It may mean that their products are packaged in much more expensive packaging since plastic and paper that are reclaimed from the recycling process cost so much more than simply using new paper or resin.
It may mean that their product itself is either lower quality (ever use a paper straw that dissolves in your glass of sodapop?) or higher price (because the partial use of recycled materials requires expensive engineering and other components to make the final product function as well as a non-recycled version would).
It may mean that the company will donate some share of their profits – money they’ve made by selling to you – to politically activist organizations like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace.
It may mean that the company will donate some share of their profits to environmentalist political candidates, or will encourage their employees to do so.
It may mean that the company is committed to DEI and ESG, and similar approaches governing their hiring practices, their sourcing priorities, and their advertising approach. These philosophies do tend to infect every division of a company, not just one.
And therefore, most likely of all, it may mean that their products will be more expensive than they ought to be, because they place so many other priorities above the simple, dependable delivery of a high-quality, cost-effective finished product.
So if you too value these other priorities first, that .eco designation just might be a plus for you.
But if you – as a potential consumer or partner – value a high-quality, cost-effective finished product most, above all that other global warming hogwash and left-wing claptrap, then that .eco designation just might be telling you that they’re not the vendor for you.
As for me…
Well, in my case, when I see the .eco designation in a potential vendor’s URL, I now know it’s someone who’s going to waste ten minutes of every business meeting jabbering on about their sustainability commitments… someone whose slideshows are going to waste time talking about how much money they’re wasting on buying EVs for their salesmen… someone whose products will likely cost more and function worse than his competitors’… someone who’s going to pour my money into political campaigns for candidates I despise.
In short, when I see the .eco designation now, I know to send him my briefest (and most cordial) rejection letter: “Thank you for your interest, but we’re really not a fit. Have a good day.”
Truth in advertising really is a wonderful thing.
Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.
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