Many of you know I am a mother of three and an environmental steward. I believe in sustainability and I am trying my hardest to be “green” — to make a cleaner planet for my kids. But I read the most interesting article today about what consumers think “green” means, versus reality…. and I fell into the trap.
One of the examples in the article is something that never dawned on me before: baby food — glass jars vs. plastic.
Nest Collective in Emeryville, CA, manufactures what is possibly the most environmentally sound baby food in America. Plum Organics products come in a micro-thin container that’s devoid of Bisphenol A (which is suspected of impeding brain development in infants) and features a recyclable cap. Competing baby food brands in glass jars use nine times as much fossil fuel to transport and take up to 14 times the amount of landfill space. By contrast, Plum’s disposable pouch is eco-friendly, competitively priced and convenient to use. So, what’s the problem? It’s plastic. And in the minds of most consumers, that’s not “green.” Sure, Plum could try to explain statistics about landfill space and weight-transport/carbon-usage ratings, but that’s a lot to cram onto a 4.2-ounce bag. “These things are hard to talk about,” co-founder Neil Grimmer says. “There’s nothing sexy about a landfill.”
In the shopper’s mind, for example, glass is eco-friendly. But it takes a lot more fuel to transport glass than plastic and only about 28 percent of glass gets recycled anyway, according to EPA estimates. Counterintuitive as it seems, in many cases, plastic is a lot more ecologically friendly. But when shoppers spend all of six seconds deciding on a brand to buy, there’s no time to give them a course in low-density polyethylene or BTU outputs. “It’s hard to get people to look at these things,” Grimmer says. “There’s a lot of information out there, and it’s difficult for anyone to decipher what’s real and what’s not.”
And that, say many observers, is among the biggest problems in green marketing. Visit your local supermarket and you’ll see hundreds of products purporting to be eco-friendly. But without a third-party monitor, a twisted dynamic emerges: Much of what consumers assume is green is actually not, and those brands that really are green are often left to make a complex and technical pitch that people don’t understand or just don’t hear. As eco-marketing consultant Jacqueline Ottman puts it, “The consumer is very confused about what’s truly green and what isn’t. Marketers are confused themselves. Some products can be green in one instance and not in another. So it’s all potentially confusing.”
So, the shopper in search of a truly green product these days is in for a heck of a time, and the problem goes well beyond greenwashing, the prevalent practice of slapping labels like “natural” and “earth-friendly” on petrochemicals that’ll strip the paint off a car. Consider some examples of supposedly good products that often aren’t — and supposedly bad ones that don’t deserve the rap. Paper bags are most always seen as “natural” and biodegradable, right? But paper manufacturing flattens millions of acres of forests and uses huge amounts of energy and chemicals.
Or consider compact fluorescent bulbs, which Americans screwed into 330 million light sockets last year alone. CFs are touted as green because they’re supposed to last 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs — but many of them burn out early and, once they’re tossed into the trash, shatter and release mercury into the environment. Oh well.
Or take the warm-and-fuzzy notion of locally grown foods, which, thanks in part to author Michael Pollan, unfailingly conjures images of the cheerful farmer who lives just down the road. As Jeffrey Hollender, co-founder and chairman of Seventh Generation, points out, “Consumers have come to believe that local is always better, but increasing research shows that, in many cases, [it's not better] because of the energy inefficiencies involved in transporting local food. There’s no question that there are a lot of things that consumers believe to be so and are not so.”
Meanwhile, woe to the brand making a verifiable green product that, for one reason or another, falls outside the neat confines of what the average American considers green. Part of what makes that mission so difficult, of course, is the sheer number of green (or allegedly green) brands out there. A count conducted by research house TerraChoice between November of 2009 and January of 2010 revealed that, in big box stores alone, 2,219 products were busy making 4,996 ecological claims. But another factor is the science itself. Green is not an absolute condition; it’s a matter of degree. Most shoppers, however, have neither the time nor the inclination to do the math behind all the green claims out there. They basically just want to buy what they need and go home.
Complicating the picture even further is a basic marketing reality that’s not fashionable to bring up when we’re talking about saving the earth: Most shoppers — whether they admit it or not — look for value and performance before they look for green. The Natural Marketing Institute recently conducted a national poll of American adults, asking them about where green figures into the purchases they make. A whopping 68 percent of consumers told the poll takers that while they “care about the environment,” their purchase decisions were driven mainly by price.
All of which begs a very big question: How is a brand that’s truly green supposed to get that point across to consumers?
Neil Grimmer sits in his office in Emeryville, looking for ways to convince moms that a plastic pouch isn’t so bad, after all. His company’s Web site features a nifty chart showing how the pouch stacks up favorably against a glass jar in terms of fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Will consumers get the message? Grimmer hopes so, but he knows one thing: “If you want to implement significant change,” he says, “it needs to be easy to understand.”
To read more from this article go to: http://www.brandweek.com/bw/content_display/news-and-features/direct/e3i8ca14b8f869f03f0da670fc86a364d2d
And let us know what you think. How are you getting your green message across to consumers?