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.
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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.
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