Jacquie Ottman's
Green marketing Blog

Jacquie Ottman's Green Marketing Blog

Sustainable Innovation 2013: Key Lessons

Enviu.org uses crowdsourcing to create concepts for innovative businesses with positive environmental and social impact.

Every year I head to Europe to take part in the Sustainable Innovation Conference organized by The Centre for Sustainable Design (UK) as part of its ‘Towards Sustainable Product Design’ series of conferences.  Sustainable Innovation brings together pioneers, movers and shakers from around the world and across multiple industries who are changing the game of sustainable design to present their ground-breaking concepts and ideas. This year’s program, as always …Read more...

 

Heineken Picks a Winner for Sustainable Packaging Challenge

Heineken $1000 bottle

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, …Read more...

 

Book Review: The Method Method

The Method Method bookcoverIn 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 …Read more...

 

Ideals on Wheels

Bicycle Rental ProgramIn many cities bicyclists battle it out with taxis for a share of the road. But all Parisians seem to agree that bicycles are a convenient, cheap, trendy, and emission-free way for locals and tourists to get around town. Representing the biking equivalent of car sharing, in 2007 the city of Paris launched Vélib, a pay-as-you-go bicycle rental program.

Bikes can be rented for pre-paid amounts of time ranging from 30 minutes to one week, and then dropped off …Read more...

 

Running On Human Power

While researchers are looking to the sun, the wind and even ocean tides to source renewable energy, some have found an answer much closer to home: the gym.  This notion dawned on the owner of a string of gyms in Hong Kong, who rigged cycling and cross-training machines to power a gym’s lights and store extra energy in batteries for later use.

The Human Power Trainer, made by Windstream Power LLC of North Ferrisburg, Vermont, works on the same concept. It mounts a …Read more...

 

Green Marketing 3.0 Can Re-ignite Interest in Green

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 …Read more...

 

Pizza by Cer té: Greener By the Slice

This is a guest blog post by Jean-Claude Darne

New York’s first green pizzeria has opened it doors. Responsible consumers and pizza lovers, you can now enjoy a slice that’s made with the environment at heart. Cer té, a popular café in Midtown East opened ‘Pizza by Cer té’ on Earth Day, April 22nd 2010. To encourage us to help us spread the word they sent us a couple of pies to sample. We took it upon ourselves to put …Read more...

 

Plastiki Trash Expedition Meets Goal—Who’s Next?

Plastiki

New York Times recently reported that the Plastiki has docked after a four-month voyage from San Francisco to Sydney. The brainchild of British environmental advocate, David de Rothschild, the 60-foot “Plastiki” is a sailboat pieced together from 12,500 recycled plastic bottles and powered by solar panels and windmills. His mission: raise awareness about the amount and effects of plastic waste affecting our oceans.

David was on to something when he built his environmentally responsible craft and sailed it across the Pacific. …Read more...

 

Defining Biobased

Biobased products are getting a lot of attention lately. Who doesn’t like the idea of making products out of corn, soy and other agricultural ingredients? We are proud to be working with the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) BioPreferred program. It’s a USDA-led initiative designed to increase the purchase, use, and evaluation of biobased products, including biopolymers.

USDA defines biobased products as those composed in whole or in significant part of biological ingredients; forestry or renewable agricultural materials - including plant, animal, or marine (e.g. algae) ingredients. USDA identifies more …Read more...

 

When it Comes to Marketing Green Appliances, Silence is Golden

Ads for Bosch’s super quiet, high performance appliances make a point about doing green marketing right loud and clear: focus on the benefits most relevant to consumers.

As I discuss at more length in my soon-to-be-published book, “Consumers buy products to meet basic needs, not (primarily) to save the planet.” Said another way, consumers walk into the store with their, well, consumer caps on, not citizen ones.

Commercials for Bosch’s super-energy efficient appliances focus on how quiet they are, with secondary emphasis on their environmentally preferable attributes. In one ad …Read more...

 

Page 1 of 1 pages


Search This Site


Subscribe to Our Mailing List

News

Events

Publications

Categories