Jacquie Ottman's
Green marketing Blog
How To Make Waste Watching Fun, Easy — and Mainstream
Posted on April 15, 2013 by Guest Blogger, Fredrica Rudell
With 9 billion people expected on the planet by 2025, all consumers will need to be reducing, refusing, repairing, reusing, recycling, and lots of other R’s. If your consumers are not on board the waste prevention movement, take some advice from social marketers — make it easy, fun and popular. Here’s how.
Easy Does It
Curbside pickup and reverse vending machines at the supermarket make it easy to recycle newspaper and co-mingles and redeem deposit bottles and cans. Businesses and schools that provide …Read more...
Eight Ways to Prevent Household Waste for Fun and Profit
Posted on March 05, 2013 by Jacquelyn Ottman
Ask a roomful of consumers, “Who here hates to see things go to waste?” and every hand will likely shoot up. But, if everyone hates to waste, then how come we generate so much of it? And what can we do to prevent waste from being created in the first place? Answering these questions can be profitable and fun.
Turn Waste into Business Opportunity
Despite all the attention paid to them during the past two decades, facilities to recycle and compost are not available in all communities nor are there …Read more...
Sustainable Innovation 2012: Key Lessons
Posted on February 14, 2013 by Jacquelyn Ottman
The Center for Sustainable Design (CfSD), since its founding in 1995, has conducted high quality research in sustainable innovation and product design. Recognized around the globe for their sustainability expertise, the Center has worked with partners in Asia, Europe, and North America to research and develop understanding of sustainability solutions in a number of fields.
The Center has organized more than 100 conferences, workshops, and courses focussed on sustainable design and innovation. In 2012, the 17th annual Sustainable Innovation Conference: Resource Efficiency, Innivation and Lifestyles took place on October 29th and 30th at Alanus University in Bonn, Germany. The Key …Read more...
Introducing WeHateToWaste.com
Posted on January 07, 2013 by Jacquelyn Ottman
I am excited to announce our new consumer-focused blog and website. In beta test since June, it’s called WeHatetoWaste.com and we’re officially launching it this week.
In line with our mission at J. Ottman Consulting, to help businesses meet consumer needs sustainably, our goal with WeHatetoWaste.com is to ignite a movement and galvanize a community of ardent ‘Waste Watchers’. You know them. They are the ones who get those last extra swipes from the Secret antiperspirant, line dry their jeans according to Levi’s Care Instructions for …Read more...
Demystifying Biobased Products Keys to Marketing Success
Posted on December 06, 2012 by Jacquie Ottman & Mark Eisen
Communicating the benefits of “biobased” content, the world’s newest ecological marketing term, is often tricky. Biobased represents all of green marketing’s traditional challenges — including greenwash — but has additional, unique challenges all its own. Happily, strategies and a credible third party label now exist.
Opportunities For Biobased Products and Packaging
There are many reasons for a business to use biobased content instead of traditional petroleum-based ingredients in their products, including: it helps grow the farm economy, promotes energy independence, and helps manage carbon impacts, providing a useful hedge against potential future …Read more...
Upshot of FTC Revised Green Guides: Let’s Stop Calling Green Products “Green”
Posted on October 11, 2012 by Jacquelyn Ottman
It only took them 20 years (The first Guides were issued in 1992), but then again, as the saying goes, every overnight sensation is twenty years in the making. Maybe the FTC Green Guide staff put in their 10,000 hours, but, at last, they nailed it. The revisions to the Green Guides, published on October 1, 2012, shows that the …Read more...
Heineken Picks a Winner for Sustainable Packaging Challenge
Posted on July 25, 2012 by Jacquelyn Ottman
The jury has spoken. The winner of the Heineken Sustainable Packaging Challenge — and a $10,000 prize is Germany’s Helmut Wittele. His “The Heineken $1000 bottle” idea turns beer pong into a recycling game.
Wittele proposed an innovative “Heineken-O-Mat” device designed to motivate consumers to return/recycle bottles. Increasing the return rate of bottles and cans has a very positive effect on their environmental impact. This idea has the potential to engage all parties needed to make a real difference for Heineken, consumers, retailers, NGO’s, and of course, the planet.
The Heineken Ideas …Read more...
Consumers Really Can Save the World
Posted on July 19, 2012 by Jacquelyn Ottman
Annie Leonard for President! Would that we all had her ability to hone in on the issues and communicate them to regular people with such clarity. Check out her new video, The Story of Change, above.
In it, Annie moves into “Season 2” of her efforts to help change the world by encouraging people to take action as citizens, not just as consumers. She posits that green consuming is necessary, but must be a starting, not an ending, point. We must change the system in which consuming takes place — the corporate practices and the …Read more...
Can Product-Sharing Sustain the Earth AND the Economy?
Posted on May 22, 2012 by Michelle Hardy, Guest Blogger
Good green marketers push the innovation of different products. Better products. But can we profit from making fewer products in the first place? “Swap Don’t Shop,” the most recent of the Columbia Business School Alumni Club’s Making Green from Green events, explored this very dilemma.
The panel began with a sobering point; Moderator Cameron Tonkinwise of the Parsons School of Design Strategies reminded his audience of green business advocates that for all the sustainable sourcing, the holistic manufacturing, the reusable materials, and whatever else constitutes our so-called …Read more...
What Green Consumer Polls Should Really Be Asking
Posted on May 04, 2012 by Jacquelyn Ottman
Ever since the resurgence of environmentalism in 1990, consumer polls have attempted to measure awareness, attitudes and behaviors towards environmental issues and products. Poll after poll has found that consumers claim to be concerned about the issues, they report high levels of green product purchase, and even claim willingness to pay a premium for greener products and packages.
But empirical evidence doesn’t seem to jibe with the research. In some markets, green products barely eke out 3% share, in contrast to the near majorities of consumers who express to pollsters interest in all …Read more...
Shop ‘Til You Drop—but on Earth Day?
Posted on April 24, 2012 by Jacquelyn Ottman
This year seemed to produce a bumper crop of Earth Day promotions — and a lot of accompanying media backlash. Stories written by Marc Gunther, Matt Wheeland, and a NYTimes piece by Elisabeth Rosenthal are three I saw and I’m sure you saw more yourself.
The media are making Earth Day marketers look like the moneychangers in the temple. Why is this happening? What can we do about it?
It’s happening because of dyed-in-the-wool skepticism over business’s real motives when it comes to the environment. Accordingly, it’s happening …Read more...
Swap, Don’t Shop: Making Green in the Sharing Economy
Posted on April 12, 2012 by Jacquelyn Ottman
With the development of social networking sites, user-generated content, and increased access to broadband technologies and personal computers, the Internet has been radically redefined and repositioned. This shift towards “Web 2.0” has changed the way we communicate with one another; it has democratized the way in which information is shared amongst users; and it has collapsed geographic, political, and cultural barriers, in turn redefining our perception of community.
While it can be hard to grasp in specific terms how exactly the Internet has changed us, there is one very tangible way in …Read more...
Heineken Launches Sustainable Packaging Challenge
Posted on April 10, 2012 by Jacquelyn Ottman
Dutch beer giant Heineken just launched an online innovation platform called Heineken Ideas Brewery. The first of several challenges will focus on new ideas for sustainable beer packaging.
Check out www.ideasbrewery.com to submit your ideas for packages that address the following questions:
How can we ensure that a larger amount of beer packaging will be re-used or recycled? What kind of new material would significantly improve the lifecycle of beer packaging? What are your ideas concerning packaging to maximize transport efficiency?
The best entry will be awarded …Read more...
USDA Certification Raises Bar for Biobased
Posted on February 21, 2012 by Jacquelyn Ottman
With carbon footprint and energy independence on everyone’s minds, many marketers are looking to capitalize upon their product’s biobased content. But not all biobased claims are alike. The scientific rigor of an ASTM standard combined with the credibility of the USDA raises the bar for the industry and makes the USDA Certified Biobased label a new source of competitive advantage within the consumer and government procurement markets for brand owners who make the effort to get their biobased products certified.
What is “Biobased”?
There is no Webster’s definition of biobased. So, marketers have tended to define it loosely or …Read more...
Book Review: Greener Products: The Making and Marketing of Sustainable Brands
Posted on February 03, 2012 by Jacquelyn Ottman
In his recently released Greener Products: The Making and Marketing of Sustainable Brands (2012, CRC Press, 222 pp.), Al Iannuzzi offers a detailed and persuasive case for incorporating sustainability into your business model. Examining both the making and the marketing of green products, his writing is firmly situated in the language of business — making it a useful resource for both business leaders and students alike.
Iannuzzi’s message is rooted in two core truths that we believe in strongly. First, there is no such thing as a truly green product: every product …Read more...
