Brand Strategy talked to Cohn & Wolfe PR and Landor Associates today about their combined 2008 Green Brands Report. Both Ian Wood of Landor and Geoff Beattie of Cohn & Wolfe argue green will become a major purchase driver going forward and unpack some of the complexities of that.
The themes they both outlined as being most interesting from the report are:
• In the general sense of how people feel about the environment, the majority of people feel that things are getting worse regarding the.
• The change between the 2007 study the agencies did and the 2008 study is interesting. Climate change used to be the most important issue for consumers: Today it comes out as a combination of the issues of energy; global warming; water; transportation and, at the highest ranking, waste.
• Now when people think about who is responsible for these kind of problems it used to be overwhelmingly private enterprise but now the highest rated group is individuals so the issue is becoming more personal with people seeing themselves as part of the problem and the solution.
• In terms of who consumers think should be dealing with the problems of the environment, people are still looking to the government to provide the broad guidelines and policies.
• People believe companies should be conserving resources and producing environmentally friendly products. This is an area which is immediate and touchable and where people believe they can make a difference.
• Green awareness hits some categories faster than others. Supermarkets are up at the beginning of the list whereas mobile phones are further down. It seems many consumers are not aware of the issues around the manufacture and disposal of those mobile phone products.
• Companies which appear to support green issues from the top of the business have greater brand awareness around their green policies e.g Marks and Spencers which is number two in a list of 20 “Green Power Brands”. The company is also perceived as having the most momentum in terms of getting greener in the past two years.
• 50 percent of consumers say they are going to be purchasing more products that are more green orientated going forward. The question leading on from that is whether consumers are going to be buying green offerings from traditional brands or products from green brands.
The shift to green is going to hit different countries and categories at different times. They predict that it is likely to become the DNA of organisations so that it becomes the norm. Ultimately it is uniqueness that tends to build powerful brands and when everybody does green it ceases to be unique.
The win win combination, they suggest, is for a brand to stress heavily the efficacy of, for example, a cleaning product and have green as a secondary advantage.
Read our case study on green cleaning brand Ecover in the July/August issue of Brand Strategy.
