Green Marketing: What is That Anyways?
By Ruby Gates
MarketShift Strategies
There is a market shift taking place and it goes deeper than trend setters buying the latest ipod or cell phone. This market shift demands products adhere to sustainable principles. This business model is gaining momentum due to the efforts of bold and creative business leaders who are creating dynamic synergies between diverse organizations.
For example, Gray’s Harbor Paper, a paper company in Hoquiam, Washington, accepts wastewater from Ocean Protein, a fish meal plant. Additionally, PanelTech, a company down the road creates siding and countertops out of compressed paper, a waste product of Grays Harbor Paper production. Meanwhile, all of the energy used to create Grays Harbor paper is generated from biomass from their own paper production, creating an excess of energy that is sold back to the power company. Finally, Gray’s Harbor supplies the City of Seattle with 100% recycled paper.
Or take the example of SeQuential BioFuels. They use the waste product of Kettle Foods, a global organic potato chip manufacturer as well as waste product from other food production facilities to create fuel. Since 2002 SeQuential has blazed the trail for the biofuels market in the Northwest and is the largest distributor of biodiesel in Oregon.
Once consumers understand the relationship between the products they purchase and the ecology associated to those products, then sustainability achieves market leverage and new, earth positive forms of profitability take place.
And this is where Green Marketing comes in.
Smart marketing departments focus on initiatives that empower sustainable business ecologies. The new paradigm now holds marketing as a resonsible party in shifting the market in favor of global sustainability. So often marketing is focused on short term goals tied directly to revenue results. It makes sense, but eventually the consumer’s awareness surrounding sustainability eclipses impulse buying and spending frenzys. Instead, thoughtful consumerism driven by educational campaigns wins out.
Because of this new consumer trend, sustainable companies are driven to tell their stories. The simple human story that speaks to a company’s values, mission and the collaborative business landscape evolving from vision. It isn’t complicated. As the definition of sustainability becomes pervasive, it won’t be the slick ad that captures the market; rather, it will be the story.
Eventually, marketing strategies designed to fold consumer values into the buying decision will complete a true and lasting market shift. These are strategies and approaches that recognize the new business paradigm and embrace the marketplace as a whole, not as separate components unrelated to each other. Sustainable companies do not exist in a void. They exercise great depths of collaboration with other businesses, often within other industries. Take, for example, the green building industry. A sustainable development project involves many layers of collaboration from city planning to materials. To drive market share for one business drives it for all.
If marketing ignores the interelated market and the synergistic dynamics occuring between businesses, than those strategies support short term goals. Collectively, it gets the sustainable economy no where. If Green Marketing is going to be used as a term, a distinction, then it holds great accountability to the evolution of an ecological consumerism we all play a part in.
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