In today’s rapidly expanding green market, there is no greater challenge facing marketers of green goods and services than making their brand or service relevant to the here and now. One thing is for sure, it won’t be saving the planet one “whatever” at a time. Not in this time of economic concern and green fatigue.

To help you navigate this rugged road in the maturing green marketing, we’ve launched GREENTELLIGENCE, our news and viewsletter that brings green marketing down to earth. In it, you will find green marketing case studies, highlights from our Green Marketing Blog, a Brand-Aid offer, and more.

We, at Mind Over Markets (better known as MOM), have a simple philosophy. We believe in bringing logic to the ecologic message– creating sound strategic reasoning that results in shifting consumer purchase habits. So read on! And if GREENTELLIGENCE ends up on your “must read” list, remember to sign up to receive it each month. And if you really like it, pass it on to a friend.

Enjoy!

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Like many of us, when the notice from our utility company came offering wind energy to us at a slightly higher cost, we signed up right away. We figured it was a clean and sustainable way to get electricity and help the environment at the same time.  According to an article in The New York Times, to date over 1,000,000 customers have volunteered to pay more for this type of power, but it seems a lot of that has been hype, not hope. 

Florida Power and Light had a program called “Sunshine Energy”  with more than 38,000 customers which was terminated by the Florida Public Service Commission after an audit found that 76.4% of the money taken in by this program went to administration and marketing costs instead of to building more solar facilities and generating more clean, renewable energy. 

A California based advocacy group called the Utility Reform Network reported, “There is little evidence to suggest that customer subscriptions have resulted in any new additions of renewable power.”  And that is the shock, not only to energy customers but to all of us in the green marketing space. 

These blatant green claims, all wrapped up in slick marketing campaigns, do more than turn off energy customers, they have the potential to turn off the greater population to many green claims and products. And this hurts us all. 

We speak a lot about green marketing and one of our primary rules is transparency and walking the talk.That means if you say something about green or sustainability, you need to back it up with action. If you claim something, it had better be supported by facts.  

As green grows, so does the danger to the entire movement. Couple that with green fatigue, greenwashing and empty meaningless claims, and green can go the way that low-carbs went. What happens is that once someone is duped by a green marketer, they don’t just turn off that message, but potentially get turned off to the green movement and we all suffer the consequences. 

Everyday the airways are filled with messages that confuse us all. Look at the  current healthcare debate and all the special interest groups pouring millions into bending your opinion one way or the other. No wonder the average person no longer believes what they read and hear.

If you want the green movement to succeed, and your product or service along with it, all of us need to be the green police and be sure that what green says, green does. It would be a tragedy if companies like Florida Power and Light are instrumental in pulling the plug on what all of us have worked so hard to accomplish. Take my word for it, it is much harder to bring someone back in once they have been disappointed than it is to bring them in from the start.

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Following in the footsteps of Paul Newman’s book Shameless Exploitation , the message below is our version.  We promise we won’t make a habit of it but hey, we’re a marketing company. Sometimes we can’t help ourselves.  

If your green product or service is experiencing one or more of these seven symptoms, you may be suffering from a common branding ailment, Message Deprivation. Warning signs include: 

• Irrelevantitis
• Strategic deficit disorder
• Acute me-tooism
• Chronic loftiness
• Message myopia
• Persistent invisibility
• Mainstreamophobia

After helping companies with these distressing, sometimes chronic symptoms for more than 10 years, we have found one trusted prescription that has been effective over and over again – especially in the maturing green market.

Relevancy. Making your product and message relevant to the here and now. One thing we know for sure, it won’t be saving the planet one “whatever” at a time. Not in this time of economic concern and green fatigue.

The solution will be bringing your message down to earth, taking it from a cause to a because, and making it meaningful to the issues, concerns and needs of everyday people’s everyday lives.

To do that, you have to leave traditional thinking and messaging behind. You have to let Kermit return to his lily pad and expand your message beyond the planet to include the people living on it. 

That’s the kind of Brand AID we offer at Mind Over Markets. Every day for every client we bring logic to ecologic and appeal to the heart and the head in equal measure.

THE DOCTOR IS IN! Call Mind Over Markets (better known as MOM) now for a free ½ hour check-up. We promise you’ll feel better in the morning. This prescription expires December 15, 2009. Call 505 989 4004 or email us for urgent care.

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Want to see greenwashing in action? Than cast your eye on Nestle Waters YouTube videos about bottled water: How Much Water Does it Take to Make Bottled Water?

In this dubious video, the company outlines how water conscious they are, because less water goes into a bottle of water than into the making of a latte. When I hear stuff like that, it’s not the caffeine in the latte that keeps me up at night.  

Maybe the water usage is down, but what about what all that water is going into. Plastic bottles. You can’t be an environmental champion when, as the largest bottled water company in the world, your plastic bottles end up chocking our landfills and littering our environment with their plastic debris that will take centuries, if ever, to decompose. As if the landfill issues weren’t bad enough, how about the vast pollution trail that comes along with plastic bottle manufacturing? 

They start their life in an oil field, get transported in a huge oil tanker (remember the Exxon Valdes?), get trucked from ports to refineries, get synthesized into toxic chemicals that become plastic in a plastic manufacturing plant — which is in itself an ecological nightmare. For something so light in weight, that little plastic bottle has a pretty heavy footprint.  

It’s actually shameful to see a company spinning a tale with so long a pollution trail. Instead why don’t they put their efforts where it might matter? Into the development and production of a biodegradable plant-based bottle. They do exist.  

If companies like Nestle don’t get it by now, they really should begin to see that consumers see through these spin doctored messages. And actually begin to resent the tale tellers. Horizon Dairy found that out when their happy cows really weren’t too happy. And neither were many of their customers who found that out and organized a boycott against their products.

Things like clean coal and water-saving bottled water might sound good on paper, but they sound like bull-produced natural plant food to most of us.

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This is a guest post from (drum roll, please) Chris Brogan, author of “Trust Agents,” but better known as the “rock star” of social media.  

The marketing game has changed. It used to be all about mass communications and a tight message spread across every medium you could afford. The goal was to hit as many people as you could touch, and hope for a low percentage of them to convert. Who knows? Maybe you’re STILL doing it that way. If so, how’s that working for you? If you’re looking at trends, the new growth and success in marketing is coming from niche marketers who understand their community and can protect you along the way.

My area of knowledge is in using social media tools and methods to build sales opportunities, increase engagement, and converting audiences into communities. One way to accomplish this is by writing compelling blog content that opens conversations that may lead to potential lead conversion. Not every bit of the content is designed for sales. There’s a relationship component to all this as well, but the point to building great content for a business is to help that business earn attention, gain a reputation, and develop trust.

Find the right niche marketer, who has a strong relationship with the community you’re seeking, and partner with these organizations for your success. I’m writing this guest post for Carolyn Parrs and team at Mind Over Markets because I was so taken with what she and the organization were doing in the space of green / ecological marketing. In this new space, marketing is about connecting and building relationships that yield. Your opportunities are tied to how you choose to reach these markets, and how you intend to take your first steps towards earning their trust. Instead of selecting based on price, seek some results-driven guidance from marketers who you feel will know your audience’s challenges and reservations, and select them. That’s what I do.

–Chris Brogan is President of New Marketing Labs, LLC, and co-author of the NYT/WSJ bestselling book Trust Agents. He blogs regularly at chrisbrogan.com

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