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Lester Brown's new book calls for
action today: "Ecological and economic deficits are now shaping not only our future, but our present.  The future is here."  Buy online at EarthPolicy.org


My friend Lester Brown's action plan for a sustainable planet.  Buy Plan B 4.0 online here at Lester's website.


Visit our off grid solar systems website and see what we do for our own rankings.

Green Marketing Ideas & Sustainability
Ron's 7 R's for Real Results

 

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.  The majority of true green business claims are based on independently conducted research, greenwash is not needed.

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 putative 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.

Visit the Action Blog!

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.

  • 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.
     

  • 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.
     

  • 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.
     

  • 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.
     

  • 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.
     

  • 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.
     

  • 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:

  • Positioning:  Tell your customers why they should do business with you.

    The best engineered = professional grade.  You deserve the best gas guzzler.

     

  • 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).

     

  • 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.

     

  • 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.)
     

  • 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 3.0" and "Outgrowing the Earth" at the Earth Policy Institute.

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