I recently conducted another interview with Conde Naste’s online magazine, portfolio.com on the subject of eco-marketing to the mainstream consumer. I thought it might be a helpful topic to share with you today since eco-marketing is so often misunderstood.
Eco-marketing, green marketing, etc.—whatever you call it, you need to either understand the marketplace or hire an expert who does. Not “getting it” in this arena could lead your business to spiral in a downward motion quickly.
Here are some important rules to live by in eco-marketing to mainstream consumers:
1. You need to minimize sacrifices that consumers make in order to buy and use green products and services. If you don’t, you’ll never get them to purchase your product or service.
2. Environmental attributes are important--the more attributes the better. Don’t forget to list benefits for your attributes as well.
3. If consumers face a trade-off with product attributes, the environment always loses. Keep-in-mind, green and LOHAS consumers will rate the environment at the top of their list often, yet the product needs to perform equally or superior than a conventional counterpart for them to even consider it.
It’s important to not ignore the traditional marketing rules of price, quality, convenience and availability:
• Price - no matter what consumers say, few will pay more.
• Quality - People view "green products" as less effective than existing brands and are event less likely to sacrifice quality than price.
• Convenience - Only minimal convenience is tolerated by consumers of green products.
• Availability - Very few will go out of their way to buy green.
Helping You Understand and Profit from Consumer Health and Green Trends
Colette Chandler
