Jacquie Ottman's
Green marketing Blog

Jacquie Ottman's Green Marketing Blog

What NYC Can Learn From San Francisco’s Zero Waste Success

San Francisco recycling

(Image: TreeHugger)

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time lately better understanding my hometown of New York City’s incredibly wasteful ways. We New Yorkers generate 11 lbs. per person of waste per day and those of us working types, 4lbs. per day. With no active landfill or incinerators (Fresh Kills was briefly re-opened to house 9/11 waste and incinerators were nixed years ago as too dirty.), we spend $300 million per year shipping our waste to Virginia, Pennsylvania and …Read more...

 

Cultures Around the World Can Inspire No-Waste LIfestyles

In India lunches are delivered to workers in reusable steel tiffins

Lunches delivered to workers in India in steel tiffins. (Image: Letztrend.com)

Cultures around the world possess their own unique, deeply-ingrained beliefs and traditions for minimizing waste. For instance, the Yankee Ingenuity helped America put down its early roots, and the Dutch custom of sharing unlocked ‘community’ bikes at train stations inspired bike-sharing programs in NY, Paris and other world capitals. Many …Read more...

 

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...

 

Introducing WeHateToWaste.com

WHW Parade Shortened

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 …Read more...

 

Consumers Really Can Save the World

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 …Read more...

 

Book Review: Greener Products: The Making and Marketing of Sustainable Brands

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 …Read more...

 

The Rise of the Biobased Economy — and Why Brand Owners Need to Develop a Strategy in 2012

Our economy is slowly but surely heeding the signal that carbon is the new watchword. During the past few years, a steady stream of so-called “biobased” products have been making their way to retail shelves — compostable dinnerware made from corn, plant-based laundry detergents, and bamboo flooring among them. Coke and Pepsi are now competing to be first to market with a soft drink bottle derived entirely from sugarcane or other plant materials.

The emerging biobased economy even has …Read more...

 

Why Empowering Children is Key to Green Marketing Success

Terracycle Outsmart WasteGood green marketing is all about making an investment in the future of the planet by promoting sustainability and protecting the environment. So it is only natural that successful green marketing campaigns can and should involve children, offering an opportunity for building life-long brand loyalty.

TerraCycle, the innovative New Jersey outfit founded by Princeton University dropout Tom Szaky, first made headlines in 2006 by selling fertilizer made from worm poop to The Home Depot and other major retailers. They …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...

 

Terrachoice’s Sins of Greenwashing Report—Time for Industry Self-Regulation?

dried green paint 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, …Read more...

 

Green Marketing Myopia and the SunChips “Snacklash”

SunChips bagsMany 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 …Read more...

 

Two Birds, One Switch? Brightening The Future With A Dark Idea

This is a guest blog post by Catie Carter.

"Lights Out New York" Press Release Picture

     For two months this fall, many of the cities largest buildings, including the Chrysler building, and Rockefeller Center, are turning their lights off. New York City Audubon has organized the fifth annual “Lights Out New York” in an effort to help migratory birds. Buildings participating in “Lights out New York” have agreed to turn their lights off from midnight to dawn from September 1st to November 1st.

Read more...

 

How We Used “Framing” to Sell the Wind

This is a guest blog post written by Cathy L. Hartman & Edwin R. Stafford.

Introducing “Framing”
By aligning marketing strategies with the core values of your audience, you can successfully craft a message that resonates with a targeted public, and increase your campaign’s chances for success. This is called “framing” and it’s well illustrated in the following two case studies.

Case Study:  Utah & ‘The Winds of Opportunity’
In 2003, we collaborated with the Utah Wind Working …Read more...

 

40 Million Kilowatts in 40 Days

Jenn Dolin, our old friend and client who’s now at Sylvania, invites you to take the Sylvania Earth Day Challenge. Representing a great way to get consumers involved in energy efficiency, Osram-Sylvania is challeging consumers to take energy-efficient actions at home and at work, that, in the 40 days leading up to Earth Day, will add up to 40 million kilowatt hours of energy savings.

Just visit their website, populated with easy, energy-efficiency actions for the home and office. Select the steps you’ll willing to do for 40 days, and …Read more...

 

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