Responsible Consumption: The Next Frontier in Green Marketing

by Jacquelyn Ottman
Published on March 30, 2011

Tags: Customer Behavior, Green Marketing, Marketing Tips In this article, you'll learn...

How to make your company greener and still profit Four examples of green marketing successes How you and your customer can engage in responsible consumption The following article is adapted from The New Rules of Green Marketing: Strategies, Tools and Inspiration for Sustainable Branding (Berrett-Koehler, February 2011). Is Tom's of Maine toothpaste really green if consumers leave the water running while they brush their teeth? Is an ENERGY STARrated light bulb really green if it remains on after everyone leaves the room? It is one thing to design a product to be greener, but the negative environmental impact made throughout a product's life-cycle cannot

be minimized unless the consumer uses (and disposes of it) responsibly. "Responsible consumption"what I consider the next frontier of green marketingis about conserving resources associated with using products. That includes encouraging consumers to use only what is needed and consciously reduce waste. Sustainability leaders are striving for the ideal goals of zero waste and zero energy, but we will never get to zero until people learn to responsibly consume and properly dispose of the products they buy.

The Consumer's Role As any life-cycle assessment will show, consumer usage can account for a significant portion of a product's total environmental impact, especially products such as laundry detergents, soaps, and shampoos that require resources, energy, and water to work. Manufacturers can design products to make it easier for consumers to minimize resource use, such as a duplex printing feature on a printer, or a dual-flush toilet. Real-time information, such as Toyota's dashboard and the new crop of energy meters and monitoring services, also help. But only consumers can push the "cold" button on the washing machine or turn off the water when they brush. Industry Incentives Businesses have lots of incentives to encourage such behavior, and some already are pioneering innovative ways to enlist consumer support. That's because, when markets fail to address environmental ills, governments tend to intervene. Witness mandated shifts to energy-, fuel-, and water-efficient appliances, light bulbs, and cars. Will coldwater, laundry detergents, organic cotton, and leather-free shoes be next? Another issue that industry needs to be mindful of is "the rebound effect"whereby consumers will buy or use more of a product if it costs less due to enhanced efficiency. A classic example of that is fuel-efficient cars that are driven more miles than less-efficient cars. Enlisting consumer support for responsible consumption is a surefire way to build credibility and reduce risk. Consumers intuitively understand that it is not possible to spend our way out of the environmental crisis. At the micro level, simply switching one supermarket-cartful of "brown" products with "green" ones will not cure environmental ills. Creating a sustainable society requires (among other things) that every one of us use only what we need and that we help recapture resources for successive use by recycling and composting. Lessons Learned From Sustainability Leaders

As I learned when advising HSBC on its award-winning "No Small Change" green marketing campaign, a key to the campaign's credibility was empowering people and businesses to reduce their carbon footprint, in line with the bank's own efforts. In other words, we weren't asking HSBC's customers to do anything the bank hadn't done itself. Sustainability leaders are now winning their stakeholders' respect by communicating the need to consume responsibly, especially in energy use. For starters, HP earned the No. 1 spot on Newsweek's list of the top green companies of 2009 by pledging to reduce product emissions and energy usage 40% from 2005 levels by 2011. Realizing that it needs to partner with consumers to reach that goal, the company has launched its Power to Change campaign, which encourages users to turn off their computers when they do not need them (e.g., at night) and tracks actions to calculate energy and carbon impact. Another example is Levi Strauss & Co., which teamed up with Goodwill to educate consumers on how to lower the life-cycle impacts of blue jeans. The company's "A Care Tag For The Planet" campaign uses online and in-store messaging, and a new care tag on jeans, to encourage owners to wash in cold water, line dry when possible, and donate their jeans (when they're no longer wanted) to Goodwill thrift stores. The company estimates that such steps by responsible consumers can reduce life-cycle climate-change impacts in half. Similarly, in Europe, Procter & Gamble's Ariel runs a Turn to 30 (degrees centigrade) campaign to encourage consumers to wash at lower temperatures. Spurred by the threat of regulation, the laundry detergent industry has united to promote responsible washing. And an industrywide Washright campaign launched in 1998 by the Brusselsbased International Association for Soaps, Detergents and Maintenance Products (AISE) reached 70% of European households with tips on how to wash laundry in environmentally preferable ways. A final example is the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which now knows that peer pressure is an excellent strategy for promoting responsible consumptionand may be even more motivating than saving money. In a test that began in April 2008, some 35,000 randomly selected customers were told via "happy" or "sad" faces (printed on their monthly utility bills) how their energy use compared with that of their neighbors and the most-efficient energy users in the district. Customers who received the information cut their electricity use 2%, compared with no change by counterparts who did not receive messages. The utility expanded the program to 50,000 households in August 2009.

Jacquelyn Ottman is an expert adviser on green marketing to Fortune 500 companies and the US government. She is author of four books on the subject; her latest is The New Rules of Green Marketing: Strategies, Tools, and Inspiration for Sustainable Branding. (Berrett-Koehler, February 2011).

Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2011/4720/responsible-consumption-the-next-frontier-in-greenmarketing#ixzz1nnGGi4LP

Whenever there's a significant change in society's needs, brands must evolve their products or services to best meet them. That is nothing new, and we are now in the midst of such changea perfect storm brought on by the economic downturn, emerging consumer interest in sustainability, and the power of social media. But marketers seem to be having trouble figuring out how to meet the resulting societal needs. That's in part why The Social Studies Group and I partnered to study what we call the "Green Mom Eco-cosm." Whether for reasons of cost savings or family health, women who are moms, write blogs, and self-identify as "green" have exactly the motivation and conviction marketers need to understand right now. The influence those women wield in the emerging environmental side of brands and products is powerful. The wellbeing of their children and safety of their homes are crucial to how and why they buy. Thanks to the blogosphere and the information available online in general, those women have become very educated about what may be harmful to their families and the environment in which they live.

Finally, once they gain that knowledge, they are driven to share what they learn with the large, likeminded communities they have built. Savvy marketers have long known to narrow down their core market to its finest point. Examining green-mom bloggers does just that, by starting with womenthe broad segment known to make or influence most consumergoods purchasesand then homing in on women who are moms, then moms who blog, and finally down to those who choose the "green" label to describe themselves. Research for our report, The Green Mom Eco-cosm: A Social Study into their Motivations, Convictions and Influence, found that this passionate group provided a revealing look at sustainability, or green-inspired consumer behavior. The research reflects the need to appreciate that "green mothers" is an expansive term that encompasses women with widely varying degrees of consumption, commitment to green issues, eco-knowledge, and motivation to be green.

Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2010/3441/profiling-green-moms-what-marketers-need-toknow#ixzz1nnGmHhGO