McKinsey just released a must read for green marketers. ‘Helping Green Products Grow‘ outlines five steps businesses need to take to sell green products successfully. Most of it is common sense. Still there were a few surprises, most notably in the area of consumers’ awareness of most concrete actions to reduce global warming:
These findings present enormous educational opportunities, not just for green marketers, but also for environmental educators, hoping to make a difference in greenhouse gas emissions. Bloggers, journalists, teachers, environmentalists need to turn up the volume on eating less beef, improving home insulation, and driving more fuel-efficient car, less often. These are all concrete actions that citizens can understand, and that also can help them save money, particularly during these hard economic times.
Here are the five steps, with selected some highlights:
1. Educate consumers:
Because consumers are largely unaware of green products, a business that sells them must see itself first as an educator, not a sales machine. Our study shows that more than one-third of the consumers who want to help mitigate climate change don’t really know how . . .
2. Build better products:
Consumers will not think better of green products until companies make them equal to, or better than, their conventional alternatives. It’s no surprise: most people value performance, reliability, and durability much more than ecological soundness. . . .
3. Be honest:
To rebuild public trust, companies must come clean about the true environmental impact of their products and their attempts to reduce it, and many will need to address historical concerns about specific products or operations . . .
4. Offer more:
Companies must ensure that consumers understand the financial and environmental returns on their investment in green products, for they are more willing to try new ones-especially those that cost more-when they find it easy to track the savings . . .
5. Bring products to the people:
Having decided to buy green products, many consumers encounter a last hurdle-finding them-either because manufacturers don’t keep up with demand or advertise where they can be bought, or because wholesalers and retailers don’t stock them or display them prominently. Biofuel enthusiasts, for example, must often drive out of their way to fill up . . .
I will end with my usual rant. Buying green stuff is good as long as it translates in net carbon reduction. Otherwise, we are all better off following the old conservation adage of, ‘reduce, re-use, recycle‘.
La Marguerite 
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Hi Marguerite,
Thanks so much for sharing. Maybe we should tackle the beef issue in a future Green Moms Carnival. I knew it was important, but I had no idea it ranked as high as #3.
Lynn
You have to be careful – the study quoted by McKinsey is very general and not robust. But the point that people don’t have the information and numeracy to decide what they can do is something that is important — and frustratingly difficult to deal with.
Meat consumption always surprises people. Here is a quick resource to get started (it gets more complex than this, but you get a feeling)
Click to access nutriEI.pdf
I’m nearly a vegan (I drink about a quart of milk a week, but don’t eat eggs or other dairy) and my food carbon footprint is about 10% of my meat eating wife … so we average out to about 1/2 the US average.
But if you tell someone they should change their diet, you’ve probably lost them.
We’re always better off – financially, environmentally, everything – reducing, reusing and recycling. Buying new stuff is the fourth choice after that.
By the way, Steve, that was a strange little study.
Firstly, when proposing alternative diets as examples, they assume exactly the same amount of plant consumption in each case. Nobody eats more potatoes or bread to make up for their lack of (say) bacon for breakfast, they just drink more milk. Which doesn’t match our own experience.
They specifically say they’re ignoring any potential increase in methane or nitrous oxide emissions due to an increase in the land area devoted to plant crops in place of livestock. Which is silly, since if you just put more ground under crops you have to put fertility back in the land somehow. But of the three ways of doing that – artificial fertilisers, plant and animal manure – when rotting in the ground produce methane and nitrous oxide. Around 7-8% of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gas emissions worldwide are due just to stuff rotting in rice paddies in Asia.
There are a few things like that in the paper. So that when you say that most people don’t have the literacy and numeracy skills to understand this stuff, I reply that they actually do, but that however smart we are we can make dumb assumptions if we want to reach a certain conclusion – say, that none of us should eat meat.
Likewise, your assumption that telling people to change their diet (or whatever) will lose them, this also seems wrong to me. Thirty years ago we would have said that about tobacco smoking. But this has changed a lot in the US and Australia over that time. From government we’ve had a combination of advertising, regulation, taxation and incentives to encourage reduced smoking. Likewise with water consumption in Melbourne and Brisbane here in Australia. And these things have worked.
So it seems that you (Steve) have a rather cynical view of people and the possibilities of productive change, that people are generally ignorant and stupid and unwilling to change. However, actual evidence of changes effected across the West in recent decades suggests that people are not ignorant and stupid, and that they’re quite willing to change –
– in response to advertising the reasons for change, taxation to discourage staying the same, regulation to make staying the same uncomfortable, and incentives to encourage the change.
I just posted a followup post on Huffington Post, “Where Is the Beef in Climate Solutions?”:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marguerite-manteaurao/where-is-the-beef-in-clim_b_137744.html
You know, when it comes to highly intelligent and influential people commenting on vitally important matters, I wish they (McKinsey) would just come out and say it: The most important thing by far that a person can do in the next two weeks regarding global warming and related matters is to vote for Obama and nearly every Democrat on the ballot. Period. Although I enjoy the McKinsey reports on global warming, energy, and related matters (including the great one about a year ago), c’mon, on an issue such as this, they could be doing more. I wish they would speak out, write editorials, make themselves more visible, and so forth. The stakes are BIG. I know that, given many of their clients or potential clients, speaking out strongly on this issue would not be easy. So what!? It’s time for ENERGIZED and responsible leadership.
I once was a McKinsey consultant and I have great admiration for the firm. But, in my view, they should be speaking up more loudly and not taking “no” for an answer.
I hope everyone is well. I’m seeing Neil Young tomorrow at Shoreline, and I hope he says a thing or two.
Cheers,
Jeff
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Jeff writes, “The most important thing by far that a person can do in the next two weeks regarding global warming and related matters is to vote for Obama and nearly every Democrat on the ballot. Period.”
Cult of the hero. Sad.
John Robb outlines it well, saying.
“The above assumptions lead to offensive (all we need to do is find the right leader) or reactive (whack a mole) mindset/policy. If you reverse them, you develop a defensive and opportunistic mindset/policy.”
Leaders do not do things which they expect to lose them office or get them impeached. In a democracy, leaders are by necessity followers of public opinion, not truly leaders. The people had to be screaming for war before Roosevely could ask Congress to declare it; MLK had to march and cases had to be brought before the Supreme Court before Eisenhower could propose the Civil Rights Act; the US people had to be crying for blood before Dubya could have the US invade an uninvolved country. They follow, they don’t lead.
Fix yourselves, and the elected leaders will follow along, whichever of the two factions of the capitalist party your guys are from.
Kiashu (#9), thanks for your post and comments, but I’d like to clarify a few things, please.
I did not say that the “only” thing for people to do was vote for the right person and thus to ignore actions at a more personal level. And, I said “the most important thing”, and I listed the timeframe under discussion as “in the next two weeks”.
Nor did I say or imply that we should just WAIT for “a right person” to come along, a “hero”, nor did I say that we should simply pray.
Voting IS action. If you doubt that voting, in America, for Obama, in about a week, on this issue is a very important thing one can do in the next two weeks, you’ll find that a lot of people here disagree with you. I was with about 5,000 of them last night.
Yesterday, I went to the Bridge School Benefit Concert, including Neil Young, Jack Johnson, Norah Jones, Josh Groban, Smashing Pumpkins, Wilco, Death Cab For Cutie, Cat Power, and others. Many artists sang songs specifically about nature and our need to protect it. Some sang songs that were very explicitly political, in favor of directions that Obama is taking and strongly against some of the actions on the part of the current gang in power. Norah Jones played a unique song she had written four years ago, just after the last election had the very wrong outcome, in her view. One of the other most prominent artists had an Obama sticker on his guitar. Neil Young wore a prominent Obama button. The artists and crowd were strongly pro-Obama. Many of the artists, and the concert hosts, frequently reminded the audience to vote next week. One could see dozens, indeed hundreds, of signs of support for Obama, and I didn’t see or hear any mention whatsoever of the other side of the race here.
Much of this was tied to the need to address the mess we humans are creating. And, people in this audience aren’t the types to just sit around and “wish” that something would happen or that some hero would happen to come by.
I understand your point (if this was the point you were getting at) that people shouldn’t avoid important everyday actions on a personal level merely in the hopes that a hero-leader will take care of everything for them. Of course. And, if a responsible leader is elected, that should not, of course, serve as an excuse that other actions aren’t necessary or that “now everything is fine.” But, I wasn’t implying or suggesting either of those ideas. Nor am I sitting around waiting for a leader to emerge. (Last week, I ran a full-page centerfold-right climate-change-oriented advertisement in the paper at the university where a Board Member of ExxonMobil teaches as a professor, as one example.)
Aside from that, voting IS a key action, and we had better vote for leaders who can help make a difference at the leadership and policy levels. Indeed, it is through the voting of every person that leaders and would-be leaders will, eventually, hopefully, get the idea that they need to be responsible on these matters if they want to get elected or re-elected.
I hope these comments clarify my stance.
Cheers for now,
Jeff
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Always a pleasure to read from you Jeff. even if we haven’t seen you a lot lately. Hope you’re ok…
Very interesting post Marguerite as usual. Keep up the good work !
For change to occur it needs to come from a combination of the grassroots “bottom up” approach and from “top down” – I agree with Jeff and Kiashu. Here in Australia, we too voted for a new government last year that sees the issue of climate change as critical and is taking steps to reduce our carbon footprint.
I agree with Marguerite that education is critical. Consumers need to be educated on ways in which to live more sustainably, the reasons for doing this and the benefits. Companies need to be transparent and authentic in their communications on green products. Those “greenwashing” need to be exposed and penalised.
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