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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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

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No matter what your personal opinion is about climate change, there is no doubt that it is having a profound impact on the marketplace. A huge amount of attention is focused on what companies are doing and whether they are part of the problem or part of the solution.

Today more than 90% of peer-reviewed scientific studies say climate change is real and humans are contributing to it in one form or another.  Images that flash across the Weather Channel compete with the Chiller Channel for sheer horror as tornadoes devastate, rivers rise and flood, heat sears the nation, and cyclones leave thousands homeless or dead.  

All this attention, plus record-breaking energy prices, are motivating consumers across the globe to demand action.  

Billions of dollars are being invested in companies developing alternative energy and other sustainable technologies. Customers, shareholders and employees are pressing companies to reduce their carbon footprints and adopt other sustainability initiatives.  

The risk of inaction overwhelms the benefits of taking action to protect your hard-earned reputation and standing. We live at a time when opinion-driven news and commentary spreads like a virus. What does it say about your company if you don’t say or do something positive and proactive?  Can you afford to sit in silence on the sidelines?  The answer I think is a resounding no.

It is incumbent on every organization to state its actions and intentions. Not with platitudes and hot air, but with substance.  You have to say what you are doing and what you intend to do and state it clearly, precisely and without grandiosity.

Energy company commercials with central casting Granddads teaching their cherubic Grandsons how to fly fish are not going to do it.  We need to hear how much they are investing in alternative sources of energy that will get us off our addiction to foreign oil.  They need to show us that they are not just sucking money out of our pockets, but rather investing profits in a more sustainable future.  We have reached the point where it’s not just polar bears that are endangered, it’s us.

Once again it comes back to our basic premise that meaningful change is beginning to take place because the issue has become personal, not just planetary. With the East Coast boiling, the Mid-West flooding, and the West Coast burning, climate change is no longer something we can just talk about; it’s something we all have to do something about. Buying green, thinking green, talking green and insisting on green may not be the entire answer, but it is a start.

Developing, implementing, and effectively communicating a coherent sustainability strategy will cost real money, but failure to act will cost a lot more. Are there steps you can take now to protect and enhance your reputation?  What actions can you take to enhance your competitive position? Can you grow your business by developing green products that educated consumers will want to buy?  Those are just a few of the questions every business leader has to answer — not someday, but now.

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Sustainability is one of those words that you hear repeated over and over again, but strangely enough most companies cannot decide what it really means.  According to The Economist, only 29% of executives surveyed have a coherent sustainability strategy.   Of those that do have a strategy, few communicate it effectively.

A recent commercial for a wind energy company took a predictable and ineffective approach by featuring lofty images, stirring music and a garbled message.  The commercial failed to take into account one of the Ten Commandments of Green Marketing, which is to appeal to the head as well as the heart.  Green consumers are more inquisitive, less trusting, and better informed than the average consumer.  

What really struck me about the commercial was its emphasis on local action, which was delivered by an announcer with an Australian accent.  It shows once again how big companies make big mistakes trying to appeal to green consumers.

Effective green marketing respects the consumer’s intelligence and delivers the message with authenticity and credibility.       

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Some might think it is.  I think it’s more a question of accepting reality as it really is.  Our modern world consumes.   That’s a fact of life.   The question is can we accomplish something good for the planet as a whole if we understand and work with that? 

Gary Hirschberg of Stonyfield Yogurt faced just such a dilemma when their company was sold to Groupe Danone.  But he decided he could do more good for everyone concerned when he found a way to bring his product more mainstream and achieve greater distribution.

Visionary and author, Paul Hawken states, “Business is the only mechanism on the planet today powerful enough to produce the changes necessary to reverse global environmental and social degradation.”   Some of that business might include manufacturing green products.

In the perfect world, none of us would consume but that is not a possibility for planet Earth in the 21st century.   Our job and our quickest way to advance the green movement is to convert consumers from products that don’t promote planet health to green products that do.  The more believable and salient the green message, the faster and more effectively we can help accomplish that.  

Imagine if all of us switched to hybrids, non-polluting detergents, non-toxic cleaning supplies, reduced the chemical loads on our lawns and gardens, increased the amount of organics we ate, pressured officials to increase the amount of available alternative energy, went solar, reused, recycled and reduced.  

Wouldn’t that move all of us to a greener, more sustainable future?   Green commerce is not THE answer but is an answer to migrating as many consumers as we can to a better, greener and healthier way. 

That way we all win. 

Irv Weinberg

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