Helping The Environment Can Have An Immediate ROI
“Go Green.” It may have started out as a catchy slogan, but people everywhere are realizing it’s not just a nice idea, or even an option. It’s necessary to preserve our way of life. Businesses are not only heeding this message and providing ground-breaking support, they’re keying into the profitability factor as well. Helping the environment, simply put, can have an immediate ROI.
“Consumers are thinking about it, and therefore retailers think they need to think about it as well,” said Mary Brett Whitfield, senior vice president at consultant TNS Retail Forward.
“Retailers have woken up to the idea that not only is this going to be good from a public-relations perspective but also from a profitability perspective“.
Public awareness of global warming is at an all time high. People are looking for ways to make the world a better place. In fact, “83% of Americans would choose products and services with environmental benefits over similar non-environmental alternatives.”
Businesses are noticing this trend, and stepping in to provide their customers with the resources and the opportunity. As The Wall Street Journal’s Livemint.com notes,
“ …for the corporate world, “green” can be a mantra with a dual advantage: it’s the right thing to adopt, not just as an environmentally responsible entity, but also — more important — as a profitable proposition”.
Companies have much to gain by investing in campaigns driven to promote the environmental movement, while at the same time adding that extra incentive to increase their customer base and optimize brand recognition. Mokugift currently offers a new environmentally driven rewards campaign, geared toward helping the earth while still offering businesses maximum return on investment potential. Mokugift’s program revolves around their unique plant-a-tree incentive.
Businesses can add the Mokugift “Help-me-plant-Widget” to any webpage they desire, or even to a customer-specific email message. The widget guides the customer through an animated online preview of planting a tree.The business pays only $1 per tree planted. The customer’s trees can be displayed, along with the business’s logo, on any popular website such as Facebook and Myspace.
At only $1 per tree, this offers companies ROI potential greater than other popular customer rewards programs. Companies can use Mokugift to save money by saving paper and postage. AT&T Wireless has over 71.4 million subscribers, many of whom still get paper bills. AT&T’s average cost to send a paper bill is $6. If they could motivate just 1 million customers to switch to paperless billing by planting a tree, AT&T would enjoy a net savings of over $72 million dollars.
Kiwi Magazine wanted to increase subscriptions, and teamed up with Mokugift to motivate customers. To date, Kiwi Magazine’s new and returning subscribers have planted over 5,000 trees. Maxine Wolf, CEO & Publisher of Kiwi Magazine, applauded the campaign by saying “Mokugift allowed us to offer our readers a meaningful gift …we are pleased with the response to this program…”
Mokugift is committed to planting trees in the twelve countries where CO2 absorption is highest. These tropical countries play the largest role in combating global warming. Mokugift also works with organizations responsible for providing educational and material resources to local communities in these regions.
There is one thing business giants and struggling newborn companies share in common. Both hunger for growth, and, if successful, find it by seeking the best ways to capitalize on investment potential. Earth-saving efforts can now lead to a measurable ROI. Planting trees fights global warming, and motivates consumers. It’s easy, simple, and in the case of savvy businesses, profitable. Caring for the environment has never been so rewarding.
Thanks for bringing up this great subject. It is important for companies to go green for the right reasons. Doing so for PR and marketing reasons alone is counterproductive. Companies guilty of “greenwashing” are increasingly being called out as frauds. Furthermore, trying to paint everything with the same green brush may lead to “green fatigue”, which could provide a real setback for companies who actually are working hard to provide genuine solutions to environmental problems. My client, StalkMarket, examines this issue on its blog here http://blog.stalkmarketproducts.com (see the posts entitled Green Fatigue and Greenwashing).
I look at it from a PR and marketing perspective in my blog here http://blog.koifishcommunications.com/2008/09/17/greenwashing–time-to-find-a-new-fad.aspx
Sometimes, a waste flow, passes through your fingers and later, you find it wasn’t a waste flow at all! Gardeners have quietly peed into containers full of sawdust, and later, cut fertilizer bills by spreading the sawdust on the garden! Other, business and industrial waste flows must be critically re-examined and inventive new ways for total engineering of processes put in place! Nuclear reactors have cooling towers that essentially waste heat that could be put to better uses! We need better engineers! China has a glut of well educated, unindoctrinated (in wasteful American ways) engineers. maybe we should hire them, and share in the successes they have brought to their own country! Our boys are too busy trying to suck up to “Peach” jobs at GM to do serious diligent, economically sound and 21st Century level work anyway, and only did the parts of their courses that taught how to build 620 hp, 8mpg, 230 mph ‘Vettes” as is evidenced by their latest toy from GM. Now there’s a wasteflow langoring on the sales lots, priced off of the American market before they got there!
I don’t think the Chinese environmental record is one that the us or any other country should be striving to emulate. http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070901faessay86503/elizabeth-c-economy/the-great-leap-backward.html
This is not meant to be a comment on the quality of engineers trained in any country.