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2008 eROI Online Marketing Prediction #10: Green Irreverence
January 1, 2008
The online green marketing theme will trend from green worshipping to green irreverence. This year's inconvenient truth is that green has hit the marketing world like a coal-spitting freight train against a pristine mountainous backdrop. Whether it's Subaru advertising its gas-gulping vehicles as magically green now, despite the fact that they don't have a single hybrid model in their entire product lineup. The Green Life named Subaru as One of the 10 Worst Greenwashers in 2003. The company made the list for "reclassifying the Outback from a car to a light truck, thus skirting fuel economy standards and violating the distinction in its marketing campaign between Outbacks and SUVs."
For all the greenwashing that is happening in traditional and online marketing campaigns, there are quite a few genuine stories of companies that are green in almost every aspect of what they do and how they do it. For example, TerraCycle created a conveyor belt system to take a huge amount of food waste and have worms eat it and poop it out into containers. The company makes all of its products and its packaging out of waste. Its marketing reflects the eco-friendly values of the business. Furthermore, Kettle Foods, an Oregon company that buys locally, uses its cooking oil twice to fuel its fleet of trucks and marketing cars on biodeisel, uses solar power and wind energy, and restores wetlands at its plant, makes sure it tells its authentic story of green-rootedness through co-creating its products and brand with customers.
This year, realtors are marketing themselves as LEED Certified, attorneys have a whole new practice of green, sustainable experts, and even accountants are joining the fray. This is fantastic - it's the right thing to do and a competitive differentiator, especially if there is true sustainable expertise there. However, their marketing concepts and themes are often so serious and borderline pious to an already serious topic of choking the Earth from a huge, global, carbon emission problem. 2008 will be the year that green-friendly and green-blooded companies in every industry will have the confidence to assume that consumers are aware of the problem and focus their marketing message on humor and a bit of green irreverence.
Posted by ryan at January 1, 2008 8:14 PM
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