Green Options

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Last week I had the chance to hear Pete Blackshaw talk about his book “Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends. Angry Customers Tell 3,000″. His message is particularly important for eco-entrepreneurs, so I’m summarizing some of his talk for you green business entrepreneurs.

Green businesses are particularly well-suited for consumer advocacy. Customers who shop from your company due to a shared concern for the environment and/or a desire to avoid toxins are likely to tell their friends about the benefits of your product or service. The flip-side is that they are also likely to be particularly vocal and angry if they feel you have betrayed your green mission.

Social media, primarily blogs, have greatly lowered the barriers for consumers to voice their opinions. They can easily advocate on behalf of a brand or take a company to task for bad service, misleading advertising, products that do not work, and more. And the title of Blackshaw’s book rings true.

The question for green businesses is are you making it easier for 1000 people to advocate on behalf of your business, and are you reacting quickly and authentically when there is a mis-step and a customer is unhappy?

We marketers used to say that a brand is the sum total of all experiences with a company–not just the product or service but the employees, partners, website, collateral, ads, service centers, etc.

Your Google ranking is part of your brand

Well, now, customer service discussions on blogs are now part of your brand experience. Blackshaw says,

First off, I want to say that, as someone who has been an analyst in the commercial printing industry for fifteen years, I’m thrilled to be part of The Inspired Economist. For years, printing has been seen as part of the problem, so the ability to get in on the ground floor of a blog on environmental sustainability and talk about how printing can become part of the “greening” of corporate culture is quite a thrill.

Using print—a medium that contributes to solid waste and may appear to be part of the problem—to “green” a company’s document management and marketing culture seems nonintuitive. It is perhaps for this very reason that I hope readers will find my posts enjoyable.

There are two points that I want to open with.

First, in marketing, electronic alternatives are often framed as the green alternative to print because they don’t require paper, ink, packaging, and physical transportation. However, there is a lot more to one’s environmental footprint than this. Take, for example, one’s carbon footprint. On this issue, electronic alternatives with their massive, 24-hour energy drain start to look less appealing.

This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of ProformaGreen, an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy. John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry.

From leather to leader is how Leed’s explains it on their website. How about from bottles to briefcases? That might be a better description for Leeds line of 100% recycled promotional items made from water bottles and other recycled everyday items.

Leed’s Owl line of bags and other items made from recycled water bottles has added a new product to their list of made from 100% post-consumer recycled material (product label affirms this claim).

Wal-Mart’s drive toward going green may have been met by green activists with skepticism, but it’s hard to argue that they are focusing on efforts to make sustainability a key part of their business. Wal-Mart’s suppliers have been given the ultimatum: “Help us on our mission to go green and skip the greenwashing”.

Rand Waddoups, senior director of corporate strategy and sustainable development, on Thursday (August 7, 2008) told more than 250 suppliers that Wal-Mart had devised a clearer strategy on its sustainability marketing.

The plan focuses on four concepts that Wal-Mart wants to promote - waste improvement and recycling, natural resources, energy and social or community impact.

“We need to fill the pipeline with products,” Waddoups said. “Not only do we need more innovative products, but we need to be able to tell a story around that product.”

As any sales or marketing executive who has sold to Wal-Mart, as I have, can tell you, the only answer to that request is, “yes, sir (or madam).

Wal-Mart sent out emails to all buyers last week giving them an Aug. 18 deadline to submit “green” products that meet the criteria. Products selected will get a major promotion during Wal-Mart’s 2009 “Earth Month” marketing campaign.

Reading between the lines, this of course means, more than just developing a great green promotional story. Required is a compelling back story to support the green attributes and shield the manufacturer and Wal-Mart by extension from green washing.

Looking to add some credentials to your new venture? Consider joining a trade organization that provides education, technical assistance, credentials and a directory listing. In a competitive marketplace these kinds of third-party endorsements can provide you with a way to improve your qualifications, expand your offerings and differentiate yourself from the competition.

One of the first and best examples of a green credentialing organization is the Green Restaurant Association. GRA provides credentials, endorsements and technical assistance not only to restaurants, but also to manufacturers, vendors, organizations and media that serve them.

The construction trades industry, largely in response to the need for green-trained trades people on LEED-certified projects, has a number of good credentialing programs. There are programs led by the US Green Building Council such as the LEED Accredited Professionals (AP) program for individuals and USGBC Membership for organizations. The National Association of Home Builders’ Certified Green Professional™ designation “certifies builders, remodelers and other industry professionals who incorporate green building principles into homes” and also includes manufacturers, vendors and service providers among their ranks. Green Advantage, a non-profit with a mission to certify building-related practitioners, has an excellent accreditation program. Although designed primarily for contractors, subcontractors and trades people, Green Advantage’s certified building practitioners include educators, consultants, manufacturers and vendors.

Awhile back I wrote about Andy Keller and his company, Chico Bags. I ran across the bag monster videos recently and asked about them. In the words of Benn Davenport of Chico Bags…

Andy Keller had been using a huge ball of 500 plastic bags to show people at farmer’s market just how many plastic bags an average American uses in a year — and one day he decided to wear it. Thus was the spawning of the first Bag Monster (costume, that is).

Well maybe.

Manufacturers and retailers of school supplies have been worried this year about how the lousy economy will impact consumer spending in the traditional back-to-school season, late July- mid September….depending on where you live. Back-to-School is the second biggest retail selling season (after Christmas) for retailers and for some manufacturers (backpacks, school supplies, etc.) the make or break time of year.

So, a recent study by the NPD group, reported in Progressive Grocer, must be sending shivers down spines across the country.

There should be much less consumer traffic in the stores aisles this back-to-school season, if the results of the NPD Group’s annual Back-to-School 2008 survey of consumers’ purchasing intentions are borne out in retailers across the country.

This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of ProformaGreen, an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy. John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry.

To capture as much information on new ideas and products coming from the convention as I could I went out and got a video camera and recorded a number of vendors talking about thier products.

The videos are on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/proformagreen.

If you are a green entrepreneur I strongly suggest you take a look at these pitches, using them as a learning tool to avoid the Six Sins of Green Washing (see www.terrachoice.com).

TerraChoice lists the sins as

Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off - e.g. paper (including household tissue, paper towel and copy paper): “Okay, this product comes from a sustainably harvested forest, but what are the impacts of its milling and transportation? Is the manufacturer also trying to reduce those impacts?” Emphasizing one environmental issue isn’t a problem (indeed, it often makes for better communications). The problem arises when hiding a trade-off between environmental issues.

This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of ProformaGreen, an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy. John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry.

I now understand that my attempt at blogging from our convention was a little bit of a pipe dream. There were simply so many green products and conversations going on that I was nearly overwhelmed.

Two big take-aways:

1) The industry is certain that green is going to stick this time around. A few vendors placed green (by their use of the word at the time) at 8-12% of the business and with a growth to 20% in the next few years seeming very likely. Ash City is looking for 50% by 2010.

2) This is the interesting point for Ecopreneurs: suppliers are having trouble keeping up with demand in the marketplace, even at the low levels of current business. Problems are at every level of the supply chain, so if you have a green idea, GET IT OUT THERE.

All the talk about benefits vs. features in last week’s post, Green Consumers Pull Back- Now What? Recession Strategies For Eco Businesses, reminded me of an NAHB article on green homes in which William H. Kreager, an architect at Mithun Architects+Designers+Planners who specializes in sustainable projects, suggests that there is a “trifecta of benefits” builders can use to market homes to buyers:

• A healthy home (1: health and safety)
• Savings due to energy efficiency (2: efficiency and the related cost savings)
• Lower maintenance costs (3:performance and related cost savings)

Kreager is talking about a principle that all green marketers could stand to know: that customer satisfaction needs to be derived by meeting fundamental – not specifically green — consumer values. Green Marketing Myopia, which outlines the above three benefits plus two more, (4) convenience and (5) status (really making it a quintuplet of benefits), sums it up well:

This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of ProformaGreen, an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy. John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry. This week John is writing about his experiences at his national convention…

I am at the Proforma national convention this week, a gathering of our sales folks in Orlando, Florida. It is a once a year chance to meet one-on-one with most of the top manufacturers in the promotional items and print industry. While here I hope to give short daily updates on what is going on from an Ecopreneurist perspective.

Green is certainly a strong theme at this year’s meeting with many vendors bringing new green items to the event. The Proforma event bag this year was even green - each member of the convention was given a Recycled Owl Deluxe Backpack made from 100% post-consumer recycled material- to hold our event training materials. These bags are made by Leed’s and are part of their Owl line of bags made from recycled water bottles and yogurt containers.