Green Messaging Case Study: “The greenest link in the supply chain.”
February 15th, 2010 by Carolyn Parrs & Irv Weinberg, Mind Over Markets
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.
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