By Elaine Appleton Grant

In the months since Deliver® published its first green issue, companies have turbocharged their attempts to become more environmentally responsible. But their efforts to create and promote eco-friendly products have become increasingly fraught with dilemmas.

Deliver checked in with four marketers concerned about sustainability to see how the marketing environment has changed since last August.

Our panelists were Edith Graves, marketing director of Eason Associates, a Washington, D.C., design firm whose clients include Clark Construction Group, which just completed the first LEED Silver Certified baseball park in the nation, and Greg Owsley, chief branding officer of New Belgium Brewing in Ft. Collins, Colo. Last year, Owsley had just kicked off a campaign called “Follow Your Folly” that encouraged consumers to save local rivers from pollution and to commute by bicycle.

We also talked with Ian Yolles, vice president of brand communications at Nau Inc., an eco-friendly apparel maker headquartered in Portland, Ore., and David Zucker, a corporate social responsibility expert and partner with New York PR firm Porter Novelli.

Deliver: Give me an update on your green marketing efforts.

Owsley: We just measured “Follow Your Folly.” We had a 30-percent increase in people’s awareness that we’re a company that strives to be more sustainable. When we started, less than 10 percent of consumers knew this.

The attendance at Tour de Fat, our bicycling event, doubled in most towns. The messaging last year was so strong that the bike could be the vehicle that leads us out of global warming! In each of the 11 towns, we had one person turn over their car keys and title and give up their car for life. We’re doing a documentary on that.

Graves: We’re on the speaker circuit, talking to designers, printers and end users about [greening their printed materials]. A lot of our clients have sustainable philosophies, but they haven’t thought about the paper they’re using.

We always offer the client three eco-friendly paper selections. Once our clients understand these papers’ properties, they want them. They may or may not cost more, but it sends a powerful message to their audience.

We’re booming right now and we feel fortunate in the current economy. I have to attribute it to something – maybe the sense of goodwill from our yearlong green campaign? Nobody’s hired us saying “You’re the green designer, that’s why we want you.” But it certainly hasn’t hurt our business.

Deliver: David Zucker, are you seeing any major changes in how clients are approaching the eco-friendly story?

Zucker: It’s a time of reckoning: People are confronting the complexity of the communication challenge. They are struggling with how to tell consumer audiences a clear story about the environmental responsibility of any given product.

On the one hand, consumers are motivated to purchase more environmentally friendly products. The dilemma is how to know whether any given product is truly environmentally friendly? The information is so complex that to tell an accurate story becomes very challenging.

For instance, the assumption about food miles early on was simplistic: The message said “local is better.” But that’s not always the case. In Europe, consumers would assume that buying locally grown roses rather than imported ones would be better from a carbon standpoint. In fact, researchers found that roses grown in Kenya had less of a footprint because of the difference in growing processes.

But are consumers going to take the time to sift through that level of information to make purchase decisions, or will they be frustrated and ignore some of this information and go back to old habits?

Deliver: Ian and Greg, are you struggling with this complexity?

Yolles: We are. In trying to think in an iterative, thoughtful way about sustainability, every day we’ve been faced with a multitude of decisions. So we introduced a new section to our Web site, “Grey Matters,” to bring full transparency to the complexity of the decisions we’ve made.

Owsley: For every sustainable move you make, it’s only slightly more pro than it is con.

For us, company growth means more jobs, more of our sustainable practices in our territory, but it also means more fossil fuels under our beer.

We try not to use the term “green marketing.” If green means lessening your impact, well, marketing means increasing your sales. Those are at odds. It’s also a classically American response to a crisis: We’ll shop our way out of global warming. We’re not quite sure that’s the complete answer. How do we continue to work on sustainability from the heart?

Graves: All of these paper companies are promoting green design and printing, and I know it is from the heart. These are 200-year-old companies with deep respect for the woods. The more they work to preserve them, the better for their companies. Paper companies now can provide documentation and certification of their eco-friendly practices. And printers and clients need to know to ask for it. The demand creates the supply. Eventually, this will be the norm.

Owsley: To me, the disclaimers are what’s so key to any long-term green messaging. You have to admit to the failings while you also tout the successes. We’re doing that on our aluminum-can 12-pack. [We're saying that] cans are only a little better than bottles; this won’t make us green, this will make us only slightly greener.

Yolles: There’s an enormous amount of greenwashing going on. I have some faith that over time people will be able to separate authenticity from marketing spin. We’re in the digital age. Everyone is a filmmaker, everyone has a blog, so they’re instantaneously publishers and journalists. So in this world, there is a level of transparency and also the ability for stories to be transmitted very broadly, very rapidly, and that’s completely unprecedented. In the digital world, there’s a persistence of memory, and so the notion of what you do and how you do it is more important than ever before.

Deliver: The Direct Marketing Association recently strengthened its ethics guidelines to require that its members notify customers of their ability to opt out of mailings in every commercial solicitation. Will this Commitment to Consumer Choice measure hurt or help your efforts to promote eco-friendly activities?
Owsley: We don’t deploy direct marketing. Yet if these guidelines could alleviate a lot of the ecological burden – as well as the marketing clutter – of junk mail, it might become a medium we’d consider.

Deliver: Interesting! So you’d see it as a more ecologically friendly alternative and one potentially worth pursuing?

Owsley: Only if direct mail were truly cleaned up of the clutter that makes going to the mailbox a chore and allowed us to deliver nice surprises to consumers who would most appreciate them. I still think the tactile experience mail brings is special, but largely the consumer perception these days is “turn off the faucet.” If that changes? Yeah, we’d be interested. We’d probably send something like our postcards, which we call “post-coasters,” that could have a life after being a mail piece.