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I guess you have heard of the 5
P's of marketing? How about the 7 P's of project
management?
Well, I decided
to do my own thing for green marketing ideas and web site marketing, which is
Ron's 7 R's for Real Results. Slick
marketing gurus will make fun of
me, but I am not writing this for them, I am writing
this for you. I am not interested in being slick.
This green marketing and
sustainability information is related to my
sustainable business
marketing page. You can also read about a
profitable business opportunity manufacturing
EcoCover. All of the claims EcoCover makes about
their products are based on independently conducted
research. EcoCover doesn't need greenwash, because
EcoCover IS green.
Greenwash definition:
Greenwash (a portmanteau
of green and whitewash) is a term that
environmentalists and other critics give to the
activity of giving a positive public image to
putatively environmentally unsound practices. The
term arose in the aftermath of the Earth Summit held
in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. Corporate lobby
groups saw the Earth Summit as a prominent platform
from which to redefine their role and to shape the
emerging debate on environment and sustainable
development.
Greenwash
short definition: Lying.
Madison Avenue style
marketing has been successful in the past helping gain
market acceptance for things that are not good for the
planet which means they are not good for you.
Clean coal advertised by children is one recent example
- no such thing as clean coal when you count CO2, think
global warming. Self dubbed "Americans for
Balanced Energy Choices", the nonprofit group behind the
ads is actually a coalition of mining companies, coal
transporters, and electricity producers. Members include
Peabody Holding, Inc., Burlington Northern/Santa Fe, and
Southern Company. According to the coalition's
website, electricity from coal is "essential,
affordable, and increasingly clean." The U.S. coal-based
electricity industry is ABEC's primary funder. Do
we need coal? Yes we do for a while. Do we
need greenwash messages delivered by children?
Your children? ABEC describes themselves as non
partisan. I wonder what non partisan means?
Or, how about BP's beyond petroleum ads -
which are about marginal investments in renewable energy
technology while lobbying hand over fist to drill the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and failing to inspect
and maintain the Alaska pipeline to the point of failure
and shut down. Perhaps BP stands
for beyond pernicious? John Kenney, a
former ad man, wrote an op-ed entitled "Beyond
Propaganda" in August 2006
in the The New York Times
about his disillusionment upon finally accepting that
the new company name and identity for BP he helped
create – "Beyond Petroleum" to replace "British
Petroleum"– has turned out to be just so much bunkum
designed to make a dirty oil company look
environmentally friendly on TV, while it's busy drilling
for ever more petroleum and spilling billions of gallons
all over Alaska.
Or, the inventors
of Chicken McSluggets, McDonald's, slipped in their own
fry oil
by putting toy Hummers in
children's Happy Meal boxes, calling it the "Hummer of a
Summer" promotion. Television and radio ads, which
started running in early August 2006,
feature a family riding in a Hummer on the way to
McDonald's. With enough visits
to McDonald's, kids will be able to collect eight
different Hummers in a variety of colors, including two
versions of the H1, the original and most monstrous
member of the Hummer family, which General Motors
stopped making in June 2006. In a written
statement reported in the Detroit
Free Press, Bill Lamar, McDonald's chief
marketing officer, said the promotion was intended to
bring "the fun and excitement of Hummer vehicles" to
"McDonald's youngest guests."
One has to
wonder why promoting global warming mobiles to children
in the age of peak oil might be regarded as fun,
exciting or a savvy marketing idea? Oh, wait.
These are the same folks who serve obese children food
loaded with fat and sugar? I answered my own
question. I do have another one, though. Why
isn't Ronald McDonald fat? He should look like the
Michelin Man?
If you look around the Internet
much, you might get the same feeling I do, that there
is a lot of coldness out there and in many cases, a lot
of slickness. Most web sites don't have much
personality? This is, in my
opinion, because most folks with web sites don't make a
lot of effort to be personally connected with their
visitors and customers or, in many cases, personally
responsible for what they do.
They think they should pretend to be something or
somebody they are not. From a sustainable business
and green marketing perspective, I don't think these
ideas are going to help us
solve our problems. We are going to have to be
personally connected because in the long run,
sustainable business is going to be more about
cooperation than about competition. Ben and
Jerry's is a good example of being connected to your
market, socially and environmentally responsible.
The Internet is the most efficient and cost effective
way to do this.
Therefore, I have come up with
a few green web and otherwise marketing tips that might help you change
this with your web visitors.
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Ron's R Number 1:
Be REAL. As my oldest grand daughter
used to say before she lost her two front teeth, you
are a human bean, aren't you? Put your
personality into what you do. If you are a
company, have a culture that projects a personal
touch in your website. If you don't have a
culture,
create one. Empower your team to do good. Websites are read by people, not
companies or corporations. It is amazing how
many big company webs I see that are meant to
project a corporate image to other corporations,
like robots hugging each other.
Don't do greenwash. Read this May 17, 2006
story from the New York Times.
Don't create phoney greenwash standards.
SFI or Sustainable Forestry Initiative sounds
impressive, but it is still a lie.
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Ron's R Number 2: Be
RELEVANT. Pick every niche in your market
apart and fill every gap with solid information
important to your web visitors. Take every
angle you can find, pretend that it is your only
approach to the market and drill down as far as you
can. Lookers will scan and skip. Buyers
want details. Give every person who comes to
your web a reason to look around and stay for a
while. Look at your web stats. When you
see 3 plus page views and lengthy visitation times,
you know you are getting somewhere. When you
see the resulting increase to
conversions and sales, you are on the money.
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Ron's R Number 3: Be
REDUNDANT. I am not talking about being
SPAMMY, unless you want to be found on MSN. I
am talking about telling the same story in different
ways on different pages for different readers who
look at the world in different ways. Religion
is a good example. Every important religion
has a creation story, each told in a
different way. They are all essentially the
same story.
Here is a similar example.
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Ron's R Number 4: Be
REGULAR and RELIABLE. OK, I am
fudging, using 2 R's for one. If you think
this is about Metamucil, please go back to Google
and try again. Regular updates, regular
content additions, regular schedule of
communications, reliable deliveries. One of my
favorite sayings is that the best ability is
dependability. When people know they can count
on you, your stature rises above the 80% who can't
yet be counted on. Don't be ordinary if you have a
choice, and you DO have a choice.
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Ron's R Number 5: Be
REALISTIC. Rome, another R, wasn't built
in a day and neither is a high performance website
for the average Joe. Keep adding content, good
relevant content. Eventually, your web will
have enough pages so that two things will happen.
First, you will be able to rank for almost any
important target of your choice. Second, you
will not have to rely on any one target because you
will see from your web stats that over 80% of your
traffic will come to your web for phrases you are
not even targeting - but they WILL be relevant to
your business or cause if you have good page copy.
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Ron's R Number 6: Be
RESPONSIBLE. For every sustainability
problem we face there is a profitable solution out
there somewhere, perhaps not even invented yet.
When you find such opportunities, find solutions and
market them, you are on the road to huge success.
See EcoCover as a good example.
Yes, I am marketing EcoCover in North America.
Wouldn't you if you had the chance? This is a
big winner.
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Ron's R Number 7:
Market your RETURN on Environment. Return
on environment is an already invented phrase, not my
original idea, but it is not being used much as far
as I can tell related to marketing. My
thinking about ROE as opposed to slick marketing ROI
or return on investment is that green marketers need
to inform consumers about the environmental benefits
of their goods and services, as well as the
environmental negatives. If we are going to
make informed choices as consumers, we need to know
both the up and down side results of our decisions
so that we make the best choices for the planet.
My friend Paul Hawken did a great
job in his book "The Ecology of Commerce" of presenting
the idea of a restorative economy. He wrote, "A
restorative
economy tries to achieve a market in which every
transaction provides constructive feedback to the
commons, as opposed to what we know today, when
virtually every act of consumption causes degradation
and harm." Paul goes on to say that, "Competition
in the marketplace should not be between a company
wasting the environment versus one that is trying to
save it. Competition should be between companies
which can do the best job in restoring and preserving
the environment, thereby reversing historical price and
cost incentives of the industrial system that
essentially send the wrong signals to consumers."
My opinion is that green marketers
have a primary responsibility to help consumers make
sustainable choices. We need to tell it like it is
for what we do, and also provide accurate comparisons of
the environmentally unsustainable impacts of alternative
products and services which have an apparent price
advantage because the companies who sell these products
do not internalize the environmental costs. Read
Eric Davidson's book "You Can't Eat GNP - Economics As
If Ecology Mattered." It does matter.
Regarding the 5 P's of
marketing, this is big company ad agency lingo.
The 5 P's can be useful if your motives are earnest and
ethical. I will paraphrase the 5 P's for the automotive industry.
They are:
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Positioning:
Tell your customers why they should do business
with you.
The best engineered = professional grade. You
deserve the best gas guzzler.
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Packaging:
Package and present your services to generate
interest and response from qualified prospects.
Conquer the last remaining wilderness in your Bummer,
which is really important because you live in Manhattan
and have the credit to afford the fleece payments. Be
safe from mortar attacks (optional extra cost
upgrade required).
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Promotion: Think
advertising, linguistic framing, selling the sizzle.
You deserve this car because it is red, goes really
fast and has poor test crash ratings. Have fun
while it lasts and we will send flowers.
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Persuasion: Tell them
whatever it takes to get the sale, including
manipulation that is not good for the consumer or
the planet.
Zero to 60 in under 6
seconds, which is really useful for the daily
commute in bumper to bumper traffic and for driving
fast in both lanes of a winding two lane road
(professional driver - closed course - don't try
this yourself.)
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Performance: Keep
clients coming back, referring others. This
one I can agree with for the right product or
service. But not the way they do it.
If our quality was
excellent, we would not advertise Mrs. Goodwench or whatever.
Regarding the 7 P's of project
success: Proper prior planning prevents piss
poor performance. This is universally true.
Stick with Ron's 7 R's, this is
the direction we must be headed. There is no
sustainable alternative.
If you would like to educate yourself
about the urgent need for sustainable business
practices, buy and read my friend and client Lester
Brown's books "Plan B 2.0" and "Outgrowing the
Earth" at the
Earth Policy Institute.
If you would like to own a
sustainable manufacturing business,
read about EcoCover. |
