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Viewpoint

Green marketingJohn Grant

C limate change is characterized by extreme scale and urgency. The expression that

is doing the rounds today, on the basis of the latest evidence, is global climateemergency. On the supply side every company needs to drastically reduce its

impacts in manufacturing, distribution, raw materials, energy use and so on. If you do notyou will be left behind by regulation and hardening customer demands. But that is not likely

to be nearly enough. What I want to discuss is how to work on the demand side whichmeans marketing. There are many ways to do green marketing I looked at 18 strategies inmy recent book. But a simplied view reduces these to four options in a two-by-two grid (seeFigure 1).

Green brands

A green brand is one that offers a signicant eco-advantage over the incumbents and whichhence appeals to those who are willing to making green a high priority. There are stronggreen brands targeting both retail consumers and also B2B customers. Whichever denitionof green you follow, there is undoubtedly a signicant segment of consumers willing tofavor greener products and services.

If you can offer something that makes a signicant green difference, in a way which isintuitive, supported (and not much contested) by expert evidence . . . and which also savespeople money, or is healthier, or confers status. . . then you are probably onto a winner:

B 8-10 percent of people are up for dark green lifestyles, e.g. composting andmicro-generation;

B 20-40 percent of people are up for light green changes, e.g. a smaller car, fewer ights;and

B 60-80 percent of people are up for no-brainers, such as turning down thermostats to saveenergy and at the same time heating bills.

But imagine a much bigger swing in consumer attitudes lies ahead. One in which the socialpressure will be to be seen to be doing everything possible (as in the war effort) from sharinglifts, to growing your own vegetables, to painting your roof white (reect light and henceheat). The climate news is worsening fast, so it is a strong possibility.

The majority of successful green brands are either based on:

B an alternative technology; or

B a company which runs on green principles.

Why would this be? Why cant you just green a conventional brand? The reason is thatgreen is not an image value like cool or classic, it is a factual evaluation. And it is anevaluation made by an increasingly skeptical audience. Nonetheless it is a judgment, andjudgments are based on credible stories. It is credible that a hybrid engine has lower

DOI 10.1108/02580540810868041 VOL. 24 NO. 6 2008, pp. 25-27,Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 0258-0543j STRATEGIC DIRECTIONj PAGE 25

John Grant is author of The Green Marketing Manifesto .

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emissions. It is credible that products from a nice company like Ecover contain less harmfulchemicals. Both claims happen to be disputed in some quarters but they feel right. They areacts of belief in a human project that is readily understandable.

Setting new standards

Setting new standards is what people often think of as sustainability marketing.

The danger is if it is only about making your virtue more visible; we have put our house inorder and now we want to communicate our credentials. Even if it is absolutely genuine,people (according to research) do not particularly like companies making capital out of theissue. It seems like proteering. You have to plot a very careful course, and of course this istrue of any area where ethics are concerned.

The point of setting new standards is to set an example and hence lead the rest of yourindustry in that direction. In GEs case they are quite explicit about the fact that they aredoing so to force the pace of regulation. If they set a pace, others will struggle to keep up,particularly where procurement by American public utilities is concerned, such being thecustomers for their power stations and hybrid diesel locomotives.

It is setting an example that gets you the endorsement of the NGOs and think tanks; this iswhat you are for them, an example to use to exhort change in others. Eurostar was endorsedby Jonathon Porritt, Tony Juniper and Stuart Rose for going that extra mile to actually reducetheir carbon, rather than resting on their laurels (they started out nine times greener thanying), or over relying on offsets. Standards are (quite properly) a moving target of bestpractice. For instance, carbon neutral is no longer regarded as a gold standard, largelybecause of increasing questions over the efciency of offsetting.

All doing our bit

The modern trend in marketing and media is from one way centralized messages andactivities (the advertising campaign) to activities that are more open and conversational ininvolving people with the brand and increasingly with each other. Amazons success isfounded upon the 10 million reviews which we have left for each other, and on the trails left byother book buyers: people who liked X , also liked Y .

When you apply this approach to green marketing the natural area to address is one ofco-operating with customers to reduce the total impact. Get people to drive less (asMercedes has urged in television advertising in Germany consider using your bicycleinstead for the short journeys). Or get people to share their cars.

This sort of approach has produced the standout green marketing of the last couple of years.For instance Ariels Turn to 30 led (in recent research among its readers by magazine groupIPC) to turning down the thermostat on your washing machine being one of the main new

Figure 1

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claimed behaviors, with people pointing to the ad campaign by Ariel as the place they gotthis idea. Similarly O2 scored a big success (winning the 2006 Green Awards) bypersuading people buying a new Nokia to keep their old charger, and to re-use thepackaging to post back their old phone for recycling while they were at it.

Going forward, if considering this sort of approach, bear in mind that (as with carbon neutral)the era of little things that make a big difference has probably passed. Its a fallacy that wecan avert a global climate change disaster without signicant change. And its alsocounterintuitive; from global climate panic . . . to light bulbs?

Networked resource systemsMany of my own hopes for improvement are pinned on what I call networked resourcesystems. The big development of the last decades in business has been new networkcomputing enabled efciencies. Now we can apply all of that to using resources. In theprocess we might unpick a little of the selsh (and lonely) individualism that is driving theexcessive and wasteful form of consumerism established in the twentieth century. With theinternet we can nd out how to share, rent, repair and re-use. Systems like Freecycle haveshown how the same system that gave us eBay and electronic exchanges can bringdumpster diving and couch surng into mainstream acceptable behavior.

A key idea in green economics is product service systems. The idea is to focus on a need,not its current delivery form. And if possible meet it in future with a service, displacing someof the demand for physical products. In a City Car Club 200 occasional drivers can share a

car. They can book it efciently, via GPS and an online system. They can locate it, pick it up,use it, and then return it. All for a nominal subscription and an hourly rate that comparesfavorably with taxis. You save money, hassle, and responsibility. An alternative contractualarrangement is pay per use (which Electrolux have trialed). Where products are alreadyrented out, extending the lifetime of the contract is another good idea moving to aPrius-style green phone with a four year contract would save millions of millions of perfectlyfunctional phone handsets from landll.

The more active and engaged people are, the more knock on effects any individual moveshave on the culture as a whole. I am a big fan of charismatic brands like innocent, Howiesand Green & Blacks because they paint a vision of the future which is not gray and bleak.Sacrice is the wrong framework, perhaps instead we need to see the present in terms ofstupidity, decadence, ugliness, waste . . . all on an obscene scale. Much as we are trying tosave the world (or at least reduce the suffering ahead for human societies and for many ofour fellow higher species) we could also see a little salvation in a world more attuned to anatural, human scale, connected and authentic way of life.

Looking forward, I think we simply need to ignore some of the current mess we are in and seethat there will be a low carbon economy soon, we just need to ll in the details for individualcompanies this is a simple matter of ensuring you survive and can even thrive after aparadigm shift it is not that much different than your decision ten years ago not to get leftbehind by the digital revolution. Sustainability changes everything.

Keywords: Organizations,Green marketing,Strategic management,Global warming

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