Fighting green fatigue

By Kate Levinson

Buy green detergent, and only use green cleaners. Eat organic everything. Use the sun to power stuff, and recycle your dirty shower water. And of course all your light bulbs should be squiggly, your electronics unplugged and your compost pile overflowing.

But who wins the dishwasher vs. washing-by-hand fight? Is the junk in Nalgene bottles (and the fuel for the distance they travel) really better than buying and recycling regular plastic water bottles? Is it time to get a hybrid?

And when is it all just too much to wrap your head around?

With living green all the rage, people panicking to do the right thing can fall victim to green noise caused by urgent, sometimes vexing or even contradictory information played at too high a volume for too long.” And then they do nothing. Or feel guilty about the small but important steps they are taking in the right direction.

This “green fatigue” from information and option overload worries companies who are marketing green products—and, lucky for young job-seekers and professionals, looking for fresh ideas and strategies for making environmentally friendly products easy to understand and easy to choose. Preston Koerner of online magazine Jetson Green gives five major principles for battling green fatigue in consumers:

· “Environmental progress should be authentic.” AKA, don’t lie. Don’t promote something that’s not quite as green as it sounds, and acknowledge the fact that you have room for improvement and are working toward it.

· “Products and services need to be remarkable.” AKA, don’t make something green just for the sake of making something green. It needs to be a good dishwasher or water bottle or car first and easy on the environment, too.

· “Spend more time strategizing over appropriate prices.” AKA, don’t make people broke. You don’t have to be the bottom-shelf green cleaner company, but be fair. If you can pitch the fact that you’ve done your homework on the two point above, charging a little more will be fair.

· “Be honest with customers about efforts to improve.” AKA, again, just don’t lie! Some things, such as the Nalgene bottle, come with a handful of good and a handful of bad. Pump up the good stuff, but also tell people a) you know there’s some not-so-good, and b) you’re doing things to make it better.

· “Avoid complaints about costs and obstacles to ‘going green.’” AKA, don’t make excuses. Go back to the childhood days of the word “can’t” not being allowed, focus on the positive and figure out how you can do it.

By keeping these pillars in mind, marketing professionals-to-be will have a leg up on the competition and can start brainstorming about ways to make consumers realize that the green noise, as noisy as it is, is truly an opportunity for people to educate themselves and make choices that will make for a healthier planet. (And of course, if one of those choices just happens to be the product you’re trying to sell, even better.) And as green gets cooler and cooler –and more and more important—you may very well find yourself in green marketing in some capacity whether you expected it or not.

Photo by Clorox Green Works