In recent posts, we explored strategies you can use to adapt your marketing to the new marketplace.  These strategies are generic — any company can use them.  But general solutions can take you only so far.  To break out of the pack, you need unique strategies that no one else can copy because they derive from your unique qualities and situation.

Where can you find such strategies?  If only you had some resource to turn to, which understood everything about your company and its market.  A resource with vast strategic insight, creativity and energetic drive, that you could harness on behalf of your business right now.  A supercomputer that could not only crunch the data but deliver strategic solutions.   If only you had... your brain.

Yes, I know you're straining your brain already to cope with the current crisis.  That may itself be part of the problem — but you probably already know this, too.  You may know all about the "relaxation response" and how relieving stress can free the brain to perform at a higher level.

But I'm not talking about the relaxation response.  Not primarily.  I am, however, talking about recent research by the man who discovered the relaxation response, Herbert Benson.  The relaxation response was just the beginning.  In The Break-out Principle: How to activate the natural trigger that maximizes creativity, athletic performance, productivity, and personal well-being, Benson details steps to develop creative strategic solutions to challenging situations, time after time after time.

At Amazon, the book gets mixed reviews — some raves, but also some who say there's little new here, it's all been said before.  Of course!  If this is how creative breakthroughs happen, humanity wouldn't have gotten this far without it — and neither would you.

Almost certainly, you have your own ways to tap into your creative potential.  It's how you built your business or career.  But you may not understand the full range of principles involved, or the practices you can draw upon to get results systematically — in business as well as personal life, for groups as well as individuals.  It's a master key that opens countless doors.

So when you read it, don't sell yourself short with a swift, smug dismissal.  Grasp the whole system — for example, the way to select people for a "breakthrough network" and the rules by which they should operate.  The great thing is that at this difficult time, when money is so tight, The Breakout Principle is a way to further leverage the assets you already have — and assemblage of human brains — to answer your most urgent question:  "What the heck should we do now?"

In our last post, we saw that one way to combat the shift in values during the recession is to move green benefits to the back of the list, to match the downshifted values of your customers.  However, one "customer" who's moving green benefits to the front of the list is Barack Obama.

Of course, Obama is budget-constrained like the rest of us.  But at least with regard to climate change, he clearly "gets it" on environmental issues.

• On the campaign trail he spoke of alternative energy in relation to saving the planet.
• One of his first actions as President was to cancel as many of Bush's anti-environmental policies as he could.
• He put billions into the economic stimulus bill for clean energy and other environmental priorities.
• His Energy Secretary is Steven Chu, a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist.  (An Energy Secretary who actually understands energy!  Imagine!)

As the stimulus money starts to flow, some of it may flow your way — either directly or indirectly.  Obviously, this would be good for your business, and you would be wise to make moves to make it happen.  Besides that, though, is there any way you could leverage Barack Obama?

Yes, there is.  Obama legitimizes environmental concern.  On election night, he said we face the challenge of "a planet in peril."  And you can leverage that legitimacy in your marketing.  "The president has said we face a planet in peril.  Acme acne cream allows you to answer Obama's call to help, ensuring both a clearer face and a cleaner planet."

President Obama has called on all of us to help.  He has said he can't solve the problems facing us alone.  If you can position your products as part of the solution, then enlist the participation of your customers in answering that call, you can leverage Barack Obama to keep your turf green (environmentally and financially!) during this difficult economic dry spell.

Look for statements by the president about the environment that relate in some way to your own company's mission.  (No doubt there will be many more as time goes on, so repeat your search every few months.)  For example, search Google for:

+obama +environment
+obama +planet
+obama +green -dress -gown

Add keywords to your search that are pertinent to your own product areas.  See if you can find quotations that you can work into your marketing.  If you can help your customers join Obama's green team, you're doing everyone a favor.  (As we say at Brilliant Green Marketing, "Better for the planet.  Better for you.  Brilliant.")

How else can you adapt your marketing to the new green market as it suddenly turns a dangerous dry brown?  Read our next post to find out.

In our last post, we explored how you might counter the economic downturn by reminding your market that collapses don't take turns — and the environmental crisis is as dire as ever.  Getting this across with impact may help, but you can do more.

For example, try moving the green aspects of your products to the side or the back of the benefits list.

To you, the environmental benefits of your products might be their most important merits.  These green benefits may be important to your customers, too, but in bad times they are less likely to be the most important benefits of your products.  So if you've been leading with these benefits, move them alongside others.  And if you were already presenting them alongside others, you might even want to move them to the back.

Being better for the planet is great.  Indeed, it's crucial.  But in hard times, emphasize instead those aspects of your products that are better for the customer as a separate individual, rather than as a member of society.  (I emphasize "as a separate individual" because of the tragedy of the commons, which is precisely what we're up against here.)

Start with the assumption that, on the average, your customers' values will have shifted from green values toward money, from community values toward personal, and from long term toward short term.  This suggests a hierarchy or sequence in which you should present benefits — tempered by how strong and direct a particular benefit is.

• Your products are less expensive than alternatives, right off the shelf.  (Lucky you!)
   
• Your products are less expensive in the long run, because they last longer.
   
• Your products are less expensive in the long run, because they use less energy, refills or other resources — they have a lower operating cost.
   
• Your products are less expensive in the larger picture, because they render products in other categories unnecessary, or preserve other items or cause less damage.
   
• Your products are safer or healthier for family and pets.
   
• Your products other personal benefits, relative to competitor products or alternative ways of meeting the need.
   
• Purchasing your products now will put in place a system your customers will want down the road, preventing the cost of starting over, or will keep in place a system already instituted.
   

The sequence here is not hard-and-fast, and the list is not complete, but you get the idea.  The point is to rethink the competitive benefits of your products from the standpoint of a prospect customer who has come to feel that buying green is temporarily a luxury they may not be able to afford.  Their attention will be more on costs and benefits to themselves rather than the planet — so show them advantages in terms of costs and benefits to themselves!  Align the presentation of benefits with your customer's new priorities.  It's as simple as that.

And what about the green benefits themselves, when you finally get to them on the list?  How do you present them?  Less as a reason to buy than as a reason to feel good about buying.  "And oh, by the way, when you purchase Acme acne cream, you can feel good knowing that washing your face will put fewer toxins into the ocean that might ultimately poison the polar bears."  (Adapt to your situation and work on the wording, but that's the attitude to convey.)

Does this offend your sensibilities of what's really important?  Then get over it.  First of all, if your customer's self-perceived needs are not important to you, you shouldn't be in business.  But even from a green standpoint, this rearrangement of your benefits list — pushing green benefits towards the back — is not a betrayal of your own green values.  Rather, it's currently your best way to serve and preserve them.

Our next post will explore further ways to sell green during the economic meltdown.

In our last post, we saw that the economic downturn will make people less green -- in effect, at least — in their values and purchasing decisions.  (Of course, when it comes to purchasing decisions, "in effect" is the reality.)  This bad news is undoubtedly not news to you, but it may be helpful to have deeper insight into the psychodynamics behind it.

What can green marketers do about this?  Before we can arrive at good strategies, we've got to hold fast to the right attitude.  Sure, the situation we're facing is bad for green business.  But what is green business?  Why are you green in the first place?  Early on, we defined "green" as better for the planet.  That means that "less green" is worse for the planet.

That's where we need to keep our attention — in how we think, and especially in how we communicate.  Nobody will care that your business is in trouble, but people still ought to care that their planet is in peril.  Remind them of that, and you'll at least catch their ear.

Collapses don't take turns.  Right now we are facing an economic collapse, but we were already facing an environmental collapse (climate, biodiversity, fisheries, forests, farmland — you know the list.)  The environmental situation was dire a year ago.  It was more dire six months ago.  Is it any less dire now?  Did the impending environmental collapse politely step aside to make room for the newly arrived economic collapse?

Of course not!  Economic collapse may have shoved aside environmental collapse in people's minds, but it didn't shove it aside in the world "out there."  So to the extent that people are now less green in their thinking, the economic collapse has caused their minds to become misaligned with reality.  That's dangerous for anybody — including your customers.

In reality, we have not shifted from facing environmental collapse to facing economic collapse.  We have shifted from facing environmental collapse to facing both environmental and economic collapse.  The fact that the economic collapse is already upon us does not make the environmental collapse any less imminent.  In fact, the environmental collapse is not "on its way" — it's already here.  It's happening at this moment, on an enormous scale.  It's just hidden behind an ever-shrinking facade of affluent appearances.

Nor is the environmental collapse separate from the economy.  In the skyscraper of civilization, ecological services are the foundation and first three stories, the economy is floors four through ten, and all the rest of society is built up from there.  When the foundation and first three floors crumble, what will happen to floors four and above?  If bailing out the banks is hard, try bailing out the ocean!

Most informed people would still agree that saving the environment is important.  But many would argue that fixing the economy is now more urgent.  That's the cognitive error we as green marketers must strive to correct.  One urgency has not displaced another; rather, the urgencies have multiplied.  Unfortunately, the human mind does not easily comprehend multiple urgencies, but that's a reality our species must now outgrow — or else (as Hobbes put it)  we'll soon return to a world where life is nasty, brutish and short.

In the end, even realizing all this, people may still make less green purchasing decisions due to budget constraints.  But the first step in stemming the tide is to help them keep straight in their thinking.  Keep them in touch with the planet.  Let them feel its scream.

Is that all we can do to market green effectively in the new green market?  No.  Read our next post for more.