How Green Is Your Corporate Responsibility?
Unless you are living under the proverbial rock, you know that ‘green-ness’ and ‘social responsibility’ are very front and center for brands these days. Whether your company is staying under the radar as you explore the best path to take, or all-out touting your wonderfulness via ad campaigns, the smart marketers know that consumers are paying attention to such things.
Take Wal-Mart for example: When the company announced a new green-building initiative and a focus on providing more organically grown produce, consumers were skeptical of whether or not the brand could truly walk that talk. How does all that promoted ‘responsibility’ jibe with news reports of employee mistreatment or the fact that their stores and parking lots seem to be the biggest of any big-box in Yourtown, USA? As Thomas Friedman wrote in the April 15th New York Times Magazine (‘The Power of Green’ is worth a read, in full, by the way):
‘The world’s biggest retailer woke up several years ago, its C.E.O. Lee Scott told me, and realized that with regard to the environment its customers ‘had higher expectations for us than we had for ourselves.’ So Scott hired a sustainability expert, Jib Ellison, to tutor the company.’
In addition to Wal-Mart, we are also reading more about the corporate responsibility of auto companies (like Toyota, and, as I just read today in MediaPost), technology brands (Microsoft, for one) and builders, among others. On the smaller scale consumers are also paying a lot of attention to the packaging (or over-packaging) of all the products they buy, which causes brands support and how recycling-friendly their general store practices are (among many other things).
Home Depot also just announced a new green labeling program that is expected to include 6,000 products by 2009. As Michael Barbaro reported in the April 17, 2007 issue of the New York Times, ‘More than 90% of the products in the line are already on Home Depot’s shelves but the Eco Options brand will identify them as environmentally friendly.’
According to another MediaPost article , which got its numbers from the Natural Marketing Institute: The super-savvy and assertive LOHAS (lifestyles of health and sustainability) consumer (16% of U.S. adults) and the slightly less demanding but greater in number ‘naturalite’ cohort (25% of U.S. adults) are leading the charge and taking names. I feel pretty safe venturing a guess that women make up a significant portion of those two segments. Here’s the deal: You can’t just say ‘we give x percent of sales to this cause’ or ‘we have solar panels on our roof’ or ‘we give you 3 cents for every bag you bring in to recycle, and call it good. Not today. Women, especially, are noticing the disconnects – even to the level of how one brand under a conglomerate umbrella may have a ‘responsible’ reputation, but most of its other brands, and the larger corporation itself, doesn’t get such a great report card on that front. Women look behind the curtain.
As important brand attributes, social/environmental responsibility aren’t going anywhere. LOHAS consumers are the cutting edge and everyone else is looking to them for their buying cues. If you don’t soon map your own brand’s way to the sort of corporate responsibility that fits your goals/mission AND that is do-able over the long run, you will be sorry.
