EcoMarkets 2007 Just Released! Great green marketing is unique in a lot of ways. The communications challenges are complicated. The science underpinning is crucial and complex. The issues are political, emotional, and highly charged. But here’s one thing that great green marketing shares with great mainstream marketing: it starts with the customer. Having a genuine environmental value proposition (EVP) is half the battle. Understanding how your customers relate to that value is the second half. The first means you’ll do good. The second means you’ll do well. Our EcoMarkets research aims to help green marketers understand the needs of one important group of customers - the professional purchasing community. This year, in partnership with the Responsible Purchasing Network (RPN) and the North American Green Purchasing Initiative (NAGPI), we reached out to almost 11,000 purchasers insightful for marketers. One clear finding is that B2B and B2G green markets are bigger than they’ve ever been. In the United States, for example, 64% of government buyers are subject to a green purchasing policy of some kind. In Canada, fully 76% of government purchasers told us they have such a policy. Amongst companies, the numbers are almost as strong. 51% of Canadian companies have either a formal or informal green purchasing policy, as do 57% of American companies. That’s consistent with everything we know anecdotally and, I’m sure, consistent with your own impressions. And is the market growing? Two pieces of data tell us that it is growing strongly. First, the frequency of green purchasing policies in Canada has almost doubled in the last eighteen months. Second, almost 80% of purchasers on both sides of the border tell us that they expect their organizations to be doing even more green purchasing in two years than they are today. And what about communications insights? Marketers need to know how to focus their messaging to express their EVP. Although the EcoMarkets research is best studied on a commodity-specific basis, there are several generalizable conclusions. Purchasers – not surprisingly – continue to prioritize health-related environmental issues over all others. Also, specific language makes a big difference to the resonance of a message. Let’s look at three alternative ways of expressing the same EVP: a paint, for example, might be promoted in terms of “low VOCs”, “improved indoor air quality”, or “protective of human health”. The data tells us that the latter is likely to be dramatically more effective than the other two. And, despite the public profile of climate change as an issue, it still ranks quite y low as a concern of purchasers. If you could choose between “greenhouse gas emissions”, “climate change”, and “energy conservation” as genuine advantages, the latter would be your best choice. In subsequent issues of EcoMarketer, I’ll narrow the focus on some of these findings. In the meanwhile, a summary of EcoMarkets 2007 is available to all of our good friends and clients at no cost. If you haven’t already got one, I’ll be happy to send you one. Just drop me a note. | 
