Five Consumer Benefits You Need To Sell Green
All the talk about benefits vs. features in last week’s post, Green Consumers Pull Back- Now What? Recession Strategies For Eco Businesses, reminded me of an NAHB article on green homes in which William H. Kreager, an architect at Mithun Architects+Designers+Planners who specializes in sustainable projects, suggests that there is a “trifecta of benefits” builders can use to market homes to buyers:
- A healthy home (1: health and safety)
- Savings due to energy efficiency (2: efficiency and the related cost savings)
- Lower maintenance costs (3:performance and related cost savings)
Kreager is talking about a principle that all green marketers could stand to know: that customer satisfaction needs to be derived by meeting fundamental – not specifically green — consumer values. Green Marketing Myopia, which outlines the above three benefits plus two more, (4) convenience and (5) status (really making it a quintuplet of benefits), sums it up well:
Green marketing must satisfy two objectives: improved environmental quality and consumer satisfaction.
Clearly builders aren’t the only ones who can leverage the quintuplet of benefits, rather, all green products and services can gain by focusing on the core consumer benefits of health, savings, performance, convenience and (sometimes) status. And, if your products and services don’t happen to provide any of the five benefits, say maybe your product is produced in a sustainable way that does not make the consumer benefit apparent, you can bundle your product features with one or more of the five benefits to create a compelling value proposition. For example, in addition to promoting the lack of the controversial ingredient, aluminum-free deodorants are also universally positioned as healthier to use and performing as well as the alternatives.
The need to be healthy, save money, save time and/or use effective products are core benefits that most green products intrinsically provide. It makes sense to reframe the way we think about marketing green in order to make the most of what we already have.
Photo: Mira Pavlakovic, www.sxc.hu Under Creative Commons License
