Congruent Green Marketing and Values-Conflict Growth Edges

In our last several posts, we looked at the many different shades of green in the marketplace today.  From an aesthetic point of view, this creates a rich jungle tapestry, a crazy quilt of green.  But from a marketing standpoint, it creates a different kind of jungle, the dangerous kind.  You think you're green.  You think your customers are green.  But if your green doesn't match their green, you (or they) might as well be brown.

Maybe your green can match their green.  Maybe it's just a matter of presentation, of selecting or emphasizing the right facts from the myriad (true) things you could say. 

On the other hand, your problem could be deeper.  Some of the shade differences reflect real differences in values and outlook.  There could be a conflict of philosophy or identity.  And this can happen not only between your company and your customers, but also between one part of your company and another, or between your company's management and its products or practices, or between your company and other parts of its value chain that in today's transparent world increasingly constitute a part of your larger identity.

A marketing message mismatched to your customers causes trouble immediately.  But any serious values mismatch, anywhere within your company or its value chain, is trouble just waiting to happen.  It's also an opportunity for growth, though, if you know how to work with it.

The ideal is congruent green marketing, where your communications, actions and transactions with every part of your value chain, from your ultimate supplier to your ultimate customer as well as throughout your company itself, are aligned in message and values, including shades of green.  Then your marketing will pack maximum punch.

At this point you may be thinking I'm an unrealistic idealist, to talk about greening your ultimate suppliers.  Well, I did say this is the ideal.  But it's an ideal actually being targeted by companies from IBM to IKEA, as portrayed in books like Green to Gold and The Triple Bottom Line.  They care. Customers care. Shouldn't you? 

This ideal will never be totally achieved, or at best it will be touched only for a moment.  The market never stands still, and now less than ever.  So at any particular time in this ever-shifting landscape, these mismatches of values define edges you can push upon — along with more traditional economic edges — to expand your arena of effectiveness.

Keith Borden, Consultant
Brilliant Green Marketing