Jacquie Ottman's
Green Marketing Blog
When it Comes to Marketing Green Appliances, Silence is Golden
January 11, 2010 by Jacquelyn Ottman
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 that I discussed in the book, a gentle deer walking through a forest meanders upon an operating Bosch Nexxt washer and dryer tandem and never notices the appliance. A second ad shows an owl swooping through an orange canyon to rest upon the (quiet) Bosch Evolution dishwasher.
So to do green marketing right: Appeal to consumers’ self interest. Focus too heavily on environmental benefits at the expense of primary ones and doom your product to the green graveyard!
To learn more about my new book, link here.
Brianna Rogers of J. Ottman Consulting, Inc. assisted with this post.
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