Buying Our Way to a Cleaner World?
A recent article in the New York Times addressed the conundrum that increasing eco-consciousness among consumers has led to a buying spree of “green” products. While substituting organic, fair-trade, locally-made, or otherwise morally-righteous products for regular purchases is an incremental improvement over what we’ve been doing, many argue that it’s not enough. They say that buying less stuff is closer to the answer.
So what’s a manager to do, in an economy awash with signals that growth is imperative?
- For one, make sure that the environmental benefits you’re touting are both real and significant. Keep in mind the “if everybody did this” mentality; i.e., if everybody bought an “Eco-McMansion” where would we be in the long run? Certainly not somewhere clean and green and naturally preserved.
- Use the fad-factor carefully. Generating an eco-buzz around a new product can be great for marketing and sales, but be sure to look at your message critically – before someone else does. Can activists accuse you of over-doing the hype for a fundamentally unsustainable product? Anticipate their stances early.
- Combine eco-product development with meaningful actions to reduce your company’s environmental footprint – to save paper, energy, biodiversity, and so on in your business operations. If your company can go beyond the selling-more-stuff mentality, you’ll fare better with both consumers and environmental advocates in the long run.
- Even in cleaning up your own house, keep in mind that product substitutions are not always sufficient. For example: rather than just buying offsets for corporate air travel, try to reduce unnecessary travel or to use trains between nearby cities.
Your green products may be selling great right now, but over the long run you’ll be glad you were ahead of the pack in going beyond green consumerism. Already, some environmental advocates are claiming that “green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase,” and others are rejecting consumerism itself for alternatives like freeganism, community-supported agriculture (CSA), and gift economies like freecycle.
If managers do indeed want to keep selling more stuff, especially to the growing number of environmentally-aware “consumers” (or potential consumers), they’ll need to do more than simply make eco-themed products. They’ll need to find real ways to help would-be consumers reduce their own environmental footprints, and they’ll need to walk the talk in their own business processes.
Labels: Communications and Marketing, Sustainable Consumption
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By 
KW, on
July 9, 2007 6:38 PM
Of course, there tends to be a conflict between the idea of "selling less stuff" and the basic idea underlying most companies, which is "make more money." The trick is to figure out how to make more money while also selling less stuff, or at least selling stuff with a smaller environmental footprint (which is not necessarily synonymous with "less"). In The Triple Bottom Line, we talk about the phenomenon of "dematerialization," which offers one way of squaring the circle. (The transition from music LPs to CDs and then to MP3 files illustrates this.) Another is to shift from selling products to services. Years ago the marketing guru Theodore Levitt famously pointed out that people don't want drills, they want holes. If companies can find ways to provide people with what they want while not burdening them with ownership of material objects, they can both make more money and and sell less stuff--which sounds pretty hip to me.