Getting It

Why we all need to care about Green Marketing

Environmental awareness is nothing new.

. But until recently the business of saving the planet was a flag flier for only a tiny proportion of organisations – usually those with clear environmental mandates, particularly zealous ownership or management, or a consumer base with strong identification with environmental issues.

All of that has changed over the past 2-3 years, with an increasing number of businesses finding ‘green’ issues suddenly impacting their internal processes, and becoming a significant part of their marketing planning

Bittersweet news

Three things happened to disturb my chocolate-induced stupor this morning.

1) my ever-thoughtful husband bought me a small-but-perfectly-formed bar of Green and Black's Organic Chocolate for Easter.

This fulfilled a number of (I admit, sad) needs I have as a consumer right now, including allowing me to feel that I was purchasing a premium product that not only tastes good, but is made with fresh, quality ingredients, produced by a socially-responsible company operating on fair-trade principles, from a small localised producer vs a global corporate giant.

2) I came across this blog entry in my regular trawl through the NYT about big corporates gobbling up small organic producers

Getting it wrong

Environmentally focused marketing - like anything else that has an organisation stick its neck over the parapet in a stake-in-the-ground sort of a way - doesn't come without its risks.

Just ask any of the companies who've come under the Greenpeace microscope lately.

Who should do your green marketing?

The emergence of important new communications influences (social media, green marketing to name just a few) inevitably bring with them a difficult question for marketers.

Is this going to be a whole new discipline with specialists of its own (like lobbying or targeting specific ethnic groups)? Or something we are all going to need to incorporate into our day to day practice?

Doubtless niche agencies will emerge in New Zealand - as they have in the UK and US - to offer clients specialist advice on green issues. Marketers and PR folk with environmental cause-marketing experience will also be in demand in the not-so distant future, as much for their contacts, networks and credibility as their technical skills.

But if green is to continue to sink into the every day fabric of our lives in ways that are meaningful and sustained, it's going to be important that green marketing skills are assimilated into mainstream marketing.
And if clients' marketing strategies are to retain some semblance of coherence, agencies are going to need to get a grip on the realities of these issues. From the ground up.

PR and marketing folk are usually pretty good at seeing the upside in any situation, and are happy to swing into action to find positive associations for their clients, but the days of dipping a toe in the water and then wandering off to swim in another pool are long gone.

We've got a consumer environment with a whole bunch of challenging drivers including demands for authenticity, reciprocity and community responsibility. None of those are new. They were emerging when I entered the game 15 years ago. What is new is that a new breed of consumer has emerged along with them: one that is not afraid to hold organisations to their words, and one that has the ways and means to do that.

Chat forums, blogsites and other social media tools exploded into middle New Zealand last year. Then, they were a novelty. Now (and these days the distance between then and now is pretty darned short) they're business as usual. And predictably, they're also a potent information gathering tool for mainstream media, who can now get instant access to all the colour and human interest elements they need to really make a story fly.

It's not longer OK to leave 'green' to the greenies or blogs to the bloggers. Every communicator has an obligation to come up to speed with the issues and understand how they're influencing not just their patch, but the business world as a whole.

But nobody is an instant expert. In the same way we've had to collaborate with those previously foreign web-types in order to offer coherent, effective responses to the emergence of social media, and the same way that corporates are now holding hands with the environmental cause marketing brigade, we're now building partnerships with those who really 'get' this area. Partnerships that are a win-win for both sides.

Welcome to the world of open-source PR.

Getting a grip on green

There's a lot of buzz right now about green marketing, and for good reason.

The last two-three years have seen a real upsurge in mainstream consumer interest in sustainability issues, thanks to a convergence of events and trends (some societal, some generational, some propaganda-based and some actually relating to the weather), with some major brands jumping on the green bandwagon.

Organisations, too, are increasingly factoring green into the their marketing planning, heaping noise upon the green noise, and helping build even greater momentum around sustainability issues.

Who is driving the push for green from a marketing perspective is unclear. Whether it's the corporates setting a consumer agenda or the consumers pushing corporates to wake up and smell the organic coffee is one of those chicken/eggs arguments that could go on for ever. Most likely it's neither nor/either or.

The interesting thing that is happening is that ownership of green issues has shifted away from the extremists and into the mainstream - whether it's mainstream community or mainstream business.

Some of the more savvy not-for-profits have cottoned on and are partnering with corporates - a move that is likely to bring a great deal of displeasure to the purists, but one that should be be celebrated by those with an interest in getting these issues out of the closet and firmly entrenched in our culture in a language people can actually understand and relate to.

Once they're there, positive peer pressure will keep them alive - while a markedly changed media environment (importantly, not limited to traditional media) will keep them honest.

There's an oft-quoted saying in PR that the court of public opinion is way more punitive to many organisations than a court of law. I think that has never been truer in a marketing environment where every claim, every pledge can be closely scrutinised, commented on and turned upside down with the click of a mouse.