I’m pretty sure Johnson & Johnson did not intend for their ad campaign to explain why people start to engage with sustainability, but I’m certainly using their tagline that way. “Having a Baby Changes Everything,” was by no means first coined by J&J’s ad team, but their great black and white television spots (remember the cute baby being washed in the sink?) made just about everyone stop and watch (parent or no, I suspect).  And, that tag phrase well represents the distinct line in the sand of life, where you think one way pre-first baby and about 180 degrees differently as soon as baby #1 arrives.  That’s why this particular life transition can be so crucial for sustainability engagement and behavior change in humans.

And, that’s why new research from EcoFocus Worldwide about EcoAware Dads is helpful.  Their recent study found:

Already, more than 1 in 2 Dads always or usually factor environmental considerations into their purchase decisions, and another 32% sometimes do so.  Almost 9 in 10 say it is important enough to change brands to make a more eco-friendly choice and more than 4 in 10 are prepared to pay more for environmentally friendly products that get it right.

But wait, there’s more.  3 out of 4 of the dads studied also agreed that : “with each step I take to make my home or lifestyle more eco-friendly, it gets easier to take the next step.”

What this all says to me, is that:

- What we see in moms with regard to their growing “green behavior” may be more a matter of parenthood than gender. So, when you see “green mom” research, replace “green parent” for “mom” in all that you read, and you may gain insight into a broader segment of your customer base.

- “Having a baby” is only the start of changing everything, but it can be a powerful launching off point. The opportunities for sustainable brands is to be there, just at that life transition point, to help newly super-environmentally conscious parents maintain their “green” living momentum and continue to take such responsible steps in child rearing and household management (and beyond!).

- Finally, segmenting market research into studies of moms, dads, aunts, chess players, bike riders, and so on, makes for much more sexy and exciting business news soundbytes.  However, as a seasoned and discerning marketing brain, your job is to think about how some findings may be very true across market segments – and then dig and combine to develop your own insights from there.

We can learn about sustainable consumer/citizen behavior by identifying and examining the same life stages, roles and influencers we’ve long known to affect buying decisions in general.  The subtleties and hidden gems of understanding come from taking into account what may be making consumers even casually consider “greening up” in the first place – and then serving that at its root.

Given that, “having a baby changes everything” may be a good phrase to just pin up on your bulletin board, right in front of your nose.

Photo credit: Paul

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Americans, with help from “the media,” tend to exaggerate problems due to a) tradition – such thinking is embedded in our DNA,  and/or; b) sexy “sound byte-itis” – such thinking makes for more exciting cable news watching.  Gender continues to be one of those hot topics, with women’s leadership strengths currently appearing front and center.  That’s why I so appreciated Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times op-ed, “Don’t Write Off Men Just Yet.” He’s read and respected by many, and he tells it like it is.  It’s almost as if each of his columns could start with: “Now, let’s step back a minute…”  A man after my own heart.

In this piece, he seems to be saying that while there are differences between the sexes in who pursues higher education, who does better in math versus writing, and how each sex tends to learn, the differences are not as great as they are made out to be. And, the point really is how it all balances out (a macro view vs. micro view).  It’s like the gender pendulum I’ve written about lately.  We may actually be heading toward the sweet spot in how various gender and individual strengths are sorting out and combining for more powerful and lasting positive outcomes all around.  As Kristof puts it:

My hunch is that we’re moving into greater gender balance, not a fundamentally new imbalance in the other direction. Don’t hold your breath for “the end of men.”

There is  great wisdom for businesses and organizational change therein.  The key lies in celebrating the fact that women are catching up, but not pushing to “surge ahead” of men and toward imbalance in the other direction.  We already know that a world where one gender is way ahead of the other in terms of education, leadership strengths or “power,” for example, doesn’t work.  It is neither productive nor sustainable.

To build an economy of thriving and interconnecting systems of people, planet and profit, we’ve got to allow for and nurture an organic organizational gender balance.  There is no one rule, number or linear path for how this “should” look in every case. That already shows that “women’s ways” of thinking are catching up with, and balancing out, traditional thinking.  Together, we are improving collective business wisdom every single day.

New research reported on by Miller-McCune’s Tom Jacobs may hold clues as to what has held women back from such careers thus far.  He writes:

A team of Miami University researchers led by psychologist Amanda Diekman has come up with a different explanation. In a paper just published in the journal Psychological Science, they argue women perceive STEM careers (those in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) as largely incompatible with one of their core goals: Engaging in work that helps others.

If perception of the science/tech career is one of the lone, geeky scientist sitting in a badly lit lab working on projects that have no immediate or “social” application, you can see why anyone with more social awareness might steer clear.   But, the needs of our sustainably-oriented economy create the perfect storm – where what we most need are science and technology-oriented brains rounded out by just such empathy.  There has to be an interconnectedness of the “geeky” stuff with the human stuff, or sustainability will not be sustainable.  Women in science and technology could be the embodiment of that connection.

As in so many cases within the sustainability realm, the issue seems to be one of communication.  If girls/young women better understood the connection between STEM careers and healthier communities or environments, a lot more of them would be signing up for such college degrees and heading into the many, many jobs of those types now becoming available.  In fact, companies are probably a bit frantic already, trying to find the right minds for exactly those current and future positions.

Interestingly, those companies may already be doing a much better job communicating their sustainability stories through branding and marketing campaigns.  And, consumers are responding.  Now, could similarly focused and relevant messaging be developed and distributed in the right places and in the right way so that women will also see future, attractive, career possibilities? Of course.  The truth is that women with an underlying desire to help others will be INTEGRAL to the mix of scientists and technologists that are already so core to our sustainable future.  They should be given the power to lead the way AND to teach their peers about the human side of science.

Photo credit: Malcom Bowman

My latest HuffingtonPost piece reflects the coalescing of my consulting and master’s program work toward a new research focus.  How can we take what we know about how women think to both develop better sustainable organizations and to better serve consumers supporting those organizations?  As always, my intention is not to say that women are the greatest and the only gender to combine systems thinking with empathy.  Rather, the fact that women are good at a kind of thinking so important in sustainable business is a clue to the bigger picture.  If your organization is reviewing and developing its sustainability efforts, this clue should help you source those best suited for your team: systems thinkers that embrace and reflect an empathic perspective on life.

An excerpt from my piece:

Women have generations of practice using and developing their empathic skills. When you combine that with solid business smarts, you get a sustainability powerhouse. It’s probably safe to say that without empathy, no business leader — male or female — would come to believe in the “triple bottom line” or the “people, planet and profit” mission. It’s the empathy extra that brings people and planet anywhere near the profit.

For those of you working in or with already well-functioning sustainability efforts, let me know if the empathic systems thinker is well represented, and how/where you’ve put that sort of mind to work.

I spotted a New York Times article today* that speaks to the “women’s ways” or right-brain guided ways of thinking that sustainability seems to be ushering in for a lot of companies.  It is incredibly exciting to watch the likes of GE’s Jeff Immelt, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and executives from Xerox and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, as noted in the article, start to push for partnership on clean energy.  Of course, sometimes attempts at partnerships can come from a wrong-spirited place (BP and oil spill responsibility), but let’s focus on the positive here!

In the past month or so, I’ve heard about so many clever partnerships in the sustainability space that I am officially accepting the role of collaboration cheerleader!  Here’s one example that  John Viera, Ford’s Director of Sustainability and Environmental Policy, reminded me of when we talked at Sustainable Brands 2010.  Cars used to be manufactured in a very vertical, competitive and secretive way (look where that got us), but the lights are going on – thanks to sustainability pursuits -  and companies, exemplified by Ford’s partnership with Microsoft for electric car management software, are partnering with technology companies to improve their vehicles.  Another one of my collaboration cheers goes to the Organic Cotton exchange, for pulling together a rather odd assortment of corporations and doing very progressive things.

Brilliant examples.  Why’d it take so long for the smart people in so many companies to start seeing things this way?

Here’s my gender expert take:  To pursue sustainability you have to think holistically.  You have to step back and realize that you can’t get to the incredible and innovative future of your products without some collaboration.  I submit this is the right-brain (sometimes referred to as “women’s way”) thought process finally seeping through.  Where the more traditional, left-brained approach presents an immediate and linear picture: “We want to win, costs be damned!”  The longer term, more interconnected, systems-thinking based, right-brained approach is more like: “We want to succeed for a long time and not hurt the environment or our communities.”  One sounds like a warrior and the other sounds like mother nature.

According to the aforementioned NYT/Greenwire article by Michael Burnham, the clean energy industry, for one,  is now even trying to take the synergistic collaboration idea a step further and form a partnership with the government (!).  The idea is to form an “energy strategy board,” which would develop an “Energy Challenge Program” described this way:

The program should be structured as a joint venture between the federal government and the energy industry, according to a “business plan” the executives plan to hand policymakers today. The program — which should be co-funded by the public and private sectors at an initial level of $20 billion over a decade — should focus on the transition from pre-commercial, large-scale energy systems to integrated, full-size system tests.

Until now, sharing the work and sharing the benefits is a concept our business culture has seen as idealistic or childish.  Sustainability is what nudges the 180 degree turn toward exactly that idea – corporations functioning in community – bettering themselves and the broader world.  And this is just the way right-brain, holistic, interconnected systems-minded people think.

How about this for my new cheer? “Systems Thinkers U-n-i-t-e! UNITE for the susty fight!”

*Thanks to MaddockDouglas for tweeting the story.

Photo credit: roderiderob via Picassa

Some of the Cone numbers that prove the point (and I highly recommend you download and memorize the entire, succinct, 6 page PDF):

• 75% of  consumers want “the opportunity to voice my opinion to a company about its social/environmental practices and products (e.g., provide comments on the company’s Web site or blog, review products).”
• 65% “believe I can have an influence on companies’ efforts toward environmental and social change.”
• 85% and 81%  of consumers want to be engaged on company topics like “how it conducts its business” and “the social and environmental issues it supports,” respectively.

And, whatever you do, don’t bemoan how this social and environmental responsibility stuff doesn’t have anything to do with business, because:

92% of Americans (finding it either Very Important – 51% or Somewhat Important – 41%) ” look to business, government and nonprofit organizations to collaborate to solve social and environmental issues.”

So why do three-quarters of Americans give companies a “C” or below on how they’re engaging consumers around key issues? Two possible excuses, that I refute:

YOUR particular consumer market is very unique and so doesn’t fall under the purview of this study. Oh really… Are any women buying your products or services?  If so, they’ve been taking a more holistic view of companies and brands for a long time now – much before the terms “corporate social responsibility” or “sustainability” rolled so trippingly off our wisened tongues.  Women make purchase decisions based not only on the linear facts, but also on the more relational or emotional elements – like: what’s in a corporate name/reputation (BP may be able to educate us on this one).

Your corporation’s executive/management team is not quite ready to face the fact that they’ve got responsibility-related issues that are destined to become huge problems. “CSR-wash” dabblings -by way of marketing tactics- are a fool’s errand at this point (but, go ahead while the rest of us laugh). Instead, REALLY committing, fessing up to mistakes and starting on a path toward a more sustainable and responsible business is your only choice,  both to deliver on the consumer-expected “social” good and to achieve twenty-first century business innovation (even the Harvard Business Review says so!).

My point is not that you need to jump fast and loose to get on the CSR case.  That will only change stakeholder perception for a moment or two – and then your efforts will fall apart.  Instead, go slow and be intentional with your approach – but START already!  To me, Cone’s report reflects that consumers are getting tired of waiting, and they are anxious to show much love to the early entrants.

• …word of mouth is the “primary factor” behind between 20% and 50% of purchases, with a particular relevance in relation to expensive products and first-time acquisitions.
• When assessing the “equity” of word of mouth, McKinsey said recommendations from a “trusted source” like a friend or family member was 50 times more likely to persuade someone to buy a brand.
• Messages passed among consumers that emphasised “important product or service features” were also found to have a more substantial impact than general or emotive comments.

In thinking about all the sustainability-related products and messages being bandied about in various marketing efforts these days,  I’ll focus on the last two points. But, first, I’ll remind you that women talk.  Their word of mouth and brand feedback are exponential in comparison to men’s as both the New York Times and P&G, to name two, seem to have found.

• So, what happens when a woman learns about or experiences your sustainability-oriented practices or products in a positive way? She’s likely already a “trusted source” for a whole group of women, so when she gets to talking about it – a LOT of people will be listening.
• There is an assumption that women are all about “the emotional,” but the truth is that it is but one thing that feeds into their holistic purchase decision-making, and likely more prominently than it does for men. Still, when it comes to their more sustainability-oriented buying, you better believe “important product services or features” take front and center.  I’d venture to say that sustainable “consuming” frequently starts from a more practical place than plain, old-fashioned consuming (think: saving energy, saving money, and keeping kids healthy) – so important linear facts/features get the most “talk.”

What this means to me is that you should be dialing into understanding how women engage with sustainability now, if you haven’t been already.  And, don’t make the same mistakes that a lot of brands did with their “marketing to women” efforts in years past by making efforts “pink” with unnecessarily “womanly” graphics, words or tone.  When it comes to sustainability, emotion plays a part, but key buying decisions still come mainly from a no nonsense place.

Just as it is for businesses entering into a more sustainable way of producing and operating, for consumers, the most compelling thing to talk about initially could be the unemotional energy efficiency benefits and costs-saved.  In some cases, the touchy-feely stuff is a pleasant side effect that occurs naturally (community love for being more environmentally responsible!) or be more likely to emerge once the practical brilliance of sustainability settles in.

To test this theory for your own product or industry, first and foremost, get women talking…

While I have not yet read the book, following are two points Strauch made in that interview, and why I think there may be sustainability implications:

1) Bi-lateralization.  Younger people tend to use one side of their brain to learn and another to recall.  But, as people age, their brains are more likely to use both sides of the brain to do both tasks.  Along similar lines, research into how women make purchasing decisions, too, cite a more “holistic” process of integrating the linear (left hemisphere thinking) with the relational (right hemisphere thinking).  The sustainability angle?  To think and engage with sustainability, you’ve got to be able to get your brain thinking more bi-laterally.

2) Exercising your frontal cortex.  One way to keep your brain highly functioning is to push it, by doing such things as: “creating a disorienting dilemma,” confronting ideas that are different from your own, or, talking with people with whom you disagree. All of these “challenges” sharpen your brain.  The sustainability angle?  For a lot of business types (and consumers, as well), thinking sustainably is indeed a “disorienting dilemma.”

The connections my own perhaps overly active brain made were these:

- While we’ve got to love what the younger generations bring to the table in terms of passion and enthusiasm for sustainability, we middle-agers may have brains that predispose us to better see all sides of the story and the mission.  Like the younger generations, we are very excited about green for green’s sake and want it to happen NOW.  However, we have the more holistic view that helps us step back and possibly make compromises in order to get to that longer term sustainable ideal.  We are more allowing of the long journey, because we’ve been on it longer.

- It isn’t just me and my marketing to women background.  It makes sense that the way women more naturally think aligns with how we sustainability-advocates would like all business people to start to think – more holistically and more EVERY stakeholder-aware.  What can we all learn from that realization to move sustainability forward?  I believe that women’s buying ways are a great filter both for understanding the sustainably-minded consumer and for training business brains to integrate sustainable practices.

- Finally, being IN the sustainability field is great exercise for our brains!  It automatically puts us in disagreement with a whole host of conventional business thinkers.  It forces us to learn new things almost moment to moment.  If we’ve got long experience in business done the old way, sustainability can be incredibly disorienting .  If all the other fascinating ideas and solutions that come from thinking sustainably weren’t enough, we can selfishly and simply give our own brains major frontal cortex exercise!  (Maybe Barbara Strauch will write her next book about the amazing ways our brains end up changing culture?)

Needless to say, those of you who have been reading my work for years know that my throwing out something new to ponder is par for the course.  I wonder if my brain knew I needed to get into sustainability long before I actually acknowledged it?  Anyway – your counterintuitive “Learned On” lesson for the day is that middle age may well help you engage with and understand sustainability better.  Now, go out and use that oh-so wise brain to make your company smarter too!

Here’s the path I took to my conclusion:

First – Extremely Huge Makeovers: Though I tend to not watch a ton of television, Extreme Makeover is one I catch more than others.  It’s a guilty pleasure, indeed. I love home building problem-solving, and the emotion around helping a family in need gets me every time.  However, I’ve certainly noticed that the “made over” homes (a.k.a. complete tear down/re-build) always end up being “extremely” over the top.  So, reading Dawn Wotapka’s WSJ article about the show’s decision to scale things back was not a surprise.  After all, it’s a bit tough to tout energy efficient appliances (from you surely know where – if you’ve EVER watched a few minutes of the show) in a house with very high ceilings, huge kitchens/living spaces and a bedroom for pretty much every last being.  Argh.  The last episode I watched resulted in a middle school-sized home for an admittedly incredible, adoption-embracing family with nine kids!  Remember those long ago days when families of 5+ regularly lived in 1000 square foot or so structures, sharing bedrooms and emphasizing not indoor television watching, but outdoor – use the whole neighborhood – entertainment?  Where is residential building/development headed now?  Consumers demand walkable neighborhoods, interaction with neighbors, and energy efficiency (more on that later), and are now starting to be more willing to take that in a smaller package.

Second – Not “Green” but EE: I had a quick call with Suzanne Shelton the other day in preparation for another piece I’m writing on consumers and energy.  One thing she pointed out during our conversation very strongly resonated: consumers do not go for “green” as much as they go for “energy efficiency” (EE).  Interesting subtlety in word choice, isn’t it? Those of us who have been writing about sustainability know that “green” is a loaded word, and, according to Shelton Group research, consumers are equally suspicious when they hear the term.  This is not so with energy efficiency – a phrase/label that reflects smarts, wisdom, and seems to stir up a competition factor to which many a human responds (“my home is more efficient than yours!”).  Plus, EE just seems p-r-a-c-t-i-c-a-l, and not pie-in-the-sky.  Energy efficiency, not “green,” is the thing to tout in the home building industry.

Third – women-centric = design smart: Finally, and, as is so often the case in my work, it all gets back to women.  The recent WSJ article by Alyssa Abkowitz presented the “news” (my emphasis) that women are the key market for today’s home builders and developers.  No huge surprise, that. But, here are two sentences that got to the real point – smarter design:

And even woman-centric builders acknowledge that men are just as likely as women to crave roomy closets or sleek countertops. “Much of what we propose is smart design,” admits Design Basics exec Paul Foresman.

Women have long demanded aesthetic and practical details, but the male-dominated/oriented building industry took a while to learn.  Yet, they have trained builders toward smarter (gender neutral) design that takes into account things that women seek and men also appreciate (in addition to the roomy closets), such as good security and low maintenance.  To that list I’d add – energy efficiency (as per the above point).  June 2009 research by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner found that women, in fact, were the primary decision makers on energy, and business women lead the way. 98 percent of women business owners have cut their electricity use at home and 77 percent have done the same at their businesses.

***

My take on “marketing to women” has always been that the way women buy is key not because women are so amazingly different and difficult to serve.  My contention is that the women’s market is important because it indicates the ways that your toughest customers (male or female) will be making their purchase decisions.  Women “represent” the core thinking in the consumer market for many a good or service.  As such, how they think, are influenced and make decisions will continue to be hugely important in the sustainability realm.

So, who cares about “green,” I mean energy efficient,  homes?  No one.  But, women do take the lead in looking for smaller footprints (take note Extreme Makeover), “energy efficiency” and other smart design details.  Serve their ways, and what you have, my friends, is a more sustainable way of building, living and serving ALL consumers.

I recently had a conversation with a fellow longtime marketing to women professional on the state of the field. Frustration ruled.  After ten years or so of beating the drum LOUDLY, along with so many other experts/consultants, we both felt like the marketing to women awareness/pursuit still had not delivered the expected and necessary dramatic shift in business practice.   Today, women-focused approaches remain much too gender-stereotyped or “pink” (even though I tried my best to let people know why NOT to think that way!)

For hopeful examples (we thought at the time) – we could refer to Dove’s efforts and the more recently noted Frito-Lay social media success with women-focused snack products.  And, to be sure, we’ve certainly seen a lot more obviously women-centered car ads, and both Lowe’s and Home Depot have gained ground by way of their more women-inspired efforts.  But, all that does not a paradigm shift.

In my years studying gender issues in consumer and organizational behavior, I have come to believe the word “women” may be the elephant in the room. No matter how much is learned about how a woman’s brain works, how women buy differently, or what influences their brand loyalty, those involved in executive decision-making are still mainly men.  No judgment. Just fact.  And, the term “women” may be too loaded for an open dialogue on how to reach them more effectively.  Any brilliant marketing strategy or business innovation idea that comes after speaking that word seems to just lose its luster.  It’s as if the thinking were:

• Well, yes, we’ll put the women on our staff “on” the women’s market topic.  They can report in occasionally, and we can say our company is marketing to women.
• Women are a whole new, scary thing to study. Since I don’t even understand my wife, I need to stay out of it altogether, or risk looking like a fool.
• There’s a conference session on women’s brands or reaching women?  No thank you. It will be a bunch of opinionated women telling us what we’ve been doing all wrong.
• Women are just a trend. If we stick our heads in the sand for a few more years (a.k.a. until I retire), we won’t have to venture into unknown territory.  Sure our brands may suffer, but I’ll manage to leave looking good.

I am not a social psychologist, but my.. how I’d love to pick the brain of one!  Of course, I don’t believe this is a conscious or overt behavior at all!  In my experience, men and women do just fine interacting and communicating in their daily and work lives (for the most part).  However, the “sexy,” gender polarizing research findings about how men and women are so amazingly different (heavily influenced by media depictions) make it seem like our culture has no hope of ever getting along or getting anything done together.

I don’t buy it.  But, I think I may have found a way past the elephant in our “marketing to women” path, toward true business and marketing innovation that finally brings that critical shift in thinking to pass. And, it’s called sustainability. No gender about it.

What I mean is this: all the fascinating information and helpful insights now available about the women’s market can be discussed, addressed and put to use for gender-neutral, sustainability-related business pursuits.  Imagine focusing on communication, decision-making or lifestyles/values, with no need to throw the gender label around?  While marketing for the majority of products or services need not be “gendered,” as such, I do believe there ARE clues to serving the toughest customer by looking at the ways women go about buying – which is a different thing.

What those of us in sustainability want to do is just that – to reach those people who are thinking in more connected terms, who see the above, beyond and around – 0r holistic – perspective of their buying and living decisions.  Am I right?  We want to reach people for whom raising healthy kids is key, and seeing their neighbors well-employed and safe is also crucial.  We want to reach those humans who give a tad more thought to their cleaning products and energy use, for instance, and who are motivated to influence others to consider doing the same.

Where ever-resistant businesses have had to be whacked over the head to pay attention to the women’s market, they definitely (and collectively) seem more eager to learn and engage with the emerging sustainably-minded consumer.  Even though she may well be one, that sustainably thinking person doesn’t have the “woman” label.  This helps business and marketing professionals have more productive conversations.

When we focus in on sustainability, the gender makeup of our core market doesn’t change, but we see it through a more meaningful lens. So tell the  elephant to leave the room, dismantle that darned brick wall, and watch marketing to women wisdom result in business practices that serve today’s motivated and word-spreading sustainably-minded consumer.