An integrated marketing plan for peace?

Here's the kind of thing you can find while surfing the web during a long weekend --

While I was surfing around New York magazine's cover story and sidebars on blogging (which I will post on later, after I've absorbed it better), I came across an article headlined "How to Reposition a Brand Called ‘Peace.’" New age guru Deepak Chopra, it seems, is teaming up with former Coca-Cola executive Jeff Dunn, now CEO of Ubiquity Brands, the Chicago-based diversified food products company that counts Jay's Potato Chips among its holdings. Their product? Peace.

According to Jada Yuan of New York, Chopra's nonprofit Alliance for Humanity wants to sell the ideas of "taking care of the environment, helping the poor achieve economic parity, making sure human rights are protected, and finding nonviolent means of conflict resolution” like, well, like potato chips. He recruited Dunn over a lunch meeting with Dunn and his wife. As Dunn told the story, “my wife Sue said, ‘You’re trying to do what Jeff did for Coke. You’re trying to brand peace!’ And I literally watched the lightbulb go on over [Chopra's] head.”

So how do you reposition peace in the marketplace? Yuan reports:

Dunn ticks off the three stages to brand development: identifying your target audience, positioning your brand, and, finally, “activating” the consumer—who progresses from product trial to brand loyalty. The target audience here is the easy part. They’re the people Dunn refers to as “conscious consumers,” those who, given a choice between two similar products, choose the one made by a company with better social and environmental policies. Still, citing a Sustainability Institute report, Dunn says only 3 or 4 percent of consumers worldwide do this consistently. Dunn thinks if they can get that number up to 10 percent, “we’d see a sea change relative to the degradation of the planet.”

But wait, there's more. Dunn wants to create a new logo -- turn the old peace sign upside down, so it looks sort of like a tree. And more importantly, he wants to work with credit card companies and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) like Save the Children to reach people who are open to this kind of marketing appeal. Yuan adds:

With or without the alliance logo, Chopra believes consumerism can trump geopolitics. “For example,” says Chopra, “if we could get India and Pakistan and Kashmir to see that there’s a huge economic incentive for Kashmir to be the Switzerland of the East, the ski resort of the world in that area, then maybe they’ll see that it doesn’t matter what flag they fly over it.”

If it sounds wild-eyed and visionary, that may be because that's exactly what it is.

But Chopra, who can be wild-eyed and visionary himself, knows a thing or two about marketing. A physician who grew up and was educated in India, he has made a bundle off of books on transcendental meditation, holistic medicine and books with titles like Creating Affluence: Wealth Consciousness in the Field of All Possibilities; The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success; Grow Younger, Live Longer: 10 Steps to Reverse Aging and, most recently, Peace Is the Way: Bringing War and Violence to an End.