Sustainability Through Marketing Communication

Source: Talk the Walk

By United Nations Environment Programme; UN Global Compact; Utopies; 2005

Synopsis: Green products right now only command 1 – 4% of market share. Market demographics break down along relatively predictable lines. The task of sustainable companies is to communicate effectively the alleged superiority of their products.

Reflection:

Two semesters ago, I took my first marketing class through the MBA program. Hate is too strong a word, but dislike not strong enough. It just seemed so utterly unimportant in the face of the problems I was learning about in other classes. I wrote off marketing as a necessary evil in my education.

Imagine my surprise then, when I was reading this document and getting excited about marketing. Every page, I was thinking of a cycling related product and how I would sell it, and then I had a minor epiphany. Despite the possibility its powers can be used for the wrong reasons (I’m thinking the booming SUV market of yore), marketing is just another form of education. At least, it can be. This becomes more important when we consider the value/behavior gap, the 5 to 70% of people (depending on location) who say they’re ready to purchase products for ethical reasons, the reality that sustainable products now command between 1 and 4% market share, and the proportion of buyers who identify lack of knowledge of sustainable products as a factor in choosing conventional products (I know I’ve seen numbers put to this, but I couldn’t find them despite my exhaustive 30 second search).

Example: Bike shops the world over stock little blinky LED lights so that motorists will know when they’ve run over a cyclist. The cheapest ones (both in price and quality) start at under 10 bucks. Last year, Blackburn came out with a new system dubbed the Flea. These are tiny lights, smaller than a book of matches and almost as light, but brighter than any lights of comparable size. On top of that, they are rechargeable via an ingenious magnetic charger that attaches to any 1.5 volt battery (think AAA, AA, C, D). The Flea taillight goes for around 25 bucks. I was having a hard time selling them, despite their performance advantages, until I saw an ad from Blackburn. It showed a pile of batteries, the batteries you would run through a conventional light over its projected lifetime, along with the price of those batteries, and compared it directly to the lifetime cost of the Flea, which was significantly less. Well, armed with this knowledge and my remarkable charm, I renovated my sales strategy and had customers challenging each other to fistfights for the last light on the shelf. Sure, and that’s why the bike shop closed…

The truth is, sales did go up, but not as much as you might think, and it corroborates perfectly what this source shows. People may be willing to pay a price premium for sustainable products, but only if it is framed properly. I think that frame should be monetary for two reasons. One, it’s not subjective, and two, Americans understand money far better than life cycle analyses and ethical arguments. Once sustainable products have been proven on terms we’re used to, they’ll have a much better chance of taking over market share from conventional products, and consumers will be open to claims based on other criteria.

Today's Big Question:

Can we rely on free market capitalism to push people toward sustainable behavior?