Green Options

Guest Post: Several months ago, Jennifer Kaplan contacted me to ask for more details about a post I had made about consumer attitudes toward green products. She teaches a market research course at Marymount University in Arlington, VA and is a partner in the marketing consultancy, Greenhance LLC. In the following post, Jennifer reports back on a project that demonstrates where to begin when considering any change to your business, with research. — Leah

To Green Or Not To Green: That Was The Question

There are 26.4 million small businesses in the United States. This is a story about one of them. Mary Hutchens, owner of a children’s clothing boutique in Washington, DC, was thinking about going green but didn’t know where to start. Mary, like many small business owners, was interested in going green for all kinds of reasons—to control skyrocketing energy costs, to meet customer expectations, to be on the leading edge, to promote sustainability. However, Mary worried that her older customers, the “grandmas,” would revolt against fewer gift boxes and organic onesies. Like many small business owners, Mary had a lot of questions about going green and didn’t know where to find the answers.

At the same time, I was looking for a “real life” project for my undergraduate Marketing Research class. What better way to teach the students about the real world of marketing then to act as a consultant to a real life small business owner? What happened over the following four months shed light on both what consumers want AND what small business owners want when it comes to going green.

At the beginning Mary simply wanted to know specifics about gift-wrapping and shopping bag preferences. The students just wanted to know how consumers felt about going green. It was my job to make everyone see the macro and micro environmental issues at play. As such, I wanted to make sure we also determined whether purchase intent would be affected by a move toward green and which green practices would resonate most with consumers.