business

So, you’ve started a green business and you’re formulating a marketing plan. Either that, or you are still reading because you fantasize about starting a green business and formulating a marketing plan. Fantasy or reality, there are some significant differences between marketing a traditional product and a green one. After all, your brand is not just the color of your logo and the tone of your tag line. It is the inclusive identity of the way in which you do business. In other words, your marketing is not just about the message. It is also about how you deliver it.

The sustainable agenda and environmentally conscious attitude which provides the backbone for your business should present itself in the marketing methodologies you pursue. Unfortunately, many trained marketers have tactics and ideas that are contrary to that backbone. Ingrained concepts and traditional methods are difficult for old dogs to shake, but a failure to drop the old, “ungreen” standbys can undermine the perception of your brand. Green products need green marketers.

Here are a few marketing tactics to avoid if you want to market green. Please feel free to add to the list in the comments or send me an email with other ideas. And yes, I know “Don’ts” isn’t a word.

1. Direct Mail
This one seems pretty obvious. If you are a green company, it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to start cutting down trees, converting them to compacted wood pulp and plastering sustainable ideas across them. Even if you are using recycled paper and biodegradable ink, the fossil fuel used to deliver your message and the landfill space the majority of your missives will end up in may mar the message. Here’s some statistics that your prospects might have heard about . . . to your mail-happy detriment.

2. Billboards
These giant, energy-devouring eyesores may attract plenty of attention, but as a green company it might not be the kind of attention you want. Also, as it panders to the gas guzzling commuter culture while sucking power from the grid, you might find yourself associated with and ignored by the SUVs zooming past. That said, there are always exceptions. While I still don’t recommend the super signs, some manage to at least positively reflect the brand.

3. Brochures
Just like direct mail, brochures run the risk of serious waste. However, I wouldn’t say that these are completely out. Properly produced and judiciously passed out, brochures can be a useful marketing tool. So, I guess this isn’t so much of a “don’t” as it is a “do carefully.” However, the more extreme your green brand is, the more you should steer away from printed materials.

4. Skywriting
Okay, so that’s obvious, but let’s include any kind of gas-powered, vehicle advertising under this heading. Stamping your message on the sides of giant trucks or sponsoring a Nascar driver would probably be mistakes as well. Remember, if your brand has a small footprint, there is no reason to strap an over-sized boot on your marketing.

5. Traditional Business Cards
Traditional business cards are significantly cheaper than their green counterparts, and it is tempting to save a bit of that marketing budget here. Don’t . . . people will notice. Design a card that advances your green brand. Recycled content and organic dyes are a good way to start, or you could get really creative.

6. Fax Attacks
Here’s another example of paper and energy waste. With the current state of computers, fax machines are a vestige of old wasteful business practices. Shun them. It will help your brand, and besides, the annoying little devices deserve it. Check out Death to the Fax Machine. If nothing else the article has a great title.

7. Door to Door and Face to Face
Yes, it is sometimes important to get out there and meet the people. Unfortunately, getting out there and meeting the people often involves a lot of driving. Limiting the necessity for face to face meetings and conferences can be an important way in which you can reinforce your company’s commitment to green. Web meetings, teleconferencing and other remote communications can be used in place of the standard handshake and sit down. When you do need to actually meet someone, bike, take public transit or walk, and be sure to order a nice environmentally friendly beer when you get there (what, some of you have meetings outside of bars?). 

8. Spam
OK, there isn’t anything specifically green about this, but generally people seem to expect environmentally concerned people not to be total jerks.

9. Unpracticed Preaching*
Marketing is not simply a department or strategy. Every part of your operation makes marketing statements, effects the perception of your brand and creates (or destroys) value in the eyes of your prospects. If you fail to practice what you preach people will notice and your brand will suffer for it. While people are generally indisposed to hypocrisy, they seem particularly offended by it when practiced by companies or individuals ostensibly adhering to some sort of virtue. If you’re a green company, you had better act the part. Get paperless, don’t employ a gas guzzling fleet and stop using plastic cups at the water cooler. If you want to be seen as green you need to be green all the way through.

10. Cutting Corners
This one applies to all of the above “don’ts“. Green marketing can be more expensive then traditional marketing. Branding green might take a bigger investment, but the perceived value of your product or service should increase accordingly. If you cut corners you will save money in the short term but lose credibility as the evidence of your unnecessary frugality accumulates. If the value of your product or service is derived from its greeness, don’t undermine it by skimping on the marketing.

Aside from the nice feeling we all get from being green, these rules make practical business sense for green companies. Adhering to them will improve the integrity of your brand and raise the value of your products and services.

Alright, what did I miss?

*Some of you may notice that my company, Universe Point, breaks a few of these don’ts from time to time. However, even though we are trying to be more environmentally conscious, we are not a green company. Our lapses are far less likely to hurt our brand than those of a company preaching green.

Nic Darling is a marketing guy/writer, and he likes postgreen because it has always been very nice to him. Keep an eye out for his ongoing appearances on the postgreen blog, and please encourage him with a comment or two. He is too emotionally fragile to be ignored like this.

Jetson Green reported late last week on a new report from CoStar that LEED and Energy Star buildings are financially outperforming similar buildings without these classifications in every category a building owner could care about. LEED buildings are selling for $171 more per square foot and renting for $11.24 more psf! That’s a big difference.

For more on the story check out the full stories here:

Green Buildings Financially Crush and Outperform Non-Green Buildings!! by Jetson Green

CoStar Study of LEED and Energy Star Buildings

There is one company in Philly that most locals know have paved the way for modern and green development in downtown Philadelphia. The company is Onion Flats and I have not been to their website in a while so decided to catch up on their projects this morning. If you’ve somehow never heard of them go their now and check out there past, present and future projects. Their site is all flash or I’d include some nice teaser pics for you.

I say they have paved the way for modern and green in Philly for a variety of reasons.

One, Philly can be especially resistant to modern architecture when it comes to getting the approvals needed to get a new project started. This has a lot to do with trying to preserve Philly’s history and culture, which is great, but the Onion Flats’ projects have now proved that modern architecture can enhance a neighborhood and a community without sticking out like a sore thumb. They have made it easier for all modern developers who follow them to get their project approved.

Secondly, they prove to the lenders that there is a market for modern and green in Philly. There are many architects, developers and realtors who know a virtually untapped market exists, but the banks like to see bricks and mortar + solid numbers to match. The Onion Flats give us nice comps to show that, yes - these homes will sell and everyone involved will not lose money.

Third, they have generated a lot of attention for environmentally responsible development in Philadelphia which helps grow the potential market for green while simultaneously giving great examples to the local and state government to encourage more of the same type of environmental responsibility in their programs.

Keep up the good work, Onion Flats!

That site again in case you missed it above is http://www.onionflats.com/

I attended the 6th Annual Social Venture Institute yesterday at the Wharton School of PA. The event was organized by the Philadelphia chapter of the Sustainable Business Network and was dedicated to the Triple Bottom Line principles of doing business. It is a two day event but my schedule only permitted me to attend for one day.

The event was better than expected and was perfect for someone like myself who has in their mission that they are a TBL company. It reminded me that, like everything else in my business, I need to continually improve my actions towards people and planet as well as profits. There were a lot of inspirational examples of businesses that have succeeded by paying their workers living wages, using organic materials/foods and greening their businesses.

I think the one issue that was brought up that could most apply to postgreen was the importance of utilizing other local businesses as much as possible. The economist, Michael Shuman, spoke about some interesting statistics regarding local businesses and their impact on the local economy. Here were a couple stats that really hit home:

• For every dollar that is spent at a national chain store, roughly 18 cents remains in the local economy while 45 cents remains in the local economy if the same dollar is spent at a locally owned store. Example - Borders or B&N vs. local book store.
• If 10% of the retail $$ spent in a community shifted towards locally owned businesses then over 1,000 new jobs would be created in the area. If the same 10% shift was made towards chain stores then over 1,000 jobs would be lost in the area.

Most have heard figures like these before but it is always helpful to have a refresher. This got me thinking about the LEED requirement in the homes program to source materials from businesses within 500 miles, in part to reduce transportation effects on the environment. These stats made me realize how important this aspect of the LEED criteria is and that I need to strive to source as many materials and services from companies well within the 500 mile perimeter to really impact postgreen’s immediate communities. Currently I buy business cards, software and hardware online. I have my websites hosted from who knows where. When we start our first project I can look into using local craftsman like welders and glass shops to make materials that I might otherwise buy from businesses outside of Philadelphia’s borders.

I could go on an on about possible ways to improve postgreen’s TBL impact. This was a common theme at the event but it was refreshing to here that others are succeeding with these approaches. It was also important to hear the most successful companies (in terms of TBL) said that achieving a good TBL is a process that takes time. It can be overwhelming at first because there are so many things that could be improved upon but you just have to keep chugging away at it and make a few good changes to your business each year. There are also times when businesses really wanted to implement more but couldn’t for financial reasons. Rather than sacrificing their economic bottom line they realize that there are just some things that might not be able to be implemented, at least not right away.

I also wanted to note that Terry Gillen from Michael Nutter’s administration spoke briefly on some of the changes we can expect in the near future that may positively effect TBL businesses in the area. Some of the highlights of their intended plans are below:

• A process to expedite permitting for development projects that conform to a set of environmental guidelines similar to what Chicago has put in place.
• Focus on making Philly a better place to do business financially by focusing on how businesses are taxed.
• Encourage infill development on Philly’s many vacant lots.
• Green vacant lots and plant a whole bunch of trees.
• Green the city’s municipal buildings and require LEED ratings on any new buildings.
• Improve recycling immediately.
• Create a sustainability cabinet that will be working with all departments of the city.

Check out some of Nutter’s policies in more detail at his website - www.nutter2007.com. He has a detailed plan for the environment on the site which is worth a peruse.

It’s been about a month since my last post but I’m finally back and still alive. It’s been a busy month. Below is a list of what has been keeping me busy and off of blogging in the past month (in chronological order):

1. 1. quit my job
2. 2. finished moving from our house into our new loft apartment down the street
3. 3. went on my last business trip to Barcelona for a week for a tradeshow
4. 4. sold my house (while in Barcelona)
5. 5. finished up my last week at work and turned in my laptop and Blackberry
6. 6. switched to all Mac products with the iMac and iPhone
7. 7. started working as a Realtor with my wife’s team in center city Philly (www.stokesgroup.com)
8. 8. revamped the entire postgreen website which is now running entirely through wordpress
9. 9. sold my first house as a Realtor (technically a condo)
10. 10. setup a new website (www.100khouse.com) to record everything to do with postgreen’s first project
11. 11. kicked off a complete redesign of my wife’s website for her RE team (see above for link)
12. 12. painted my entire loft with 14′ ceilings and a total of five colors using Olympic no-VOC paint from Lowes
13. 13. put my first vacant lots under contract for postgreen’s first project
14. 14. wrote this blog post

That’s all for now. More later…

Big things happened for postgreen this past week! I just quit my 9-5 job and said goodbye to corporate America forever! After one last business trip to Barcelona for my old company I’ll be focusing on postgreen projects full time (I wasn’t exactly going to pass up a free trip to Barcelona).

Secondly, we are finalizing our first postgreen stock home and hope to have the plans and renderings available on the website in the next few weeks. I have also begun a total redesign of the site to clean it up and feature the stock homes once we start finalizing the different models. Look for a lot of changes soon!

Have a great week everyone!

Like many small business startups it has been a long journey to the start of postgreen. I suppose it all started back in high school while trying to decide what I wanted to study in college. While I never felt a strong pull to any one major I realized that it was my ultimate goal to have my own business. I had no idea what that business might be but knew that I wanted the freedom and control that could accompany having your own business if run properly.

I think this early desire came from observing others who had built their own business as well as those toiling away in corporate America. I noticed a difference from these two types of people. While I can’t say that I fully understood the misery that can accompany a career in the corporate world until I began working after college, I could definitely see early on that there was something different about the individuals that had successfully created their own businesses. These were the people that seemed to be at every one of their children’s sporting, music, acting or other events. They also seemed to be more involved in local school, church and community activities. Some even contributed financially in addition to their time. These were also the families that seemed to come back from summer breaks with stories of their month long vacations near some large body of water.

It was at this stage that I knew I wanted to someday build a business of my own. I knew it would be hard work and had no idea what the business would be but I wanted to experience the lifestyle I saw other small business owners around me had built for themselves.

So the time came for me to go to college and I decided on Electrical Engineering mainly because I was good at math and science and every test and teacher told me that was the major for me. I liked audio equipment so I picked electrical over mechanical. I soon found that electrical engineering was not for me and switched to mechanical. After a year or so of that I realized I was attracted to business, management and marketing so I changed my major a final time to Industrial Management which was half business, half engineering and a couple of Industrial Engineering specific courses thrown in.

Late in my junior year of college I started thinking about what my first job might be while I worked on ideas for my own business. This is the time that I started reading books on business, investing and real estate. I think the first book I read that convinced me I wanted real estate investing to be part of my primary business and investing strategy was Multiple Streams of Income by Robert Allen. This was the first time I read about the benefits of real estate including passive income (or making money while you sleep as Robert put it) and using leverage and OPM (other people’s money) to purchase large investments. I decided that real estate was the best investment one could make on earth and vowed to learn more about all aspects of it.

It was also around this time that I considered continuing schooling after college to become an architect. I loved the creating and drafting part of engineering and always had somewhat of a suppressed artistic side that I thought would merge well into a career in architecture. It also dealt with real estate and had the potential to grow into my own business if I was successful. Alas, by the time I was nearing graduation I knew I had had enough of schooling for the time being and wanted to get out into that real world and start gaining real life experience. This would not be the last time I considered architecture again though…

to be continued…