We’ve just come back from the CORE Sustainability Summit in Denver. It was a great show and like every other good trade show we have even attended or exhibited at, we learned a lot. Listening to the many great presenters and speaking to the hundreds of conference goers we heard one thing over and over again. The world of sustainability is suffering from a serious lack of messaging.

This was the theme of the show for us. And well it should be because that is what we have been blogging about since our blog began. Making your green message relevant, accessible and compelling to the mainstream.

It was great for us to be exhibiting there and have our booth proclaim in big, easily readable type “Effective messaging for the maturing green market.” We could see by the interest everyone showed that we had hit a note that resonated broadly among the audience. It showed that across the board the lack of coherent messaging was high up on everyone’s list of what needed to be improved in the world of green communication.

At MOM, it all comes down to a few important points.

Make your message relevant not only to the needs of the planet but to the needs of all those living on it.

Make your message compelling by thinking of what your audience needs and answer those needs.

Make your message educational, informative and entertaining.

Tell your target what’s in it for them.

That’s why we love trade shows so much. In the world of virtual communication, you get to meet your customer face to face and hear them tell you exactly what you need to do.

What do you need to do?

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Imagine being in a room filled with other green-minded business owners and execs and tapping into their smarts for 3 hours on behalf of your business? That’s what our Green Marketing Labs are all about.  Our first one in Denver is happening in a few weeks. Think of it, you can saturate on Saturday in our lab and ski on Sunday on the slopes. 

Here’s what happening in our first lab. 

Green Marketing Lab 1: Developing Your Marketing GPS (Green Positioning Strategy) on March 27.

With over 1,500+ new products enter the market each year, how will you break through the clutter and position your product or service so it’s not another “me too”? In this green marketing lab, you will:

Obtain a clear understanding of the current green market – its obstacles and opportunities

Identify how meaningfully different you are from your competition

Uncover the advantages that result from using your product or service

Identify your key target audience(s) and the rational and emotional reasons they buy your product or service

Develop a strategy statement to effectively communicate your message to your target audience(s)

These interactive, real-life marketing laboratories will give you the insights and tangible solutions you need to make your marketing meaningful in the maturing green market. So bring your questions. Bring your challenges. Roll your sleeves up and have some fun.

PRICING: $40 per lab or $130 for all 4 labs (discounts available for CORE members).

Saturday March 27, 2010, 9:00am – 12 noon

Location: All 4 labs will be held in the CORE offices at 1801 California Street, Suite 4900, Denver, CO 80202.

Register for all 4 labs or any of them individually at: www.corecolorado.org or call (303) 894 6333

Presenters: Irv Weinberg and Carolyn Parrs of Mind Over Markets, a dedicated green marketing communications company in Santa Fe, NM. To learn more about our work, go to www.mindovermarkets.com.

Hope to see you there! Can you help us spread the word and Retweet this or share this with your community?

Many thanks!

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Next up for our “TAKE THE GREEN MARKETING CHALLENGE” is Organic Bug. Thanks for stepping up, Peggy. You’re doing some great things but you need a little help.

Organic and healthy product websites are no longer unique. There are many of them —  including those endorsed by well known green organizations like the Sierra Club. There’s competition so you need to be competitive. Not in a negative way, but in a “having a unique position” way. Something you do, accomplish or offer – or even the way you do it, that will communicate to your customer why they should choose you. When we Googled “sustainable products”, there were over 14,000,000 hits. You have got to be unique. Don’t worry, we can help. 

BRANDING LINE

Let’s begin with your tag line, “Sustainable Products Promoting a Healthy Lifestyle”. Yes, it describes what you offer but that’s where it ends. Tag lines are not mission statements. They’re compelling statements that position your company, give it personality and a reason to be. It’s saying why you and not someone else.

Irv: Think about what your end benefit is. Are you bringing the green world down to earth for your customer? Are you making it more affordable, more accessible?  Have you sourced through all the green products and found those that offer ecology, efficacy and economy? What is your niche within this niche?  The answers to those questions will lead you to a tag line that says your unique position in a clever, compelling way. 

Let us give you an example. For a client of ours that manufactures zero VOC, non-toxic paints, we created the tag line “Beauty Without the Beast”.  That line acknowledged that people paint their homes first to to beautify them. So we had to tell them we were going to give them the beauty they wanted, without the toxins they didn’t want. See what we mean?

COMPANY NAME AND LOGO

You have a homespun name and logo so why not capitalize on it? But it does have a downside. There are a lot of green lawncare and pest control companies out there now. Organic Bug could be confused with one of them. All the more reason to make your name stand for something. Maybe it’s playing with the “bug” a little and being the site for people who are bugged by green products that cost too much, work too little, etc.?

Carolyn: Maybe there’s a cute “bug” visual that can become the personality of your company? Is the bug smart? Funny? Clever? A wisecracker? You can deliver your message through its “voice” and personality. Now you are starting to create a reason to be.     

WEBSITE

Your web copy is a very important part of your communications. You have to make sure its working as hard as it can. Web visitors move fast. You only have a few seconds to grab their interest. Your products display nicely but they don’t reach out to us. Feature some and tell me their story. Some of your suppliers might want to be part of this.  Remember the web is an experience. Check out what Patagonia is doing with their Footprint Chronicles.  In short, in their mini interactive website, they investigate the footprint of several of their garmets. They put right out there what they are doing right and wrong — and how they are working to make it better. They put their mission where their mouth is by telling on themselves. This builds trust and a deep brand message that people know and love. What is yours?     

Nicole: Regarding the visual look of your homepage, the fonts are clean and legitable. Your white background opens up the space. But your menu drop downs are too long and overwhelming. Create sub menus. There is little  visual hierarchy on your homepage. Other than the big green box that jumps out, where do you want my eyes to go? Back to Patagonia, check out their homepage heirarchy and you’ll see what I mean.   

Bringing the green world to everyone is a great thing to do. The better you do it, the better it gets done.

Thanks Peggy!

If  this blog post was helpful to you, would you retweet it and share it with your friends?

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A couple of weeks ago we challenged you right here on the Green Marketing Blog to TAKE THE GREEN MARKETING CHALLENGE. We’re happy to say we’ve had quite a few takers. Most of them green businesses that are part of the Green America Business Network. A brave bunch. Here’s what we asked:

Send us your green brand message (logo, brand line, graphic, copy), and we’ll evaluate it. That means our Green Team at Mind Over Markets will assess your brand and post the results here on our Green Marketing Blog.  Then we will open it up to you, our readers, to join in and make comments, suggestions, or add your brilliant ideas to the conversation.  Now let’s get going…     

BRANDING LINE

We’re happy to say that Terra Source Chocolates started the challenge off on a happy note. We like your branding line, “Responsibly Decadent” because it says it all and honors the real reason people love chocolate. Because it’s so decadently good. That’s a good start. A good balance of the green message and the chocolate message. So many green brands go to saving the earth as their total message. We’re happy you didn’t. Now hurry up and get your branding line integrated with your graphic and on your website because it is sorely missing there.

COMPANY NAME

Next, your name, Terra Source, does not have the same impact.

Irv (our copywriter and King): Personally, I don’t like generic names. I much prefer a name that is your claim. Terra Source could be anything, and in fact, variations of that are everywhere in the green product world. You name should be as unique as your product.

WEBSITE

Now to your website. Remember it’s going to be your #1 marketing vehicle, so use it well. Make it decadent too. Make healthy, responsible decadence part of your brand personality. Have fun with it. Be wickedly funny and charming in what you show and what you say. Define what decadence is for your customer and involve them in the process. Social media is perfect for this, just like we’re doing here.

Carolyn (social media maniac, project manager and sometimes copywriter): For instance, ask your customers and potential customers “What does decadent mean to you?” Post it right on your site, your blog, your packaging, etc. Have them join in the conversation. Create a decadent Facebook Fan page and give away some chocolate to your new fans who answer that question. Decadent is such a delicious word, you’ll get all sorts of yummy responses.

Back to your website. Right now, your web copy is as generic as your company name. There is so much good stuff to say about chocolate (its health benefits for one), that you are missing a big selling opportunity by not giving your customer permission to indulge. Tell me more about what makes your chocolate responsible. Then I can feel three times as good.  The taste, the benefits, the sustainability of it all. That’s a good story to be telling. Make sure you’re not saying what everyone else is saying.

Entice me. Visually, we all think you are missing it. Show me people eating your chocolate with a twinkle in their eye. Above all make your product photography luscious. Your current photography is a disservice to your product. Simply put, it’s not delicious enough. 

LOGO 

Your logo is another generic element. There are way too many planets in the green business logo universe today. And yours doesn’t even feature the countries that are the source of your chocolate.  If your logo is invisible, why bother? 

Nicole (our graphic artist extraordinaire): Name recognition is key in your branding efforts. Rethink your choice of fonts and typeface. Yours feel dated and hard to read. Why not use fonts that reflect your brand image – back to decadent again. Regarding your color choices on your site, one idea is to use ones that are actually ingredients in your chocolate: raspberry, blueberry, etc. This makes your color palate relevant and it enhances your brand line, “Responsibly Decadent”.

PACKAGING

Your packaging is inconsistent. Again, it needs to reflect your brand. (Are we sounding like a broken record yet?). It might be via color coding, illustration, photography, etc. Whatever you choose, let it be a marriage of elements that work together to strengthen your brand.

Irv: Mary Wells, one of the greats of advertising, once told me that good advertising is a substitute for a free sample. She was right. I want all your branding and your website to give me a taste of what you do and make me order it express shipping because I can’t wait for my first bite.

Ok, what do you think? Join in on the conversation by posting your thoughts below in our comment box.

And thank you Josie for TAKING THE GREEN MARKETING CHALLENGE.  We think you are on your way to fabulous and effective branding.

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Go out of your way to serve, not sell. Help your customer. Tell them things they need to know. If you don’t have what they need, tell them where to get it, even if it’s from your competitor. Give away your knowledge and expertise without cost or expectation. Spread the love.

It’s much more cost effective to keep a customer than to create a new one, so keep them happy. The green consumer, by definition, wants to help not only themselves, but the planet. Knowing that helpfulness is part of the currency of green should be a mantra and guiding principle of your business.

With the onset of social media, there’s never been a better and more affordable way to genuinely reach out and touch someone – thousands, millions at a time. The way to do that, according to Chris Brogan, social media superstar, is becoming a Trust Agent.  “Trust agents aren’t necessarily marketers or salespeople; they’re the digitally savvy people who use the Web to humanize businesses using transparency, honesty and genuine relationships. When you learned a trust agents secrets, your words can carry more power and more weight than any PR firm or big corporate marketing department,” says Brogan.  

At MOM, one of our secrets is being helpful. For instance, in every one of our monthly Greentelligence green marketing newsletters, we offer an in-depth branding examination for free to green businesses owners. We call it “BrandAID”. This is over $750.00 worth of green marketing brains – for free.  We do this to give business owners and marketers a taste of the way we approach green branding and marketing, and more importantly, to help them spread the green message and encourage the growth and success of green products and services. When you reward your customers with your help, they often reward you right back.

 How are you serving?

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Green consumers can smell a marketing message from a meaningful message a mile away. And many marketers learned this the hard way, including poor Kermit. It might have been easy to spin a green story on Madison Avenue, but if it’s greenwashing, it ain’t so easy to shake — thanks to the internet. So if you are even thinking of introducing a green product into this wildly vocal marketplace, you might as well be straight up about it or you might find yourself with a frog in your throat.

Instead, communicate your green message with honesty and sincerity. It builds trust and faith in what you have to say. You don’t have to be perfect, but you do have to be willing to explain where you need improvement and what you’re going to do about it.

Take Patagonia, the California-based outdoor equipment and clothing maker. Their mission, published on their web site for all to see is “to make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” One of the ways Patagonia puts its mission where its mouth is by implementing a self-imposed “earth tax,” a sum founder, Yvon Chouinard, feels is owed to the earth for being a polluter and user of the planet’s nonrenewable resources. They even created the Patagonia Footprint Chronicles, an interactive mini-site that allows you to track the impact of Patagonia products from design through delivery – the good, the bad, and the ugly. That is transparency in action.

Just remember what your mother always told you. Honesty is the best policy. You can be excused for making a mistake, but you’ll be punished if you lie about it. Toyota may soon learn that a sticky accelerator is not their worse problem, it was waiting too long to tell their loyal customers. And that can take years to repair.

What green marketing wins the sincerity vote from you? We want to know!   

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One of the most important issues in the business world today is the greening of the supply chain. That long trail of goods, services, and supplies that go into the manufacturing process from raw materials to manufacturing practices to packaging, delivery, and beyond. That was a fundamental issue for our client and our campaign for PALNET, a national supplier of wooden shipping pallets, because pallets move almost everything that moves around the globe.

Our goal was to build awareness that PALNET ‘s wooden pallets are the sustainable and environmental choice by emphasizing their natural greenness and earth-friendly manufacturing process.

Since many pallet customers today are under pressure to make significant changes in their supply chain to make it greener, the eco-advantages of wooden pallets became the key issues to promote and advance. We emphasized that PALNET pallets are made from scrap lumber from sustainable sources, never virgin hardwoods. We built promotions around the notion that at the end of their life, after constant recycling and repairs, old pallets are turned into garden mulch. It was a way to promote sustainability and environmental friendliness in a dramatic way.

Our sustainability brochure featured a bag of garden mulch inside with the message on the cover, “This used to be a PALNET pallet.” We backed that up with a PR campaign that hammered out the message that wooden pallets were the eco-choice and that “environmental” plastic pallets were an unsustainable myth like “clean coal” and the “Loch Ness” monster. We had fun with our press releases and they received wide coverage including Forbes, USA Today, Reuters and Businessweek.

Got a green messaging case study? Share your story here!

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They say there is no impression as powerful as a first impression. How’s yours? Have you got a nibble and then failed to hook your visitor? Or have you had that nibble turn into a strike? To add to the pressure, you just have seconds to invite your visitor in and start a relationship growing. That’s a lot to think about so let me go fast.

Make your message about them. Not you.

Say something that is personal to them and their needs. The realer you make it the better.

Be sincere.

Have fun. The green message should be full of life. 

Here’s an example of what I mean. 

For the Santa Fe Farmers Market, we wanted to focus on the very real differences between what you get at the Farmers Market and what you get at the supermarket. We wanted to make our communication about the farm and the farmer. We wanted to create a relationship between the customer and the grower to make the shopping experience personal and tangible. 

“Family Farm, Not Factory Farm” was one of a series of ads that told the story quickly. We relied on theater of the mind to help us do just that. What’s that? It’s the information that you know your customer knows. It’s those built-in pictures you can draw on to tell your story.

Think of what you think of when you hear family farm? Red barns and sunshine. Fresh air and friendly cows. Chickens running free and running streams. All those communicate instantly.  They say local. Fresh. Your neighbors growing food for the community. A real family proudly standing behind everything they grow. They say everything you want to say without you having to say it. 

Now consider the image of a factory farm. Impersonal. Distant. Corporate. Run for profit, not for love. Plumes of chemicals fogging the air. Just the opposite of what you find in the back of a pickup at your local Farmers Market. See what I mean?

“Family Farm, Not Factory Farm” delivers a big message in 5 little words.

Good communication happens fast when it happens right. Don’t make me work hard to figure out what you’re trying to tell me. I’m working hard enough already.

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If you are anywhere near Denver in early March (skiing, soaking in the hot springs, etc.), our friends at CORE Colorado are putting on a sustainability summit that can’t be missed. We’ll be there. Visit us at our booth. 

Here’s all the info from Graham Russell, CORE’s Executive Director.   

2010 SUSTAINABLE OPPORTUNITIES SUMMIT + EXPO

March 2 – 4, 2010 | Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO

Looking for new ways to turn your company’s sustainability challenges into business opportunities?

The Sustainable Opportunities Summit + Expo, held annually in Denver, Colorado, is consistently one of the most comprehensive, actionable conferences in the industry.

 Our 2010 program promises to be the best yet. Among the sessions you will enjoy are:

Sustainability in the Supply Chain – featuring a plenary panel discussion of the Sustainability Consortium initiated by major retailers and including speakers from Miller Coors, KPMG and Wal-Mart. 

Plenary presentations by Andrew Winston: co-author of the sustainability best-seller “Green to Gold” and Peter Fusaro: author of NY Times best-seller “What Went Wrong at Enron?” 

Sustainability in the World of Sports: a panel discussion of how the sports industry is addressing the demands for more environmentally responsible sporting events AND greener sporting venues. Speakers from the Pepsi Center, Dicks Sporting Goods Park and Icon Venues. 

MORE THAN 60 SPEAKERS, 100 EXHIBITORS + COUNTLESS BENEFITS 

   Gain a global perspective and apply it to constructive local action.

   Turn corporate responsibility into long-term competitive advantage.

   The latest technologies in water treatment & conservation, recycling, waste minimization, sustainable agriculture, responsible mining and more.

   Learn how innovative energy ideas will create a robust economic engine.

   Connect with the most powerful sustainability players, locally and nationwide.

   Get access to key decision-makers, including buyers and investors.

Join Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, our speakers, exhibitors and hundreds of your colleagues to learn how sustainability is fast becoming the key driver of innovation, improved financial performance and more robust economic development. 

To register or for more info: 2010 Sustainable Opportunties Summit & Expo.

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We live in a world of instants. Instant gratification, instant information, instant connections.

When it comes to your green brand, there is another instant you have to honor.  The need for your brand message to instantly communicate its promise of value to everyone it meets.

A brand must do many things all at once.

It must communicate, compel, intrigue, be meaningful, relevant and educate all at once. That’s a lot to ask of a tag line and graphic approach. But it still has to do it, and do it instantly.

Especially now in our instant age, your brand position has to reach out and grab your audience and steal their attention from the millions of other bits of information flooding their synapses.

The big question for you is, does yours?

Do you have to make me work to understand what you are trying to tell me? If you do, you lost me. I’m already down the block and on to something else.

Is your offer vague? Are you speaking to me or at me? Do I have to guess what you really mean? Are you using generic eco statements like “Green Done Right” or “Saving the planet one ‘whatever’ at a time”?  They’re not greenwashing in the traditional sense. They just wash over you and leave little or nothing behind.

It’s better to say something dull but educational than something slick and meaningless.  But whatever you do, say something for your green brand that I can get instantly.

To add some zest to this request, we at Mind Over Markets are challenging you to TAKE THE GREEN MARKETING CHALLENGE. 

Here it is: Send us your green message (logo, tag line, graphic, copy), and we’ll evaluate it here for free. That’s right. A team of three (Art Director, Copywriter and Account Manager) will thoughtfully assess your brand and we’ll post the results here. Then all of our readers can join in on the conversation too. That’s thousands of dollars of consultation for free to those who are courageous enough to step up and put their brand message on display. 

Let the games begin.

(Send your submission to: carolyn (at) mindovermarkets (dot) com).

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