It takes two to tango (Episode Five)

In the last post I told you that making green products attractive is particularly difficult because people don’t think their quality and durability reach the “good enough” standards, and because they don’t always believe products are green at all. We have an explosive combo for this barrier: bad perceptions and lack of trust.

Apparently, consumers are more likely to trust environmental groups and scientists than the government, the media or the companies when it comes to these issues. Sadly, they are not so wrong because some companies haven’t been completely honest claiming their products were eco-friendly. Some “don’t do it at home” examples:

• Labeling a product as eco-friendly because it doesn’t contain a substance that is forbidden. The classic example is the one about the CFCs in aerosol cans that damaged the ozone layer… when CFCs are not used for this purpose since 1996!
• Making fallacious comparisons like stating that a certain SUV is greener than its competition because it makes more distance with the same amount of gas when, hello, SUVs are not exactly what we could call fuel efficient.
• Using complicated, pseudo-scientific terms that regular consumers cannot understand, and lead them to the conclusion that purchasing the product is not harmful for the environment.
• Giving figures that seem to be good for, let’s say, emission levels, but mean nothing at all if you don’t provide the legal standards as well. There’s this motto engineers use all the time, “You can’t improve what you can’t measure”… well, neither you can tell whether something is wrong or right if you don’t know how it should be in the first place.

Don’t panic, I have good examples too! You probably know Timberland, a brand that sells shoes for outdoor activities. A couple of years ago they started sticking a label on the boxes explaining the impact each pair produced, dividing it into three categories(*):

• Manufacturing, detailing where the pair was produced (factory and country).
• Environmental impact, explaining the amount of energy that was used for the production of the shoes, and what percentage of that energy was renewable.
• Community impact, showing the percentage of factories evaluated by Timberland against its Code of Conduct, and the number of hours employees volunteered in the previous year.

Remember this post and the previous one were about emphasizing products features for raising interest and creating desire? Well, Timberland kind of had an advantage because its target market is mainly composed by people who love to be out and enjoy nature, and therefore reducing environmental damage is relevant to them. They saw they could take advantage of that and went for it, so claps to them! And by the way, guess the word they actually used instead of impact: footprint. Accurate, yet a bit obvious…

(*) You can learn more about this by going to their site (http://www.timberland.com/earthkeepers/index.jsp)