Archive for the ‘green advertising’ Category

With the number of companies going green these days, it can be difficult to distinguish between those which promote genuine environmental initiatives and those which are simply greenwashing. Yet as stakeholder demand for environmental stewardship continues to rise, the divide between these two types of campaigns – the genuine and the phony – will become increasingly clear. Knowing the “best practices” for successful green marketing will prove essential for brand differentiation and increased accountability.

There are two simple keys to running a successful green marketing campaign. The first is know and engage your audience. This includes not only understanding the values and expectations of customers, investors, and other relevant stakeholders, but tailoring specific green initiatives to address those concerns and allow people to become involved.

This starts with understanding who your stakeholders are. “Stakeholders” can be anyone from corporate partners, shareholders, indirectly affected organizations (ie a company’s upstream or downstream) right down do the individual consumer. What environmental issues do they care about? Why? Are they “light green” (young, well-educated, tend to donate to the occasional environmental nonprofit) or “dark green” (opinion leaders attempting to lead the greenest lives possible)?

Once each of different types of stakeholders have been qualified, they must be strategically engaged and actively made aware of the organization’s initiatives and how they (the stakeholders) fit into the picture. Amazon.com, for example, has found success with their Green 3 module, which has users tell their friends which green products to buy via their profiles.

The second key to effective green marketing is to simply be honest. With the amount of empty environmental initiatives being promoted by companies today, not enough can be said for the value of clear, understandable initiatives, identifiable benchmarks, and transparency. Basically, walk the walk if you decide to talk the talk.

Of course, being honest about slashing your carbon footprint by half is more powerful than being honest about, say, planting a few trees outside your corporate headquarters. But what’s key is reporting accurate, measurable details, including tracking progress toward longer-term goals.

These days, simply publishing an annual report detailing how much recycled paper you use or how you’ll reduce truck idling will no longer cut it. In order to be truly transparent, green marketing campaigns must engage relevant stakeholders, establish clear benchmarks, and report progress toward those benchmarks with clarity and honesty.

By Grant Draper, Partner at The Element Agency in New York

A year ago, Amtrak, the U.S. passenger rail service, began offering carbon offsets to its passengers through CarbonFund.org (a U.S. nonprofit which also offsets 100% of The Element Agency’s carbon emissions).

“By choosing to travel by rail, Amtrak passengers are already a step ahead because the carbon footprint generated by their trip is smaller than that of most other modes of transportation,” Roy Deitchman, Vice President, Environmental Health & Safety for Amtrak said in a statement. “Because it is more energy efficient, traveling by rail contributes less per passenger mile to greenhouse gas emissions than either cars or airplanes. Rail travel also helps to reduce highway congestion in major urban centers.”

Now that higher fuel prices have made train travel more attractive, green marketing efforts are picking up steam on both sides of the Atlantic, reports the U.K.’s Guardian.

Norfolk Southern has been running ads like the one above since May. Go to its site, and the firm boosts “Norfolk Trains may be painted black and white, but every day they prove they’re green.”

Union Pacific also promotes its green advantages front and center on its homepage.

“Our employees understand that protecting the environment is part of every job, and they are creating and implementing world-class energy conservation techniques that are helping us to move more freight with less fuel.” argues Union Pacific.

We don’t need any convincing that train travel is often the greenest choice. But why does it cost more than a plane to travel along the U.S. Eastern seaboard?

By Stefan Deeran at The Element Agency in New York