Empower to the People

by Jacquelyn Ottman

The most successful brands connect with their customers emotionally in addition to logical facts and rational appeals. Effective green product marketers connect with concerned and aware consumers willing to pay a premium to buy green products by empowering them to clean the air, purify the water, or help save endangered forests and species.

Product purchasing and consumption are the #1 ways in which Americans act upon their environmental worries. Ask an American adult what he/she is doing to save the planet and their responses most likely will center on product-related behaviors like turning off the lights when leaving a room, recycling products and packages (and more recycling), and looking for green labels when shopping. These activities are more prevalent than donating to environmental groups or voting for green candidates, for instance.

So showing people how products will help them address environmental issues is a key quiver in a green marketers arsenal.

Educate
According to Ropers Green Gauge, 50% of American adults say they would do more for the environment if only they knew how. So, education is critical. Does your product save water or energy? Does it help cut down on waste that must be landfilled? Does it contain fewer toxics that can harm children or wildlife? Let your customers know this!

Better yet, dramatize just how much of an impact your customer can have either by him/herself or in concert with scores of other people also using your product. As one good example, advertising for Wellmans EcoSpun fiber made from 100% recycled soda bottles claimed that the fiber production, “Saved enough energy to power a city the size of Atlanta for a year.”

To make sure your claims are credible, avoid overstatement and have them verified by a third party. This will help project a deep green image on your brand and company, and generate the loyalty that builds brands over time.

Personalize
Which environmental issues does your product address best? Enhance relevance and build credibility by focusing on them. Stonyfield Farm, the makers of high quality and organic yogurts capitalizes on peoples’ concern for global warming and the link between methane produced by dairy cows, to help empower consumers to take action. The company has engaged in energy efficiency programs to reduce the gases produced at power plants, and invested in reforestation efforts to help offset their own carbon emissions. Then, to promote global warming awareness to its customers, it distributed five million yogurt container lids urging consumers to “Put a Lid on Global Warming.” Inside the lids was information and a website with more information.

Be Upbeat
Environmental matters are serious indeed, and if you let them, they will drag down your brands image, limiting your acceptance among mainstream consumers. Thats why theres a big opportunity to make your brand stand for hope. Project optimism. Make it fun to do the right thing.

One of my favorite green marketing slogans comes from the makers of GreenDisk brand diskettes that are recovered from unsold boxes of software. Recognizing the superior quality of diskettes that survive the thrice-inspected trip to retail store shelves, packaging for GreenDisks brags brags, “Made from the best diskettes everyone else ever made.”

Bring It Home
Of all the strategies for empowering people, perhaps the most effective is this one. Focus on the local. Theres a raft of issues that people are concerned about, but feel they can’t influence: global warming, ozone layer depletion, rainforest destruction, and the like. And there are a host of issues that are purely local in nature – litter, graffiti, sprawl – you know them well.

When possible, demonstrate how your product or company can affect change locally. Or demonstrate how your product’s use can actually help address issues that sound faraway or are out of ones personal control. Labels and farmer’s markets that help people understand how produce was farmed locally is a great example. So are products that can be verifiably sourced from the rain forest.

++++

Jacquelyn Ottman is president of J. Ottman Consulting, Inc., a New York City-based consulting firm that works with Fortune 500 companies, the US EPA and other organizations on strategies for green marketing and eco-innovation.

See her website for upcoming presentations. She is also launching a set of groundbreaking workshops on green product development and design which will be conducted in various locations over the next few months.

Contact her: info3@greenmarketing.com

www.greenmarketing.com