April 12th, 2010 by Carolyn Parrs & Irv Weinberg, Mind Over Markets
Sorry to sound like a broken record but here we go again. If green is going to have any real impact, you got to make it about me. Bring your message down to earth. Make it personal. I don’t eat organic pizza to save the planet. I eat it because it tastes better. I don’t wear eco anything because of a melting iceberg. I wear it because it feels better and I look great in it. But don’t believe me. This week in Joel Makower’s blog post ”
Me First, Planet Later” he reported:
“The news this year is not encouraging. The Great Recession has taken its toll, as has the “controversy” created by climate deniers — those advocating that climate change either isn’t real, or that it isn’t caused by human activity, or if it is, the “fix” is too costly, especially during tough times. Interest in and commitment to environmental problems and solutions has dropped among Americans. With the exception of committed environmentalists — a relative sliver of the populace — the mood has switched from “What can I do to be helpful?” to “What’s in it for me?”
Frankly, we always believed it was the latter that really moved the needle toward green from as far back as saving the ozone layer. Making ozone personal is what did the job. Now what about your product? How are you making your green message personal so we really give a #%&*?
Tags: Carolyn Parrs, green message, green business, green communications, Green marketing, Green Marketing Blog, Greenbiz.com, Irv Weinberg, Joel Makower, Me first planet later, Mind Over Markets, ozone layer, saving the planet, sustainability in business
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June 15th, 2009 by Carolyn Parrs & Irv Weinberg, Mind Over Markets
It’s easy to point your finger at Coca-Cola’s environmental effort and use your middle finger instead of your index finger. But when one of the world’s largest fillers of landfills, that’s where 75% of all Coke bottles end up, adopts the PlantBottle, a more eco-friendly bottle made in part from sugar cane and molasses, we should all drink to that.
This move alone doesn’t make Coke a green champion but it certainly will help make them less of a culprit. And all that green money they’ll spend to promote it will help to get the environmental message out to a much broader segment of the population. We should all hope this will start a trend in the beverage world and their competition will follow, as they usually do. Since we started writing the Green Marketing Blog, our hope was to help marketers take their messages and their products more mainstream so the green world becomes the everyday and not the alternative world.
A marketing professor interviewed for this article said, “Anything you wrap in green is going to sell.” I don’t agree. Green, as we’ve said many times before, needs to make sense if it’s going to be viable for the long haul. If not, it will stay on the fringes and that’s not where the real change takes place.
Irv
Tags: Carolyn Parrs, Coca-Cola, Coke, green business, Green marketing, Green Marketing Blog, green messaging, Irv Weinberg, Mind Over Markets, PlantBottle, sustainability
Posted in Corporations and Green, Environment | No Comments »
