Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Answers to: Major Issues Facing Green Marketers & CSR Pros

Here are some answers that I promised to the first of a set of LinkedIn questions I posted not long ago: What do you see as the major issues facing green marketers & CSR professionals over the next couple of years?

Ted Ning, LOHAS: I think those companies that are not communicating their green initiatives in ways that keep up with current events will faulter. (sic) With the economy as it is, there will need to be more emphasis of cost benefits such as durability and energy efficiency. CSR professionals will now need to demonstrate thier value to companies who now have the scissors out to cut jobs that don't feed the bottom line. Unless they are positioned in companies that have sustainability in thier core and are connected to that core, thier jobs are in jeapordy. (sic) There will need to be more tactics and strategy for thier roles beyond big annual reports and PR announcements.

Randy Paynter, Care2: Revenues and Cash flow – ie the same thing that most businesses are going to face. But, on the green front, I think green companies need to continue to find ways to break through all the noise, differentiate themselves, and find unique ways to provide true value. (again, kind of what all companies need to do, but when “green” is the twist/niche I think the value proposition often gets lost.

Ian Myszenski, Hotwire: I agree the challenge is "Legitimacy" for being a Green or Socially Responsible product/company. There has been so much Greenwashing and unsubstantiated messaging that customers (B2B & B2C) are looking for ways to verify a product is truly a better choice for the environment and world.
In order to break through the noise, company's need to either devote serious brand marketing to explain in detail how they are Socially Responsible or more likely look for certification or endorsement of their actions. Hence we're seeing a rise in corporate marketing of 1% for the Planet, B Corporations, and Nonprofit endorsements (Sierra Club/Clorox Greenworks).

More LinkedIn questions and answers to follow.

Labels: corporate social responsibility, CSR, green business, green certifications, green marketing, LinkedIn

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Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Green Social Networks - A Special Report released

SRB Marketing today announced a new, special report titled Green Social Networks. The only one of its kind, the report identifies over 50 total green social networks, ranks the top 15, offers an overview of social networking, and provides tips on using green social networks. The report helps businesses, governments and nonprofits to use social networks most effectively to reach environmentally- and socially-conscious consumers.

Green Social Networks examines the intersection of two powerful, long-term trends:

• A greening economy and marketing industry, where businesses and nonprofits alike are increasingly accountable to their various constituencies, society and the environment, and eager to communicate about their responsibility efforts.
• The rapid growth of social networks, and how they're changing both our work and personal lives.

Taking advantage of both these trends, organizations from those as small as Care2, Green Irenes, and Personal Life Media, to those as large as Starbucks Coffee and Ben & Jerry's, have successfully used social networks to reach green and curious consumers.

Yet the vast majority of organizations who serve such consumers still don't know whether or how to effectively use the social networks to reach their target markets.

Green Social Networks helps level the playing field, enabling organizations of all sizes to jumpstart their social networking relationship and promotional efforts. It helps demystify social networks and identify the ones organizations can best use to reach green and curious audiences.

The report ranks the top 15 green social networks by Alexa traffic and includes Google PageRank for each as well. It also lists alphabetically over 50 total green social networks, providing brief descriptions for the vast majority.

The special report is now available online in PDF format at http://www.srbmarketing.com/pubs_socnet_report.htm. Review copies of the report are available upon request to qualifying members of the media and blogosphere.

Labels: green business, green marketing, social networks

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Thursday, June 26, 2008

Top 15 Green Social Networks

I'm almost finished with a special report on green social networks. It's going to include an overview of the social network industry; strategy and tactics for using green social nets; and the most comprehensive listing of green social networks to date, with over 50 listed.

It's also going to include a ranking of the top 15 green social networks by Alexa traffic rank. Hint: Yahoo! Green, Care2 and Treehugger are in the top three green social networks. Can you guess some of the other 12?!

Here's an excerpt from the report:

For-profit companies and brands are also starting to get some traction with social network profiles and pages. Ben & Jerry’s has nearly 25,000 fans on Facebook, with a very active Page that includes a video contest, a quiz, and hundreds of posts from its fans. Nike has over 73,000 Facebook fans. There are even two Facebook groups, apparently initiated by Toyota Prius owners with over a combined 1,500 members – something Toyota should probably nurture if it isn't already! Still, it seems most green brands either aren’t yet engaging in social networks, or are getting little traction.

Send an email to the address on our contact page if you'd like to be alerted when the report is released.

Labels: green business, green marketing, social networks

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Friday, June 20, 2008

Green Homes for All?

My family and I are nearing the end of the process of building a new home in New Paltz, NY, in the Hudson Valley area. This has been a great opportunity to live and have a home in a region we love that's "us" and that, of course, incorporates a large number of green elements. We didn't realize it was the type of home some, especially among the Hollywood set, now consider the "new trophy home" as the NY Times recently put it -- small and ecological. It's simply what we've wanted for a while now, for our health and environmental reasons, and have had the good fortune to pursue.

The process has been jaw-droppingly time-consuming, though - I've spent hundreds of hours on it over the last year and a half, and my wife dozens or hundreds more. We understand from other friends that have had homes built that the process is de facto a time-consuming one; but I know our desire for numerous green elements added to that significantly as well.

It didn't help that the process started around the time the credit crisis accelerated -- the large national lender we started with for the home construction loan (HCL) took dozens of hours of my time alone, approving our application but then deciding to close their HCL department. I had to start the whole HCL application process over with a new lender.

That's why, when I saw this recently-posted video below, I had to share it. It shows a much simpler way to have a new green home. Hopefully new ideas and economies of scale will continue to make the process easier for both existing and new home owners -- I'm not sure we'd go through the process again if given the choice, unless it was something like the modular home in the video. The Hollywood people probably have teams of architects and designers to help them with green homes constructed on site from scratch!

Labels: green building, green business, green homes, green marketing

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G'day - What Green Certifications are Credible?

I came across a video from "down under" by a self-proclaimed expert on environmental management systems stating that ISO 14001 is the only credible green certification for businesses worldwide (see below). With the dozens (hundreds?) of government and non-governmental certifications that have sprouted in the last decade or two, I thought that was a provocative statement.

While the "expert's" website is geared heavily toward making the sale, rather than providing additional information, she makes some good points in her video about the problem of green washing and loose guidelines in many green certification programs, rather than hard, provable standards.

The FTC is going through its rules on green marketing now, and these points are well taken. We will be putting together soon a paper on the FTC's process and what it will mean for green marketing and green marketers.

Labels: green business, green certifications, green marketing, green washing

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Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Digital Marketers See Green: Small Properties Gobbled Up

ClickZ, a respected source of information on interactive marketing that I admire just posted an excellent article discussing how "digital eco-marketing initiatives devoted to saving the planet - or at least talking about it in ads - has been picking up."

The article, lengthy by online standards, covers more details than others I've seen from mainstream and industry media not specifically geared toward environmental or social issues, and hits some topics I've covered in this blog in recent months, including some of the articles in this issue of the Conscious Clicks newsletter.

ClickZ editor and author of the article, Zachary Rodgers, adeptly points out that mainstream green marketing efforts are crowding in on green marketing's endemic advertisers -- companies like Seventh Generation, Organic Valley and Method. This is one of a number of important effects from this trend that I'm analyzing in a white paper on green marketing I hope to release later this year (if interested in getting a copy, please email me).

Yet many blue chips hitting the green media circuit for the first time are finding the rules are a little different online.

As we've known for a while and have advised our clients, demographics don't matter nearly as much as psychographics when it comes to green marketing, especially on the web. People who care about different issues such as the climate crisis, indoor air quality or fair trade, can be targeted directly with greater success than trying to reach them through channels with certain demographics in their audience like gender, age, etc.

Web marketing allows for dialogs - think email, blogs and social nets - and that's driving a wave of recent consolidation in green market media. Online, that consolidation includes Discovery Communications' purchase of TreeHugger.com, National Geographic's acquisition of The Green Guide, and Gaiam's acquisition of eco-lifestyles media firm Lime Media and Zaadz, a "LOHAS" social net. (Discosloure: The Green Guide and Lime Media are SRB clients; also, not a Hawaiin greeting, many of you already know that LOHAS stands for Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability).

These dialogs between many authentic, green new-media companies and their engaged audiences can be powerful. As president of TreeHugger, Ken Rother says: "There's this implicit trust between... TreeHugger and the reader. That trust takes a lot of work to build. It's our belief that the advertising should have similar conceptual values to the content."

Jakob Daschek is a founder and creative director of Syrup, the creative and production agency that worked with GE agency-of-record BBDO on the effort. He believes the U.S. market has become considerably more sophisticated about environmental issues since the campaign began 18 months ago.

"With the first launch of Ecomagination, we had this whole thing educating people about what the issues are," he said. "Now we're migrating it out into specifically what GE is doing, because people know at this point [about the issues], and they can benefit from knowing exactly what GE is doing."

Labels: green business, green marketing

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Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Is BIG Green Business a Good Thing?

Jason Mark and Kevin Danaher's post on AltnerNet asks this question, close to my heart. They point out that GE and BP are ramping up their renewable energy efforts; prominent architects are using recycled and reused materials, and the market for non-residential green building is at $43 billion a year; more than $2 trillion in assets are invested in socially responsible funds; and sales of organically grown food are growing at 20 percent per year.

They also ask lots of more detailed and important questions related to this theme:

How can we celebrate companies that move toward better practices while acknowledging how much farther they need to go? Will transnational corporations use green practices to more effectively wipe out their mom-and-pop competitors? Will organic standards be weakened by the power of large corporations? Will Americans retain their bad habits of overconsumption but simply switch to earth-friendly products?

There are no hard answers, of course.

I agree with the authors' premise that we need not view the BIG green business revolution (that has followed the small green business revolution, in progress for decades) through either/or thinking that says we can either have Safeway organic broccoli or we can have local farmers' markets.

Rather, we should adopt a both/and mentality that makes room for each path. There always has been and always will be more than one way forward.

In fact, as a "mom-and-pop competitor" myself (there are lots of much larger marketing agencies out there seeing the advantage of green initiatives), I remain optimistic that smaller, nimbler organizations will always find and better serve the right niches. And when the time is right, those smaller, green organizations that offer enough continued value will either remain in business or be integrated into larger organizations reaching greater numbers of people. That's been the case with such companies as Stonyfield Farm (acquired by Danon), White Wave (acquired by Deans Foods), and Green & Black's Organic (acquired by Cadbury-Schweppes), to name just a few. If the acquiring company looses the purpose of the green brand, new smaller competitors will emerge to serve the niche.

As Mark and Danaher state: "The idea is to construct a green economy broad enough to accommodate a range of interests, niches for both the deeply committed and the newly curious -- while of course at all times pushing farther and constantly redefining 'mainstream' and 'normal' and 'acceptable.'"

For more on these questions as specifically applied to the organic foods industry, see Jurriaan Kamp's article in Ode magazine -- Organic goes mainstream - and why that’s cause for celebration.

Labels: green business, green marketing

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