Editor’s Note: This is the second in a two-part series examining the marketing of environmentally friendly products and services. Read Part One.
Last month we looked at the value of green marketing, its benefits as a marketing tool, and the potential pitfalls. We came to the conclusion that, when done correctly, green marketing was worth integrating into your overriding marketing initiatives. This time, we want to take a more in-depth look at how to implement your own green marketing campaign by examining a series of exercises designed to help you think through the process and steer clear of legal dangers.
You may recall that we introduced the concept of taking a self-inventory of your business to identify where green opportunities exist. We encouraged marketers to put on their “green” glasses and take a hard look at all phases of their company.
In actuality, this isn’t something that should be done by a single individual within the organization but by a group of employees representing a cross-section of your operations. Let’s call them the Green Team. The goal is to literally have a brainstorming session or series of sessions. Let the ideas fly; feed off of each other’s thoughts. Ideally, you should consider including a couple of customers, suppliers or other stakeholders from outside the company who have an interest or interaction in your business.
Part of the reasoning behind the self-inventory is to avoid missing obvious opportunities that would diminish the value of your new marketing campaign. A carwash that claims to recycle its water while allowing faucets to drip in the men’s room sends a damaging mixed message. Similarly, claiming to use recycled materials while failing to provide recycling containers is shortsighted and counterintuitive for customers.
The self-inventory also provides a good foundation from which to build a track to run on. As we have learned, green marketing is a widely used term, but it is difficult to find a single definition because of so many green marketing claims used by marketers keen on expanding their eco-friendly horizons. Thus, creating a site-specific definition for your location and leveraging a green marketing campaign for your business is not necessarily an easy task.
There likely will be two broad categories of results that come out of your brainstorming: areas in which valid claims can be made immediately and parts of the business that represent opportunities to re-engineer a product or process in order to make a green claim in the future.
Keep in mind that green opportunities can relate to more than just products and services; they are often related to what goes into those products and services, including a company’s processes, operations, manufacturing, packaging, and even building materials.
As you brainstorm, ideas will flow simultaneously from both an identification of opportunities to market and how to market it, namely the message, the media, the location of the message, etc. Remember, the most important thing is to keep ideas rolling; everything goes up on the board and nothing should be judged or debated at this point. In the next step, you will come back and apply rules to your marketing ideas to see if they are valid.
If you have included customers, vendors and other outside stakeholders on your Green Team (and we strongly urge that you do), you will find that the internal and external views of the company will co-mingle, and that’s OK. Good ideas from employees and customers will cross-pollinate to form additional ideas. There is no need to keep them separate. The goal is to make sure you have examined your green marketing opportunities from an inside point of view, as well as an outside (customer) perspective.
Using a full-service carwash as an example, the most obvious service category is the function of the carwash itself — the process of producing a clean car. This is your manufacturing plant. You are manufacturing a clean car from a dirty car. This process involves water, soap and chemistry, sewer discharge, electricity, gas, etc. By brainstorming with an outside point of view, you will be able to look deeper and more critically at the process. What happens from beginning to end?
The car pulls up and is greeted by a greeter. Can the greeter display an eco-friendly logo on his uniform, sales ticket or menu? Is there an opportunity to use recycled paper during the ticket-writing process? Trash is removed from the vehicle. What happens to that trash? Can you recycle it? The car is vacuumed. Anything there? Are you using equipment or processes to reduce the amount of energy consumed?
With ticket in hand, the customer enters the lobby, where there is merchandise for sale. Is the packaging recycled or eco-friendly in some manner? Once customers are in the lobby, there is ample opportunity to market to a captive audience. Let’s say the customer uses the restroom. Are there air dryers instead of paper towels? Is there eco-friendly soap that is branded as such by a reputable company to give the claim added validity?
Getting back to the wash process, your Green Team can brainstorm about chemistry that is “biodegradable” and water that is “recycled.” The brainstorming should continue until the group is exhausted. Like popcorn popping in a microwave, the ideas will come further apart, more labored, and with diminishing quality.
By the end of the session, you will have created a long list of current and potential opportunities. The second phase of the brainstorming process is when you should judge the list for validity and whittle it down to the most important and relevant claims.
After the initial brainstorming, your green marketing team should be narrowed to employees (and potentially suppliers) because this is when the real work begins, and it can be difficult to accomplish the next tasks with too