The new Yankelovich report on green living is out, and is confirming what we have been seeing in the marketplace. Sure, citizens are concerned about the environment, but they are not willing to pay extra for green products.
Environmentalism is developing among U.S. consumers — especially among Echo Boomers (ages16-29) and GenXers (ages 30-43), who both said they are more concerned about the environment compared to a year ago. But while interest in green issues continues to grow, consumers’ willingness to pay more for green alternatives has decreased. “There is a looming challenge for marketers of green products and services,” said Dr. David Bersoff, the EVP in charge of global knowledge and intelligence at Yankelovich and author of Going Green 2. “Consumers will be pushing for stricter governmental and institutional green policies, and they’ll be choosing brands to a greater extent based on green considerations. But at the same time, they are becoming less willing to help marketers pay for the greening of their business and products.” While concern about the environment is increasing among the population as a whole, it is still — for the most part — a minority position. Although 49% of consumers feel that our environmental problems are severe and 51% feel that these problems demand immediate corrective action, only 41% of Americans express high levels of personal concern, a meager four-point increase over last year. “It is important to note that, contrary to what might have been expected in the midst of rising unemployment unemployment, interest rates and fuel prices, increased levels of economic concern did not reduce levels of environmental concern,” said Dr. Bersoff. “In fact, somewhat surprisingly, consumers who have no financial anxiety appear to be the least attractive targets for new green products and services.”
The pressure is on marketers and policy makers to green their stuff, at no extra cost to consumers. Of course, this does not relieve citizens from their responsibility to consume less.
This doesn’t surprise me, but it is cause for concern. Thanks for posting.
Would be interesting to know more about their statistical study group and how they derived to this conclusion. If acurate (plus or minus, of course) – then it would indicate that the same people who are concerned still do not believe that they themselves have an impact by their actions/inactions. They do not feel empowered by the small everyday decisions they make (like living in a vacuum) – perhaps there’s the disconnect and challenge of our time – how to empower/educate a public that they are not alone?
Several studies have said much the same thing.
It is also true the studies have only a small coupling with reality – people as a mass are much less “green” than they claim on surveys. In isolation it is easy for them to claim, but in competition for other things (cheaper, more convenient, etc..) “green” doesn’t stack up well.
For decades the average person has called themselves an environmentalist, but people rarely consider it a major concern…
not surprising at all…
I think that going green should be seen as an investment.
Many environmentally friendly moves are sound investments. decreasing our houses’ energy consumption indeed cost money, but it pays back in around 5-8 years.
Going toward renewables has a cost, but oil and coal prices are soaring which make these clean energies more competitive.
It is us as marketers to explain to masses that going green will enable them to save money in a not so long period of time…
To conclude, going green would create millions of jobs. In the US, please refer to :
http://www.elrst.com/2008/09/22/a-green-recovery-for-our-economies-is-possible/
For the rest of the world, my article on tuesday will tackle the issue with HUGE numbers. 😛
Excellent post as usual Marguerite ! Keep it up and enjoy your weekend ! 😉
I’m unwilling to pay extra for “green”. So I just use less stuff overall.
We used to use 14kWh/day of electricity got from coal, costing us 15c/kWhr, so we paid $2.10 for dirty energy. Now we use 6kWh/day of electricity got from wind, costing us 21c/kWh, so we pay $1.26/day for cleaner (not clean, but cleaner) energy. We don’t pay more for “green”.
We used to consume 48kg each of meat and fish annually at about $10/kg, or $480 each annually for confined animals fed crud. We looked at organic and free range, and found they have no consistent standards across the country, so that the labels meant nothing. So now we consume 10kg each of meat and fish at about $10/kg, or $100 each annually for confined animals fed crud. But those factory farms would not survive long on our business, they survive by high volume, low cost; if more people were like us in amount consumed then the farms would all go genuinely organic and free range, and even if the price went to $30/kg we’d still be spending less on meat and fish than we used to.
And so on and so forth. Among many people, especially those involved in commerce, there’s an idea that all we have to do is “green” things up, and we can continue consuming vast amounts. This is rather like the apocryphal obese person who orders two burgers and fries, a chocolate sundae, and a diet coke – and expects to get thin.
The commerce guys tell us we’ll still holiday across the ocean, we’ll just fly with biofuels. We’ll still use airconditioning and heating and have 50″ flatscreen tvs, but it’ll all be powered by wind or pretty girl’s smiles or something. We’ll still eat 100 or more kg of meat and fish each year, but they’ll all be organic free range animals.
The problem is that when you calculate just how much land and resources this would all require, the Earth still isn’t big enough for 6.7 billion of us to live like that. Of course, it’s big enough for something like 1 billion of us to live like that, which is why the 1 billion of us in the developed West like to talk about population being too high. If only those dirty brown people would stop having so many children, I could use heaps of energy and eat heaps of meat without guilt! Stupid brown people.
No. The simple fact is that we in the West need to consume less. Because even if we stopped using oil and coal and gas tomorrow, our current rate of consumption means we’d just run short of some other stuff instead – copper or iron or fresh water or whatever.
So we need to reduce consumption as well as getting “green” things in place of what we now get. And as I pointed out about the electricity and meat above, if we consume less then even if the stuff is more expensive, overall we spend less. So a “green” lifestyle does not have to cost us more. Only “consume lots, buy green label” costs more.
Now, the reduced consumption does not have to be to living in a cold cave levels, mostly because we have so much waste in our lives. For example, the world produces about 50kg of meat and fish per person each year. A sustainable level is at worst one-quarter of that – 12.5kg, more than enough to supply all the nutrients we need and have nice meals. And just a few decades ago people got along very well with $20 shirts that lasted 5 years and were made locally, rather than $5 shirts that last 6 months and were made in China. And we don’t really need to heat or cool every room in the house, just our own bodies. And even if we have a 50″ flatscreen tv, there’s still nothing on. And so on.
Of course, you are not going to get people doing surveys for commerce telling us that we can just consume less. So they present a false dilemma, between consuming heaps of “green” and more expensive products, and consuming heaps of “not green” and cheap products. There are other choices, such as consuming less but “green”, or consuming less but “not green” – these other choices would have less impact and cost the same or less as our current lifestyles.
Agree with you Kyle on how we need to consume less.
However, please bear in mind that not all commerce people are bad (business was my education topic, yet I agree totally with your views )
I differ on your view on how populations’ increase don’t matter. We won’t be able to add 70 millions people on this planet indefinitely.
Except on that, I agree once again 100 percent. Keep up the good work… 🙂
Commerce people are “bad” only in the sense that most promote endless growth of the economy and of overall consumption, which is what got us into this mess in the first place. But in this the public in general are responsible, most stuff bought nobody forced us to buy.
I didn’t say that population increase didn’t matter, or that we could expand our population indefinitely. I said that we in the West like to focus on the population issue rather than focusing on the consumption issue. By a strange coincidence, the West is low population, high consumption.
As I say here and in many other places, the important difference between the two is that we can humanely drop our consumption quite literally overnight; we cannot humanely change population very fast at all.
The only proven method for dropping population in the long run is to improve the prosperity, education and political power of women. Employed PhD women in countries where they can vote tend to have no children at all; unemployed illiterate oppressed women tend to have half a dozen children or more. However, when people talk about the importance of “controlling” population, they tend not to bring up the importance of increasing women’s education, prosperity and say in public affairs.
However, the UN projects that because of rising prosperity and education around the world, the rate of growth of population will continue its decline, so that we reach the highest population ever around 2050, at 9-10 billion, and decline from there on.
So we don’t have to think about the sustainable consumption of “an extra 70 million people” forever and ever, we only have to think about what sort of lifestyle we can give 9 or 10 billion people. The two basic choices are between giving 1 billion of them a very wasteful lifestyle like ours in Australia and the US today, while the other 8-9 billion live in miserable poverty, or giving all 9-10 billion frugal comfort.
I think it’s obvious which I’m in favour of, though commonly people in the West think more of the former, which is the sort of person this survey was targeting. Daharja talks about an aspect of this in a recent article, where she talks about “designer green” and “frugal green”. I’d call “designer green” “consumer green” instead, but it comes to the same thing.
Your post is about consumers… but the same applies to companies too, which are huge consumers of energy and electricity. I have been really disillusioned for the most part about corporate America’s attitude towards climate change. (Google’s efforts [1] being an exception). The bottom-line being what drives these companies, these tough times and the recent focus on sustainability and ‘green’ has led to many cases of green-washing or merely pasting a ‘green’ sticker on their cost-cutting measures. Without making any conscious attempt to curtail excesses or even simple things like setting up recycle programs at the work place, many just ride the ‘green’ bandwagon because it is the expedient or opportune thing to do today.
I am not denying that some companies have taken genuine steps in this regard. The most unlikeliest of companies one would think of — Walmart — has shown some great leadership in this regard. Of course, they do it to bring their own energy costs down — after the US government, I believe they are the highest land/building owners in the US and their energy costs to keep these buildings are enormous. That alone would not impress me. I am impressed, however, from what I have heard and read about their ongoing efforts to drive change through influencing consumer and consumer choices. For eg: I have heard someone from Walmart (VP level) say that they plan to have CFL and other energy efficient lighting in all their stores as a first step but they plan to go beyond that and take out all regular bulbs from their shelves and have only CFLs (even if it is their own Great Value brand predominantly!)
A large portion of the US shops at Walmart. They have the power to influence consumer behavior and choices significantly. So, I hope they continue this effort and roll it out to ALL their stores soon — not just the two show-n-tell fancy stores they have in Texas and Colorado.[2]
Also, they have a huge suppliers list of companies who would (and probably do) bend over backwards to have supply arrangements with Walmart. I believe Walmart has already started affecting their suppliers attitudes regarding packaging and other choices by demanding a ‘greening’ of the suppliers corporate decisions and choices.
So…slowly but steadily, change is happening but we definitely need more of them to happen for this to become not a fringe or oh-look-what-those-great-guys-at-Google-did news item[3] but a way of life!
[1] http://www.thestreet.com/story/10440459/1/google-lays-out-44-trillion-us-energy-plan.html
[2] http://www.environmentalleader.com/2006/11/13/wal-mart-evaluates-environmental-efforts/
[3] http://www.thestreet.com/story/10436467/1/google-gets-patent-for-giant-floating-data-center.html
Disclaimer: I own neither WMT or GOOG stocks; other than what some mutual funds I own may have in their portfolio.
Note: The Walmart VP which I mentioned above is from a Keynote Address given at the Solar Conference in 2007.*
The talk was given by Charles Zimmerman, VP of Prototype and New Format Development, Wal-Mart.
I believe that is where I heard the point about rolling out only CFLs in Walmarts.
I will stand corrected (though I did hear it somewhere) if one of you has the patience or interest to listen to his speech in its entirety. It is posted at
http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/solar_power/070924/default.cfm?id=8925&type=wmhigh&test=0
* It was this conference
http://www.solarpowerconference.com/news/news.php?id=72
This years conference starts in San Diego next Monday. I wish I was going!
Oops… somehow this got cut out from my original post. Sorry for 3 comments. But hope this is informative.
I came to your blog first with the intention of letting you and your readers know about this article I just saw at TheStreet about a recent survey (albeit of 16 companies only) that lists the various advantages of going green.
http://www.thestreet.com/story/10440217/1/green-retrofits-more-than-pay-for-themselves.html
So, there are obviously many reasons for corporate america to go green. But will they commit to it or merely indulge in it as a green-washing measure?
I’m not sure that one can jump from these findings and say that consumers don’t support “green” initiatives. They’re just saying that they’re not likely to spend more money. Like most issues where the public understands that there is a problem (i.e. transportation, crime, economic development), I believe consumers want government and businesses to use their broad powers to understand and affect change. This is why running on an environmental platform is a good thing.
In Germany now we have the first milk company that will have gentech free milk. They pay to the milkfarmers more money to use only grass and so on from own land. The taste of milk is really better ( http://www.kaeseplatte.com) is a blog roundabout cheese and milk, but in german !