Going Green: Can Self-Interest Overcome Resistance?
Marc Stoiber, in his article, “Seven Crazy Reasons Consumers Won’t Embrace Your Green Innovation,” argues that many green initiatives fail because humans (to make sweeping generalizations) are too inertial:
- we don’t like change
- we resist new facts that contradict our worldview
- we prefer the familiar
- we’re more scared of losing what we have than excited to gain something new
- we are biased toward what we already know
- we judge innovation based on comparison to what we’ve already experienced, rather than on its own merits
- we prefer immediate gratification to long-term benefit
Stoiber explores each of these a bit in his article, which I recommend reading. And I basically agree with him, at least when talking about the majority culture.
Which is why, in my work as a strategic marketer and copywriter working frequently in the green marketing world, I always do my best to:
- include both emotional and rational benefits,
- root my arguments in both self-interest and planetary interest,
- match my message to its intended audience
Let’s make this concrete.
Say, for example, you want to market a “magic” all-natural enzyme that neutralizes the odor and stain of urine, and thus dramatically reduces the need to flush. The environmental benefit is saving water, a supercritical but very much underappreciated (and underpriced) natural resource. But to someone without a deep green consciousness, living in a place where water is close to free and appears to be inexhaustible, saving water is not a benefit they can wrap themselves around. A traditional green marketer would go to people in big cities and laboriously educate the audience on why it’s important to safe water (people in rural areas often already recognize the importance of water).
But an easier approach, based in appeals to self-interest, might take the marketing campaign to places that restrict water use—with arguments like “your bathroom can smell as clean as it did when you were allowed to flush”, “good-bye to icky yellow toilet stains”, or even an economic argument aimed at large-scale users (including landlords and property managers at large residential complexes—let THEM educate their residents, as hotels did with the towel-washing issue), like “cut your water and sewer bills in half.”
Those kinds of arguments open your product up to those who are caught in the kind of rigid thinking Stoiber describes.
