Woman, the most underserved market of all time

Marketing to women

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First Shown at 10 Harvest, 10 Advertising's own inspiration festival

The 10 Environmental worldviews

This is an interesting overview that maps the attitude towards the environment in 10 segments. I found it in Joel Makower's new book: Strategies for the Green Economy:

1. Greenest Americans:
Everything is connected, and our daily actions have an impact on the environment (9%)

2. Ungreens:
Environmental degradation and pollution are inevitable in maintaining AMerica's prosperity (3%)

3. Compassionate caretakers:
Healthy families need a healthy environment (24%)

4. Proud traditionalists:
Religion and morality dictate actions in a world where humans are superior to nature (20%)

5. Murky Middles:
Indifferent to most everything, including the environment (17%)

6. Antiauthoritarian Materialists:
Little can be done to protect the environment, so why not get a piece of the pie (7%)

7. Driven independents:
Protecting the earth is fine, as long as it doesn't get inthe way of success (7%)

8. Cruel Worlders:
Resentment and isolation leave no room for environmental concerns (6%)

9. Borderline Fatalists:
Getting material and status needs met on a daily basistrumps worries on the planet (5%)

10. Postmodern Idealists:
Green lifestyles are part of a new way of being (3%)

Wanne succeed with women? Get a hybrid

Just in case you needed another reason to care about the environment...turns out girls dig guys who dig environmental technology. According to a study done by GM (of all people) as part of this year's Challenge X competition:

1) Close to nine in 10 women (88 percent) say they’d rather chat up someone with the latest fuel-efficient car versus the latest sports car.

2)Eighty percent of American car buyers would find someone with the latest model fuel-efficient car more interesting to talk to at a party than someone with the latest model sports car.

3) More than four out of 10 (45 percent) 18-43 year-olds say it’s a fashion faux-pas nowadays to have a car that is not green or environmentally friendly.

GM's Challenge X is a yearly competition between college students to make GM vehicles more efficient. Students from 17 universities are "re-engineering" Chevy Equinox's to make them more efficient and reduce their greenhouse impact while retaining consumer appeal. Solutions the students are putting together include alternative propulsion systems like fuel cells and hybrids, and alternative fuels like biodiesel and ethanol.
This year's winners, from Mississippi State, increased the fuel economy of the Equinox by almost 40% with a hybrid-electric bio-diesel engine.

Straight from ecogeek.

Consumers do have the power to change the food industry

This article appeared on the WELL-blog of the New York times! It is exciting to share with consumers, especially families with kids.

The idea is that by changing your buying behavior a little, you can make a big difference.

The call-for-action: Just go for 5 basic organic foods!

For instance: When buying conventional milk, you're buying into a whole chemical system of agriculture. If you chose to go organic for Milk, Apples, Potatoes, Peanut butter and Ketchup (yes, this is an American article), you have a positive effect on an large part of agriculture, without hitting into your wallet to much.

This is a great idea to turn into marketing communications. Lot of consumers are worried about the environment, but consider their buying behavior as something that won't make any significant change.

In the article, they explain why this 'buy 5 organic basics' is a good buying strategy that makes a change! Read the entire article here!

A Mantra of Sustainable living and green consumer motivations

During ages, consumers where only aware of one thing they feel as ‘home’. These days are different. As material needs get satisfied, and the World is flat (and people get worried on climate change and political instability), people feel more ‘levels’ as their home. In every level, they feel the need of health, neatness, honesty, happiness, beauty and peace This is just a thought. But it means green business has the opportunity to detect and meet more needs. If you can use it to convince your clients to go green, go for it!


1) MY SOUL
>>> I want to feel consious and develope my personality
2) MY BODY
>>> I want to stay healthy
3) MY HOME
>>> I want a sociable and comfortable place to live
4) MY COMMUNITY
>>> I want to feel accepted by people who are important to me and enjoy a happy and durable relation with them
5) SOCIETY
>>> I want to live in a safe and positive, well designed society and look forward to a prosperous future
6) THE BIOSPHERE
>>> I want the eco-system to stay alive

UK Study on Green Attitudes and Behavior

There's an interesting post today on GristMill about the Green attitudes and behaviors of the Brits. I beleive the reality in Belgium is quite the same.

A study by Norwich Union has unearthed the truth about how green Brits really are (read the article of the Telegraph here):


The good news: Of the 1,580 people surveyed across Britain, more than half considered unethical living as much of a social taboo as drunk driving -- or, as the Brits call it, drink-driving.

The bad news: Due to this "green guilt," nine in 10 admit they lie to exaggerate their environmental commitment. (Rather than actually making the changes.)

Even badder: More than half say they are "unlikely to alter their way of life despite pressure from the media, politicians, and their children to be greener."

Superbad: One in five don't even know how to be more green.

Green Consumers and the Mushiness Index

by:

Joel Makower
A new market research study of Americans' green passions and buying habits is out this week, from the venerable Yankelovich.
I've just seen a presentation on the findings, and it's at once fascinating and maddening. That is, fascinating if you want a glimpse into Americans' green turn-ons and turn-offs. Maddening if you are trying to figure out how to sell into this unruly market space.
First, the bottom line. "Given consumer attitudes today, green is best characterized as a niche opportunity in the consumer marketplace," says Walker Smith, president of Yankelovich. "It is a strong niche opportunity, but it is not a mainstream interest that is passionately held or strongly felt by the majority of consumers."
Or, perhaps more to the point: "The majority of consumers really don't care all that much about the environment. Green simply has not captured the public imagination."
Ouch.
After endless months of magazine covers, TV specials, Al Gore, Live Earth, and a gazillion other media stories and events, how can this be? After all the warnings about flooded coastlines, drowning polar bears, more Katrinas, and the increased threat of invasion of everything from infectious insects to rogue superweeds, why aren't people concerned? Has all this fallen on deaf ears?
Says Smith:
"The fact is, the amount of media interest given to the environment far exceeds the amount of consumer interest. It's not that consumers aren't aware of the environment, but there's something missing in the way consumers are processing information given to them about the environment today."
Consider: 82% of Americans have neither read nor seen Al Gore's book or movie.
That will likely be news to the many environmental activists and professionals I hear from who proclaim that we've reached a "tipping point" or "inflection point" on the environment -- the notion that public sentiment is growing, and will soon lead companies and products to transform their ways of doing business. (This may be the real green business bubble I keep hearing about.)

The problem, explains Smith, is that green marketing realities fly in the face of conventional marketing wisdom. "People don't buy products. They buy solutions to problems," as Ted Levitt, a marketing guru at Harvard Business School, once famously put it. But since most consumers don't see the environment as a problem, green marketers must take an extra step, helping them not just to understand the problem, but to actually care about it.
Some of Yankelovich's findings are sobering, to say the least. For example, 37% of consumers feel "highly concerned" about environmental issues, but only 25% feel highly knowledgeable about environmental issues. And only 22% feel they can make a difference when it comes to the environment.
The Yankelovich study, like many others before it, offers a consumer segmentation model, dividing the marketplace into five groups (in declining order of commitment): Greenthusiasts (13% of the U.S. population, or more than 30 million consumers), Greenspeaks (15%), Greensteps (25%), Greenbits (19%) -- and the biggest group, Greenless (29%). As with other segmentation models, there is a rich lode of data and psychographics about each.

Yankelovich's segmentations are based both on attitudes and actual behaviors, which sets them apart from most others, which are based only on attitudes. This is where things get interesting. According to the research, green behaviors and attitudes often take divergent paths -- green attitudes don't always predict green behavior, and green behaviors often occur without accompanying attitudes. Example: Greenbits consumers say they are more inclined to pay more than Greenspeaks consumers for green products, but their behavior doesn't sync up -- they buy these products less frequently than the Greenspeak-ers.

All of which presents opportunities for green marketers to change attitudes as well as behaviors, if done so in a targeted fashion.

For example, says Smith, if you're trying to change the behaviors of Greenless and Greenbits consumers, increasing their knowledge has nothing to do with it. "It is strictly a matter of making it personally relevant," he says. "This is the group that is most likely to think that the media are making things seem worse than they really are."

Making all of this even more challenging is something Yankelovich calls the Mushiness Index, a device developed by Daniel Yankelovich himself more than a quarter-century ago. It measures the firmness of opinion on a topic -- the degree to which consumers are comfortable and sure about how they think.
When it comes to the environment, opinions are pretty mushy, Yankelovich found. "The vast majority of people don't have very well-articulated views of the environment," says Yankelovich. "They can answer an overnight public opinion poll. But that's not an answer they can necessarily talk about in-depth or understand the costs and consequences about those things. Even something like global warming, where there's been a lot of talk, the distribution of opinion is not very firm."There's a lot more good stuff here. You can watch a one-hour webinar on the Yankelovich study

here (registration required).
The bottom line is that there is no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy when it comes to green. That may seem like common sense, but such wisdom seems to elude most marketers, who still insist on pushing out marketing efforts that are variously too vague, too technical, or way too -- well, mushy.
Original post: http://makower.typepad.com/joel_makower/2007/07/green-consumers.html

Or check: http://www.yankelovich.com/