“Going” green is only the first step. L.L. Bean public affairs manager Carolyn Beem reveals how big brands can stay that way.

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The director of publishing operations for Consumers Union, which produces Consumer Reports magazine, Meta Brophy explains how going green helps brands boost creativity and focus.

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Angela Weidmann, catalog print production manager for eco-conscious retailer Patagonia, explains how marketers can enlist corporate allies in their push to go green.

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Jacquelyn Ottman, eponymous president of J. Ottman Consulting, chats about the rules of going green and why major marketers need to heed them.

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TerraChoice consultant Lise Beutel explores the promise and pitfalls of the eco-marketing movement.

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Stay abreast of the trends
Lise Beutel discusses the current trends in eco-friendly marketing and how companies can seize on them.

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Making a better life
Lise Beutel runs down assorted methods that brands can employ to bring their mail marketing more in line with green standards.

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3 M’s
Lise Beutel outlines key areas that green marketers must integrate to be effective.

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Eco-friendly, business-friendly
Not all companies have embraced green marketing. Beutel explains why those who have often enjoy a competitive advantage.

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Six deadly sins
Lise Beutel discusses six common mistakes that lead to doubts about a company’s green claims.

Our editor provides a glimpse inside the “Green Room”

Cat Moriarty, editor of Deliver® magazine, takes viewers on a quick trip through the Deliver “Green Room,” the newest content hub for environmentally conscious marketing. As she points out, this latest addition to the delivermagazine.com site offers a rich array of data, opinion pieces, case studies and multimedia that marketers can utilize to enhance the development of eco-friendly campaigns.

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Jeff Baker turned his company upside down to become sustainable and socially responsible. So why did he keep it a secret for so long?

By: Elaine Appleton Grant

Jeffrey Baker’s company does not look like a green business. To get to his Image 4 offices, you inch delicately past ditches dug for a mile down Candia Road, swerving away from jackhammers and excavation rigs doing interminable construction in this developing section of Manchester, N.H. From the outside, the company’s one-story brick building screams 1970s industrial not 21st century sustainability. Inside, a chaos of trade show exhibits greets you.

This is “sustainability central?” Perhaps.

Image 4 manufactures trade show exhibits and what Baker calls “branded environments” the banners, signs, displays, even the furniture that companies use to announce themselves to the world. Increasingly, Baker and his 15 employees have taken some innovative steps to make Image 4’s practices more eco-friendly, including using non-toxic inks on 100-percent recycled fabric, reclaimed metal, egg-based varnish, non-volatile paints and other green materials. Only recently, though, has Image 4 mentioned its environmentally progressive operations, spotlighting them on its Web site and in a series of eco-friendly direct mail postcards to customers.

Previously, though, Baker quietly went about transforming this traditional manufacturing company into an environmentally conscious thought leader; since his efforts started, the company has grown far beyond the 46-year-old Baker’s boldest imaginings. By 2009, Baker expects Image 4 to double its revenues while expanding its profit margins. That growth, Baker believes, is coming as a direct result of the 20-year-old company’s commitment to sustainability, a commitment Image 4 has worked hard to honor even while laboring in what may possibly be the most toxic and wasteful sector of the marketing industry.

He is, in some ways, a paradox. In an age when it seems that only two kinds of companies get serious press for being green mammoth businesses whose initiatives, however controversial, can make a big impact, and tiny, sexy startups that sell green products and are eco-friendly at birth Image 4 is among the vast number of businesses with 500 workers or fewer that are making serious green inroads. He has overcome the same daunting obstacles that discourage many of his peers from reducing their environmental footprint, including lack of time, a dearth of information and little money, as well as entrenched behavior on the part of employees, customers and suppliers.

Here’s how he did it.

Humble Beginnings

Baker started at the company as an employee. Then, in 1989, with a partner he scraped together enough cash to buy out the owner. At that point, the company was essentially a photo lab, and it was no different from the rest of the industry using caustic chemicals to process photographic materials, postprocessing heavy metals and using extraordinary amounts of power and water.

All that photo-processing equipment also generated thousands of BTUs of heat. Baker seized on the idea of heating the company’s building with that wasted warmth. It wasn’t “to be green,” Baker says. “It was because I was cheap.” He finally figured out how to do it, and since then, the company has spent almost nothing warming an 8,500-square-foot building in snowy New Hampshire. For Baker, successfully engineering a “heatless building” was the beginning of questioning the assumption that waste, inefficiency and pollution were simply the cost of doing business.

In the trade show business, you can’t buy green products off the shelf. Vinyl technically, polyvinyl chloride, or PVC is ubiquitous because it’s cheap, strong, flexible and lightweight. But “when burned, the PVC releases dioxin fumes, which are a known carcinogen,” says Andrea Atkinson, general manager of NEXUS Green Building Resource Center, a Boston-based educational facility for green builders.

You’d think 100-percent recycled paper is eco-friendlier than 20-percent recycled paper, right? Well, that’s not the only idea green marketers get wrong…

By: Lara Jensen

Misconceptions about eco-friendly direct marketing abound. For instance, many a green tyro has assumed that paper with higher levels of recycled content will automatically have less of an environmental impact. But according to Brian McClay, principal at TerraChoice Market Services Inc., when factors such as energy use and greenhouse gas emissions are taken into account and not just overburdened landfills often a mix of recycled content and virgin pulp from sustainably harvested forests turns out to be better overall for the environment. We’ve scrutinized this and some other commonly held ideas about green marketing to help you separate fact from fiction:

What you may think: “The more recycled content, the better.”

What you need to know: Again, not necessarily true. To help you determine which issues are of most interest to your company, try visiting the Environmental Paper Assessment Tool® (epat.org), which is organized by a consortium of well-known large companies under the rubric the Paper Working Group. The EPAT enables paper buyers to weigh the relative costs of water, air and climate quality, as well as the health of natural systems and community well-being, then matches buyers with the paper that best addresses their needs. EPAT 2.0 is due to be released to the public this month.

What you may think: “As long as it’s paper, it’s recyclable.”

What you need to know: Varnishes and metallic inks may make your communication stand out in the mail, but once they’re applied to paper, processing that paper becomes difficult for recycling plants. As a result, anything with chemical additions could end up sitting in a landfill for years, whereas soy inks and other natural substances are easily recyclable by most municipalities’ recycling programs.

What you may think: “Green direct mail is boring.”

What you need to know: Au contraire. Creating environmentally friendly direct mail doesn’t have to mean sending out a simple gray card. “Push designers to create an intriguing piece that doesn’t need all those extras on the printing side,” says Seri McClendon, co-founder of Clean Agency, a marketing services firm that specializes in sustainable campaigns. For example, a postcard printed on paper that’s embedded with wildflower seeds that can be planted in the ground creates an impact because of its dual use. An interesting call to action can also capture customers’ attention, such as by offering the ability to purchase carbon-emission offsets with any order.

What you may think: “There’s no environmental cost to going digital.”

What you need to know: Marketers hoping to reduce their environmental footprint by migrating communication efforts online often don’t take into account the environmental costs to maintaining a Web site, a data center and other related equipment, according to Lisa Wellman, CEO of SustainCommWorld, which produces an annual trade show on green-media issues. The average 24kg desktop computer with monitor requires at least 10 times its weight in fossil fuels and chemicals to manufacture, making it much more materials intensive than an automobile or refrigerator. “Marketers need to be able to weigh the environmental cost of each channel and balance them,” Wellman says.

What you may think: “Cleaning up my own backyard is enough.”

What you need to know: More and more, companies are being held accountable by consumers, even if it’s not the company itself but rather one of its vendors that’s running afoul. So cleaning up your own act isn’t enough. “Supply chain analysis is important” to avoid getting in trouble on the environmental front, says McClendon. If a supplier doesn’t improve its environmental record, your solution might be as simple as taking your business elsewhere.

True, more marketers are looking for the green working hard to make their product or their message more environmentally sensitive. In recent years, “green marketing” has exploded in popularity among companies big and small. More and more, direct marketers are upping the recycled content of their paper, cleansing their databases faster than ever before and encouraging more consumers to toss unwanted fliers, envelopes and catalogs into recycling bins. “It’s very clear that all of our members and board members see how important this issue is,” says Pat Kachura, senior vice president of social responsibility for the Direct Marketing Association. Last year, Deliver® began addressing the environmental impact of direct marketing in our first “green” issue. Now, as we return to the subject in our second eco-themed issue, we are finding still more examples of marketers making full-on commitments to green marketing. And they are having an effect. How? Well, consider the impact of a few of the recent achievements cited below:

3 percent savings on paper quantity, the result of reductions in mailer sizes, spared nonprofit group Consumers Union more than $250,000 over three years.

375 million paper pages were saved in 2007 when MetLife began mailing directories and periodicals on CDs instead of paper.

930 million pieces of unwanted mail were eliminated last year by the 1,500 marketers using the DMA’s Mail Preference Service.

His company famous for its organic yogurt, Stonyfield Farm president Gary Hirshberg now has a new book on how to go green and still get rich. We sat with the self-styled “CE-Yo” as he churned out still more interesting thoughts on green marketing

By: Natalie Engler

Gary Hirshberg wears his passion for green business practices on his sleeve. And there are certainly days when you might see some yogurt there, too.

Hirshberg is president and self-titled “CE-Yo” of Stonyfield Farm, the iconic manufacturer of organic yogurt. He’s also an outspoken advocate for unconventional marketing, his ideas first taking root back in the days when he personally handed out yogurt samples from a folding table at supermarkets.

Since then, Hirshberg has put Stonyfield Farm in the spotlight with various high-profile promotional efforts, from inflating drivers’ tires to delivering frozen manure to a radio personality who’d claimed he’d rather eat camel dung than Hirshberg’s yogurt. (Turns out he preferred the yogurt.) But he doesn’t rely merely on publicity stunts and word-of-mouth marketing. Hirshberg has also wisely used traditional advertising channels like direct mail, always mindful to calibrate his campaigns for maximum impact.

Now, he’s an author too. Hirshberg who has overseen Stonyfield’s evolution from a tiny organic-farming school to a global yogurt producer with $320 million in sales details his journey to success in his new book, Stirring it Up: How to Make Money and Save the World (Hyperion, 2008).

Hirshberg recently spoke with Deliver® about combining counterculture and yogurt culture, the role of green marketing and why, when it comes to connecting with consumers through marketing efforts, “You can’t fake this stuff.”

Deliver: Sustainability and environmental protection are literally written into Stonyfield’s mission statement. But what can direct marketers do if they work for a company that was not founded on such green values?

Hirshberg: Marketers should think of ways to save their company some money. If you can reduce costs and feed those dollars back into the product or put them toward something consumers believe in, you have the potential to not just drive customer loyalty but reduce turnover and build employee pride. The No. 1 thing people say they are looking for is meaningful work. But I’d caution that this isn’t a quick fix. You don’t just engage in social responsibility and get an immediate spike in sales. This is something you build over time.

You should also be aware that if the cause is only in the marketing, and doesn’t reflect a genuine commitment, you are highly vulnerable.

Just look at the big auto manufacturers. (In my opinion,) a few of them have been the darlings of environmentalists because of hybrid cars. But it turns out that those companies have also been lobbying against raising fuel-economy standards. So the environmental community has now made these companies public enemy No. 1 because they’re breaching an emotional contract they had created. On the one hand they’re producing and marketing these hybrid cars, but their corporate commitment is clearly mixed, if not contradictory.

You see this happen a lot. I call it the talk/do ratio. You have to keep them in balance.

Deliver: In your book, you say that you drive your marketing people crazy. How so?

Hirshberg: The main thing I ask my marketing folks to be sure they ask before they present me with something is “What would the big yogurt manufacturers not do?” If they show me something that could be done by the others, then it’s not good enough for us.

Deliver: So do you use traditional media?

Hirshberg: We continue to use mail when it fits into our overall plan. We’re also mindful of the environmental costs of any mailings we do.

Deliver: In your book, you describe conventional advertising as the “fertilizer of conventional business.” What did you mean by that?

Hirshberg: Well, no one can claim that advertising doesn’t work. The advertising we’ve been able to do has worked, but it isn’t sustainable. You get the sales lift during your ad buy, but then you drop back. If you rely solely on advertising, you rely on reaching people in less effective emotional ways. But if a customer meets someone from Stonyfield at a soccer match, train station, park or community event, they have another connection with us. Hopefully, they’ve interacted with a nice person and had an engaging experience that made them feel good.

A growing number of companies are adopting procurement policies that help protect the world’s forests by tracking paper production from stump to shelf

By: Anne Stuart

When many businesses discuss their efforts to “go green,” they’re talking about recycling and reuse in other words, initiatives designed for the end of their products’ lives.

But some leading retailers and catalogers are now focusing on the beginning of those life cycles as well. They’re establishing rigorous environmental guidelines for procuring materials such as paper and cardboard and making sure that consumers, investors, competitors and most of all suppliers know that they’re serious about sticking to those rules.

Take Patagonia Inc., the outdoor clothing and gear retailer headquartered in California. Angela Weidmann, Patagonia’s catalog print-production manager, says the company’s been printing catalogs on recycled paper since 1991 and, in 2002, launched an aggressive internal effort to cut waste and partner with environmentally responsible paper suppliers.

But the company hasn’t always marketed its green practices. Patagonia began talking more about its efforts in 2007, when in response to pressure from environmental groups it posted its comprehensive “Paper Use and Procurement Policy” on its Web site. “Ultimately, we felt that it was important to get the information out there to the public and to our vendors,” Weidmann says. “It makes us more accountable and, hopefully, an example to others.”

The policy details Patagonia’s practices, such as switching from 50-pound to 45-pound catalog paper, which requires fewer trees to produce. Thinner paper involves a slight “quality tradeoff,” Weidmann acknowledges, but adds: “When we did press tests, even some of our more discerning colleagues had a hard time telling the difference” between the two stocks.

The benefits? To date, Patagonia has saved more than 730 tons of paper (which the company says is equivalent to nearly 13,000 40-foot-tall trees). And the company has saved money. “Paper and postage are our two biggest expenses.
You buy paper by the pound; to a certain extent, you buy postage by the pound as well,” Weidmann explains. Reducing the catalog’s weight has cut annual costs by about 10 percent in both areas.

Patagonia also looks for paper that’s made with as much post-consumer recycled (PCR) content as possible typically about 40 percent and that’s been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a global forest-management organization, as using virgin fiber only from well-managed forests. And the company strives to buy from suppliers based within 200 miles of its printer to cut travel for the delivery trucks.

Many companies are also getting their suppliers involved, including Staples, the office supply retailer and cataloger. In 2002, the company took a hard look at its paper procurement policies. “We realized that we’re in a global economy with a global supply chain, and we need to think more broadly about issues such as where our suppliers are located and where their suppliers are located,” says Mark Buckley, the company’s vice president of environmental affairs.

Staples’ policy sets escalating goals for both the 2,000-store chain itself and its suppliers. For instance, the average amount of PCR content across all Staples’ paper products sold by weight is 30 percent, and the company is shooting for 50 percent. And it expects to have the majority of its suppliers FSC-certified by 2010.

Most recently, Staples enforced its policy by cutting ties with an Indonesian company that supplied about 5 percent of Staples’ total paper supply. The reason: Environmental groups had accused the company of illegal logging practices. Also, the company wasn’t green enough.

Buckley says Staples didn’t make the decision lightly; he and other executives tried for more than two years to bring the company into compliance with Staples’ standards. But by February 2008, “We felt that they weren’t making significant enough progress for us to stay with them as a supplier,” Buckley says. “We encourage suppliers to move in the right direction or we have to look elsewhere.”

Meanwhile, Staples is extending its current slogan “That Was Easy” to the environment. Its new consumer-oriented “EcoEasy” brand promotes Staples products and services that, in Buckley’s words, “make it easy for you to make a difference.” Offerings range from recycled-content products to low-cost recycling of old computers and monitors even those purchased elsewhere.

Officials at Staples who have promoted eco-friendly initiatives online and through branding efforts such as placing its logo on recycled paperboard clothes hangers consider the efforts part of a company-wide commitment to reduce waste, conserve energy and promote recycling and reuse. “It’s not just about paper,” Buckley says. “It’s about everything we do. Those issues are increasingly important to our customers, and [green practices] add value to our brand.”

And as at Patagonia, most of those efforts cut costs, too. “Everything we’re doing around climate change is saving money and we’re reducing our carbon footprint,” Buckley says. “It’s a win-winwin. What’s not to like?”

The DMA on Paper Procurement: As part of its “Green 15″ initiative, the Direct Marketing Association encourages its members to develop environmentally sound paper-procurement practices. For guidelines and a sample policy, visit: the-dma.org/Green15Toolkit/

Producing eco-friendly products and services means more than simply using recycled materials you need to look at the entire life cycle

By: Linda Formichelli

Recycling your scrap paper used to be all you needed to call your business “green.” But in today’s environment, green comes in many shades, with the richest and most all-inclusive being “cradle-to-cradle” design.

While the term “cradle-to-grave” covers the life cycle of a product from production to landfill, “cradle-to-cradle” describes products that exist in closed, environmentally friendly loops: They start out healthful for the environment that’s the first “cradle” and can be recycled, composted or reclaimed for a new life, hence, the second “cradle.”

The product- and process-design firm McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC) offers cradle-to-cradle certification for products ranging from furniture to envelopes.

Showing off your recycling bin in the front office won’t be nearly enough to gain this certification, which is offered at Platinum, Gold and Silver levels. Instead, a company must use environmentally safe and healthy materials, design its product for reutilization (such as recycling or composting) and keep water pure and used efficiently. The company also must make efficient use of renewable energy and promote social responsibility.

“The social responsibility’ element addresses business activities and employee treatment, and can include community connections as well,” says Steve Bolton, a senior consultant and manager of business development for MBDC. Bolton says they’re most interested in activities beyond simple employee health and safety, moving into quality-of-life issues on the positive side that is, they don’t just meet minimum regulations, but also improve worker happiness.

“We’ll go through the company’s supply chain to understand every ingredient in its finished product down to a detailed level,” says Bolton. “It’s a very intense process, but it helps us understand what we’re dealing with and what can be done to improve it.”

Companies that have received cradle-to-cradle certification for their products include eco-friendly flooring company Shaw Industries and the United States Postal Service,® which recently received Silver certification from MBDC for its Priority Mail® and Express Mail® corrugated boxes, paperboard envelopes, Tyvek envelopes, mailing labels and mailing tape. In granting the certification,
MBDC not only scrutinized the internal processes of the USPS,® but also contacted and examined their more than 200 suppliers.

So why the interest in cradle-to-cradle design? Well, it’s not just good for the environment, practitioners claim, but also for business. “The certification was important because our clients are looking for third-party authentication,” says Jeff West, director of environmental affairs for the commercial division of Shaw, which received certification for its Eco Solutions Q nylon fiber and its EcoWorx tile and broadloom backing system. The certification took six months, shorter than usual because Shaw had already obtained the MBDC Design Protocol, an earlier certification.

Cradle-to-cradle certification, and any green initiative that a company takes, can also be used as an important part of the business’s marketing strategy. For example, Shaw notes its certification on the sample books it shows to customers, in product specs and in customer presentations. It’s too early to tell how the certification is affecting Shaw’s bottom line (Shaw received it in June 2007), as the details were only recently included in its marketing pieces; however, “early results seem to indicate that it’s generating questions and positive comments from our clients,” says West.

To green up your products and boost your marketing talk to your suppliers about how they can help make your products more environmentally friendly. “You need to leverage people to make change,” says Bolton. Learning about the eco-friendliness of your processes and products will help you make smart, green decisions. Says Bolton, “You’re ahead of 99 percent of the manufacturing population if you’ve fully characterized your ingredients and can work to improve them over time.”

Teaming up with a worthy not-for-profit or even launching one of your own can add value to your prospects and cachet your brand

By: Linda Formichelli

Every March, April and May, all 22 million Money Mailer coupon envelopes will carry free advertising for Children’s Miracle Network, a non-profit organization that raises money for children’s hospitals. Money Mailer, a leading national direct marketing company, also donates inserts in their shared mailings to promote the nonprofit’s fundraising events. In the past two years, Money Mailer has given Children’s Miracle Network $1.4 million in ad value and almost $800,000 in donations.

Co-marketing your business with a charity, called “cause marketing,” helps not only the cause, but also your business’s brand image. According to the Cone Millennial Cause Study, 87 percent of Americans ages 13 to 25 would switch brands if one brand were associated with a good cause, assuming that the brands were otherwise comparable. It’s difficult to quantify how much of a profit boost comes from cause marketing, but really, it’s more about brand enhancement than tallying up dollars and cents. “Our local and national advertisers and franchisees are saying it’s making a difference in their business to provide this sponsorship,” says Beth Swade Thomas, director of marketing communications for Money Mailer.

Want to help out a cause while upping your brand recognition? “Think about your values and culture, your business objectives and your stakeholders’ needs,” says Julia Hobbs Kivistik, executive vice president at Cone, a strategy and communications agency that specializes in cause branding and corporate responsibility. “By exploring where these areas intersect, you can answer the question, What do we stand for?’”

For example, the apparel company Arrow dubs itself an “authentic American brand,” so it made sense for the company to create the “We Are Ellis Island” campaign, which is raising money to restore dilapidated buildings on the south side of Ellis Island. Arrow launched a Web site at which visitors can post their family stories and donate money to the cause; the company is also donating 1 percent of its 2008 wholesale sales to the project. The site now has thousands of registered users, and according to Mike Kelly, executive vice president of Phillips-Van Heusen, which owns the Arrow brand, “The result for us is an elevated brand awareness that’s been unbelievable. We brought a lot of awareness to a brand that was dark.”

Even if your business and your cause are perfectly aligned, it takes more than a clever cause marketing campaign to woo consumers to both. “The public is getting more sophisticated,” says Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com, an information resource on how to align environmental responsibility with business success. “A cause-marketing campaign can seem out of context if the company itself doesn’t have basic environmental and social policies and programs in place,” he says. “A good cause-marketing campaign isn’t enough to render a company as good.’”

A business also has to practice its rhetoric. In other words, a business has to walk the talk. For example, if you’re supporting a nonprofit that plants trees to offset carbon emissions, says Makower, you also need to reduce your own energy use or increase your use of renewable energy.

Cynics might maintain that cause marketers are thinking more about their brand than about the cause, but in reality, both get a boost. “If a company is in business to do business and, in addition, they help provide funding for and awareness of a cause, that’s great,” says Hobbs Kivistik. “It’s a win for the cause, the company, the community and the consumer.”

For publisher Dawn Codd, making direct mail magazines more eco-friendly is the right thing to do for the planet and for her business

By: Anne Stuart

Dawn Codd firmly believes that her three direct mail lifestyle magazines all stuffed with special offers, restaurant reviews and events listings bring plenty of value to the 97,000 readers in the upscale communities that the magazines target.

But the Washington, D.C.-based publisher also knows that, in an era of ever-increasing ecological awareness, some recipients may view direct mail publications as a waste of precious natural resources. For that reason and because she and her partners personally support environmental causes Codd wanted to reduce both that perception and the size of her company’s “footprint” on the earth. “Our beliefs are why we did what we did,” she says.

What they did was adopt an aggressively conservation-oriented approach to producing the trio of publications: City Living Source (citylivingsource.com), for households in D.C.; City Living Source-Baltimore (citylivingbaltimore.com), for similarly well-heeled readers in that city; and Howard County Living (howardliving.com), for residents of an affluent suburban area in central Maryland. (Each publication goes to about 32,000 readers six times a year.)

Beginning with their January 2008 issues, all three magazines have become significantly more eco-friendly. That’s a change that involves more than simply adding green content although there’s more of that these days, too. Codd has focused on producing the magazines as cleanly and greenly as possible. “Everything about our business is about recycling and sustainability,” she says.

Specifically, the publications are printed only on Forest Stewardship Council-certified paper, meaning that it’s from timber grown and harvested according to the international forest-management association’s strict environmental standards. In addition, Codd recently switched to a new printer that uses soy-based ink, an alcohol-free press operation and a filmless, all-digital printing process that eliminates the need for silver and chemicals. “That’s all more healthful for readers and for the environment,” says Codd, who has promoted the printer’s techniques in print and online.

But what she hasn’t publicly emphasized is what those changes are costing her young business: an additional $1,000 per issue for each magazine. That’s an expense that she’s not passing on to advertisers until next year: “[Going green] was so important because of our personal beliefs that we were going to do it no matter what,” she says. “Our advertising rates will go up as our circulation goes up. And our circulation is growing pretty fast.”

That’s the case even though the publications specifically instruct readers how to get off the mailing list. Codd says that her company typically receives about one opt-out request per issue; in contrast, she says, “We’ve got people e-mailing every day asking to be put on the list.” She attributes that demand to each 24-page publication’s mix of local incentives, event listings and content that now includes advertiser advice on topics such as improving window insulation, buying organic fabrics and bicycling to work.

Codd’s publications also offer “virtual” incentives online, allowing readers to sign up to receive coupons and other offers via their cell phones. The incentives are specially formatted to fit on a mobile phone’s display screen; to redeem one, a consumer just shows the screen to a participating merchant. The process obviously eliminates the need to print, carry, redeem and recycle paper coupons.

Has anybody noticed one publisher’s efforts to tell the world that “green is good”? Codd says yes. “People have actually sent thank-you notes by e-mail, saying it’s great that we made the change,” she says. And any time a recipient of a direct mail piece personally thanks the marketer who sent it, that’s a pretty strong indicator that the message is getting across.

What’s the argument in favor of adopting new, industry-imposed direct mail guidelines? Your business may not survive otherwise. Convinced yet?

Where adaptation is concerned, marketers aren’t necessarily behind the times, but neither have all of us always been in the forefront when it comes to embracing new ideas and innovative methods.

But as consumers clamor for more responsible marketing calling for reductions in the amount of direct mail received and more emphasis on the environment smart marketers know that adaptation isn’t optional. Changes must be made.

Recently, initiatives have been put forward that promote responsible guidelines for marketers and offer a glimpse of the shifts that more will be compelled to make in coming years. One major step forward is the Commitment to Consumer
Choice (CCC), a set of direct mail standards that has been established by the Direct Marketing Association.

There has been some debate in the industry about whether this idea is best for marketers; indeed, some marketers have even been resistant to it. But we think that fighting this sensible effort is both pointless and potentially dangerous.

First, it’s obvious that consumers and many leading direct marketers support these guidelines. To help give the measures teeth, the DMA has announced that all of its members must comply with the CCC or lose membership.

We’re not saying all the self-policing guidelines are perfect. But any marketer who thinks that flaws in the initiatives or the debate over how good self-policing guidelines are for business mean they can do nothing is making a big mistake.

First, fighting the CCC guidelines makes it appear that marketers don’t care about consumers’ demands, a risky proposition indeed in an era of increased customer power to blow off marketing messages. Second, marketers improve the efficiency of mailings when they reduce the number of catalogs going to uninterested consumers. They can then take any incremental return on investment and pour it back into building circulation.

Reducing unwanted direct mail can be good for business and for companies’ relationships with consumers. And while some question how much these guidelines will help the environment, there’s no doubt they will have some positive impact. Thus, we not only think direct mailers should tolerate the Commitment to Consumer Choice, we urge them to embrace it wholeheartedly.

Why more and more big brands are using carbon offsets to bolster PR, profits and the planet

By: Samar Farah

“The VW Forest” sounds like the name of a sporty German all-terrain vehicle, or perhaps an advanced level in a video game designed for Jetta zealots. In fact, it’s a straight forward moniker for acres of trees in Louisiana’s Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, paid for by carmaker Volkswagen of America and its customers. So far, more than 900 acres designated as the VW forest have already been replanted in an effort to offset the carbon dioxide produced by VW vehicles.

These figures represent some of the new thinking driving the latest trend in environmental marketing carbon offsets. An initiative that allows companies to underwrite environmentally friendly measures as a way of counterbalancing (or “offsetting”) the ecological harm of their business practices, offsets have become a valuable instrument for many brands seeking to spotlight their “green” bona fides.

The trend cuts across industries, too, with offset programs embraced by everyone from airlines to credit card companies.

Of course, there’s still some debate around select issues within carbon-offset programs. For instance, disagreement remains over certain measurement standards (a comparable disagreement is the debate over whether to switch to the metric system). Meanwhile, the government continues to monitor the programs closely to ensure compliance, although it has found no evidence of fraud. Despite this, though, experts agree that consumers and brands should use common sense when deciding to join an offset program and choosing which groups to work with.

For its own program, the Carbon Neutral project, Volkswagen of America went with an approach that’s equal parts volunteer work and gift to consumers. Between September 2007 and January 2008, for every VW that consumers purchased or leased, the automaker pledged to plant enough trees to offset carbon emissions equivalent to one year of driving.

To market the effort, Volkswagen set up a mini-site within its VW.com site where customers are informed about VW’s efforts and allowed to make donations to the offset program. The site remains up to foster ongoing dialogue with consumers, even though the program has officially ended. Meanwhile, only a couple of clicks away is a portion of the site where customers can sign up to have VW product brochures mailed to their homes, thus using the environmental effort as a springboard for a multimedia dialogue about both ecology and VW cars.

Laura Soave, marketing manager at Volkswagen of America, has this warning about “green” campaigns: “It’s definitely something you can’t just jump into.”

Still, environmentalists and business experts agree that these offset programs, if done properly, can have a positive impact on the atmosphere, and on business. “It’s a wonderful entrepreneurial response to a real set of concerns in the public,” says William Moomaw, director of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Tufts University.

What makes a project well executed? Marketers interested in pursuing such projects need to think about what kind of program makes sense for them, as well as how they’ll choose to communicate with and involve their consumers.

A Range of Possibilities

The most common carbon-offset projects generally fall into three categories: renewable energy, energy efficiency and reforestation.

Renewable energy projects typically involve a company purchasing renewable energy credits (RECs) from a utility. These credits, which are a separate commodity from the electricity itself, represent a revenue stream for generators of clean energy, such as wind turbine or solar energy plants. They also give a company the right to say that a percentage of their electricity consumption is based on renewable energy. By contrast, energy efficiency projects look at ways that companies can reduce their emission through more efficient technologies, and reforestation initiatives involve planting trees.

Planting trees is arguably the most tangible action a brand can take to offset carbon emissions. Most consumers intuitively understand that trees are good for the environment. It conjures a specific image a leafy, green image unlike energy efficiency programs or REC projects, which take some explanation and abstract logic for stakeholders to grasp.

Still for some providers and practitioner companies, these last two projects are more attractive. David Ragland is the general manager of the Marriott Residence Inn in Washington, D.C., which is now operating on 50-percent renewable energy. Marriott announced its renewable energy program last September and now offsets half of its emissions by purchasing RECs. (Guests are also invited to donate $5 toward additional RECs.)

Clean Currents, Ragland’s offset provider of choice, focuses primarily on buying RECs for its partners through private markets. “There’s certainly a role for reforestation,” says Lee Keshishian, vice president of business operations at Clean Currents. “Customers ask us about it, but so far we’ve shied away from it.

It’s harder to measure.” While reforestation proponents argue that there are indeed clear measurement tools in place, Clean Currents’ position nonetheless reflects the varying opinions that exist even among those who support offsets.

Carbonfund.org takes a slightly different approach it offers all three categories of projects and even gives partners the option of building a portfolio of projects in different categories. Michael Stewart, the nonprofit’s partnerships manager, argues that each type of project accomplishes something slightly different. Reforestation, he points out, is the only kind of offset project that can impact the current high level of CO2 emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere. Says Stewart, “The other two offset methods are critical, but they can only focus on reducing the amount of CO2 that we produce in the future.”

Stewart, whose company is VW’s offset program partner, adds: “While individuals may have a project preference, Carbonfund loves all of its kids’ equally. By employing all three methods together as a cohesive team, we hope to address the whole process of fighting climate change. Along with direct reductions, offsets are simply a great tool to use toward that end. That’s our motto: Reduce what you can, offset what you can’t.”

VW’s Soave says the company chose to go the reforestation path because they found there were added benefits to rebuilding a forest, like creating jobs for planters and supporting endangered wildlife, in this case the Louisiana black bear. The idea of rallying a community of VW owners around a project with a tangible and visible impact on U.S. land was also appealing, as opposed to a parcel of land in, say, Guatemala. “We tried to keep a closer-to-home approach,” says Soave. The Alluvial Valley in Louisiana was attractive for another reason: Its climate and growing conditions support a rate of carbon absorption that is significantly higher than in other parts of the United States.

A Tale of Carbon Offsets

Once VW’s tree-planting project was under way, the company’s biggest challenge was to portray to consumers that the automaker was undertaking the project strictly for its environmental benefit. Ultimately, VW decided that an advertising campaign touting the project would only taint it in the eyes of consumers, so Volkswagen of America refrained from advertising or marketing the VW Forest.

“It would have been easy for us to go out with a huge campaign, and we did discuss that at length,” Soave says. Instead, the carmaker announced its project strictly through dealerships: Car salesmen at VW dealerships promoted the program verbally. Bloggers soon caught wind and helped get the VW Forest some press in major publications. A micro-site on the company’s Web site, jointly designed by its ad agency and Carbonfund.org, explains the project and invites other car owners to participate.

Although VW and Marriott pursued completely different offset projects, they both had to think through how they would explain their projects to customers an increasingly skeptical group when it comes to environmental claims.

While Ragland says he needed to train hotel staff to explain the concept of RECs to inquisitive customers, he also left some of the explaining in the hands of Clean Currents. For example, the offset company provided Marriott with a list of quantifiable benefits from the hotels’ REC purchase, including the fact that the 1.3 million kilowatts in RECs that the hotel has saved through its program is the equivalent of 178 cars off the road, a fact that Ragland has published on the hotel’s Web site.

VW also has had to balance transparency about its program with a desire not to inundate customers with technical details. The Web site for the VW Forest sticks mostly to generalities. VW and Carbonfund.org plan to update the site with recent photos of trees being planted in the valley. But, for example, the Web site excludes facts about how the new forest will support 17 different species of trees with specific consideration for how the ecosystem will be affected.

Indeed, most customers don’t expect brands to be environmental experts, but are looking for an honest and open conversation about the issues. “When we have conversations about offsets with customers, we don’t pretend we know it all,” says Ragland. Shortly after introducing the company’s carbon-offset program, Ragland was confronted by a Marriott guest who called out the hotel for using Styrofoam cups and plates. Guests have also requested more efficient LED lights in elevators. Ragland got rid of the Styrofoam, but didn’t add the expensive LED lighting.

Says the hotel general manager: “We’re not afraid to explain that we are a business, and we do need to maintain margins.”

Click here to read more.

What catalogers are doing to preserve the planet

By: Aaron Dalton

Sustainability often presents a quandary for outdoor outfitter Patagonia.

On one hand, the company has dedicated itself fully to preserving the planet, its environmental and conservation goals defining everything from its mission statement to its product line.

But there’s another type of sustainability that Patagonia officials have to bear in mind that of their own business.

So when executives at the company talk about the environmental impact on forests of their successful catalog program, they do so knowing full well that, as much as big businesses may want to help the planet, they sometimes can’t help doing as much harm as good.

“We need to be profitable or we will not be sustainable, and the catalog is a successful sales driver for the company,” says Angela Weidmann, Patagonia’s catalog print production manager. “We cannot walk away from producing a catalog, so we strive to lessen the impact by committing to several things.”

And Patagonia is not alone in its efforts. From clothing companies to home furnishing manufacturers, retailers are taking a variety of steps to minimize the environmental impact of their catalog operations for the sake of the planet and also to retain the loyalty of the growing ranks of green consumers. (For more information about how direct mailers are “greening” their campaigns, please read “Fit to Print” and “Green Means Grow.”)

Take, for instance, outdoor apparel and equipment maker L.L. Bean, which ships 250 million catalogs annually. At L.L. Bean, steps toward sustainability include enforcing a policy that specifies suppliers who are third-party certified by organizations, such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), as practicing sustainable forestry. Despite the slight cost increase, L.L. Bean has also begun stepping up the use of recycled content in its catalogs.

The company also claims to maintain one of the cleanest mailing lists in the industry, which makes economic and environmental sense. Sending catalogs to people who don’t want or need them wastes paper, production and mailing costs.

“Customers have an expectation of companies like ours. We sell outdoor goods and apparel so people can enjoy the outdoors, therefore we feel we have responsibility to maintain and protect the outdoors,” says L.L. Bean spokeswoman Carolyn Beem. “We think our customers are more attuned to issues surrounding paper, catalog production and environmental standards. While there is more than one way to green a business and achieve environmental best practices, most companies should assume that their customers will be paying attention.”

Many of the other big-name catalog retailers have taken steps to mitigate the environmental impact of their catalog operations in recent years. Limited Brands, the parent company of Victoria’s Secret, no longer accepts paper sourced from endangered forests of Canada’s Boreal Region. The company has also dedicated $1 million to research and advocacy for the protection of endangered forests.

Looking for ways to make your marketing efforts more eco-friendly? Our green “audit” just might help.

It’s getting easier every day to convince your CEO and CFO of the marketing benefits, and ultimately the bottom-line impact, of creating sustainable business processes. So the next time you champion some green marketing initiatives, you’re far more likely to get buy-in from the C-level types as well as your board of directors.

But once you’ve got the higher-ups on board, how do you get started? Experts agree that the best way to start is by taking stock: Exactly how green are you right now? What follows is a checklist of some of the eco-minded efforts espoused by sources in our recent green marketing issue. It’s by no means comprehensive, but it should give you a good idea of where your company stands right now - and how far you need to go.

In recent memory, which of the following green efforts have occurred within your organization? (Check all that apply. Score one point for each “yes” response.)

1. Decreased the thickness of your paper stock
2. Reduced the trim size on a mailer or catalog
3. Used recycled or “groundwood” paper rather than virgin stock
4. Used chlorine-free paper
5. Used soy- or water-based inks
6. Used such alternate energy sources as solar- or wind-generated electricity
7. Donated money to green initiatives to offset the cost of environmentally harmful business practices
8. Cleaned your mailing lists of duplicated or non-active recipients
9. Asked customers to specify how frequently they’d like to hear from you
10. Opted for printing processes that produce less waste, such as rotogravure
11. Offered customers print-on-demand technology
12. Sent customers online for follow-up information
13. Sent out larger print pieces on CD
14. Printed marketing materials on both sides of the paper
15. Chose vendors based on their use of renewable energy
16. Provide encouragement, incentives or opportunities for customers to use renewable energy
17. Engaged a third-party organization to perform an audit of your environmental practices
18. Benchmarked your environmental efficiency against local and national standards
19. Communicated your green efforts to your customer base
20. Shared an environmental innovation with one or more of your competitors

IF YOU SCORED:

15 to 20 points: Congrats! You’re about as green as they come. But don’t stop there! Keep up the good work, and continue to spread the word to all of your stakeholders.

10 to 14 points: Yeah, you’re green, all right. You’ve done a lot of great stuff, but there’s a lot more you can do.

5 to 9 points: Kudos for making the effort, but you’ve got a bit of a way to go before you could truly be considered “green.”

0 to 4 points: So, uh, what’s the holdup, friend? Being green is no longer a luxury: It’s a price of doing business. It’s time to get the green ball rolling.

Outdoor apparel-maker attracts customers with innovative approaches to green

Riding the wave of inconvenient truths about an increasingly toxic and hotter planet, popular outdoor apparel-maker Nau, based in Portland, Ore., has tapped into a sprawling market of consumers who’re hungry for environmentally friendly products and businesses that put sustainability front and center. With four stores that opened this year, 15 more slated for 2008 and a thriving Web site, Nau (which means “welcome” in Maori) has also taken concern for everything from sourcing to worker rights to unprecedented levels. Ian Yolles, the vice president of brand communications for Nau, sat down to explain the company’s new business model.

DELIVER: How does the unusual nature of Nau become part of its marketing?
YOLLES: Our experience suggests that great brands are built from the inside out. A lot of people think about branding from outside in - a tag line, a logo, some kind of advertising, which is superficial. We had a unique opportunity to build a company from scratch and align all the internal workings of the company to be congruent with the customer-facing interactions to make it authentic. We believe that our values-based proposition is going to be deeply resonant with a large group of people. We had a design philosophy predicated first on performance and function for people who live an active life. Second was not negatively impacting the environment. Third, we wanted a beautiful product.

The dominant design paradigm has been that if you tried to integrate all three of those characteristics in a single product you’d end up with a compromised end result. We felt it was a question of innovation, particularly from a fabric development point of view. In our spring product line, there are about 100 styles made from 30 fabrics - 27 of which required very significant work to commercialize, the reason being that the fabrics that met our criteria simply didn’t exist. For example, all of our two- and three-layer shell garments are made from recycled polyester, which comes from soda pop bottles and has been turned into this waterproof and breathable fabric with an aesthetic look that is very different from anything else in the outdoor business.

DELIVER: Nau is donating 5 percent of all sales to nonprofits, an uncommonly large amount. Why so much?
YOLLES: It certainly gets the customer’s attention. We can do this because we are working in an industry that has been primarily operating within a wholesale model of third-party distribution. We distribute our products through our own channels, our stores and Web site, which gives us significant margin advantage. Much more interesting is that we invite the customers to directly participate in the giving process. For each purchase, we give you a menu of 10 nonprofit organizations that work locally, nationally or internationally - and you choose where we should direct the donation.

DELIVER: How do you get customers into the stores?
YOLLES: We’ve done some advertising in weekly papers and on the radio, but we relied predominantly on word of mouth, which is far more credible. By way of example, we identified people in the community who had interesting stories that related to the sensibilities of our brand and invited them to join us for an evening of storytelling and conversation at three events for each store in the first month. We produced these beautiful invitations on paper stock that had seeds embedded in it, and you could literally bury the invitation and a poppy would grow out of it. These evenings were called “See[d] Change.” We mailed a package of these with postage-paid envelopes to everyone we knew and asked them to send them to friends. We had about 50 people turn out at each event, which is what we were aiming for in our 2,200-square-foot stores.

DELIVER: How do you integrate the store experience and your Web site?
YOLLES: When e-commerce first emerged in 1997, there was a lot of hype about the Internet fundamentally transforming the bricks-and-mortar shopping experience. Shoppers have changed their behavior; they move back and forth between these two channels - they’ll start researching online and then go in a store to try a product on, go home and compare prices on the Internet. But for retailers, these channels still exist parallel to each other. Nobody has connected the dots structurally in a way that is meaningful to the consumer.

When you come into our stores, each style is merchandised, and you can shop the store just like a traditional apparel store. You can try the product on, decide to buy it and sales associates will process your transaction at a (point-of-sale) terminal. However, we merchandise every single product with a corresponding card that has a bar code on it. If you want to learn about the product prior to purchase you can ask a sales associate, or you can take the card to interactive devices we call product trees, scan the bar code, and it will bring up the product detail page from our Web site, which contains all the detailed information about that specific style. You can also take the card to other interactive devices to initiate the transactional experience. When you scan the bar code it calls up the product detail page associated with that specific style. We prompt you to choose the color, size and quantity you want, then we ask if you’re ready to check out. If you are willing to wait a few days to have the product shipped to you at no charge, you get a 10 percent discount on the purchase price. During our first year of operation, we expected only 30 percent of our customers to opt for this “ship to you” methodology given there would be a customer learning and adoption curve. To date 50 percent of our customers have been choosing this approach.

DELIVER: How do you send the clothing to the customer?
YOLLES: We ship it in what looks like a feedstock bag - 50 percent post-consumer recycled paper and you can use it to return the product, if necessary, or you reuse it other ways. So wherever we use paper of any sort - or mailing - we’ve definitely thought about how to do it in the most sustainable way.

To learn more about Nau, its practices and its business philosophy, visit nau.com.

Eco-conscious brewery New Belgium Brewing reuses 98 percent of its waste stream.