TODAY’S STUDY: GREEN AS SEEN BY THE MARKETEERS

Tomorrow, Earth Day 2011, is arguably the stupidest day in the year. Yet if there were no such day, NewEnergyNews would surely advocate for creating one.

Earth Day is a classic case of “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Mother’s Day was like that. Who could argue with the idea of dedicating a day to remembering the blessings of Mom? Then the marketeers got to it and drowned it in Hallmark cards and empty materialism and guilt.

NewEnergyNews knew a guy who brought his mother a bunch of daisies almost every Sunday morning but on Mother’s Day he stopped by and made her cook breakfast.

One of the smartest of NewEnergyNews' mentors, a leader in the No New Coal Plants movement (arguably the most successful grassroots movement in the nation today, having stopped Big Coal in its tracks), has recently taken to observing that there is no point in talking climate change to heads of utilities and power companies because they just won’t get it.

The only way to reach them, he now says, is to show them that instituting Energy Efficiency and using the profits to build New Energy is the only smart way to go.

Forget the hockey stick graphs showing the severity of global warming, the bottom line is the only line money people see. Thus, the advent of Earth Day, when everyone is remonstrated to be or go green and the marketing mavens, herein known as marketeers, study their polls trying to understand why green just isn’t selling.

Some of the marketeers have, like the No New Coal Plants guy, moved on. They are now working with every nerve in their hustling little souls to sell sustainability.

Reducing, reusing and recycling really do add up. That’s why NewEnergyNews admits it would have advocated for Earth Day if Senator Gaylord Nelson and John McConnell hadn’t gotten there first. But until Paris, Shanghai and Brasilia go off-grid, the only way to save this good earth is moving as quickly and efficiently as possible to the blessings of sun, wind, deep heat and flowing waters.

In a perfect world, every day would be Earth Day (like the guy who regularly took his mother flowers) and tomorrow would be the ideal day to rent a Hummvie and drive out into rush hour traffic (like the guy making his mother cook on Mother’s Day).

But, as evidenced by the report highlighted below, this is a more than slightly stupid world. Not only will people not change their ways, but the marketeers have decided it simply means they need to find a better way to sell green.

So have a nice Earth Day. Move to a yurt. Buy some organic lingerie. Or look into solar panels and write Congress demanding a national renewable energy standard and a law streamlining new transmission.

Mainstream Green: Moving Sustainability from Niche to Normal
Graceann Bennett & Freya Williams, April 2011 (Ogilvy & Mather)

Executive Summary

Over the past several years, research in the green marketing space has repeatedly revealed a gaping disparity between what mainstream consumers say they intend to do and what they actually do when it comes to living and shopping sustainably. At OgilvyEarth we call this the Green Gap. The Green Gap isn’t just a concern for environmentalists; many of the world’s leading corporations are staking their futures on the bet that sustainability will become a major driver of mainstream consumer purchase behavior. Unless they can figure out how to close the gap, there will never be a business case for green.

In the 2011 study “Mainstream Green: Moving sustainability from niche to normal,” OgilvyEarth presents fresh insight into the factors behind the Green Gap and identifies a host of innovative ways we can begin to close it. Many of the insights we found were surprising. What we learned will enable marketers, governments, and NGOs to:

• create products and services that better meet consumer needs

• change consumers’ perceptions of the value of green products and inspire them to take action

• target communication more effectively

• establish their leadership on the journey to a more sustainable world

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Topline: We’ve been getting the message all wrong

Our research shows that when it comes to motivating the American Mainstream, marketers, governments, and NGOs have been approaching messaging and marketing around sustainability all wrong. Indeed much of what we’ve been doing has actually been cementing the Green Gap by making green behavior too difficult and costly from a practical, financial, and social standpoint.

Our approach has been based on some fundamental misunderstandings summarized here and available in greater detail in the full report:

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We’ve Been Missing the Middle

The study found that 82% of Americans have good green intentions but only 16% are dedicated to fulfilling these intentions, putting 66% firmly in what we’re calling the Middle Green. Considering green behavior on a continuum, most of the dialogue and marketing to date has focused on Super Greens on the one hand and Green Rejecters on the other. There has been limited success in motivating the masses or the Middle Green, for a number of reasons that were uncovered in the research.


Green Feels Niche

The Mainstream Green Study reveals that half of study respondents think the green and environmentally friendly product category is for “Crunchy Granola Hippies” or “Rich Elitist Snobs” rather than “Everyday Americans.” No wonder the Middle has proven difficult to motivate: marketing has inadvertently been positioning the category as niche rather than mainstream, sending the Middle the signal that it is “not for them.” We don’t market Budweiser the same way we market Stella Artois, so why are we trying to motivate the Green Middle with the same tactics we use for the highly motivated Super Green niche? As marketers know, you can’t motivate a mass movement with niche marketing.

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High Costs of Green

The number-one barrier Americans claimed was holding them back from more sustainable behaviors was money. The price premium many eco-friendly products carry over “regular” products is not just a financial barrier; it also says to the regular consumer, “this is for someone sophisticated, someone rich…not you.” But the costs are more than financial. Our research found that the valiant minority that venture into the green space do so with a relatively high social and emotional cost. Upper Middle and Super Greens told us they feel ostracized from their neighbors, families, and friends; the mainstream said they fear attracting the negative judgment of their peers if they go out on a limb to purchase green products. Being human, those in the Middle don’t want to feel different, they want to feel normal. Until green products and services feel normal, the Middle is unlikely to embrace them.

Green Guilt

Green is a major mood kill. Nearly half of Americans claim to feel guiltier “the more they know” about how to live a sustainable lifestyle. Super Greens feel twice the guilt as the average American. People told us they feel guilty about everything from their flat screen TV to their Sunday paper to their Christmas tree. Flooded with guilt, they want to retreat to the comfort of ignorance. Now that we understand this, we can see where sustainability marketing has gone wrong. People don’t need to know about the state of polar bears in the Arctic to turn off the lights — paradoxically, it may be stopping them from doing so.

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Green is the New Pink

The barrier is even higher for men. Fully 82% of our respondents said going green is “more feminine than masculine.” No wonder then that men clustered to the left, less-green side of our continuum while the greener, right side was dominated by women. This feminization holds men back from visible green behavior like using reusable grocery bags or carrying around reusable water bottles, and even from driving a Prius.

There’s a Big Opportunity for Mainstream Brands

We asked Americans if they would rather purchase the environmentally responsible product-line from a mainstream brand that they’re familiar with (such as Clorox’s Green Works) or purchase a product from a company who specializes in being green and environmentally responsible (such as Seventh Generation). Seventy-three percent of Americans opted for the known, mainstream brand. A legacy of inferior performance prevents consumers from taking the leap to an unknown, eco brand.

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Higher Stakes than Whiter Whites

While consumers are loath to sacrifice convenience for sustainability, our research showed they aren’t always just being lazy; they may be weighing higher-stakes consequences. If I let my kid ride his bike, will he get hit by a car? If I use the less-efficient green cleaning product, will my baby get E. coli ? When it comes to a choice between saving a little gas and your kid’s life, it’s easy to see how the less eco-friendly choice often wins out.

The Complexity of Carbon Calculus

Is it worse to use cloth or disposable diapers? To stick with your old SUV or buy a new Prius? Eighty-two percent of Americans from our survey don’t have a clue on how to calculate their carbon footprint. Maybe that’s why 80% of Americans would rather cure cancer than fix the environment; they need topics to be personal, positive, and plausible — which the environment, as of now, is not.

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Closing the Green Gap: 12 Steps

In our Report we outline 12 steps to closing the gap. These are grounded in the populist and popular thinking that is relevant to the mass consumer. They call for a shift from an over-emphasis on changing attitudes to working on normalizing green behaviors. Essentially, we need to mainstream green. We topline five of the steps here; the remaining seven can be found in the full report:

• Make it Normal: The great Green Middle aren’t looking for things to set them apart from everyone else. They want to fit in. When it comes to driving mass behavior change, we marketers need to restrain the urge to make going green feel cool or different and make it normal. OPOWER does this brilliantly by showing you how your energy bill compares to your neighbor’s.

• Eliminate the Sustainability Tax: We’re taxing people’s virtuous behavior. The high price of many of the greener products on store shelves suggests that we are trying to limit or discourage more sustainable choices. We must dismantle the informal luxury tax placed on green products if we are to close the Green Gap for the mainstream American consumer. Eliminating the price barrier eliminates the notion that green products are not for normal citizens.

• Make Eco-friendly Male Ego-friendly: Carry a tote, give up your 4WD truck, wear hemp t-shirts, compost… the everyday domestic choices we need to make in favor of sustainability do not make the Nascar fan’s heart race. Sustainability could use its Marlboro Man moment. In the male-dominated world of automobiles, those environmental brands grabbing male attention are doing so by relying on old-fashioned sleek and stylish ads emphasizing performance and design, with credible environmental messages woven into the appeals to primal desires to go fast and look good doing it.

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• Lose the Crunch: Just because a product is green doesn’t mean it must be packaged in burlap. We need to ditch the crunch factor of green and liberate ourselves from the stereotypes. And the best way to do it may be not to mention the “G” word at all; that or push sustainability down the benefit hierarchy.

•Hedonism over Altruism: The emotional tenor of sustainable marketing to date has been focused on appeals to Americans’ altruistic tendencies, but our research shows that this is to deny human nature. The study reveals the simple truth that people are motivated by things they enjoy doing, like having fun, so rather than making sustainability choices seem like a righteous thing to do, wise brands are tapping into enjoyment over altruism and seeking to hit the consumer’s “G-spot.”

The study shows that it is time to forge a new era of sustainability marketing. It’s time to acknowledge human nature; self-interest will always trump altruism. It’s time to focus on changing behavior, not attitudes. And it’s time we all agree that “normal” is neither a dirty word nor a boring strategy. Normal is mainstream; normal is popular; and above all, normal is the key to sustainability.

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Methodology

The research approach, being mindful that the very premise for this study is the discrepancy between people’s stated intentions and actions, went at it from every angle in order to triangulate to the truth. Ideas were inspired and fermented by expert interviews and secondary research. We spent time doing ethnographies in homes and neighborhoods of 15 subjects in three key markets: San Francisco, Chicago, and the New York Metro area, between September 2010 and February 2011. These interviewees were representative of various lifestyles and life stages. We talked to 1,800 Americans through a conversational quantitative research study, using MarketTools True Sample, representative of the U.S. adult population, in two phases, September 2010 and February 2011.