Marketing Green? Keep an Eye on Social Networks!
Tuesday, 12 July 2011 00:00
By Heidi Tolliver-Nigro
Everyone these days, it seems, wants to be seen as “green.” Studies consistently show that consumers want to know if their vendors or favorite brands have a green story to tell. If they do, that “green-ness” can influence their purchasing decisions in a positive way. No surprise, brands are responding, talking green and trying to pull those customers in. But those marketing claims better be true. After all, the social networks are watching.
According to Resonate Networks, which helps online advertisers reach targeted consumers based on their attitudes, it is not online green communities in which you will find people dedicated to environmental issues and awareness. It is the traditional, diffused, and highly unpredictable social networks. In fact, it was the outcry in the social networks against the original and noisy SunChips “compostable” bag (the blogosphere and YouTube chief among them) that forced the company to ditch its original effort and replace it with a newly formulated bag only a few months later.
According to Resonate’s research, green consumers (defined as those who look for products with an actual and, it must be assumed, measurable environmental benefit) spend less than 1% of their time online reading the content of official “green” sites. Instead, they are active participants in their own social networks, spending just over 15% of their time there.
In other words, green consumers are not functioning in a centralized space over which marketers can exert some measure of control. They are communicating through a diffused network of friends, family, and followers, where their message is something over which marketers have no control whatsoever. Just ask SunChips.
Social media has become a type of filter for truthfulness in marketing. So if you’re marketing green, you’d better be telling the truth. If you're just greenwashing, you're going to get weeded out by the green community before you get "liked," Tweeted, or a thumbs up. Even worse, social networkers’ passion for the environment could result in negative word of mouth over which you have no control.
I recently read a blog by one of the marketing gurus who recommended that every brand do a Twitter search on "[your company name] stinks" at least once per month (well, he didn’t say “stinks,” but you get the idea). That not a search you want to be found in!
So if you're marketing green products, get out the truth serum. Green consumers in the social networks are watching you.
Heidi Tolliver-Nigro is an industry analyst specializing in digital, 1:1, personalized URLs, QR codes, and other marketing technologies as they apply to print. You can contact her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
