post-Copenhagen

On lunch yesterday I got invited to a webinar that was entitled something like “Copenhagen Follow-Up: So Now What?” I felt guilty for not following CoP-15 (“Conference of the Parties”– never would have guessed) apparently no one else had heard it called this before, either) so I was interested in attending…and then I heard Dr. Hansen was one of the speakers, which sealed the deal (he’s a prominent figure in the movement). So I went, and Hansen flew threw some slides and talked fast and basically his spiel was cap and trade= bad, “fee & dividend approach” = good. Funny, because I was just thinking about carbon tax the other day, after I heard this NPR piece.

I don’t know enough about cap and trade and the things Hansen (and Alan AtKission, the other speaker) went over, and it’s on my “to research” list. I left the webinar not really feeling any better off about my initial thoughts on the conference (what really got accomplished that will help solve the issues?) But in the meantime I wanted to say something about my webinar lunch experience, so I might as well give you a visualization of the thoughts in my head:

proverbial shower thoughts

In a random moment of clairvoyance, I recently decided that I’ve been using the same brand of portable chapped-lip protection (because “Chapstick” is a real brand name, so I’m not sure how to refer to the stuff) for too long. It was time for a change. Despite the fact I have never seen an ad (that I’m aware of) for Burt’s Bees, the brand had worked itself into my consideration set for lip protection. So I decided to give it a shot and long story short I walked out of the store with a free tube of Burt’s Bees lip stuff…attached to an expensive bottle of BB shampoo. Despite all the marketing I have studied, I walk right into these traps creative selling ideas all the time.

So anyways, I’ve been using this “98.80%” natural shampoo…and guess what? It cleans my hair just as good, if not better, than normal shampoo. And it doesn’t contain funky chemical stuff that actually dries out your hair. But I digress– the point of this post is to talk about the mega-differences between the two “green” shampoos I have in my shower caddy.

Shampoo #2 also cleans my hair, and is by a company called Organix. The name sounds green, and their slogan claims their “formulas contain organic active ingredients.” Oh, and they have environmentally friendly packaging. But when navigating around their green-looking website, donned with leaves and grass, I see no other mention of sustainability, and when I look at their blog I only see hair tips. And when I look at the bottle ingredients such as “tea leaves” are listed at the very, very end of the list behind a slew of things I can’t pronounce. My initial thought? In a post from a while ago, I mentioned an author who brought up the point of taking products and marketing them as green vs. marketing green products.(*Cough* Greenwashing? *Cough*)

And I think my shampoo situation illustrates this: Organix is the first scenario, while Burt’s Bees is the latter (I especially like that they have stuck to their color scheme, with minimal amounts of literal green print and stuff splashed across their site). Spending the same amount of time browsing the Burt’s Bees website, I easily stumbled upon a few different pages, such as their page on their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) slogan– “The Greater Good”. Continuing on, I find more and more info, such as what the labels on their bottles mean, like The Natural Standard. This is super because anyone can design a label and slap it on a bottle and get consumers in a rush to see a fancy looking label and decide it must mean the product is “awesome” without knowing what the label is actually for/means.

Organix perhaps has a decent start, I don’t want to rail on them and the free shampoo they gave me a while back via my first mail-in rebate, but it’s the companies that set the bar high in their industry and aim for a stricter standard that I am interested in supporting. As I lathered up, I decided from now on when I run out of beauty products and need to replenish them, I am going to buy natural, more environmentally friendly products only. I’ve been rubbing random chemicals on my hair for a couple decades and it hasn’t killed me yet, but I really like the idea of supporting good companies and trying to phase out some of the things my hair probably doesn’t need on it…

selling points

I was going to update about a thought I had concerning the bike tax debate that has been happening in town, but while doing my daily email check/NPR scan I came across a piece about the housing market and green homes and got geekishly excited about it.

To summarize, with the housing market in a slump realtors are playing up the green appeal of homes. It’s a good selling technique– I remember from marketing classes in school to sell using the “FAB” (features, attributes/advantages, and benefits) technique, for instance a feature of a new home could be the geothermal heating system, which pulls heat from the Earth, the benefit being (in the house in the article) residents can save about $100 a month in utility bills. This is further exciting to me (besides being able to tie in concepts I learned to school to my interests to my current profession– I LOVE making these connections) because even if home buyers aren’t inherently green, if realtors talk up the FABs of these green homes and get shoppers thinking in terms of how many green features one house has over the other, the shoppers may sort of boil it down in their minds to thinking about the extra features the green houses have, eventually settle into a green house, and then because they have all these cool features like geothermal they may feel somehow compelled/encouraged to try out some other green behaviors. Maybe I’m just dreaming, but in my mind it works something like that.

The piece was also exciting because any national article I come across that mentions anywhere I’ve ever lived (in this case Portland) is always fun to hear. Something I didn’t know (but assumed Portland had) was that more recently there has been content established on the web to match up green sellers and buyers. Good, because when I go to buy a house (in 23989 years)  an online system will make it super easy to locate and narrow down some choices of homes with sustainable features– an important component of my future home.

The only thing that worries me is certain realtors could try to play up the “green” features of their properties that really aren’t all that green, which could potentially cause some greenwashing and make it even harder to compare homes in an apples to oranges way…

ALSO all the time I try to argue with people that the little good things people do for the environment can add up– my friend sent me another great NPR piece proving my point. Really cool. Check it out.

Energy Star education

Energy Star is sometimes the bane of my existence, as I work for a program that offers incentives toward the purchase of washing machines that, more times than not, are affiliated with Energy Star. The machines don’t necessarily have to don the blue Energy Star sticker  in order to be considered energy/water saving enough to earn it a $100 rebate. Countless times a month over the phone to confused customers I politely need to explain, “Just because your washer has the blue Energy Star sticker on it does not automatically mean it is eligible for a rebate with this program.” “But Energy Star means it’s efficient!” is always the response. I’ll admit, Energy Star is kind of misleading and confusing to customers, as this NYT article points out. How can this be?

According to a recent NPR piece, Energy Star ranks appliances within their category, meaning a fridge with the freezer on the bottom (very efficient– as heat rises) can not have the Energy Star logo proudly stamped on it but a side-by-side fridge (“the SUV of fridges”) can use a lot more energy and have a sticker. This isn’t necessarily bad– if you are strictly in the market for a side-by-side fridge, you may still be concerned with finding a model that is more and the logo can help. But what if you are in the market for any type of fridge? You may be specifically looking for a fridge that saves energy, see both models with their stickers, and assume both are efficient (which they are in comparison with their fellow category-mates).

I don’t think the current system is a huge problem in terms of the categories, however Energy Star should clarify and help educate consumers on the different tiers/categories/levels of efficiency. Perhaps instead of having only blue stickers, they could have different color stickers to help distinguish energy savings across the breadth of the appliance– green stickers could represent a very high caliber of efficiency, blue could be high efficiency, etc.

Consumers need to do their part, too, and come armed with some knowledge when they shop. For instance, with the washing machine incentives I work with, our program is based strictly on the Modified Energy Factor (MEF) and the Water Factor (WF) of the washing machines. These two factors let customers know how much energy and water their potential machine will be using, and provides a simple way (assuming this info is accessible in the stores) to compare different machines’ efficiencies. When I tell customers this on the phone, they have no clue what MEF and WF mean and are just concerned if there is an Energy Star sticker slapped on there. It’s great that Energy Star has become such a recognizable logo, but as John Grant warned in his book I just finished, you have to be very up front and honest to your customers and clear up any potentially confusing aspects in order to gain and make the public really trust your brand and give it the image of dependability.

The take home point is this: you don’t have to spend a ton of time researching your big purchase (though I would if I was slapping down that much cash!), but at least do a little leg work to understand what some of the measures/numbers of the appliance mean, and check out EnergyStar.gov to be familiar with what the blue sticker on your machine means.

just started another book

I just started reading John Grant’s The Green Marketing Manifesto which I think I will really enjoy. When I was in school I wanted to put my marketing degree into use but senior year when I decided I wanted to work in a sustainable field it dawned on me that one of the points/types of marketing is, well, getting people to buy things they don’t necessarily need therefore producing and packaging and utilizing more resources which is pretty un-green.

I haven’t gotten that far into the book yet, but Grant mentioned some interesting things in the intro that he will elaborate on in the following pages:

“Old” vs. “New” marketing: Old marketing Grant calls “imagewashing” in which markets add nice culturall images to packages or advertise factory made pies as “fresh baked style!” The New marketing Grant speaks of involves active customer engagement (customers ranking books on Amazon, for instance) in which everyone works together to create ideas and lifestyles.

In the intro, Grant also points out that green and business used to be two seperate entities, but instead of attacking each other they need to work together to converge in the middle to help the environment (duh). He also mentioned something like marketers shouldn’t take products and market them as green; they should work more on marketing green products.

I’m excited to hear what his ideas are and how marketers and the business world can put them to use. More thoughts as I read more.