Dwell Creative and the Environment

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The Green Market Niche: Being Green, Going Mainstream (Part 1)

by John Rooks March 20, 2007

• Source: Marketing Profs

I'm going to start an ad agency the niche market of which is marketing for niche ad agencies. It seems that there are as many niche agencies out there now as there are niches. And, like eBay, it seems that ad agencies have found the long tail. Smaller, more specialized firms are making compelling arguments for their existence—even competing with larger agencies for specialized project work.

But unlike the market for, say, Russian Carnivalesque Literature, the long tail of the "Green Marketing" niche seems to be getting thicker as America mainstreams into greener consumerism (some call it "prosumerism").

With such a dynamic and emerging marketplace, it's important to understand where the Green Market came from and how it will progress into the future. This series of articles will be taking a closer look at this swelling market by dissecting the factors that may contribute to its sustainability or fracture its foundation.

What we find may leave you confident of a smooth transition from fringe to mainstream—or questioning whether a sudden market burst and decline in receptivity to "greenness" is looming.

Let's begin by breaking down the current state of the marketplace.

Is It Really Not Easy Being Green?

There are no shortages of small markets available to smaller agencies that don't feel like competing for the local bank, insurance company, and restaurant business. One niche that has catapulted in the last three years is the Green Agency niche—those ad agencies that care about their clients' social and environmental standards. Or, maybe, they don't care, but realize that Green is a growing market. But let's be optimistic.

The market is large and growing—the Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) marketplace is now a $209 billion space. That's a lot of hemp. But of course it's not hemp. It's green building, renewable energy, socially responsible investing, alternative transportation, healthcare, natural, organics; nutritional products, dietary supplements, home and office products, tourism, and travel.

The optimistic take: Consumers care what they consume. The pessimistic take: Consumers care what it looks like they consume (can you say brand washing?). Either way, the market is huge. But the language is different, depending on your audience.

Once relegated to the fringe markets of "hippie" products and granola aisles, the Green Market has been pulled from the fringes into the mainstream by several factors:

1. The mainstream press has picked up on "Green as Gold" stories. These stories comment on the economics of "going green" (market size, market affluence, cost-savings on building and operational performance, etc.)
2. Major corporations have thrown money at huge ad campaigns promoting their Green-ness. Look at BP's $140 million campaign to support a $500 million solar division, and by extension re-brand the company.
3. Al Gore, global warming and, by President Bush's own admission, America's addiction to oil have brought the issue to the masses.

All good things for the Green Agency. But like marketing to any subculture, it helps to understand the market: Why is it developing? What language works best? What are the previous trends? And, most critically, What's next?

Looking at the World Through Green-Colored Glasses

Some observations about marketing to the Green(ing) consumer:

• Be authentic. The green consumer is willing to self-educate. They can and will sniff out Greenwashing. When they do, they will tell their friends. The mainstream may care less about Greenwashing, but they will also look to the trend-setting True Greens for product approval and authentication.
• Back it up. Use numbers—simple, easy-to-digest numbers. Look at Timberland's new eco-nutrition label as a good example. It's simple, accurate, and creative.
• The color "Green" is both a boon and a curse. No matter what Pantone mix you choose, anyone can use the color green and be associated with being Green. Make your message deeper than that; otherwise, you may get caught up in the Greenwash and end up in a sea of not-so-green companies.
• "Green" is a politically charged word. Just acknowledge that fact when you sit down to write copy for the next ad.
• The Green consumers of the new wave are not treehuggers. They are over-educated, SUV-driving, Whole Foods-shopping, expendable-income-having soccer moms... and they love thinking that they are green. Make sure your message isn't too green to drive them away (see No. 4 and No. 1).
• Greenwashing will work for a while. But like any brand, it's a promise. Fail to fulfill the promise, and customers will leave in droves. 30 minutes or less, the real thing, my kids are safe at Disneyland, be like Mike... all of these are promises that deliver on some level. Green brands need to do the same, or die.
• Watch your language. Like the "Latino agency," "the active and over 60 agency," or the "urban youth agency," you have to understand the language of the (sub)culture you are targeting. Green has a language all its own, and it's changing faster than you can say "ecomagination."

The Green Market Niche, Part 2: Who Killed the Electric Car (or How to Be a Good Greenwasher)

by John Rooks May 1, 2007

• Source: Marketing Profs

Some fringe markets develop into not so fringe markets. Very few hit the big time and go mainstream. It's the same odds for Hollywood starlets. Chances are the fringe will stay right where it is—on the outskirts of popularity. And, for that matter, once given the chance at greatness even fewer will come back from their own "Come on Eileen"—just ask Dexy.

The fringe-to-great path is rare and, for that reason, worthy of review. Reflecting on past green products that were moving toward mainstream but failed... illustrates some of the challenges of legitimacy that innovation can face. On the other hand, monitoring those who have been notoriously self-serving and successful reveals marketing efforts to exemplify emotion, evade rationalization and drive profits.

Sony Pictures depicts an uphill battle, once lost, in "Who Killed the Electric Car," postulating that perhaps it was the oil industry. Or Republicans. Or maybe even a coalition of the five giant auto manufacturers who plotted, planned, and are responsible for the plug-in car's demise...

Despite Ed Bagley Jr.'s pleas, the electric car did in fact die. But if sales figures for Prius and other hybrids are to be believed, the second cousin to the electric car may be on the rebound. Just look at the numbers that show by March of 2007 there were already 20,526 hybrids sold. An impressive number that is greater than 2002's total annual sales.

But will the hybrid car die a death like its second cousin? Maybe—if Madison Avenue has anything to say about it.

Greenwashing may leave soap scum residue

For a long time, the green market was a fringe place, marketing compost toilets to hippies who washed with rocks (admit it, it started there). They loved the premise of the electric car and they did the math to realize the practical benefits.

But now, after a few epidemics related to health and obesity, fuel costs and addiction, mass marketing of climate change, and corporate transparency, the green fringe has moved to center-square quicker than most fringe markets. Important to note: not "quicker" in overall duration, but in haste.

Some of this growth opportunity is, no doubt, thanks to "greenwashing"—which helped catapult the marketplace to its current size. It also happens to be exactly what will kill the next "electric car."

With the mainstreaming of green products, there is also an increase in attempts by conventional companies to camouflage themselves into something they are not—exclusively to increase their own product demand and revenue. Case in point: G.E.'s ecomagination campaign is a glorious blur of positive images, pretty colors, and sexy models covered in dusty coal.

What this campaign is void of is facts. And, since G.E. understands that there can be no fact without interpretation, it leaves the facts out altogether. By not being allowed us an opportunity to interpret, we respond emotionally.

Don't be fooled, this is not by chance. G.E. is savvy enough to know that to actually interpret ecomagination would require the involvement of cerebral engagement with things G.E. might not want us to encounter with its new "green" brand.

The latest in a series of G.E. "clean coal" ads claim "harnessing the power of coal is something everybody can get behind." Apparently the folks in the ads chasing after the coal in tube socks have never seen mountaintop removal.

The old fringe hippies would never buy it. They would research, do the math, and draw their own conclusions based on facts. Today's loyal green consumer will also question the messaging and review the contradicting data.

But G.E. is betting that the mainstream consumer will do neither, and instead simply absorb and accept the emotion of the campaign... And if G.E. holds its breath, it might be right.

What's the lesson?

• If you want to attract a loyal green consumer, use concrete data to support your claims. Give them facts and invite them to interpret.
• If you want to attract mainstream consumers, use brand and emotion, the stuff we were taught back in Marketing Psych.101... and cross your fingers they don't start to actually care about legitimacy.

It's called Whole Foods Hummer Syndrome... it afflicts those consumers who want to be associated with the brand of being green and healthy, but not at the expense of any real sacrifice. The brand of being green is as powerful as the brand of being cool—that stuff that sells booze, cigarettes, muscle cars, and Prada.

Greenwashers know this. They know that the emotion of popularity—or the fear of rejection—sells. So they manufacture and market popularity. If it's manufactured fast enough, it can't be real—there's no time for authenticity in the whip of marketing.

If advertisers decide that lime is no longer the flavor of the month—when the news cycle gets stale and Gore grows tired—so goes the green buzz. The train leaves the station. The fear is then, of course, that when the only purchase pattern is based on emotion and not intellect—it is simply a fad that will revert back to the fringe.

For the green marketer, we are left asking: Could the speedy mass production of green branding deplete the niche's ability to resonate with a larger marketplace and carve an enduring place in conventional consumers' purchase patterns?

Let's face it, markets grow and pop faster than ever now. Could the answer be in slowing growth to ensure a more authentic movement, as opposed to a manufactured one? Maybe Ed Begley Jr. knows.

Green Bubbles Pop Too

by John Rooks July 17, 2007

• Source: Marketing Profs

Note: This is part 3 in a three-part series on green marketing.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel likened historical and political cycles to a pendulum in his famous Hegelian Dialectic. It states (in its quickest form) that things go from one extreme (thesis) to another (antithesis) and settle in the middle (synthesis). Always.

Housing booms, dot-coms, high-tech, bio-med, religious fervor, Republican or Democrat regimes, peace-war—all of it... all the best (and worst) bubbles have, or will, pop on their way back to the center. Perhaps Hegel was thinking more of a guillotine.

In terms of the "Greening of America," it feels like we are currently on the thesis end of the pendulum, with a fair amount more left to go to reach the apex. And then the backward slope begins. The bubble pops at the top.

The Green Bubble will pop too

But there are two popping scenarios:

1. Green will index within the mainstream and become ubiquitous.
2. It's a fad and will vanish back to the margins of our society.

Let's look at the landscape:

• Climate Crisis news is above the fold.
• Trade media and beat journalists find new angles every day to connect their scope into the green wave.
• Wal-Mart is changing packaging standards for suppliers, showing end-of-isle favor for greener products.
• Product manufacturers are changing company brand based on "the greening."
• Oil companies are marketing their oil with cartoon people filling cartoon cars with cartoon flowers. (Backed by a Flaming Lips-esque cartoon soundtrack.)
• Coke buys Odwalla, so PepsiCo buys Naked Juice.

If you want to see more examples of culture change, look at language

A new lexicon is being introduced, and the oft-bastardized "eco-" is thrown into the marketing mix as a way to "green-up" products and attract the new market. From EcoMalls to EcoCasinos, it's all lost contextually. Ecomagination is a meaningless term, and it works for that very reason. It's almost Suessean in its meaninglessness. Not to mention that the word "sustainable" is rarely understood, and still overused. But this is all unofficial language.

Official language—the language of sanction—is changing, too. Organic, Fair Trade, Green-E, Energy Star, or LEED certifications mark the packaging of the products we consume... and we consume more of them because of it.

I suppose my ad agency is an example too. While we were blissfully ignorant of the developing market four years ago, we were no doubt part of the developing green zeitgeist as general consumers. We are now certainly witnessing a competitive up-tick of Johnny-Come-Latelys from the larger homogenous ad agencies developing "Green Divisions" or disguising them as "Lifestyle Groups." They did it with their "Interactive Division" just before the dot-com bust, and they are dusting them off again with the Web2.0 race.

But that's market-chasing stuff, not market-shaping change

Ad agencies are supposed to create markets, not run after them. Change brand loyalties, not merely leverage them. But this type of talk immediately sets up a contention. It supposes that companies that are Green for, let's just say, philosophical reasons, are better than those that are only Green for profitability reasons. (They are, by the way.)

Change happens and slow companies chase it. Fast companies make it. Of this we are certain. But what is more interesting for bubble-popping is why change sticks. It seems to stick when it has more than market factors behind it. Culture changes because it must to to survive.

But when the stories start to drop below the fold, when consumers start to care just little bit less, and when Green is no longer a competitive advantage, the "for profit" Greenies will turn and vogue becomes passé. So how can it hold on? Well, as a marketing advantage, it can't.

Return to the paths of likelihood for when the Green Bubble pops

• Green Fever goes away because it is a trend, a fad. News stories drop off, the chasing arrows shrink smaller on the back of packaging again, people stop bragging that their letterhead is 100% FCS Certified and Acid Free. Some small vestiges will still remain, and progress will have been made. New products were launched and the consumers will be more aware. But the trend died... popped.

• It sticks. People keep pushing corporations to deeper levels of sustainability. Greenwashers fall on their face because it's an unfulfilled promise, and then they mean it and real change happens. Green becomes ubiquitous. Smaller, plucky green companies struggle to regain any competitive advantage. When everything is green, green means nothing. (The study of green language is already there.)

Either way, as an ad agency specializing in "being green," I'm out of a job. But in the meantime, we have an opportunity to make hay and work toward ubiquity. With the right language, the right positioning, and the right market intelligence, we can position our green companies for what's next.

When the Green Bubble pops, will your brand be intact?

John Rooks is president of Dwell Creative (www.dwellcreative.com), an advertising and PR firm focused on products, services, and causes that support sustainable living. He blogs at Green-Vox, (green-vox.typepad.com). Reach him via jrooks [at] dwellcreative.com.