While it’s a fairly slippery concept to define, green marketing is in essence the selling of a product that has a perceived environmental benefit. This includes how the product is sourced, modified, packaged, distributed and advertised; and it is this last point that we will explore here.
Green marketing challenges existing notions of marketing, in the face of our environmental and social realities. As concern over climate change grows and individuals become more attuned to how they consume, sustainability is increasingly important in their purchasing decisions, and they will choose “green(er)” brands.
In saying that it is concerned about our world and our future, a company is telling its customers that it shares their values. The customers develop emotional loyalty to that brand; they come to love it. What the brand must then do is convert that emotional loyalty into action, by prioritising their shared values.
This goes way beyond loyalty programmes and shopper points. In effect, brands must bare their hearts to their customers, and show how they are creating a better environment and a more sustainable future through their activities; they must derive environmental and social dividends, as well as financial ones.
Customers quickly pick up on corporate insincerity, though. Greenwashing – that lamentable marketing practice of making a business appear sustainable when it is, in fact, anything but – is a stupid, dishonest approach that will derive short-term gains and longer-term losses. Institutional investor Warren Buffett is largely credited with saying that it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it, and he (or whoever said it, because the internet also attributes it to others) is right.
The supermarket chain that trumpets greenness but imports most of its fresh goods; the oil company that pays to protect turtles or seabirds but its product pollutes more than ever; the brewery that recycles bottles but does little to curb its massive water usage; the organic food brand that uses non-recyclable packaging … Sooner or later, consumers find out and, betrayed, many leave. Maybe they’ll post the break-up on social media for good measure.
However, when a brand’s sustainability credentials are for real, when environmental, social and governance (or ESG) principles are baked into its way of doing things, that’s when green marketing comes into its own. (From a marketing perspective, there’s little more exciting than promoting an authentic brand to a jaded audience and seeing them embrace it nevertheless.)
But how green is the marketing itself? What are the marketers’ sustainability chops – do they walk the talk, too? Can they really create authentic campaigns if they don’t? And what is their contribution to the brand’s sustainability account?
Flow Communications, where I work, is today far better off sustainability-wise than it was five years ago. A huge part of that has been going remote, which we did a few weeks before the Covid-19 lockdown (the foresight of our owners around the future of work giving us a head start on others).
Immediately, 60-plus commuters, mainly in cars, were taken off the road. We no longer operated energy- and water-intensive premises. These days, we do far fewer on-site client visits; it’s nearly all online. Over time our head office address and some of our staff have switched to solar, further reducing our overall energy impact.
We’re also steadily moving away from traditional, paper-heavy marketing materials and in-person interaction to more sustainable solutions: from WhatsApp business cards to award-winning online eventing, and AI- and social media-based loyalty to digital marketing for environmental sustainability campaigns, we’re constantly finding novel, green(er) ways to grow brand loyalty.
No matter the platform, however, for green marketing to succeed a brand must always be authentic and tell a believable story. It stands to reason that many can tell a clever story (for marketing is replete with clever people), but to tell it believably, the storytellers should themselves be believers.