If you’ve changed your business and/or operational practices to reduce your carbon footprint, you should tell your customers about it. If you’ve changed your ingredients or manufacturing processes to be more environmentally friendly, you should take credit for it. But before you slap a green label on your product, consider this: While the benefits can be numerous, the potential pitfalls are equally so. Here are the pros and cons, and how you can make green labels work for – not against – your brand. By Matt Heinz
Many companies are adding green labels to their products, and doing so successfully. SC Johnson, Sun Chips, and Royal Hawaiian are just a few companies and brands successfully marketing their green (and greener) products today.
But on the other side of that slope are brands that have already faced the bite of customers who aren’t impressed with their shallow or deceptive green labeling practices. Wal-Mart is one of the biggest examples thus far of a company under fire for questionable green labeling, but they’re far from alone.
Let’s start with some specific reasons why green labeling might make sense for your business and products. These benefits apply to all types of business and products – online and offline, goods and services.
Transparency
The rise of citizen marketing and social media has accelerated a trend towards transparency in marketing. Consumers are increasingly skeptical of marketing messages with even a faint scent of spin doctoring. Your messaging needs to be more straightforward and forthright than ever. Every claim you make will be tested and tested again by your customers, and if they find fault they’ll tell the world through blogs, message boards, Facebook accounts, and more.
The upside of all this is that, for those brands leveraging authentic and verifiable green practices, transparency can provide a self-perpetuating message that flies through your customer and prospect audience through word of mouth. At the same time that consumers are quick to disparage companies they find less than authentic, they’ll heap praise on those who authentically live their brands, and transparently share what’s great about their products and services.
Thought Leadership
In the scramble by brands to claim a sustainability message, many good stories are quickly getting muddled. Sustainability claims are starting to melt together in a very undifferentiated way. This isn’t as much due to the overall volume of emerging sustainability stories, but the lack of clarity and authenticity from many of those claims. Companies that communicate distinct, compelling and authentic sustainability stories can still rise above the crowd and create significant (and still early) thought leadership for their brands as innovators and leaders in sustainable products.
This isn’t about first-mover advantage as much as it is about having the best, clearest, most meaningful story from a brand that’s already recognized and respected. Look no further than your local grocery store for a great example of this. If your supermarket is anything like mine, the “organic” selections (and sections) grow every day. Many of these products make sustainable ingredients and operational practices the heart of their story, yet beyond a few exceptions (Kashi being one) few of these brands have significant mindshare or market share.
Established brands have the mindshare advantage in this game, and through authentic marketing of sustainable practices, can leverage that mindshare advantage to quickly capture thought leadership as a sustainability leader.
Public Relations
The PR value of green labeling simply builds on the first two elements discussed here, thanks to the increasingly attentive media antennae searching for compelling “green” stories to share with an increasingly attentive “green” audience. If you have an authentic sustainability story to tell, can share it in a clear and transparent way, and can leverage your existing brand awareness and market share to accelerate your thought leadership on the sustainability front, additional PR for your products will result.
Sales
All of this is for naught unless it helps you sell more. And the fact of the matter is, plain and simple, green labels move more product. In the long-run, without authenticity and transparency behind your green label claims, those incremental sales will disappear (and in some cases may shrink from your pre-label basis if the consumer backlash is bad enough). However, adding a well-produced green label to your products is one of the quickest ways to accelerate point-of-purchase sales. It’s a “red-button” differentiator that can immediately send a positive message to a buyer, and make a significant buying decision difference for independent buyers without strong existing brand loyalties (who otherwise might just buy based on price and/or convenience).
How to Execute Successful Green Labeling
So the battle lines are drawn. Is green labeling a high-risk, high-reward endeavor? Only if you don’t authentically have a good story to tell. If you do, it’s almost all upside for your brand.
That said, there are several best practices to employ when executing green labels that will accelerate their value and ROI. Some of these best practices focus on what to include in your label and how to build its content. Others merely leverage the label as a launching pad for increased customer involvement and brand engagement.
Prove It
What are you claiming on your green labels, and how can you prove it? Can you summarize those proof points on the label itself? Has a credible third-party endorsed your sustainability practices? Could their logo be placed within your label to add credibility?
Think carefully about not just the claim you make on the label, but how that label’s contents help prove or validate the claim. Think as well as about how the label could be a starting point for that proof. For example, include a short, user-friendly URL on the label inviting customers (and prospective customers) to learn more about your sustainability claims. That URL destination can have all kinds of one-way and two-way information – updates on progressive sustainability initiatives, collective customer impact on reducing a carbon footprint (based on sales and pass-along, for example), etc.
The possibilities are endless and can be customized for your unique situation and brand, but don’t stop at simply making a sustainability claim on your green label. Use the label to prove it, too.
Take Credit for What You’ve Always Done
Is your company or brand already engaged in sustainability initiatives? Have certain green best practices always been at the heart of your story? If so, take credit for those achievements. Nothing sniffs of marketing puffery like a brand-new, yet-unproven sustainability initiative and claim by an existing brand. On the flip side, communicating something you’ve been doing for years to your customers allows your to leverage a claim few others can take credit for, and will accelerate your authenticity and thought leadership.
Encourage Interaction
Today’s consumer expects and responds to opportunities not just to read a one-way message from brands, but engage in an active two-way conversation with the brand itself and with other brand enthusiasts. Give your customers (and prospects) an opportunity via your green label to interact with you and with each other. Give them tools to share your green message with others. Give them incentives and rewards for doing so.
Word-of-mouth has always existed among consumers, albeit at a smaller scale without the right communication tools. The Internet in particular has simply given those individuals a louder microphone with which to share their story and/or opinion. Take advantage of this to accelerate your green message, and the extent to which more consumers hear it.
Encourage Participation
Is your sustainability practice something that consumers can do on their own as well? Give them the opportunity (and the tools) to “green” themselves in the same way you’ve optimized your own business. This best practices doesn’t work for some strategies (manufacturing processes, for example), but will work in several other scenarios.
If you sell food or drink, for example, and have made changes to the way you grow, cultivate or otherwise produce the product, are there steps in that more sustainable process that consumers can do at home – in their gardens, for example? Can you teach them about your sustainability practices, and encourage them to expect this higher standard from others around them?
Another example relates to power management. Let’s say your company has employed PC power management tools to significantly reduce your carbon footprint (up to 40% with Verdiem’s software, for example). What best practices can you share with your customers to enable them to achieve similar benefits and reductions in their own PC power usage?
Creating active alignments between brand and consumer can be incredibly powerful, and doing so with sustainable messages and best practices can be even more powerful, especially right now.
Solicit Feedback
The two-way communication your green labels should encourage doesn’t stop at empowerment. You also need to encourage feedback – feedback on whether or not your green claims are deemed authentic, feedback on how well those individual empowerment messages are faring, and further feedback on what your customers think you should do next to create more sustainable practices.
Your customers and prospects have these opinions whether you ask for them or not. Give them the microphone, and the opportunity to exponentially increase the size of your R&D department. It’ll give you a flood of new ideas, plus create stronger bonds with a customer that now isn’t just a buyer, but feels part of the process.
This is a mere start to what’s possible. Now let’s do as we say, and start the interaction. In the comments section below, share a bit about your brand. What are you selling? What green story do you have to share? How can that be more directly leveraged and communicated with green labels? What best practices above will you consider or execute in your own marketing? What additional ideas do you have to add to this conversation – either new ideas, or implementation stories (good and bad) that you’ve already tried?
Source - Sustainable Life Media
