Spreading The Green Message: Marketing Vital to Expanding Green Building Beyond The Leading Edge

by Mark Ohrenschall

Marketing green building is vital to expanding its practice beyond the leading edge. So believes a Portland-based sustainable design professional, who recently surveyed nearly 500 green building practitioners.

“My big message is we’ve got a lot more work to do,” says Jerry Yudelson, sustainability director for Interface Engineering in Portland, Oregon. The U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards are followed by about 10 percent of the institutional market for new buildings, but only some 2 percent of the corporate new building market, Yudelson wrote in a paper titled “Marketing Sustainable Design Services,” delivered to the Greenbuild conference in November in Pittsburgh.

“We’ve begun to make movement in the institutional sector. The commercial building sector is still very, very new, and we need to be really serious about documenting benefits, documenting costs and really communicating effectively with the people who make decisions” about building green.

Green building costs remain a significant challenge — 78 percent of respondents to Yudelson’s survey cited higher costs as a perceived barrier to incorporating sustainable design and LEED. More than 60 percent of respondents thought independent cost information would help them better promote green building to clients.

“Anecdotal evidence of benefits is strongly in favor of green building, but it has not filtered yet into the general marketplace enough to overcome perceived cost hurdles,” Yudelson writes. His paper recommends development of more solid information on green building costs and benefits, along with compelling stories. Also suggested are strategic competitive approaches by green building practitioners.

He sees a model in the market growth of compact fluorescent lamps, spurred by “a very sophisticated outreach program” by organizations such as the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance. “I feel that’s a good lesson,” says Yudelson. “It gets a lot more difficult trying to move a whole sector like the building sector, which is inherently conservative.”

Assessing Green Building
Green building practices can be considered a decade old, dating to the 1993 formation of USGBC. LEED has gained “considerable” marketplace acceptance since 2000, although new project registrations have leveled out at about 30 to 40 per month in 2003. Meanwhile, only about 60 U.S. commercial building projects are certified under LEED versions 2.0 and 2.1, even though there are almost 5,000 LEED-accredited professionals nationwide, and more than 10,000 attendees of LEED intermediate workshops.

Curious about green building progress and marketing, and long interested in the spread of new technologies, Yudelson sent a survey to the 2,700 attendees of Greenbuild 2002. He got 473 responses, about 17 percent. Almost 75 percent of respondents classified themselves as very or somewhat experienced in sustainable design. Architects were the most common profession among respondents, representing 35 percent. The rest were engineers, design and construction teams, building owners/developers, government agencies, manufacturers/vendors and others.

Yudelson’s survey concludes that building green is itself a predominant marketing strategy. Almost 60 percent of respondents said they sought LEED certification for at least one project, as the top-listed response to the emerging green building market. Successful projects were listed by 37 percent of respondents as the most effective means of marketing sustainable design services, also highest in that category.

Yudelson describes a traditional reluctance by many architects and engineers to strongly promote specific approaches to their clients. “They like to be professionals with an objective viewpoint,” he said. There is also a long-established dynamic between building designers and owners, he said. “The way the building industry works, the owners wait for the architects to bring them something, and the architects wait for the owners to tell them what they’re interested in.”

But practitioners that advocate green building are finding success, Yudelson said. His survey shows that expertise in green building enabled 76 percent of respondents to gain new clients or projects; 79 percent of respondents reported their green building work had helped distinguish them in the marketplace.

“Firms that have decided to be strong advocates in that area and have otherwise good credentials are cleaning up. They’re getting the plum jobs,” says Yudelson, mentioning Mithun and Keen Engineering as examples. Interface, too, has found a “definite benefit from getting into shortlists of competitions and then winning because of this developed reputation.”

His message to designers: “It’s not too late to get on the [green building] train. The train is leaving the station, and firms that don’t respond are going to be fighting an uphill battle.”

Challenging Market
Still, green building remains a challenging market. More than three-fourths of respondents cited significant additional costs as a perceived barrier to applying sustainable design and LEED. Nearly half, 47 percent, found green building difficult to justify to clients, and 39 percent reported market discomfort with new ideas and technologies.

Yudelson delved into theories about the spread of innovations, concluding that green building in the governmental/institutional sector is supported by early adopters, and in the private-sector market by the even smaller category of innovators. Among the main issues, “relative economic advantage is the major driver of response to innovation,” Yudelson wrote, but that hasn’t been sufficiently demonstrated for higher-cost green building.

“Benefits appear greater for long-term owner occupants of buildings, but many of the reported and putative benefits are harder-to-measure ‘soft costs’ such as employee productivity, improved morale, reduced absenteeism and illness,” he wrote. “These benefits have relatively little acceptance among building owners and project financiers.”

Better information on green building costs and benefits is needed, according to Yudelson. Cost equations can be challenging, he acknowledged — it’s relatively easy to tote the price of components, such as solar electricity, green roofs or added insulation, but trickier for integrated strategies such as natural ventilation. Post-occupancy data on green buildings also is lacking, he said.

The “best piece of work to date,” he said, is a recent California study that found spending about 2 percent of construction costs on green building produces life-cycle savings of more than 10 times that initial investment.

On the benefits side, studies have linked higher student test scores and increased retail sales to daylighting. One result is more attention to daylighting for large new retail stores, he said. However, he said, documented health and productivity benefits from green buildings are still sketchy.

Green building marketing should start at the beginning of a project, Yudelson said. “Part of my research and my experience is that what really counts is that very first discussion between the client and the design and construction team, when they really talk about goals, expectations, etc. It’s at that point that this has to be pitched.” Otherwise, he said, the owner leaves the scene and building professionals tend to follow conventional paths.

Green building’s spread ultimately comes down to salesmanship, at which many design professionals are not highly
skilled, Yudelson wrote. This “presents a major barrier to more widespread adoption of sustainable design.”

Yudelson’s paper recommends use of “compelling sales material” for green building marketing, such as multimedia. He also urges firms to develop a clear green building business strategy, based on some combination of market differentiation, low cost and focus on specific niches, such as building types or project size.

Public agencies can play a role in promoting green building, Yudelson says. One is incorporating it into their own facilities, as the city of Seattle has done by mandating LEED silver for its new buildings. Public agencies also can provide advocacy, technical assistance and even funding. All these help foster the market.

“This is a very sophisticated, complex industry,” Yudelson says of the building world. “It’s hard to know where to intervene. My feeling is you have to intervene at multiple points.”

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