From the category archives:

Personal Travel Updates

Green: A Gift with Purchase or Emotional Goldmine?

by Keith on February 1, 2012 · 0 comments

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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Backpacker to Business Class Part 3: The Work

by Keith on July 1, 2011 · 3 comments

This is the third and final (for now) post in a series documenting the differences between traveling as a backpacker and as a business traveler. Click to see the first or second post in the series about the differences in the Flying and the Staying.  Next I wanted to cover the differences in working while on the road.

This is where the real tradeoffs come in.  While it would be great to stay in amazing hotels and fly business class as a backpacker, you just can’t afford to because it is so expensive.  And if you are working while backpacking it is usually not for more money than covering your blog hosting costs and maybe a nice night out (in Thailand), hence the hostels and coach class seats.  But since J&J is paying, I have a job to do when I get to wherever I am going.  And all the sightseeing, eating in great local restaurants and even sleeping in those big comfy beds (no matter how jetlagged you are) comes second to doing excellent work.

Now with good planning and prioritization I have been able to do most of the fun things in addition to delivering great work.  On my most recent international work trip to Brazil, I was able to fly down 3 days early and spend some time sightseeing over the weekend in Rio.  A couple of my pictures are below.

I also spent some of that time at my hotel doing emails, working on PowerPoint decks and making phone calls.  Although most of it was on Monday while it was stormy and raining.

I would also like it to be known that by taking my detour to Rio I managed to save J&J $650 off the direct flight from Newark to Sao Paulo and back.  So not only did I get to enjoy the trip with a short personal stay on the front end, I saved the company some money.

And while I gave up a weekend at home with Amy, I was able to ensure that my first trip to Brazil was not entirely spent in conference rooms like this one, which turned out to be much nicer than many of the ones we have in New Jersey.

So what is your best business trip extension?  Let’s hear about it in the comments below.

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Backpacker to Business Class Part 2: The Staying

by Keith on June 22, 2011 · 4 comments

This is the second post in a series documenting the differences between traveling as a backpacker and as a business traveler.  To see the first post in the series about the differences in air travel, please click here.  Next, I want to cover the differences in accommodations.

One of the biggest questions people asked about our backpacking trip was, “What was it like to stay in hostels?” often asked with an intonation that implies that hostels must be dirty and terrible places to “have” to stay when traveling on a budget.  So I thought I would compare my Singapore accommodations on both trips.  While backpacking, Amy and I stayed at the lovely Sleepy Sam’s in the Arab section of Singapore, just down from the Masjid Sultan mosque.

We sprung for a private room ($62/night), but shared the bath, toilet and kitchen facilities with everyone.  Included in that nightly fee was a simple breakfast of toast, jam and coffee, so we never really had to use the very nice kitchen.

Compare that to the luxurious Fairmont Hotel, which is located across the street from the famous Raffles Hotel, the birthplace of the Singapore Sling.

My room at the Fairmont ran $265/night, but did include a magnificent buffet breakfast every morning (which was most likely a huge contributor to the approximately 5lbs I gained on this trip despite working out 4 days in the Fairmount’s huge gym).  The biggest difference probably has to be the beds.  At the Fairmont there was a very comfortable king size bed with fresh sheets every 3 days. At Sleepy Sams the bed was a pretty thin mattress on a small platform.  However, I will note that the free lobby wifi was MUCH slower than the wifi at Sleepy Sam’s.

All in all I am not sure that the Fairmont is worth the entire $1,100 premium that they charge over a place like Sleepy Sam’s for 6 nights in Singapore.  In fact, at the Sustainable Brands 2011 Conference in Monterey, the second stop on my business trip,  I learned about Google’s travel and expense system, Trips, that employs gamification principals to save the company money.  As it was explained, the system works by allotting employees a set amount of funding for a trip to a city or region.  If the employee is able to book and travel for less than the set amount, my understanding is that the employee has two options on what to do with the savings:

  1. Bank the savings to use on a future trip – allowing you to stay at a luxury hotel; or
  2. Donate the difference to charity.

If we had that system at Johnson & Johnson, I think that I may have honestly considered the option of staying at Sleepy Sam’s if I knew that I could bank the savings or donate it to charity.   The potential $1,100 savings would have been a bit of an inconvenience and a little less comfortable, but if I am willing to take it on, I should share in the savings, right?  What would you do?  Let me know in the comments below.  And if you work for Google (Kristin, I am talking to you) and I have this wrong please correct me.

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