Jacquie Ottman's
Green Marketing Blog
Why Empowering Children is Key to Green Marketing Success
September 06, 2011 by Jacquelyn Ottman
Good 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 now put non-recyclable items such as food wrappers to work as raw materials for tote bags and other fashion items.
“Brigades” enlisted within hundreds of schools collect packaging of sponsors including Capri Sun, Kool-Aid, Oreo cookies, and Stonyfield Farm yogurt. Each used pack collected earns the school a one- or two-cent rebate to help build a garden or buy school supplies. And educators jump at the opportunity to encourage kids to recycle, to earn extra money for schools, and to repurpose what would otherwise be “trash” into new products.
The Islesboro Central School in Maine lost no time in putting the monies raised by their students to work at building composting bins and supporting the Rainforest Action Network’s efforts to buy rainforest land for restoration.
Excerpted from The New Rules of Green Marketing: Strategies, Tools and Inspiration for Sustainable Branding (Berrett-Koehler 2011) by Jacquelyn A. Ottman. She is an expert adviser on green marketing to Fortune 500 companies and the U.S. government. Her firm’s website is http://www.greenmarketing.com.
Recent blog posts:
• Don’t Let Skepticism Stifle Your Green Efforts
• Earth to Eco-Labels
• Why Guilt Won’t Sell Green
Subscribe to Jacquie Ottman’s Green Marketing Blog. Link here.
ShareThis
