Jacquie Ottman's
Green marketing Blog
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...
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...
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...
Book Review: The Method Method
Posted on December 12, 2011 by Jacquelyn Ottman
In their new book The Method Method: 7 Obsessions that Helped Our Scrappy Start-up Turn an Industry Upside Down, Method cofounders Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry with co-author Lucas Conley take the occasion of their unconventional company’s tenth anniversary to step back, and offer readers the opportunity to peek inside their business, learning from their mistakes and acquiring the secrets to their success.
The Method Method offers a refreshingly honest look at how to create and maintain a successful business in a changing market where consumers …Read more...
EPA’s Design for the Environment Label — A Route to Safer Chemicals
Posted on November 21, 2011 by Jacquelyn Ottman
Some chemicals are safer than others, and the U.S. EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics’s voluntary Design for the Environment label can help consumers identify all purpose cleaners, laundry detergents and oth
er products that have met performance measures and are known to contain the safest possible ingredients. Since its inception in 1997, the label has been earned by over 2700 products. (Full disclosure: DfE is a former client of mine.)
A product of EPA’s now twenty-year-old Design for the Environment (DfE) Program, the DfE label is based upon product review criteria developed with …Read more...
Why Education is Key to Green Marketing Success
Posted on October 26, 2011 by Jacquelyn Ottman
Given the complexities of greening, properly educating consumers can make the difference in the success of a campaign. One green marketer who learned the hard way about the need to educate is Whirlpool. In the early 1990s they won a $30 million “Golden Carrot” award that was put up by the U.S. Department of Energy and a consortium of electrical utilities for being the first to market with a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC)-free refrigerator. But they misjudged consumer’s willingness to pay a 10% premium for a product with an environmental benefit that many did not …Read more...
Toyota’s Prius: Different Strokes for Different Folks
Posted on October 12, 2011 by Jacquelyn Ottman
The mainstreaming of green brings with it the need to segment audiences. As marketing efforts behind the Toyota Prius demonstrate, targeting messages to specific consumer groups can broaden appeal.
When launching the Prius in 2001, Toyota opted to target not the green-leaning drivers one might expect, but rather tech-savvy “early adopter” consumers. Featuring a beauty shot of a shiny new car parked at a stop light and illustrated by the provocative headline, “Ever heard the sound a stoplight makes?” an introductory print ad emphasized the hybrid car’s quiet ride (and specifically the fact …Read more...
Focus On Consumer Self-Interest to Win Today’s Green Customer
Posted on October 05, 2011 by Jacquelyn Ottman
If your green ads showcase the now tiresome images of babies, daisies, and planets, your messages will likely be irrelevant to mainstream consumers. Eco-imagery may have tugged at the purse-strings of “deep green” consumers, but their lighter green counterparts, who make up the bulk of the market, want to know how even the greenest of products benefit them personally. While the environment may be the underlying reason a product was created or upgraded, it will likely not be the primary motivation for consumers to choose your brand over those of competitors.
Avoid green marketing myopia
In other words, don’t commit …Read more...
“New Rules of Green Marketing” Named One of Top 40 Books on Sustainability
Posted on June 06, 2011 by Jacquelyn Ottman
I’m thrilled to announce that my book The New Rules of Green Marketing: Strategies, Tools and Inspiration for Sustainable Branding was recently named to the list of Top 40 Sustainability Books of 2010 by the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership (CPSL), University of Cambridge (U.K.).
Other titles on the list include: Our Choice (Al Gore), Next Generation Business Strategies for the Base of the Pyramid (Ted London & Stuart L. Hart), The Power of Sustainable Thinking (Bob Doppelt), and Prosperity Without Growth (Tim Jackson). See a full list here.
…Read more...
Green Marketing. Not Dead, Just Misdirected.
Posted on May 19, 2011 by Guest Blogger, Irv Weinberg
Some pundits declare that green marketing is dead. To quote Mark Twain, ” the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” I think the same can be said of green marketing.
Here at Mind Over Markets we’ve been saying for years that green marketing messages have not been communicated correctly right from the start.
The first task of green marketing, like all other marketing, should have been an analysis of benefits. First to the consumer and then to the planet. Too many opted for the first instinct, save the planet, as though you could …Read more...
Green Marketing 3.0 Can Re-ignite Interest in Green
Posted on November 15, 2010 by guest blogger, Jeff Dubin
Rumors of green’s demise are being greatly exaggerated. In this year of fiery political passions, the word “revolt” is in the air. However, I think Ad Age inhaled a whiff of the zeitgeist and incorrectly applied the term to consumers supposedly cooling in their ardor for green products. “Has Green Stopped Giving? Seeds of Consumers Revolt Sprouting Against Some Environmentally Friendly Product Lines” trumpets the headline of a recent Ad Age article. The author quotes Timothy Kenyon, director of GfK Roper’s Green Gauge study who more judiciously describes the current situation as “green fatigue.” This may be closer to …Read more...
Terrachoice’s Sins of Greenwashing Report—Time for Industry Self-Regulation?
Posted on November 08, 2010 by Jacquelyn Ottman
Most of you are familiar with Terrachoice’s “Seven Sins of Greenwashing” report. On a webinar aired in late October, CEO Scott McDougall admitted that his firm never intended to be malicious in their use of the term, “sins”. He believes that most of the “sins” of greenwashing being committed today are really not sins at all, but rather, inadvertent missteps.
Call me literal, or not a fan of hyperbole, but I believe that calling, in effect, otherwise well-intended marketers “sinners”, and setting the bar too high …Read more...
Green Marketing Myopia and the SunChips “Snacklash”
Posted on October 27, 2010 by Jacquie Ottman & Mark Eisen
Many marketing experts have weighed in on what they believe to be the reasons for the current backlash against SunChips’s new compostable chip package: excess noise. If you somehow missed it, consumers complained so loudly about the snack food’s new environmentally preferable but noisy corn-based bag that the brand reverted to the old packaging for most of its line. Before we blame consumers once again for not sacrificing a little inconvenience for the sake of the planet, let’s take a step back and understand what really is to …Read more...
Creating the Virtuous Cycle: Integrating Online and Offline Green Marketing
Posted on July 20, 2010 by Jacquelyn Ottman
This is a guest blog post by Paul Hannam.
Conscious consumers are shifting to the web even more rapidly than many other market segments. According to a report in early 2010 from Burst Media, the internet is the number one source of product information for green consumers. Almost 40% of this group prefers the web in contrast to the TV, in second place, at only 18%. All businesses and organizations that want to engage with these consumers need to …Read more...
