When I interview a green business owner, one of my standard questions is “when marketing, do you target green customers specifically, or do you go for a much broader audience?” Perhaps a better question would be: “Do you give your customers a choice to go green, or do you just force the issue?”
The Sustainability Symposium, sponsored by Ace Hardware, which has a line of green products known as Helpful Earth Choices, featured a panel of four experts, including Eric Corey Freed, author of Green Building and Remodeling for Dummies, and Principal of Organic Architect. One of the most interesting comments Eric made during the event was that many clients come to his architecture firm wanting ‘green’, but don’t necessarily know what it means. To address the ‘options paralysis’ that many consumers feel when confronted with too many choices, his firm makes it easy and only specs out green options. Could your business survive with this model?
Granted, this is a specialized service. People come to an architecture firm looking for help, and acknowledging the architects’ expertise. People come to Organic Architect looking for green help. But the point is made: sometimes clients just want you to show them what is best, and will go from there. Sometimes they won’t. It’s up to you to decide if your business can succeed without selling the non-green stuff. Mr. Freed also added a terrific comment, if I might paraphrase: when talking to green-washing companies, you can ask, ‘oh, so you have a green line of products. That’s great. Does that mean the rest of your products are toxic? How can you in good conscience, now that you’ve acknowledged that people deserve healthier choices, sell the rest of that stuff?’
The flip side of the coin, of course, is that your business might go under if you only sell green products. And of course, there’s the macro view: how many new green customers are there now that Clorox went mainstream with their GreenWorks line? That education alone is more than most non-profits and government programs could hope to achieve.
Scott Cooney is author of Build a Green Small Business: Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur, and blogs regularly at www.EcopreneursGuide.com.
About Scott Cooney
For us we always ask the same questions of all promotional item clients. What is your budget? Who is your audience? When is your event/in-hands date?
Then – if we are not talking to a eco focused company – we ask, Do you want to go green?
For us in the promo industry, when looking at items of quality there is very little price difference between traditional and green promo items.
With the cheap stuff yes, cheap stuff made from bad materials is cheaper, but for the quality items, like a nice 100% cotton dress shirt and a nice 100% eco bamboo cotton dress shirt the pricing is the same.
So for more and more of our clients green is just a choice, and honestly if the pricing is the same, most opt for a green option.
I like what was said about how you should ask a company with a new green product line if their other products are toxic…that is a really great point.
I hope that we are making a shift to more green product lines and less toxic ones. Many large corporations would probably die if they stopped making all of their non-green products, but they could do it gradually.
I am sure Clorox may have some of the same customers it did before with their new green line, however if they increase the price or decrease the quantity sold in comparison to their non-green products, that is a nice increase in revenue. I don’t mind companies doing that if its a green product. The more they profit off of the green products, the more green product lines they will start, and that is one way this green revolution will evolve.
Thank you for the great post!