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 …
Every March, April and May, all 22 million Money Mailer coupon envelopes will carry free advertising for Children’s …
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.”
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 …
“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.
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. …
