Green Options

Abe’s Market, a new online natural marketplace, is about to launch and is looking for the latest and greatest natural products to create the best array of products for the site.

Abe’s will offer a comprehensive selection of all natural products, with the best and latest in health, beauty, food, home and consumer goods with the ease and convenience of the most modern e-commerce services. The site aims to be a place for customers to find their favorite natural brands as well as a place to discover some of the newest and unique undiscovered lines, as well as “meet” the creators of the brands and gain knowledge about the ingredients, processes and stories behind these products.

In addition to being the source for purchasing all-natural goods, Abe’s Market will be the place and opportunity for up and coming producers of natural products to feature, market, and grow their brands. Abe’s will continually seek out new brands and welcome new sellers to the site. Additionally, the Abe’s Market management team led by co-founders Richard Demb and Jon Polin, who have their professional experience in both natural businesses and the retail environment, will help these newer brands gain exposure with natural retailers to establish distribution.

Online, ecopreneurs should explore partnership models with low barriers. Lowering the barrier, increases the breadth of partnerships that can be experimented with. Relationship can be deepened and customized once traction is proven.

Mobile phone service, kajeet, innovates by rewarding customers for choosing refurbished phones by planting trees. Win-win for kajeet, customers, and our planet.

It’s easy to see how house swapping can save you some green, but what makes it ecologically green? Houses tend not to have all the bells and whistles of large hotel complexes (nor the acreage) – and all the resultant waste in energy and resources.

Are you like millions of others who assume that an online business, just by virtue of being online, translates to having a lower carbon footprint? If so, then you are in for a shock. Although this is a fairly common assumption, the truth is that internet powered businesses often have a higher energy consumption requirements than offline businesses and so might have a long way to go before they can become green.

The purpose of mokugift is to make make tree planting easy and affordable. Making that mission a reality isn’t as easy as the concept.

In December, I wrote that energy efficiency is the business opportunity for 2009. However, we all know that businesses and consumers can’t buy many of the energy efficiency products and services without financing. So, where’s the money?

Government Help?

If you are a small business or want to sell energy efficiency products to a small business, you might think that a logical place to start is the US Small Business Association. However, I don’t think that the SBA has any special loan guaranty programs for renewable energy or energy efficiency purchases. Please comment below if you have had experience with any of the above financing programs or if you know of others!

Recently, the SBA did announce grants to specific small business development centers for energy efficiency programs. Although I don’t see any reference to financing, if you can qualify for a general SBA loan, energy efficiency improvements could be a good use of proceeds!

Another Federal government agency, the EPA, has a list of resources as part of its Energy Star for Small Business program. When I clicked on “California” I received this list, which includes some lenders.

If your business wants to sell energy efficiency products or services to homeowners, then you’ll be happy to see an increasing number of related loan products for homeowners. For a number of years there has been an Energy Efficient Mortgage program, but I’ve heard that is hasn’t been very popular with banks and homeowners. And now, In the northeast, there is a pilot program for a promising-sounding Energy Star Mortgage, which allows homeowners to finance energy efficiency retrofits with a tax-deductible interest payments.

Private Sector Financing Sources

Private banks are starting to innovate with “green loans”. One that was launched late last year is by Umpqua Bank and the Energy Trust for Oregon is the Greenstreet lending program is for installing solar energy systems or energy efficiency improvements. Businesses who are customers of Portland General Electric, Pacific Power, NW Natural or Cascade Natural Gas can apply for loans of $5,000 to $100,000 with a fixed 6.5% interest rate. There is also a program for homeowners.

In 1953, almost 60 years ago, in his American Marketing Association presidential address, Professor Neil Borden of Harvard Business School, introduced the term “marketing mix” and in 1960 E. Jerome McCarthy supplemented that concept with the 4 P’s of Marketing. Ever since then, every student of marketing has learned the 4 P’s of marketing; Product, Pricing, Promotion, Placement. In recent years, and not for the first time, these once-seen as fundamental concepts are coming under scrutiny in the wake of a dramatically altered landscape.

The reality is that consumers shop differently than they did 50 years ago and expect different things from your brand. First, consumers want to learn about your product on their time. Traditional push, top-down, or inside-out oriented marketing from the marketing department that interrupts a consumer experience is ineffective. Think TiVo, iPod, pop-up blockers. Sure, they’ll consume your media – when they want to – not when it is pushed on them. Why don’t commercials get TiVo’d during the Super Bowl? It is part of the experience, for some it is the most important experience, of watching the Super Bowl.

Maybe the title should instead read “How to Fail at ‘Greening’ Your Business”. Often times companies seem to approach “green” or eco-friendly as just another product attribute that can simply be added to packaging or website to reach the “green” consumer segment. In the rush to be eco-friendly, and due to the typical structure of many organizations, the marketing team will take the lead of the greening effort and, in the interest of time & energy, they’ll create a brilliant plan to communicate “green” to a target consumer group, but no internal alignment.

The sustainability and marketing strategies of a typical entrepreneur are often times based on the same model - the shotgun approach. Typically, entrepreneurs start to think about marketing after at least 6 months of hitting the pavement, and then sustainability appears as part of a new “marketing plan” or is seen as some kind of charitable giving / community relations campaign. Sustainable business is neither part of a marketing campaign nor a community relations effort. Neither is it about shifting revenue, but rather how revenue is generated.

Ah, the internet, what an amazing tool you are for helping businesses grow. Or even exist. You allow so much more to happen for so many more people than in the past.  And yet, there’s only so much you can do online, if you deal in physical products. They need to be stored somewhere. Packed. Shipped. Returned. All necessary, and yet for most entrepreneurs, something they’d rather not deal with. You’ve come up with a product line that more and more people love, and it’s making you more and more hate what fulfilling on that demand has begun to entail.

You find yourself needing a warehouse, or needing a bigger one then you have. Maybe you don’t need a warehouse, but managing all the nittie gritties is extra hassle you’d rather not have. Or perhaps your customers aren’t just local anymore, and your carbon footprint is getting larger because of the shipping. What to do?

With all the hype surrounding web 2.0, it seems odd that we are already talking about web 3.0, or what some are calling the semantic web. One of the key reasons driving the move towards a new web is the pending shortage of addresses. Both Google and Yahoo are moving towards the new semantic web, but today you can try it out on Truevert, the new Green Web Search Engine.

So just what exactly is the future of the web? Below is a snapshot of some of the buzz surrounding what to expect from the next web.

(Image Credit)

Semantic Search – Well, I’ve read far too much about semantic search and to the best of my understanding it appears that they’ve taught computers to learn the meaning of words based on popular interaction. I could have very easily jumbled that definition so here are some more resources and how the folks over at Truevert describe it.

“Truevert is a truly semantic search engine. Truevert learns the meaning of words directly from the documents that it reads. It does not rely on a prebuilt taxonomy, ontology, dictionary or thesaurus or limit search to only a small hand-selected group of sites.”

And this new version of Truevert is “focused on green, environmental awareness. All searches are done from the point of view of environmental and social concern.” Looking for more on the new semantic web, and web 3.0? Check out Twine! and the links below.

Web 3.0 org.

CNET Article