The Clean and Green Club

If you’re marketing a green product or service, it’s up to you to demonstrate why your offering is superior to the conventional alternatives. That means drilling down and drilling down to identify and brag about the core reasons, and to do so in a way that resonates with your audience.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’re a building manager and you offer the feature I mention in this month’s book review: graywater recycling. How can you turn that feature into benefits, and then drill deeper to get at the core benefits?

Good green marketing usually involves showing the benefits both to the customers themselves and to the world as a whole. In this case, the feature is a system to capture waste water from relatively clean uses like sinks and showers, and use it again to water lawns, flush toilets, etc.

The primary benefits are reduced water use and less water contamination. On the personal benefit side, that means lower water bills. Municipal water is artificially cheap in many developed countries, just as oil used to be, so thats a relatively weak benefit. Can we find any deeper personal benefits? How about this: by recycling the water, there is less need to draw down the water supply, which in turn keeps it available for other uses. OK, so if the aquifer is drawn down more slowly, it can recharge properly—and that keeps the water clean and pure.

Ah ha! Now there are both health and aesthetic benefits! The feature of clean and pure water turns into the benefit of staying healthy, not getting sick—and also the benefit of water that is not only good for you, but tastes good, too. This in turn means the customer doesn’t have to go out and spend money on bottled water, because the tap water is good enough to drink. So now we have two economic benefits (tap water lasts longer and therefore costs less, and eliminating the need to buy water bottles) as well as a health benefit because the water stays pure.

Let’s turn to the social goods. More water is available for other uses—and fewer oil-based plastic bottles are needed. If we accept Bill Roth’s statement (see book review) that 5000 kids die every day from lack of good water, we now see a clear benefit to conserving through recycling the graywater: we stop kids from dying. Add that to the benefit of protecting the water supply for our own kids and grandkids in the generations to come, and not squandering that resource the way we’ve squandered oil for so many years, and it should be pretty easy to write some powerful marketing copy.