Green Options

I’ve been talking about saving money and going “green” at the same time. Let’s look at a terrific example from a high-profile marketer, AutoNation.

AutoNation, the largest U.S. retailer of new and used vehicles, wanted to streamline its marketing materials. AutoNation consists of 383 different franchises, comprising 35 different brands, in 17 states. Philosophically, it was committed to personalizing its direct mail materials, but imagine the nightmare that this structure presented!

To meet its challenge, AutoNation’s printer—the high-volume direct mail company DME—had taken the “brute force” approach, producing preprinted stock “shells” for each campaign and brand. These were carted to DME’s humidity-controlled warehouse, stored, counted for individual print runs, and carted back for each print run, in which the personalized information was overprinted.

This was an expensive labor- and inventory-intensive process involving multiple set-ups, print runs, and back-and-forth trips to the warehouse. From a green perspective, imagine the impact of the multiple offset print runs, the energy used for product storage, and the fuel used for delivery. It’s quite a carbon footprint.

So DME developed a new solution—one that would reduce inventory, manage the various brands, process multiple personalized orders in the same print run, and provide a better means of response tracking to AutoNation.

One reason many businesses hesitate to “go green” is because environmental responsibility seems too time-consuming and overwhelming.  It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that, with all of their other responsibilities, it seems like too much.

Just the thought of measuring the corporate environmental footprint—from measuring the carbon output of every office copier to the impact of the transportation methods of employees—is enough to send the poor manager tasked with the job into apoplexy.

But while “going green” may seem overwhelming, in reality, I see it as being a lot like my relationship with my dishwasher.