Green marketing refers to the process of selling products and/or services based on their environmental benefits. Such a product or service may be environmentally friendly in itself or produced and/or packaged in an environmentally friendly way.
The obvious assumption of green marketing is that potential consumers will view a product or service's "greenness" as a benefit and base their buying decision accordingly. The not-so-obvious assumption of green marketing is that consumers will be willing to pay more for green products than they would for a less-green comparable alternative product - an assumption that, in my opinion, has not been proven conclusively. Green is now mainstream—and recession-proof. According to Reuters, a full 82 percent of U.S. consumers are buying at least some green products even during the current economic crisis.
Different between Sustainable Marketing and Green Marketing: It isn't just about selling green products to the LOHAS market segment, which encompasses 63 million people. Or the $540 billion Cultural Creatives market. Sustainable Marketing gives traditional marketing methods and discipline to entrepreneurs in the green marketing sector, teaches corporate social responsibility and green marketing to existing well-established companies, and also going beyond branding, evolving marketing, understanding our customers better, their values, emotions, and buying behavior, and their hopes for making a sustainable, restorative relationship with their families, their communities, and the earth.
SustainableMarketing.com is one of the only agencies to bring the whole life-cycle approach to green marketing, from designing better sustainable and green products, to finding sustainable ways to build your sales and your business. Sustainable Marketing coordinates a network of professionals with deep knowledge of how to communicate sustainability - and inspire customers from the core to the mainstream. Our talents include branding, internet marketing, public relations, business development, sales training, graphic design, and measuring and teaching sustainability. That's Sustainable, Green Marketing.
Today's customers are more demanding. With green marketers having sullied their images with all manner of greenwashing, today's communications are likely to be accompanied by one or more of the 299 ecolabels offered by trusted third parties — NGO's, environmental groups, retailers, and government agencies — and even "self declarations" provided in the interest of "transparency," another rising theme. In Monterey, for instance, the Clorox brand manager boasted of his company's recognition from the U.S. EPA's Design for Environment labeling program, as well as an endorsement from the Sierra Club. His competitor from S.C. Johnson pointed to his company's website where consumers can find a list of ingredients for many of their brands.
Simple product labels and ingredient lists, however, are no longer enough. While green marketing has moved well beyond brands that appeal to the "deep green" niche, at the same time the relationship-building tools of social media allow marketers to tap into a gold mine of passionately green customers for market research tidbits. Seventh Generation, the granddaddy of green cleaning products, has an "Inspired Protoganist" blog and a "Seventh Generation Nation" social network on its website with thousands of members providing feedback and suggesting new product ideas. Method has its own Facebook page complete with a wall of comments from many of their over 6,000 "fans" and a Twitter following of over 2,000 users. Not bad for soap.
Where once green cleaners gathered dust on health food store shelves, contemporary sustainable branders are finding an exciting new market opportunity in the mainstream. In the cleaning category, it's hard to get more mainstream than Clorox. Clorox's Greenworks line is being fueled as much by its well-known brand name as it is by the same natural ingredients that characterize so many other green brands on the shelves. The Clorox rep in Monterey announced sales and market share increases even in the face of a recession, declaring that GreenWorks now represents 45% of the natural cleaning category, muscling out the venerable, "deep green" Seventh Generation, which was introduced, well, twenty years ago.
Sources:
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/leadinggreen/2009/07/green-marketing-has-come-a-lon.html
http://greenormal.blogspot.com/
http://greenmarketingblog.com/
Acadmecian in Higher Education
