Gift with purchase, that is how I use to describe green marketing when I began working with new business partners. I took this approach as it supported the widely held belief that the main-stream American consumer is not going to sacrifice product performance and is unwilling to pay any significant premium for a more sustainable product or service. Witness the SunChips compostable, but noisy packaging disaster from just 2 years ago. Hence, I thought of green product benefits as a “gift with purchase,” a free bonus for choosing one product over another, but not something that can represent a trade off. I had wanted my partners to think of green as the “tie-breaker”, allowing their brands to win the toss-up.
Today, I want to officially call B.S. on this logic.
The fatal flaw in this idea is that it assumes consumers are taking the time to full evaluate primary product benefits, make the determination that they are equal, and then move on to the secondary benefits. I don’t buy it. Focused and singular communications are the most impactful. Cluttered multi-benefit messages get lost and consumers’ quickly lose interest trying to wade through it all. If you have not seen the video below depicting the result of Microsoft designing the iPod box, it is a great example of this effect and worth a quick view. Just imagine how many eco-logos could be slapped on there today!
So if green is not a secondary communication tie-breaker, and it is not a primary product benefit communication for the general market, where does that leave sustainability and green marketing? I think it leaves green marketers promoting more sustainable products in a tremendous position, because let’s face it, being a tie-breaker is not that enviable of a position.
Inspiration recently came to me at the wine store as I reached for the “The Big Green Box” by Pepperwood Grove, a brand from Don Sebastiani & Sons.
The story I told myself as I bought the Big Green Box was that I wanted the very functional benefit common to all boxed wines, the ability to enjoy a glass or two at night without leaving half a bottle in the fridge, becoming slightly oxidized overnight and losing the tastiest aspects of the wine. Most bag-in-the-box wines allow you to enjoy the wine over 4 weeks from when you initially open it with no oxidation. While a nice benefit, the real reason I have recently adopted bag-in-box wines is not an increase in functionality – after all the original box wine, Franzia, has had an identical benefit for the last 25 years. Heck they even trademarked it with WineTap(R). Rather, it is the signal of quality and sophistication that a boxed wine positioned as a more sustainable and greener alternative tells me as the consumer, “you can trust me, I’ll taste good, look how enlightened I am in my eco-conscious packaging.”
I want to make the case that it is these higher order emotional benefits that are the real opportunity for green marketing to shine. Just as a higher price can be a signal of quality, so too can green benefits.
Besides box wine I have another example closer to my work at Johnson & Johnson, that of reprocessed single-use surgical devices. In this category the main functional benefit for hospital customers is significant savings, in many cases up to 50% versus purchasing new devices. And while that is a compelling case for any resource constrained hospital, it seems that the emotional benefit of reducing waste going to landfills and contributing to more sustainable operations is what wins hospitals’ hearts and minds, as evidenced by the category leader Styker Sustainability Solution’s current marketing, website and blog.
With appropriate customer targeting, a green message can allow brands to strike emotional gold.
What categories have you seen where green has or could be used to signal quality and help deliver an emotional benefit for customers?
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