PRINTIt's not easy selling green
The story behind green products isn't all black and white
April 10, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
What’s green, a limited resource but infinitely reusable? Cash, of course. Last year, U.S. consumers spent about $250 billion on products and services that claim to be good for the planet — from hybrid SUVs to eco-friendly toilet paper — according to the 2007 ImagePower Green Brands Survey. So it’s no wonder companies are handing over big chunks of their own change to marketers who promise them a greener glow.
Green might be mainstream, but consumers haven’t stamped it at the top of their priorities just yet. Here are six ways a group of marketing scholars say products can break through the eco-barrier.
Efficiency and cost effectiveness
People are much more inclined to save their own precious resources: time and money. When GE shifted the marketing of its high-efficiency light bulbs from earth-friendly to wallet-friendly, the bulbs sold much better.
Health and safety
With semi-toxic spinach and lead-tainted toys creeping into stores across the country, U.S. consumers have become more serious about knowing what’s in their food and products.
Performance
Many products that use greener methods actually work better. One example is front-loading washing machines.
Symbolism
The rash of movie stars diving Toyota Priuses is a prime example of a status symbol that is also (arguably) better for the planet.
Convenience
Solar-powered garden lights are a no-brainer that is also good for the environment.
Bundling
When green benefits don’t translate easily into consumer benefits, developers can add to their products, such as including new features in a fuel-efficient car.
But buying by the label color doesn’t always pay off for the planet. Precious few rules actually govern what companies can and can’t declare about how green they really are, so even the most well-intentioned consumers are basically buying blind. On the flip side, for those not willing to spend the extra time or money, some clever marketers are dreaming up ways to get everyone else buying green without even realizing it.
Designing the corporate green-over
Millions of television viewers have seen Kermit the Frog give a throaty chuckle as he finds a Ford SUV hybrid perched in a mountain clearing. They’ve witnessed a computer-generated brown tree frog taking a fanciful global tour of General Electric’s facilities, which include a wind farm in Germany and a cleaner coal power plant in Florida. And they have watched a massive Waste Management refuse truck lumbering through a peaceful forest — a young deer looks on, and a female voice notes the number of trees the company’s recycling program has saved. What, exactly, are these ads trying to sell?
It’s more than just a car or a recycling provider, explains Cynthia Frisby, a strategic communication associate professor at MU. These commercials are a more complex form of public relations that looks to cast a favorable light back on the company itself. Lisa Lanspery, GE’s public relations manger, describes her company’s ads as a way to keep consumers educated about the corporation as a whole. Improving the company’s image is “an easier way to sell our technology,” says Lanspery, who notes that many of their actual products, such as more efficient jet engines, are too complex to successfully market on their own.
Environmentally themed ads have been around as long as the modern environmental movement itself, says Edwin Stafford, an associate professor of business administration at Utah State University and author of several articles about green marketing. But in recent years, he says, there’s been more interest in buying green because of the rise in energy prices, more concern about food safety and an increased awareness of climate change.
To keep up with demand, the number of advertising and communications agencies dedicated to eco-conscious campaigns has grown. Even some of the country’s largest ad agencies have opened green subsidiaries such as Ethos, a division of JWT (previously J. Walter Thompson).
Hugh Hough, president and founder of Green Team, the country’s first communication agency to focus primarily on environmental and social responsibility credits consumer awareness for the increase in green marketing. “Companies that before didn’t think it was important now realize that consumers expect it,” he says of the earth-conscious messages.
Hough is also keenly aware that as consumers become more savvy, corporations must become more transparent. This new demand is one of the reasons his New York City-based agency performs in-depth, two- to three-month audits of new clients, a practice that is a hallmark of many agencies that pride themselves on social and environmental responsibility. Green Team researchers examine the company’s supply-chain. “What does this brand stand for? Or if it’s a product, what goes into it?” Hough asks, then informs his clients: “OK, this is what you can say today. This is what you need to fix.”
MIA: The green police
The formal research is left to the agencies and their clients. After the ad campaign is designed, consumers then pass their own judgement, says Hough. At this point, consumers don’t have a choice. No national laws or agencies exist to test environmental claims or hold companies to their promises as the FDA does for food and medicine. “There’s so much confusion out there because there’s no regulation,” says Hough. The Federal Trade Commission, which is in charge of keeping advertisers honest, has been the government’s best watchdog.
The FTC’s biggest service on this front has been its green guides, which are online and printed brochures offering definitions and examples of environmental claims for both consumers and advertisers. As FTC spokesperson Frank Dorman points out, they aren’t law and haven’t been revised in 10 years. The next review of the guides was scheduled for 2009, but the explosion of green marketing set the bureaucratic gears in motion early, and the revision has begun.
One of the catchphrases that is not in the current green guide, “Carbon offset credits,” has been popping up everywhere, from online car insurance offers to bakery counter pamphlets. The credits are advertised as an easy way to make up for a harmful purchase, such as a flight across the Atlantic, by putting money toward activities that will mitigate green house gas emissions, such as planting trees. Carbon offset credits have yet to be standardized, so the amount of good they do is still up for debate. “Generally, we’re seeing more in the market that there are claims for carbon offsets, so people are saying, ‘What’s that mean?’” says Dorman. “And other people are saying, ‘Those people are full of baloney — they’re not doing any good.’”
It’s one thing to determine a set of carbon-mitigation formulas, but it’s quite another to be able to communicate it through words and images. The environmental movement has long been peppered with evocative buzzwords, and finding the right phrases for concepts like “eco-friendly” isn’t easy, even for people in the business of doing just that. “How do you figure out how to talk about it?” asks Hough. “How do you even define ‘green’?”
Because there is still no such thing as a green housekeeping seal of approval, consumers must be wary advertising and labels (see sidebar on page 18). Companies with hollow claims risk being accused of “greenwashing.” The term, which comes from the idea of whitewashing, entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1999.
Stafford offers a cautionary note about GE’s Ecomagination campaign. “I am absolutely thrilled that GE is moving into wind power,” he says. But he raises an eyebrow at some of the images in their television commercial, such as clean coal and trains, which could be perceived as exaggerating their overall environmental impact. “That’s a risk you take if you put a spotlight on your company being greener than others,” he says. For GE’s part, it has made sure that there is “a big legal arm behind it,” Lanspery says.
To be sure, there is plenty of gray in the green marketplace. In the relative void of legal regulation, marketers themselves have stepped in to create watchdog-type Web sites such as Greenwashing Index and After These Messages. Run by EnviroMedia and Green Team respectively, these two sites host public discussions about advertising claims. Although neither company hides its involvement with the sites, this crossbred roll of promoter and monitor adds another layer of complexity to the already hazy field. One recent consumer post on Greenwashing Index derides GE’s Ecomagination frog commercial. It notes that the ad relies on feel-good comparative words like better and greener without the logical follow-up, “better than what?”
Buying green and selling out?
Even consumers with good intentions cannot take the time to sort through all of the competing claims. “The complexities of it are mind-boggling,” says Stafford. That’s why he and his colleagues suggest advertisers focus on more than environmental benefits.
“What savvy marketers need to do is add consumer value to a green product,” says Stafford. At the end of the day, consumers still care more about the limited resources of time and money than, say, glaciers or fossil fuels. Stafford, in collaboration with other marketers, developed a list of economic and convenience incentives to get people buying green. “You have to leverage those personal benefits because those are going to be more appealing to the soccer mom, the NASCAR dad or the Wal-Mart shopper.”
Does a more incentive-based style of marketing mean that, like stubborn children who won’t eat their vegetables, consumers are refusing what should be good for them? Or does the flood of green advertising indicate that advertisers are just at work chiseling out a new niche of neuroses to feed upon. Frisby doesn’t think either is entirely the case. “There has to be some kind of feedback loop,” she says, explaining that without a sizable audience, these ads wouldn’t exist.
Perhaps the growing hum of green is already turning into white noise. New government regulations might help clarify some of the static, but this is where those 250 billion consumer greenbacks come into play. Whether they’re carried away in a flood of greenwashing or stacked up in favor of the truly efficient is up to the spender to decide. V
