photo credit: ellievanhoutte

A recent study by the Food Action Group found that 70% of consumers polled would be more inclined to visit green or organic restaurants regardless of price, up from 37 percent in 2007. And while the search engine Google returned 1,467 results for the phrase “green restaurant” in 2006, today a search on that phrase returned nearly 79 million results.  That proves the growing appetite America is developing for better, safer and healthier food.

For any out there who think that green is a passing fad it’s time to put that old thinking to bed. Green is growing in leaps and bounds. And it’s not just to save the planet. One more e-coli scare, one more hamburger meat recall, one more peanut butter fiasco, one more incident where even that staple of American food happiness, the Toll House cookie, becomes suspect, and you can see why consumers are turning green every chance they get.

Help accelerate that shift by telling your customers the benefits of green cuisine. It’s not a hard story to tell if you think about it a bit. Doesn’t a tomato raised on a family farm have more appetite appeal than one grown on a factory farm?  Don’t eggs laid by free range organic chickens sound more appetizing than eggs laid by an imprisoned chicken juiced up on chemicals and hormones? Doesn’t broccoli that comes from  your neighborhood Farmers Market sound way more delicious than broccoli trucked in from 1,600 miles away (that’s how far the  average store-bought veggie travels to your plate)? Marketers, those are gems waiting for you to uncover.

When you strip everything aside, marketing and advertising are really a sound foundation of facts and information waiting to be told well. More than anything, remember that people do not eat pizza to save the planet. They eat it to enjoy it, because they love the taste of it and because it’s a sensory delight. And a story of better, tastier and healthier ingredients should net out as a story of better taste and more enjoyment. 

We really are at critical mass right now. The thought of conventional and industrial grown food and all the little surprises that can come along with it are enough to turn America’s stomachs and turn their purchase patterns to a better way of eating and living. And that’s a very appetizing fact and marketing tidbit for all of us to chew on. 

Got a tasty tidbit you want to share?

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photo credit: rengel134                       

What a difference a word makes. With news out of Washington on the waffling on the Alternative Energy front, it occurred to me how much further this effort might be moving along if we weren’t dealing with the term “alternative” as in just another possible way instead of the most intelligent way to create new and reliable sources to power our future.

 Maybe the new term, which I offer up gratis to all of you, should be Absolutely Necessary Energy, or even Can’t Live Without It Energy. Then maybe a sound energy policy would already be in place and people would understand that we can’t live without it.

 As a marketer, I know how we label something has a profound effect on its acceptance. I find it incredible that with all our brilliant sunshine shining down every day and all our abundant wind blowing freely, instead of being captured and harnessed, we’re still dragging our feet on getting out and demanding a sane, inexhaustible and clean supply to power our nation. The jobs it would create and the national security this would engender, not to mention the cleaning of our air and water supply, would be the greatest gift this or any Administration could give our country and the world. 

 So let’s change the name and change our direction on this or someday the future generations will look back on us and shake their heads in disbelief.  

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This move alone doesn’t make Coke a green champion but it certainly will help make them less of a culprit. And all that green money they’ll spend to promote it will help to get the environmental message out to a much broader segment of the population. We should all hope this will start a trend in the beverage world and their competition will follow, as they usually do. Since we started writing the Green Marketing Blog, our hope was to help marketers take their messages and their products more mainstream so the green world becomes the everyday and not the alternative world. 

A marketing professor interviewed for this article said, “Anything you wrap in green is going to sell.” I don’t agree. Green, as we’ve said many times before, needs to make sense if it’s going to be viable for the long haul.  If not, it will stay on the fringes and that’s not where the real change takes place. 

Irv

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Well, it’s about time. Green has to mean something more than pretty little pictures of forests and flowers on the bottle of your shampoo.  When launching a truly organic (and biodynamic) personal care product for a client, I got to know some of the dirty little secrets of this unregulated field. Did you know that when you see claims like “70% organic” blazoned across the label of a certain shampoo by certain manufacturer, most of the “organic” they are talking about is the water in their product?  Is that misleading or what? Hair washing and greenwashing in one bottle. 

I am happy that new rules are being structured.  The Canadians did it a long time ago. And that’s good news for start-ups that tend to lean more green than the bigger guys.  If we want green to be more than a fad, consumers of all shades of green need to have confidence in the products and services they buy.  And when they do, watch your green brand turn into gold.    

– Carolyn    

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That’s the true green message that wants to be told. Organic food equals better food, tastier food, fresher food.  Eco- cleaning products are safer for your kids and home.  Zero VOC paints are not only beautiful to look at but beautiful to live with. They don’t off-gas toxins into your inner environment.  In the time of Swine flu, e-coli hamburgers and scary peanut butter, green products need to make the case that they’re better products. 

For instance, for a solar client we recommended as their company tag line, “We Bring Solar Down To Earth.”  That said two things.  Number one, they harnessed the sun.  Number two and even more important, they have made solar practical, economical, every day and something for everyone, not just off-the-gridders.

What does that mean to you?  Simple. Get relevant.  Communicate your reason for being. What you do and what you do better. Make your case personal and close-in. When you’ve educated all of us in simple, down-to-earth terms, than you create a relationship not just a customer.  You’ve done something for them, instead of just selling something to them.

What are you doing to get relevant?  We want to know.  Really.

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Are you listening in? Monitoring their blog? And their tweets on Twitter? If you’re not, you should be. Once you know what they’re thinking and what they’re saying you can reach out to them. If it’s positive, give them heartfelt thanks and appreciate their efforts on your behalf. If it’s negative, communicate with them and let them know you appreciate their concerns and are working to rectify them. Word of mouse is a powerful thing.

To prove the point, just a couple of weeks ago two Domino’s pizza employees posted a video on You Tube of them spitting in a pizza (and doing other nasty things). The ripples went out faster than a case of swine flu. Within hours, thousands and thousands of people downloaded that video which put the international pizza delivery chain in crisis. Imagine that. That’s how fast a situation can be spread by the click of a mouse.

On a more positive note, Blendtec, a company that makes super duper blenders at a super duper price ($399.00 and up), created an “extreme blending” video series called “Will it Blend?” and posted it on video-sharing sites like You Tube. The first five videos cost $50.00 to make. Imagine that.

One particular video featured a bright and shiny new iPod being pulverized by a well used Blendtec blender. When the company posted a link on Digg after setting up the video on their site, it spread like wildfire which soon led to appearances on The Today Show and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Soon the views for Blendtec’s video series reached 60 million and increased their sales by 20%.

As some traditional media loses its audience and its clout, social media is the way to go. It’s not only cost effective, its brand effective. It’s a new world out there, use it or lose it.

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A lot has happened in the green world in the last five years. Green went from a movement to a market and with it came tens of thousands of products and services with the marketing message of saving the planet.  A recent Google search for the phrase, “Saving the planet one (whatever) at a time” revealed more than 17,000,000 responses — with everything from “saving the planet one flush at time”  to “one hanger at a time” to “one  bag, one shower, one burger, one carpet, one idea…”  You get the idea.

If you want to break through the green clutter, that won’t cut it anymore.  With the recent economic downturn, the species most people want to save is their selves. There was nothing like the cost of gas skyrocketing to over $4.00 a gallon to drive the sales of hybrids through the roof.

It’s no longer viable to just be green, your product or service has to be great.  It has to marry ecology with economy. How much green does your green product save me?  It has to work. Will that green cleaning product actually clean my counter top?

We call this the 3 e’s of green:

•         Ecology

•         Economy

•         Efficacy

When your product or service has all three, now you have a green story that’s great. Tell it well and you are well on your way to saving your product in today’s competitive marketplace.

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Never before has a candidate wielded the power of Web 2.0 like Obama.  And never before could they.  Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, iTunes, Flickr - many of these platforms didn’t even exist back in 2004. But I must commend Obama and his relatively lean group of tech-heads; they took these tools to a whole new level.  Not just by disseminating his message in mass amounts (that’s so 1990’s), but by encouraging users — or better yet, voters — to take his message and make it their own. 

I remember my almost daily messages from Michelle Obama.  How did she get my email anyway?  Some of her messages I forwarded to friends (there’s that viral thing at work).  But this is just the tip of the iceberg.  The campaign also provided supporters with a multiple tools and asked them over and over and over to get involved.  From easy-to-use how-to’s to asking for a $25 donation to unrestricted permission to share, post and re-purpose campaign content, the Obama frenzy grew and sucked you in.  Vive de viral!

“The Obama campaign embraced this new, open society.  Unlike most of the publishing, entertainment and music industries today, the campaign encouraged the rampant re-purposing of content and thus started a movement that took on a life of its own,” wrote Jalali Hartman, CEO and founder of Yovia.com.  “This distinction gave his supporters the drive and resources to grow the community for him… [He] strengthened his community members by providing tools that would help them to be more successful; he empowered them by refusing to micro-manage and asking them to do it themselves.”  Can you imagine Madison Avenue doing that?   

This is green marketing at its finest.  Full out transparency that builds a community of wired-in supporters by building trust. 

How did his viral campaign reach you? We want to know!

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In the next few weeks, we will examine how Obama took this commandment, and a couple of others I’ll share, and turbo charged it by turning ordinary American’s into advocates.  His primary tools: Inspiration and the Internet.

This week, we begin with one of the most basic rules of marketing, and one that is broken over and over by some of the biggest marketers on Madison Avenue.  But not Obama.    

It’s all about them, not you.

Never before has a candidate molded his message around the people, and not just the politician.  ”Yes, We Can!” became the mantra and millions joined him in the chant.  What he did was ignite the personal power of Americans by making his mantra our own.  A story where we could fill in the blanks.

Take Barack’s “This Is Your Victory” speech:

“This is our moment.  This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth:  That out of the many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope; and where we are met with cynicism and doubt and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes we can.” 

Inspiration squared.  Now times that by a million American’s making it their own in hometowns across our land and you have an election won by the people and for the people.  Brilliant! 

Next week: How Obama used the internet to drive his message home. – and you can too.               

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One of our prime focuses is to keep abreast of this sector and inform our clients and the business world in general through speaking engagements, blogging, interviews, article writing and in other forms of communications about the movements being made to green the media supply chain. Walk your talk, right?   

Here are a few environmental wake-up calls for corporations to consider concerning their communications:

• Printing 10,000 bumper stickers equals 1.6 tons of CO2
• Printing a 10,000 piece mailing equals 2.1 tons of CO2
• Printing 10,000 yard signs equals 10.7 tons of CO2

The impact of these activities have been largely overlooked but websites such as SustainCommWorld.com are in the forefront of our industry providing research and awareness in this arena.  They found out the 10% of the companies they surveyed had not even considered reporting on the carbon footprint of the publications they advertise in.  In an effort to create meaningful change in the greening of the media supply chain, they publish articles, newsletters and produce tradeshows in order to move the needle for marketers and business owners towards true sustainability in the marketing field.

The challenges are certainly unique in the world of green marketing.  From the media carbon footprint to the lack of standards for determining what it means to be a green product to communicating a message truthfully, authentically and credibly.  This always brings us back to the Golden Rule.  Do to others as you would like them to do to you.  It can’t get any greener than that. 

(Exerpt from upcoming book, “Inside the Minds: Greening your Business” by Thompson Reuters. Green Marketing chapter written by Carolyn Parrs and Irv Weinberg)    

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