Long Live (Green) Marketing

07 Jun 2011 – Chris Guenther

I’m on my way to the Sustainable Brands conference in Monterey this week where my colleague Mark Lee will be delivering the opening keynote. While I’m looking forward to tapping into (and trying to help shape) the latest thinking on a variety of topics in this space, I’m probably like a lot of participants who are dying to see how the current mini-debate over the state of green marketing itself – touched off a few weeks ago by Joel Makower’s great provocation that green marketing is over and it’s time to move on – will play out at the conference. We briefly framed the debate in another post earlier today, which I aim to complement here with a few further thoughts and opinions.

Whatever your stake in this debate, it is clear that we are at something of an inflection point in the evolution of green/ethical marketing. Despite a lot of progress to date, and plenty of reasons to remain optimistic, even veterans of the field are beginning to recognize that the ‘deep green’ or ‘active’ segment will never make up more than 20 percent of consumers, and that trying to gradually convert the rest to more overt green/ethical behavior and preferences may be an unnecessarily painstaking and ineffective strategy. Yes, leadership at the margin plays a vital role in raising wider awareness and expectations, but let’s not pretend that sustainability, however more urgent and complicated it becomes, will ever (or should ever) crowd out all the other legitimate issues and concerns that shape our lives and choices.

Instead, we are already seeing several companies grappling with this dilemma: if making even highly-credible green claims in your marketing risks penalizing you (e.g. driving down perceptions of quality and/or value), or confusing and alienating your traditional customers, then what is a well-intentioned sustainable brand to do?

The solution will depend on marketers beginning to better understand how sustainability sits alongside and/or interacts with traditional value drivers in a given industry or product category. As that happens, we should expect to see more and more marketing of green products that won’t be immediately recognizable as green, and though professional stakeholders and peers like us will still have to keep a close eye on underlying sustainability performance, we should generally welcome and encourage this shift.

Think of GE. Some observers we’ve spoken to are coming to believe that despite the considerable goodwill that ecomagination has generated in the media and among sustainability experts, investors may in fact be penalizing the company for overemphasizing the greenness of the associated products. But surely the answer is not for them just to bin the whole effort, especially because the core strategic insight that brought it about – that big issues like climate change, energy security, and water scarcity will powerfully shape the firm’s core business for years to come – remains fundamentally sound. Instead, I expect we’ll see the company begin to pivot toward more nuanced or even ‘browner’ marketing of its ecomagination products, by emphasizing more of their primary benefits – like electricity itself, rather than lower emissions – or traditional attributes like price, performance, reputation for innovation, etc. And again, I think we should encourage them as they do so.

Or, for a more B2C example, and perhaps one that’s had this issue right from the outset, consider Method. The deep greens and professional stakeholder types like me are generally well acquainted with the company’s green credentials, and yet it has long emphasized a much more fundamental brand proposition of ‘clean’. I imagine other firms will be looking to emulate exactly this sort of approach as we begin to value sustainability among rather than instead of other concerns.

What do you think? Will more firms seek to integrate traditional and green marketing in order to drive performance of and demand for sustainable products? And will such a shift be mostly a good thing? We’d love to talk more with you. Join us at #SustainBrands, or get in touch to talk more about how this dilemma is playing out at your firm.