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News and analysis on sustainability, corporate social responsibility, stakeholder engagement, and Internet and other digital marketing and communications. You'll even get some very practical tips on these topics that you can put to immediate use!

June 20th, 2008

Green Homes for All?

My family and I are nearing the end of the process of building a new home in New Paltz, NY, in the Hudson Valley area. This has been a great opportunity to live and have a home in a region we love that’s “us” and that, of course, incorporates a large number of green elements. We didn’t realize it was the type of home some, especially among the Hollywood set, now consider the “new trophy home” as the NY Times recently put it — small and ecological. It’s simply what we’ve wanted for a while now, for our health and environmental reasons, and have had the good fortune to pursue.

The process has been jaw-droppingly time-consuming, though – I’ve spent hundreds of hours on it over the last year and a half, and my wife dozens or hundreds more. We understand from other friends that have had homes built that the process is de facto a time-consuming one; but I know our desire for numerous green elements added to that significantly as well.

It didn’t help that the process started around the time the credit crisis accelerated — the large national lender we started with for the home construction loan (HCL) took dozens of hours of my time alone, approving our application but then deciding to close their HCL department. I had to start the whole HCL application process over with a new lender.

That’s why, when I saw this recently-posted video below, I had to share it. It shows a much simpler way to have a new green home. Hopefully new ideas and economies of scale will continue to make the process easier for both existing and new home owners — I’m not sure we’d go through the process again if given the choice, unless it was something like the modular home in the video. The Hollywood people probably have teams of architects and designers to help them with green homes constructed on site from scratch!

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June 20th, 2008

G’day – What Green Certifications are Credible?

I came across a video from “down under” by a self-proclaimed expert on environmental management systems stating that ISO 14001 is the only credible green certification for businesses worldwide (see below). With the dozens (hundreds?) of government and non-governmental certifications that have sprouted in the last decade or two, I thought that was a provocative statement.

While the “expert’s” website is geared heavily toward making the sale, rather than providing additional information, she makes some good points in her video about the problem of green washing and loose guidelines in many green certification programs, rather than hard, provable standards.

The FTC is going through its rules on green marketing now, and these points are well taken. We will be putting together soon a paper on the FTC’s process and what it will mean for green marketing and green marketers.

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August 21st, 2007

Digital Marketers See Green: Small Properties Gobbled Up

ClickZ, a respected source of information on interactive marketing that I admire just posted an excellent article discussing how “digital eco-marketing initiatives devoted to saving the planet – or at least talking about it in ads – has been picking up.”

The article, lengthy by online standards, covers more details than others I’ve seen from mainstream and industry media not specifically geared toward environmental or social issues, and hits some topics I’ve covered in this blog in recent months, including some of the articles in this issue of the Conscious Clicks newsletter.

ClickZ editor and author of the article, Zachary Rodgers, adeptly points out that mainstream green marketing efforts are crowding in on green marketing’s endemic advertisers — companies like Seventh Generation, Organic Valley and Method. This is one of a number of important effects from this trend that I’m analyzing in a white paper on green marketing I hope to release later this year (if interested in getting a copy, please email me).

Yet many blue chips hitting the green media circuit for the first time are finding the rules are a little different online.

As we’ve known for a while and have advised our clients, demographics don’t matter nearly as much as psychographics when it comes to green marketing, especially on the web. People who care about different issues such as the climate crisis, indoor air quality or fair trade, can be targeted directly with greater success than trying to reach them through channels with certain demographics in their audience like gender, age, etc.

Web marketing allows for dialogs – think email, blogs and social nets – and that’s driving a wave of recent consolidation in green market media. Online, that consolidation includes Discovery Communications’ purchase of TreeHugger.com, National Geographic’s acquisition of The Green Guide, and Gaiam’s acquisition of eco-lifestyles media firm Lime Media and Zaadz, a “LOHAS” social net. (Discosloure: The Green Guide and Lime Media are SRB clients; also, not a Hawaiin greeting, many of you already know that LOHAS stands for Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability).

These dialogs between many authentic, green new-media companies and their engaged audiences can be powerful. As president of TreeHugger, Ken Rother says: “There’s this implicit trust between… TreeHugger and the reader. That trust takes a lot of work to build. It’s our belief that the advertising should have similar conceptual values to the content.”

Jakob Daschek is a founder and creative director of Syrup, the creative and production agency that worked with GE agency-of-record BBDO on the effort. He believes the U.S. market has become considerably more sophisticated about environmental issues since the campaign began 18 months ago.

“With the first launch of Ecomagination, we had this whole thing educating people about what the issues are,” he said. “Now we’re migrating it out into specifically what GE is doing, because people know at this point [about the issues], and they can benefit from knowing exactly what GE is doing.”

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February 20th, 2007

Is BIG Green Business a Good Thing?

Jason Mark and Kevin Danaher’s post on AltnerNet asks this question, close to my heart. They point out that GE and BP are ramping up their renewable energy efforts; prominent architects are using recycled and reused materials, and the market for non-residential green building is at $43 billion a year; more than $2 trillion in assets are invested in socially responsible funds; and sales of organically grown food are growing at 20 percent per year.

They also ask lots of more detailed and important questions related to this theme:

How can we celebrate companies that move toward better practices while acknowledging how much farther they need to go? Will transnational corporations use green practices to more effectively wipe out their mom-and-pop competitors? Will organic standards be weakened by the power of large corporations? Will Americans retain their bad habits of overconsumption but simply switch to earth-friendly products?

There are no hard answers, of course.

I agree with the authors’ premise that we need not view the BIG green business revolution (that has followed the small green business revolution, in progress for decades) through either/or thinking that says we can either have Safeway organic broccoli or we can have local farmers’ markets.

Rather, we should adopt a both/and mentality that makes room for each path. There always has been and always will be more than one way forward.

In fact, as a “mom-and-pop competitor” myself (there are lots of much larger marketing agencies out there seeing the advantage of green initiatives), I remain optimistic that smaller, nimbler organizations will always find and better serve the right niches. And when the time is right, those smaller, green organizations that offer enough continued value will either remain in business or be integrated into larger organizations reaching greater numbers of people. That’s been the case with such companies as Stonyfield Farm (acquired by Danon), White Wave (acquired by Deans Foods), and Green & Black’s Organic (acquired by Cadbury-Schweppes), to name just a few. If the acquiring company looses the purpose of the green brand, new smaller competitors will emerge to serve the niche.

As Mark and Danaher state: “The idea is to construct a green economy broad enough to accommodate a range of interests, niches for both the deeply committed and the newly curious — while of course at all times pushing farther and constantly redefining ‘mainstream’ and ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable.’”

For more on these questions as specifically applied to the organic foods industry, see Jurriaan Kamp’s article in Ode magazine — Organic goes mainstream – and why that’s cause for celebration.

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CONSCIOUS CLICKS - The Blog

Green Homes for All?

G’day – What Green Certifications are Credible?

Digital Marketers See Green: Small Properties Gobbled Up

Is BIG Green Business a Good Thing?

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CONSCIOUS CLICKS - The Blog

Top 15 Green Social Networks

Green Homes for All?

G’day – What Green Certifications are Credible?

Digital Marketers See Green: Small Properties Gobbled Up

Is BIG Green Business a Good Thing?

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